The rules are always flexible enough. They never matter.

The power structure, the actual humans making decisions are all that is important.

And currently that behemoth is hell bent on not giving a fuck about itself, its components [the humans] are mostly looking out for themselves, there's not enough institutional inertia to change this, etc.

I'm not saying it needs to be dismantled, torched to the ground, blablabla, but of course there needs to be deep, systematic, qualitative and quantitative changes. Personnel, ideology/dogma, leadership, training, culture, process, structure.

"Congress" (or more precisely the upper echelon of the power structure - Congress/courts/administration are just the venues where the show happens) is in a gridlock over moral issues, that means everything else is at best performing at the level of the status quo, at worse things become chips in the very high-stakes poker game.

Why is everybody so afraid of violence? Do you think politely discussing on HN the pros/cons of King of Earth owning 79 oil rigs is going to get him to see the error of his ways? That he should stop funding F-35s to bomb his neighbors while he bangs 42 Swedish models per day? "Please sir, that's bad of you."

The problem seems to be not too much pacifism. Quite the contrary. Both sides, every party is able and willing to escalate. Both in domestic and in geopolitics.

This of course leads to a lot of inefficient posturing and back-and-forth, and the preservation of the gridlock.

Building 1500 of the early-adopter version is madness though. What we should be doing is something like what's ended up happening with the much-maligned Zumwalts: build a handful of the gen0 fancy stealth tech and experimental weapons, some of which aren't going to work out. Then take the lessons into the next mass-production system.

It’s not like F-35 is the first at anything. I bet you can’t name one thing it is that hasn’t been done before.

I think the F-35 is the first stealth VTOL fighter-bomber. F-22 was just a fighter and wasn't VTOL (and was similarly expensive). Harrier did VTOL but isn't stealthy and only carried IR missiles until recently. B-2 and F-117 are stealthy but are neither fighters nor VTOL.

Done before in a lab, sure. For a service aircraft the full-VR helmet and the lift fan are new, and while the B-2 is reportedly "compatible" with the F-35 data link functionality I can't find anything claiming clearly that that means it's been validated in the field.