Can't those airplanes be moved / evacuated by ground?

Sure, if they had made any preparations or advance plans to save our billions of dollars worth of equipment. Instead, they write articles about how we just don’t know how hard it is to not waste $4 billion.

In a word, no. F-22s are huge. Time and trucks are limited.

Could they possibly have thought ahead a little more? Is this the first time a storm hit the area or something?

Not if you're busy evacuating actual functioning aircraft.

So we didn't budget for maintenance?

From the article: ““One of them was scheduled to leave but GABed [ground aborted] after an issue prior to taxi. The other three were jets that couldn't be spun up in time to fly.” Two had been cannibalized for parts, he said, and the others had “issues that couldn't be fixed. They were in hangars that [they] are usually put in according to hurricane plans.””

So we budgeted for maintenance, but no one cared to fix the planes we paid for? ...costing us ~$1billion

Your line of commenting here is unreasonable and does a disservice to any valid criticism of military spending.

Planes cannot be fixed instantly. I would hope that is obvious.

This was a powerful storm that did a huge amount of damage to more than just these planes. You could take a more generous and broad view of the events and ask if saving these planes would have been worth the opportunity cost to other resources that would have then been left in the storm's path.

I appreciate your last two sentences because they made me pause, and realized I hadn't thought about this much living on the left coast.. (waiting for a decent earthquake).

I guess my point from the beginning is that these planes didn't need to exist in the first place, so the money spent could have been provisioned differently, like for programs to possibly help tax payers that just got given the finger.

edit: Your first sentence sounds like it's meant to dissuade criticism about military spending, because your opinion mandates it.

My first sentence does nothing of the sort. As I clearly state this kind of rhetoric will undermine any valid criticism of military spending. I have said nothing that should suggest to you my personal beliefs on the state of military spending.

A certain percentage of these planes are always on the ground being repaired. They rotate in and out of flight readiness. What's important is that enough planes are ready for their missions at any one time, not that ALL the planes are ready.

It's common practice to use a small number of planes as spare part source to keep a larger group flying while you wait for spares to be delivered. Better 3 planes with lots of bits missing than 10 with one piece broken each.

These planes require many man hours of maintenance for each flight hour. So it isn't unusual for them to be in a state where maintenance isn't complete.

> It's not unusual for them to be in a state where maintenance isn't completed...by anyone.

As sung by Tom Jones.