Air superiority is the defining aspect of modern war. Whoever owns the skies wins. Whatever one's opinion on the FXX planes, the goal of maintaining air superiority into the future is completely obvious and necessary.

Well, only if you can keep fighting a defined enemy who is at all vulnerable to a traditional conflict. An enemy who is globally distributed and just targets vulnerable energy and water infrastructure over the internet is much less targetable with air power.

But if you don't keep up at least a modicum of pretense for building air superiority, you will have two problems.

In the case of domestic extremism the theatre gets pushed to surveillance + communication monitoring.

Why? The enemy still exists physically and can be attacked like any other target. Being distributed is precisely the reason why we need a strong Air Force with global air superiority so the enemy can't hide.

This is like complaining about an expensive meal and then someone starts to bring up how necessary food is.

It's more like complaining about an expensive meal like it was a crazy idea to begin with, and someone points out that expensive meals can be necessary. Air superiority will obviously be one of the most expensive elements to maintain in a modern military. whether the meal should be 200 or 500, whether the restaurant could have been a much better value, it's going to be more than most any other food you buy and the problem was not in deciding to eat at an expensive restaurant, but in more specific choices of which restaurant, what you ordered off the menu, etc.

Imagine how many people you could feed for $350B. Or how much we cancer and HIV research we could fund. Denmark bought a set of these monsters and I still have no idea why we need them. Competition (SAAB Gripen, F18) was 1/3 of the price, purchase as well as ongoing opex.

That's not how budgets work. You don't automatically get to spend $350B because of a budget shift. You also have to consider the diminishing returns of things like disease fighting, crime fighting, and the incentive to fraudulently justify your research/actions.

The F-35 is designed to be more expensive but cheaper to maintain. Fleet maintenance, especially in the US eats up a massive, massive chunk of the budget. So while the F/A 18 might be 1/3rd the price, once you count in maintenance, it might not be much cheaper...and it's last generation. There is a complex math behind it. There is absolutely waste, fraud and abuse in the military...but it's probably not as much as you think since the majority of military spending in the US is actually on pensions, healthcare, housing, salaries and maintenance of aging equipment. Things that in other countries are much cheaper or just not given to soldiers. Comparing the US to China and Russian (at least their public spending numbers) is so misleading. New research and projects is a drop in the bucket.

Your comment reminds me of one of the greatest speeches of the 20th century:

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms in not spending money alone.

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.

It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.

It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.

It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.

We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat.

We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."

Address by President Dwight D. Eisenhower "The Chance for Peace" delivered before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16,1953.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9743.htm

The world isn't peaceful. The last 50 years has seen unprecedented peace and people today forget just how fragile that is.

It's a super expensive jet that was touted to be a good idea because cramming three roles into "one design" would lead to efficiencies and cost reductions. Instead the end result is that there's barely 30% commonality between the 3 versions while also being hugely expensive and underperforming. Meanwhile, remember that the F-22 program was effectively cut short and cancelled because it was too expensive, at around $150 million per jet.

If they had any sense they would have cancelled the F-35 program long ago and rerun a set of competition trials for each of the three separate roles.

A 737 Max costs over $120,000,000 and that’s essentially a flying bus. The F-35 is the most advanced fighter in the air.

Gun violence has little connection to budget. That’s a straw man. Dangerous water is a failure of local governments (such as Flint;) the vast majority of American water is perfectly fine. As far as government workers being “paycheck to paycheck” — that’s a problem with financial literacy. Government jobs generally have great benefits and aren’t minimum wage. Americans need more Dave Ramsey and not necessarily more Bernie Sanders.

s/DaveRamsey/ClarkHoward/