[raketenjagdpanzer]

Army acquisition - hell, all procurement for all branches except maybe Naval (sub/surface) is so fucked it's not even funny.

The M1 was a world-beater...fifteen years ago. The US' artillery systems are so out of date it's laughable, and they're using up MLRS' as targets at Elgin (I've seen the photos of them being hauled out and prepped) because hey, HIMARS is good enough, right? The K9 Thunder from South Korea is in every way a superior artillery system to the M109-whatever-revision-we're-up-to-now. Longer range, more accurate. Don't even get me started on the edge South Africa have. The proof is in the purchasing; armies are ditching the M109 for the K9. We had a great chance with the Crusader SPH! Now we don't even use parts of it, despite it being qualitatively better than the 109.

Stryker never, ever should've been bought. Ever. MGS was worse than terrible, and this new 30mm turret looks like something a kid bodged together out of two model kits, and is worse in every way to competing vehicles.

We've flushed how many billions down the shitter on the useless F35? When we could've kept F22 lines open? (not that the F22 should've been procured anyway: the YF-23 was the better aircraft...). My wife works for the Army, and was at work the day Congress canned the RAH66, my God what a cluster. They had a battalion's worth of people who were getting ready to move to Orlando and Ft. Rucker and elsewhere who literally woke up one morning and found that they were either out of work, or despite having sold their homes and packed up their families, being told they weren't going anywhere.

Shit's just getting worse and worse, and I'm sick to death of thinking about it. Our military either drags along half-broken fifty year old shit that has to be babied along and was outclassed 30 years ago or pours money into whiz-bang junk that might work in another decade when the software for its systems is finally written, debugged, patched, patched again, updated, and patched. There's no middle ground, there's no "we've got good working gear in between those extremes". If we had to go to war tomorrow - I mean a real war, not this Fahrenheit 451-esque phony, 20-hour war bullshit against troops that wouldn't rate "Category-C" in the WarPac lineup - the results would make the retreat down the Korean peninsula look like a St. Patrick's Day parade.

/rant