Defence Department gets approval to spend $7B on 16 F-35s: s

I still think the F-35 is a turdburger, but like most defence procurement in Canada, it's been a mess. Had Harper just had a competition in 2011, we'd already have some of these in service by now.

The more things change, the more they stay the same...

Yup. The F-35 is a flying Schewinnigan Golf course. But most of our allies are likely to have them, so it makes sense that we do. Barring of course, any real alternative that would integrate into our allies systems.

But there are many that think the F-35 can never be all the things it needs to be, in one airframe. It should have been different airframes, like the F-14, F-16, and F-18.

I think after a while, the F-35 will be a decent enough platform. But that doesn’t change the fact that it costs way too much and that the offered deal from Saab was way better.

Hasn't there been a running theme of politicians wanting to buy vehicles that look cool, but aren't actually what our troops most need? I seem to recall something about Hornets and how they were unsuited for the Northern patrols they'd be intended for, or am I conflating two separate issues?

Boots, why didn't Harper have a competition for fighter jets in 2011? I'm not the biggest expert on defence issues, but I'd have thought that rebuilding our military vehicles would be one of Harper's biggests focuses.

Given the pathetic display put on by the Russians in Ukraine everyone in NATO could probably go back to flying F4 Phantoms and still be able to knock the miserable bastards out of the skies by the hundreds, and that's even if the pricks are in their magical "next gen" planes with their awww cool! thrust-vector crap. Gotta have a discussion someday about how successful the equipment salesmen were in terrifying our governments over decades into buying the most expensive stuff imaginable given that the enemy is still training their idiots like it's still the 1950's even if the garbage they're using is supposedly cutting edge and hyper dangerous. The guys at Jane's Defence publications should really hang their heads in shame at how much they wildly over-estimated Russian capabilities from 1950 to 1995 or so.

Not arrogance here, just addressing the obvious reality. A country like Russia will never produce a quality item. And they're also no longer capable of swarming a battle, either in the sky or on the ground, with superior numbers the way they did against the Germans in the last half of World War Two. Nuclear weapons are their only real threat and Putin will probably get his head chopped off by his own catamites if he dares to go that far. So the lesser countries in NATO, like Canada, don't need this Star Trek grade crap the likes of Lockheed keep pushing. And we probably never did ever need it at all either.

Russia may be a rotting husk but China isn't making biplanes. It may not be as cutting edge but they have the money and can mass produce.

China also doesn't pose a direct military threat to the West in the way the Soviets did. China can only really fuck us with cyber problems, like tech theft and hacking. Given that their own never-proven-in-battle equipment probably suffers the same quality problems as their consumer goods do, in that they're so cheaply & horribly built they're literally crap, a out and out military fight against the US and the other Western powers would result in just another stalemate like happened in Korea from 1953 onwards. The odds are much better that the combined Chinese fleet wouldn't even make it out of the Philippine seas before it was sunk en masse by the US Navy, much less ever got as far as Hawaii.

Being prepared is vitally necessary. Running around in terror, a fear deliberately provoked by salesmen like the ones at Lockheed, and screaming "oh my god we're gonna lose and all die if we don't spend a billion dollars per plane on this funky new fighter aircraft" is simply unbecoming of any adult. And it's also literally impossible for any country that isn't the US to keep up at that level of purchasing because we simply don't have the money for it, and never will either. $7 billion for a mere sixteen aircraft is simply obscene, even more so given the fact that the odds are massive that none of them will ever fire a shot in anger at an enemy anywhere.

We outsourced dam near all of our manufacturing and union jobs to Mexico and then to China under Free trade and NAFTA. China is a MUCH bigger threat than the USSR ever was. The worlds production lines are still based there in our mad rush to the bottom to appease stockholders. The only thing keeping them from asserting their will on the world stage is access to resources and that is where the belt and road initiative comes into play. This will lock down Africa, Indonesia and South America into a debt prison where China will promise development and loans for access and LOCK OUT anyone else to those markets.

Without economy you can't field a military.

^^^ What he wrote.

Look at all the problems we have with China just fighting Covid. If they wanted us to suffer, they would blockade Taiwan and then our modern society would be back to ox and cart.

War is just politics by other means.

The Soviets at their peak could have wiped out around 60 to 70% of the population of Europe & North America in the space of a few hours if a full scale nuclear war had broken out. And billions more across the world would have died as well over the following weeks & months from the ensuing nuclear winter, the infrastructure obliteration, and the wholesale environmental collapse. There is no way China presents, or ever will present, a threat that was as brutally existential to the overall population of the planet as the one that existed from the 1960's through to the 1990's.

Wrong.

Play wack a mole with nukes

There are HUNDREDS of silos now, no way we can target them all and no way to know which sites are real and which are decoys. Never mind their space program that will develop platforms in space. When Russia collapses they will have access to all of those as well.