One of the other side benefits of being in the Air Force is getting to fly around on the military airlift planes. I’ve got to admit, it seems romantic – flying in the big boxcars, like Solid Snake in Metal Gear Solid, sitting in a jumpseat with exposed metal, and none of that annoying “please put your tray-table in the upright and locked position” nanny state nonsense, just tough heavy metal sky-choo-choo stuff.
A funny thing popped up while I was reading about F-35s, regarding the Air Force’s labor problem.
Warning: Bio warfare, sadism, murder
In my previous post about Shiro Ishii, I told a bit about his interest in biological warfare, and how he came to serve the US Government, at its bio-warfare research base at Ft Detrick, MD. It’s a depressing tale, but it gets worse.
We see the future through a glass, darkly.
We all hate losing, but we need to keep some kind of realistic perspective on the stakes and the game.
When I read Robert Coram’s Boyd [wc] I was fascinated. Here was a fellow who appears to have been two things: 1- a strategic genius and 2- a really fast thinker. Coram (and others, including Chuck Spinney) have long held Boyd forward as a innovator who re-invented the art of war, but I respectfully must disagree.
I think that with a procurement program like the F-35, there’s too much money at stake for anyone to point, and say out loud, “OK, this is not going to work.”
This is not a story about the F-35. It’s a story about the corrupt and broken process that brought the US taxpayers the F-35.
I’m not going to build out an exact time-line of events because it would be a waste of time.