I'm curious how the f35 has such an incredibly negative perception on hacker news. Any reception I see from more military minded communities are very positive [0]. Countries that participated in the Eurofighter program are buying f35s. Ukraine has shown that cheaper previous generation fighters are relegated to pitch up lobbing missile tosses. Russia is afraid to use their modern fighters[1], and crucially, there's not that many of them since they don't scale well.
Yet hacker news can only imagine nefarious reasons why militaries would want an f35. Maybe it's because the Canadian government watched a Tom Cruise movie and acted on it rather than listen to their military advisors. Maybe they wish to display fealty to the United States rather than have a functioning military. Do they even need a military? Does a country need a military? If you were to believe hacker news, it is impossible for someone to make a judgement that the f35 is a desirable plane.
I'm sure everyone has their own reason, so I'll just speak for myself.
I don't understand why we spend so much time and resource getting better at war when we (US citizen here) are already so extremely good at it. Atm, the US has 11 aircraft carriers, which is just shy of half in all of the world (not to mention many belong to our allies).
We have crazy drones, missiles, submarines, nukes... How much better do you need to be at war? The truth is, if we wanted to light up some country or other, we could totally do it - the reasons we don't are ethical/economical/politcal, it's not because our war planes are not advanced enough.
Instead, what if we invested the same set of resources on public school systems or water desalination technology? Just let the 11 aircraft carriers ride...
Speaking for myself (American, but an AFG veteran).
Your description of how you view war is hopelessly naïve (no offense). Take out the whole “war” aspect to this and just think about it in terms of raw technology.
“Why would we improve X? It works just fine with Y right now.”
My guess is your aversion to continuous improvement in defense tech is really related to an aversion to war, which is all well and good, but irrelevant. The enemy also gets a say, and adversaries tend to invest in technologies that exploit your weaknesses - something Russia and China have assuredly done. So all this stuff you seem to think makes the US invulnerable may not actually work as well, because we have a bunch of new technologies out there for the first time.
> The truth is, if we wanted to light up some country or other, we could totally do it - the reasons we don't are ethical/economical/politcal, it's not because our war planes are not advanced enough.
There are new missiles that may, in fact, mean our bombers are not advanced enough. So, no.
If I have to be totally honest, the US military is probably too small for its political goals. Definitely in terms of keeping production and replenishment lines open [1]. But even for things like aircraft carriers, I don't think 11 aircraft carriers [2] are enough to achieve air superiority in Chinese littoral waters.
Another point is that US military tactics are highly reliant on the US maintaining a technological superiority over its opponents. This means that weapon systems constantly have to be tossed out and replaced with newer variants as technology improves. And it's often cheaper to build from scratch than retrofit existing platforms to support new technology.
[1] See the Russo-Ukrainian war, where both sides are running through things like artillery shells at something like 5-10× production rates. Even a short, "small" war consumes stockpiles ravenously.
[2] The US has 11 aircraft carriers, but not all of them can be on active duty at the same time. The USN essentially runs 1 in active duty, 1 in reserve, and 1 in refit at any given time; I suspect the USN would struggle to even have 8 aircraft carriers in forward deployment at once, let alone concentrated in one active theater (don't forget, the US has commitments literally across the world that don't go away in war!).
"The most expensive thing in the world is a second-best military establishment, good but not good enough to win." -- Robert A. Heinlein
Can't say it much better than that. Threats aren't static. Wise planners plan around enemy capabilities, not intentions. Even ignoring the more BS of the claims about who are our enemies, there are real ones. After getting caught unprepared in two world wars, the US people and military had decided it shouldn't happen again. Secondarily, the constitution doesn't really make allowances for a federal industrial policy, so the clearest constitutional levers they have are in the national defence area.
There is a very real risk coming up in a few years of China attempting to invade Taiwan. 250,000 people in Ukraine and Russia are killed or wounded because Russia was not deterred to invade. The difference in distance makes it difficult to project power in defense of Taiwan, without programs like these. China is making more progress than the US on closing the military differential.
The cheapest way to win a war is to make it too expensive for anyone especially near peers to fight you, this is how the US won the Cold War.
Whilst the US can maintain a decent defensive posture at a much lower cost the cost of an actual war when it comes (not if) would be far greater than any savings you’ll make along the way.
It would also make it far more expensive for the rest of the world to boot, to some extent the US is subsidizing peace or reduction in the intensity of conflicts world wide which is what you do when you are a super power.
Soft power comes mainly from having actual power to back it up, either direct or through alliances and if you look at smaller states with a lot of soft power most of them rely on long term cultural ties and alliances with the US.
The reality is that the US can fund better healthcare, better public eduction and better public services in general without giving up its military spending its very difficult to for people to understand just how much wealthier the US is as a nation than everyone else.
The US on a wider cultural level doesn’t seem to want these things, heck the cost of Medicare and Medicaid alone outstrips per capita the cost of just about every universal health care system even when accounting for the entire population of the US not just for those eligible for it.
If the cost of healthcare in the US was similar to that of Germany it could outspend Germany 5 fold per capita whilst granting everyone in the US access to healthcare for what Medicare, Medicaid and the VA health expenditures currently cost.
Laptops from 2020 have been able to serve the needs of the vast majority of people. Laptops from 2015 even serve the needs of most. Why invent the m1 chip?
Now imagine instead of a lesser product causing you to surf the web sightly slower, it instead causes your planes and pilots to be shot out of the sky. That is the reality that Russia and Ukraine are experiencing today.
Plus, remember that the f35 is similarly priced and in some cases cheaper than 4.5 generation planes. It was designed from the start to scale well, or at least better than in the past.
Because things don't stand still. If you don't continually try to improve, one, well, could end up in Russia's shoes. A has-been who is more bluff than bite. Of course they do have one tremendous bite up their sleeve --which of course no one in their right mind (including themselves) would want them to resort to.
In order to stay ahead, you cannot afford to stagnate and feel like a fat cat.
> the reasons we don't are ethical/economical/politcal
The US's history with war is far from any of those reasons. Ethics is one of the least of politicians concern. The main reason why the US hasn't invaded a big country yet is because the world is divided in 2, and invasion would mean the end of the world.
Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen (recent ones) would beg to differ on the US's very ethical wars.
I'd suggest that being just extremely good at war might be not quite enough. Even being the best might be not enough. It would suggest a victory but it still might be too costly. Look at Ukraine-Russia war, for example. It seems with western support Ukraine's victory all but guaranteed but because of small margin of superiority the war is approaching a year, loss is counted in 5 figures for men and billions of dollars for property. Russia still seem to hope to win because it has advantage in certain areas (e.g. troop numbers, nukes). If USA barged in in the first weeks of the war and made full might of its military available to Ukraine there would be no war by now (or there would be WW3 but that's not the point). The more obvious military superiority the shorter any conflict would be or there would be no military conflict in the first place.
In a way, it's cheaper to buy expensive F35s (providing jobs for those who build them and for those who shoot patriotic clips for election campaigns) and show how big your stick is than to be drawn into a war with F16s and just barely win it.
Another aspect is that the technology has to actually improve and that's expensive. Russian propaganda, for instance, was peddling Russian military superiority for decades. Putin kept saying "no analogues" at every opportunity. But it was just propaganda. They were trying to do it on the cheap. On the field they actually resort to WW2 era equipment.
It's not about being 'extremely good' at war. It's about being so overwhelmingly dominate, no one challenges you -- ever.
Not doing anything (i.e., not developing weapons) will cause the US to slowly lose that footing. And we just need to look at how quickly the PLA(N) has caught up to the USAF/USN (I'm not saying they're an equal, today, but they've come leaps and bounds over 10-20 years ago).
> crazy drones
So does RU, CN, and Iran.
> missiles
See above. When it comes to long range air-to-air and hypersonic, the US is lagging.
> submarines
PLAN is deploying diesel-electric and AIP boats, which can be virtually silent. USN boats are all nuclear powered, which we're good at making them silent, but they'll never be as silent as diesel-electric/AIP.
> nukes
Should never be deployed.
One of the things no one comes close to touching any of the US military branches on is our airlift and logistics.
> How much better do you need to be at war?
So much better than the other guy, you just need to rattle your sword, not use it.
I don't disagree with you about investment into social services, though I feel they're broken not only by funding, but by capitalism itself. I think the other thing we have to remember is that the Military Industrial Complex employs a significant number of workers and even more, if you extend that into all points of State and Federal government that touches the military. Those companies and workers are taxed (maybe). Those taxes cycle back into the system, etc. What kind of system would we have without those millions of workers? No idea. Maybe they'd all be doing something else and my argument would fall flat, which would be great.
Military bad? Yes. Military necessary? Probably, unfortunately, until we're no longer tribalistic. If necessity is a requirement, should we be so much better at it than anyone else on the planet that everyone keeps within their own borders? Yes.
We can expect China to engage Taiwan within the next 6-8 years. And they're practicing for it.
Many readers probably grew up during the (long) development of the F-35, and there were a LOT of problems (as is common for such complex projects). Unlike private projects, a lot of those issues were publicized. And of course it went vastly over the original budget, when it was billed as the "low" option to pair with the "high" F-22 (similar to the high/low F-15 & F/16 pair before).
The F-35 is behind many older planes in traditional "fighter plane" metrics, like speed, manoeuvrability, etc.. It also didn't fare well in initial dog-fighting trials, mainly because it was a new plane whose envelope hadn't been explored going up against planes that pilots knew how to wring every last ounce of performance out of. The thing is, dog-fighting isn't really the F-35's main role. It's more useful in modern combat as a flying command and control outpost.
That being said, Canada doesn't need 88 of these things. They're buying 88 because the government has convinced everyone that running more than one type of fighter is an expensive luxury that only top-tier militaries can afford, so they're going to use F-35's for everything right down to close air support. Everything. One plane. They're probably not even going to buy different F-35 variants and will just shoe-horn one variant into all roles.
What they should be doing is looking at how to replace manned fighter planes with drones in as many roles as possible, and using F-35's only in the roles where they are clearly superior to unmanned alternatives. If they did that, they'd probably wind up with an assortment of different drones better suited to individual tasks and a much smaller number of F-35's.
Telling the military what they need and spending more to do less are, however, longstanding traditions of both of Canada's ruling parties.
My understanding is that f35s shoots down other planes perfectly well, in modern plane to plane combat. Saying it can't dog fight is a bit like saying a knife is superior to a gun because the gun didn't cut as well. Of course a gun doesn't cut well, modern fighting is about shooting not cutting. In the same way the f35 overmatches most other planes in BVR fighting but not in flying really close up and shooting the enemy with a gun.
You should also know that planes can shoot at things behind them. There's no need to point the nose of the f35 at things.
Drones are a game changer but they do not replace planes. When's the last time you saw a Bayraktar video? They were effective in the initial chaos but once a front was solidified, jamming and AA were able to stop them. They need to be able to act autonomously or they'll just be jammed.
> They're buying 88 because the government has convinced everyone that running more than one type of fighter is an expensive luxury that only top-tier militaries can afford
Honestly they have a point. There are a ton of inefficiencies associated with having more than one type of aircraft in your inventory. You need separate training pipelines, not just for your pilots but all your maintainers. Spare parts aren't going to be compatible across airframes. All of these costs are relatively constant whether you are purchasing a handful of new airframes or a bunch. Which is why in most air forces around the size of Canada's you tend to see only a handful of distinct jet fighters. Usually there are just 2 procured in numbers: one being the new airframe, the other being the legacy airframe that is slowly being retired. Which is exactly what you are going to see in Canada's airforce: the hornets will be slowly retired as new F-35s show up, a process that will take decades.
> using F-35's only in the roles where they are clearly superior to unmanned alternatives
The F-35 will eventually be flown in combination with unmanned aircraft. The loyal wingman concept will have F-35s and F-22s leading a wing of fighter drones:
I have no idea what to do about it, but there's a huge bias for those with negative opinions to be more vocal about their opinions. I don't appreciate the original Nixon-ian context what-so-ever, but the idea of "the Silent Majority" seems ever more and more real, that the majority of those with anything to say are only there to throw shit & rake muck. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_majority
Actually, I have one idea, which is to do some basic sentiment analysis and try to get some positive vs negative analysis of how people post, such that folks can start outright disregarding the negative forces.
I'm usually the one defending the f35 (not here) because I know that the US have the will, technology and money to make the best plane and also that the metrics used to criticize the plane is not often very good (dogfight is not really useful in modern warfare). But also buying military equipment is not only a matter of choosing the better tool, but very much a political choice
I think they have a point — the jets are expensive, Canada would be better off spending the money on pandemic preparedness. We know this because they are obviously posting from 10 years ago when the f-35 was still having development trouble. Warn them about COVID!
I wouldn't doubt that it's part of a "social media strategy" by your friendly ministry of clandestine institutions. Perception management, and marketing, it's the way of the future! At least, that's what they tell me.
It’s because of initial headlines, from many years ago, about issues and cost. Even tho those aren’t valid arguments anymore, it’s hard to change perception.
This works out to $50/person per year in Canada. I think we can afford that. Also, the current fleet is unlikely free to operate. We also agreed to spend 2% of GDP on defence as part of our NATO commitment and are far behind that. We should have just bought this when we originally said we were going to 7 years ago instead of cancelling and re-instating later.
Per year? What length of time are you referring to?
$14,200,000,000/27,855,050[1] = $509 per tax filer (regardless of tax contribution)
Also, the bottom 40%[2] of Canadians pay $0 in income tax, so every Canadian that actually contributes to the national revenue has paid nearly $1,000 just for this purchase.
I support defence spending but let's not sugarcoat how much it really costs.
I wonder if the f-35 is a cheap way to hit the 2% number. At nearly 100 million per unit, and an existing production line - a government can just announce a purchase and hit the target.
For the kinds of conflicts nato is likely to engage in in the next 20 years, the about to project power may be more valuable than the ability to fight a protracted conflict.
F18s are ran ragged and getting hard to acquire spare frames to buy / strip. F35 unit price + operation costs came down a lot in the last few years. RCAF overdue for new jets just for retention / attracting talent. That said, after bombardier drama, if Canada wants to contribute to NATO better off spending 14B on 1200 LAV6s because at least that will go into domestic coffers. Or spin up some domestic ordnance factory. But optics of that's going to be bad since it'll end up murdering kids in MENA.
No we cannot. We should be spending that money on more pressing things, we don't need a stealth fighter.
Canada is dealing with:
- High inflation
- Housing Crisis
- Crumbling Health system
- Food security issues; in 2022 a record breaking 1.5 million visits to the food banks across Canada. It will get worse in 2023
Yet, we are spending billions on ridiculous and unnecessary jets, and policies.
Canada's North is rich in natural resources that are becoming more accessible because of technology and milder winters.
Canada's far Norther territory has been increasingly encroached on by other nations. This jet purchase might have something to do with the necessity to be able to show strength next time this happens.
I've jokingly said over the years that Canada is secretly behind global warming because they have the most to gain.
They're obviously not literally behind it (we know who's emitting the lion's share of CO2: not Canada) but as you say: they're going to benefit in some ways!
Our CF18s didn't get many upgrades; everyone agrees they require replacement at this point.
Harper joined the F35 program, it cost money to gain access to bid on manufacturing of the F35 with discounts. Ultimately would have saved money. Trudeau ran on cancelling the F35 and he did cancel. Canadian tax payers are now paying the cost of his short sighted and ideologically motivation.
F22 was never for export. We're never buying Russian or Chinese; especially now we are at war with both of them. India/Japan has lagged behind in their development and is paying for it in their north. F35 is really our only option. We never got invited to the british 6th gen. We never got invited to the german/french 6th gen. It's surprising how much military diplomacy has been excluding Canada lately, fear about what side we are on.
Trudeau did have other options other than the F35. He could take the money and develop a drone fighter. Built in Canada but made available to all NATO? It would sell and pay for itself. The future doesn't have pilot seats, it will be drones for air superiority.
I learnt something recently as well. One of the key reasons Canada is generally safe from invasion is primarily defensive alliances and not our pathetic military. But rather civilian firearm expertise. Our government should basically have a firearm mandate. Every house must own something. Except we're doing the opposite?
A key difference between US and Canadian spending is that when the US spends $163 million on an American jet, the money stays within the US economy. It's essentially a roundabout economic stimulus program.
That said, big economic deals like this between the US and Canada don't happen in a vacuum either.
Our two countries have a large, complex, and mutually beneficial economic relationship.
And assuming Canada wants to maintain self-defense capability, it needs to buy the jets from somewhere. The F-35 is competitive with or superior to the competition from elsewhere in terms of price and performance.
Readit News
Yet hacker news can only imagine nefarious reasons why militaries would want an f35. Maybe it's because the Canadian government watched a Tom Cruise movie and acted on it rather than listen to their military advisors. Maybe they wish to display fealty to the United States rather than have a functioning military. Do they even need a military? Does a country need a military? If you were to believe hacker news, it is impossible for someone to make a judgement that the f35 is a desirable plane.
[0]: example I read two days ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/1062frs/the_bra...
[1]: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/russia-holding-back-usin...
I don't understand why we spend so much time and resource getting better at war when we (US citizen here) are already so extremely good at it. Atm, the US has 11 aircraft carriers, which is just shy of half in all of the world (not to mention many belong to our allies).
We have crazy drones, missiles, submarines, nukes... How much better do you need to be at war? The truth is, if we wanted to light up some country or other, we could totally do it - the reasons we don't are ethical/economical/politcal, it's not because our war planes are not advanced enough.
Instead, what if we invested the same set of resources on public school systems or water desalination technology? Just let the 11 aircraft carriers ride...
Your description of how you view war is hopelessly naïve (no offense). Take out the whole “war” aspect to this and just think about it in terms of raw technology.
“Why would we improve X? It works just fine with Y right now.”
My guess is your aversion to continuous improvement in defense tech is really related to an aversion to war, which is all well and good, but irrelevant. The enemy also gets a say, and adversaries tend to invest in technologies that exploit your weaknesses - something Russia and China have assuredly done. So all this stuff you seem to think makes the US invulnerable may not actually work as well, because we have a bunch of new technologies out there for the first time.
> The truth is, if we wanted to light up some country or other, we could totally do it - the reasons we don't are ethical/economical/politcal, it's not because our war planes are not advanced enough.
There are new missiles that may, in fact, mean our bombers are not advanced enough. So, no.
Another point is that US military tactics are highly reliant on the US maintaining a technological superiority over its opponents. This means that weapon systems constantly have to be tossed out and replaced with newer variants as technology improves. And it's often cheaper to build from scratch than retrofit existing platforms to support new technology.
[1] See the Russo-Ukrainian war, where both sides are running through things like artillery shells at something like 5-10× production rates. Even a short, "small" war consumes stockpiles ravenously.
[2] The US has 11 aircraft carriers, but not all of them can be on active duty at the same time. The USN essentially runs 1 in active duty, 1 in reserve, and 1 in refit at any given time; I suspect the USN would struggle to even have 8 aircraft carriers in forward deployment at once, let alone concentrated in one active theater (don't forget, the US has commitments literally across the world that don't go away in war!).
Can't say it much better than that. Threats aren't static. Wise planners plan around enemy capabilities, not intentions. Even ignoring the more BS of the claims about who are our enemies, there are real ones. After getting caught unprepared in two world wars, the US people and military had decided it shouldn't happen again. Secondarily, the constitution doesn't really make allowances for a federal industrial policy, so the clearest constitutional levers they have are in the national defence area.
Whilst the US can maintain a decent defensive posture at a much lower cost the cost of an actual war when it comes (not if) would be far greater than any savings you’ll make along the way.
It would also make it far more expensive for the rest of the world to boot, to some extent the US is subsidizing peace or reduction in the intensity of conflicts world wide which is what you do when you are a super power.
Soft power comes mainly from having actual power to back it up, either direct or through alliances and if you look at smaller states with a lot of soft power most of them rely on long term cultural ties and alliances with the US.
The reality is that the US can fund better healthcare, better public eduction and better public services in general without giving up its military spending its very difficult to for people to understand just how much wealthier the US is as a nation than everyone else.
The US on a wider cultural level doesn’t seem to want these things, heck the cost of Medicare and Medicaid alone outstrips per capita the cost of just about every universal health care system even when accounting for the entire population of the US not just for those eligible for it.
If the cost of healthcare in the US was similar to that of Germany it could outspend Germany 5 fold per capita whilst granting everyone in the US access to healthcare for what Medicare, Medicaid and the VA health expenditures currently cost.
Now imagine instead of a lesser product causing you to surf the web sightly slower, it instead causes your planes and pilots to be shot out of the sky. That is the reality that Russia and Ukraine are experiencing today.
Plus, remember that the f35 is similarly priced and in some cases cheaper than 4.5 generation planes. It was designed from the start to scale well, or at least better than in the past.
In order to stay ahead, you cannot afford to stagnate and feel like a fat cat.
The US's history with war is far from any of those reasons. Ethics is one of the least of politicians concern. The main reason why the US hasn't invaded a big country yet is because the world is divided in 2, and invasion would mean the end of the world.
Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen (recent ones) would beg to differ on the US's very ethical wars.
In a way, it's cheaper to buy expensive F35s (providing jobs for those who build them and for those who shoot patriotic clips for election campaigns) and show how big your stick is than to be drawn into a war with F16s and just barely win it.
Another aspect is that the technology has to actually improve and that's expensive. Russian propaganda, for instance, was peddling Russian military superiority for decades. Putin kept saying "no analogues" at every opportunity. But it was just propaganda. They were trying to do it on the cheap. On the field they actually resort to WW2 era equipment.
Not doing anything (i.e., not developing weapons) will cause the US to slowly lose that footing. And we just need to look at how quickly the PLA(N) has caught up to the USAF/USN (I'm not saying they're an equal, today, but they've come leaps and bounds over 10-20 years ago).
> crazy drones
So does RU, CN, and Iran.
> missiles
See above. When it comes to long range air-to-air and hypersonic, the US is lagging.
> submarines
PLAN is deploying diesel-electric and AIP boats, which can be virtually silent. USN boats are all nuclear powered, which we're good at making them silent, but they'll never be as silent as diesel-electric/AIP.
> nukes
Should never be deployed.
One of the things no one comes close to touching any of the US military branches on is our airlift and logistics.
> How much better do you need to be at war?
So much better than the other guy, you just need to rattle your sword, not use it.
I don't disagree with you about investment into social services, though I feel they're broken not only by funding, but by capitalism itself. I think the other thing we have to remember is that the Military Industrial Complex employs a significant number of workers and even more, if you extend that into all points of State and Federal government that touches the military. Those companies and workers are taxed (maybe). Those taxes cycle back into the system, etc. What kind of system would we have without those millions of workers? No idea. Maybe they'd all be doing something else and my argument would fall flat, which would be great.
Military bad? Yes. Military necessary? Probably, unfortunately, until we're no longer tribalistic. If necessity is a requirement, should we be so much better at it than anyone else on the planet that everyone keeps within their own borders? Yes.
We can expect China to engage Taiwan within the next 6-8 years. And they're practicing for it.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/mock-attack-on-u-s-nav...
(So is Taiwan)
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/taiwan-extends-mandato...
Deleted Comment
That being said, Canada doesn't need 88 of these things. They're buying 88 because the government has convinced everyone that running more than one type of fighter is an expensive luxury that only top-tier militaries can afford, so they're going to use F-35's for everything right down to close air support. Everything. One plane. They're probably not even going to buy different F-35 variants and will just shoe-horn one variant into all roles.
What they should be doing is looking at how to replace manned fighter planes with drones in as many roles as possible, and using F-35's only in the roles where they are clearly superior to unmanned alternatives. If they did that, they'd probably wind up with an assortment of different drones better suited to individual tasks and a much smaller number of F-35's.
Telling the military what they need and spending more to do less are, however, longstanding traditions of both of Canada's ruling parties.
You should also know that planes can shoot at things behind them. There's no need to point the nose of the f35 at things.
Drones are a game changer but they do not replace planes. When's the last time you saw a Bayraktar video? They were effective in the initial chaos but once a front was solidified, jamming and AA were able to stop them. They need to be able to act autonomously or they'll just be jammed.
Honestly they have a point. There are a ton of inefficiencies associated with having more than one type of aircraft in your inventory. You need separate training pipelines, not just for your pilots but all your maintainers. Spare parts aren't going to be compatible across airframes. All of these costs are relatively constant whether you are purchasing a handful of new airframes or a bunch. Which is why in most air forces around the size of Canada's you tend to see only a handful of distinct jet fighters. Usually there are just 2 procured in numbers: one being the new airframe, the other being the legacy airframe that is slowly being retired. Which is exactly what you are going to see in Canada's airforce: the hornets will be slowly retired as new F-35s show up, a process that will take decades.
The F-35 will eventually be flown in combination with unmanned aircraft. The loyal wingman concept will have F-35s and F-22s leading a wing of fighter drones:
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/secret-competition-for...
Great idea, great in production, but getting from idea to production is an overpriced, inefficient process that every engineer shakes his head at.
Actually, I have one idea, which is to do some basic sentiment analysis and try to get some positive vs negative analysis of how people post, such that folks can start outright disregarding the negative forces.
$14,200,000,000/27,855,050[1] = $509 per tax filer (regardless of tax contribution)
Also, the bottom 40%[2] of Canadians pay $0 in income tax, so every Canadian that actually contributes to the national revenue has paid nearly $1,000 just for this purchase.
I support defence spending but let's not sugarcoat how much it really costs.
[1] # of taxfilers in Canada in 2020 - https://www.statista.com/statistics/478908/number-of-taxfile... [2] https://financialpost.com/personal-finance/taxes/trudeau-is-...
The other article linked states that the programme lifetime is 40 years.
$70B/35M/40 = $50 / year per person
For the kinds of conflicts nato is likely to engage in in the next 20 years, the about to project power may be more valuable than the ability to fight a protracted conflict.
Canada is dealing with: - High inflation - Housing Crisis - Crumbling Health system - Food security issues; in 2022 a record breaking 1.5 million visits to the food banks across Canada. It will get worse in 2023
Yet, we are spending billions on ridiculous and unnecessary jets, and policies.
They're obviously not literally behind it (we know who's emitting the lion's share of CO2: not Canada) but as you say: they're going to benefit in some ways!
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/new-prehistoric-palm-1.39392...
Harper joined the F35 program, it cost money to gain access to bid on manufacturing of the F35 with discounts. Ultimately would have saved money. Trudeau ran on cancelling the F35 and he did cancel. Canadian tax payers are now paying the cost of his short sighted and ideologically motivation.
F22 was never for export. We're never buying Russian or Chinese; especially now we are at war with both of them. India/Japan has lagged behind in their development and is paying for it in their north. F35 is really our only option. We never got invited to the british 6th gen. We never got invited to the german/french 6th gen. It's surprising how much military diplomacy has been excluding Canada lately, fear about what side we are on.
Trudeau did have other options other than the F35. He could take the money and develop a drone fighter. Built in Canada but made available to all NATO? It would sell and pay for itself. The future doesn't have pilot seats, it will be drones for air superiority.
I learnt something recently as well. One of the key reasons Canada is generally safe from invasion is primarily defensive alliances and not our pathetic military. But rather civilian firearm expertise. Our government should basically have a firearm mandate. Every house must own something. Except we're doing the opposite?
Maybe Top Gun Maverick marketing played a role :D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDQow_MfE0s&ab_channel=CityN...
Cold weather: https://www.defensenews.com/air/2019/06/12/the-f-35-has-to-k...
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That said, big economic deals like this between the US and Canada don't happen in a vacuum either.
Our two countries have a large, complex, and mutually beneficial economic relationship.
And assuming Canada wants to maintain self-defense capability, it needs to buy the jets from somewhere. The F-35 is competitive with or superior to the competition from elsewhere in terms of price and performance.
Not to mention Canada has a lot of issues right now where that money should go to.