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F-22 Raptor Cancelled
BayaWeaver writes "Slate reports that the F-22 Raptor has been cancelled by the Senate. At an estimated price tag of $339 million per aircraft, even the powerful military-industrial-congressional complex couldn't keep this Cold War program alive in these hard times. They look very cool though and have appeared in movies like Hulk and Transformers. But not to worry too much about the future of the military-industrial-congressional complex: the F-35 Lightning II begins production next year!
As a side note, in 2007 a squadron of Raptors became deaf, dumb and blind when they flew over the International Date Line."
This story indeed deserves to be tagged "suddenoutbreakofcommonsense". Producing such an expensive aircraft in large numbers is a pretty dumb idea: I'm not sure there are enough important targets on the Earth for a squadron of these to be cost-effective. UAVs FTW!
The f-35 Lightening is half the size and has less than a third the weapons payload of the Raptor. It is a multimission fighter intended for all services except army, but you'd need three-four of them to replace one Raptor and remember the single most expensive component in a modern fighter jet is the pilot. 3-4 pilots instead of one and the saving don't add up real fast.
The Lightning is seriously cool but it simple cannot replace the Raptor - and it was never meant to, except, it appears, in the minds of Democrats. Let's face it, they aren't going to buy any extra Lightnings because of the reduction in the Raptor fleet. In point of fact, they'll cut the ones they have already committed to.
I predict. And I've been dead right about every prediction I've made about Obama and his lunatic lefties.
Park a submarine off the cost and lob in cruise missiles. Death from Below!!!!! 24 empty missile tubes and a mushroom cloud, now comes Miller Time!
Wow. Just wow. Please do a little bit of research, and then we can talk
How about this. We nuked the Japanese, twice, and we firebombed Germany into the stone age. That pales in comparison to anything that we did to Iran, Guatamela, Haiti, Laos, Cuba, Dominican Republica, Bolivia, etc...
Even in Vietnam, we did not wage the sort of air war that we waged over Germany. In Germany we did indiscrimant bombing of every target there was.
And what happened, after that war?
I'd say not even a decade after being completely flattened, the Germans and Japanese were well on their way to rebuilding their own countries. Indeed, Europe was already revived as an economic rival to the USA by the 1960s. Having flattened itself with two back to back world wars, that's a pretty good accomplishment.
By similar comparison, the Russians had a giant portion of their population killed by the Germans, and 20 years later, put the first man into orbit, and lead off with a number of advances in the sciences.
The Chinese were beat up for a couple of centuries by the west, got mauled by the Japanese in WWII, had the Japanese kill like 20M of their people, then, they killed 30M of themselves after that during the Cultural Revolution, and, then they changed their economic system and within a decade became a manufacturing power and within two decades a world power.
So... all of this persecution talk is an excuse...
If all of these third world countries had people that wanted to succeed, they could succeed, but they don't, and so they won't, no matter how much money you throw at them.
This is my sig.