Quote:
Originally Posted by raketenjagdpanzer
I don't disagree with anything you're saying; but what I think doesn't matter. How many awesome, light, useful solutions has the five-sided puzzle palace discarded just in our lifetimes?
Bombcat? Gone - we need F/A-18-E/Fs, now! Oh and F35s! So throw that old F14 away (...and just ignore how incredibly effective it was reborn as a strike fighter, a sort of carrier-borne F15E).
A10? Oh god the dirty shit the USAF is pulling trying to throw the A10 away makes me sick to my stomach. They have literally told Congress that pilots and ground crew and armorers for the F35 program can and will only come from A10 squadrons, period.
So while the USAF "has to" keep some 200 or so A10s for another few years they're going to play little asshole games to keep them as unready as possible.
Don't get me started on the light armor issue. The Army can't even call things like the M8 a "light tank". remember the nomenclature throughout the 80s? "RDF Tank", "Expeditionary Tank" etc. Now? "Cancelled Tank" (again).
RAH-66? My wife was at the epicenter of that cluster-fuck. Pilots slated to start flying the first sqdns of those birds calling her in a panic when they found out via CNN that the fucking thing had been cancelled, because they had sold houses and moved families to the Orlando area to start training on flight simulators for it.
I'm not questioning the utility of that bird one bit.
I'm telling you what you'd hear from <$MILITARY_BRANCH> if you propose it.
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Well the USAF may not want to buy the Scorpion, but there are many other air forces who don't have the vast defence budget of the United States who may.
On another note the F-35 is a disaster waiting to happen. Nobody has any confidence in its ability to do the job it was has been lavishly funded to do except for Lockheed Martin. However With the economy the way its is the Pentagon may eventually no longer have the funds to keep pouring into the bottomless hole that the F-35 has become. I really hope that the sixth generation F-X fighter is accelerated to replace the F-35 in production