American Taxpayers Hit By ANOTHER Military-Industrial Complex Rip-Off!

October 12, 2018

The American taxpayer has been ripped off – yet again – by the military-industrial complex!

The world’s most expensive fighter jet, the F-35, has been grounded all around the world just weeks after its first successful combat sortie, as investigators try to identify the catastrophic fault which caused one of the planes to crash during training mission last month.

The three U.S. armed services and international militaries flying the single-engine F-35 all decided onThursday to temporarily halt flights while investigators conduct a fleetwide inspection for a faulty part—a fuel tube within the engine—according to Joe Dellavedova, a spokesman for the F-35 Joint Program Office. The roughly $100 million F-35 is built by Lockheed Martin; Pratt & Whitney supplies the engine.

The U.S. Marine Corps, Air Force, and Navy have hundreds of F-35s, both flying in the continental United States and deployed abroad, while the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Turkey, Australia, Norway, Israel, Japan, and South Korea have smaller fleets.

Defense Department, the timing could not be worse. The news comes days after reports surfaced that Defense Secretary James Mattis ordered the Air Force and Navy to significantly improve “mission capable rates,” or readiness, of the F-35 and three other tactical aircraft fleets—referring to the percentage of time the aircraft are available to fly versus being down for maintenance.

Even before the F-35 grounding, experts speculated that Mattis’s goal of reaching 80 percent readiness for these aircraft—the F-35, F-22, F-16, and F/A-18—was a pipe dream. Mission capable rates currently hover between 49 and 71 percent, according to Defense News.

Whatever the specific reason for the fault, the overall picture of the F-35 is that it is massively overpriced and inferior to the latest generation Russian fighter jets.

The key difference is that the Russian military-industrial machine designs military equipment with the sole purpose of making it cost-effective and efficient in battle. The American military-industrial complex, in contrast, designs its equipment with a view to maximising profits.

In other words, the U.S. giant corporations, and the politicians they bribe, are in the business of getting even richer themselves, rather than defending America or giving American taxpayers value for money.