[Infowarrior] - OT: Flight of the Discords

[Richard Forno]

The rest of the article talks about the MICC and is worth reading in its entirety ... but this one paragraph screams volumes about one of DOD's latest "weapons systems" being acquired.  ---rick

Flight of the Discords
The military–industrial–congressional complex bullies the F-35 Lightning II into Burlington
By Andrew Cockburn, Harpers
http://harpers.org/blog/2013/06/flight-of-the-discords/

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The F-35 encapsulates in one airframe the full flowering of bloat, corruption, and decay attendant to the defense system. Costing a staggering $191 million (and rising), according to defense analyst Winslow Wheeler, each plane is more sluggish as a fighter than the F-16 and flies too high and too fast to adequately perform its other assigned role, replacing the A-10 ground-support plane. It is also dangerously unsafe. Thanks to a poorly designed fire-suppression system, for example, the F-35 cannot fly within twenty-five miles of a thunderstorm for fear of lightning. This has led to the cancellation of four out of every ten of test flights scheduled for the plane at the Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. The F-35 also cannot safely dump fuel in case of an emergency and uses flammable fluids to power the engine hydraulics and cool the electronics, while the electrical system runs at an unnecessarily high 270 volts, vastly exacerbating the risk of fire. Pierre Sprey, who co-designed the F-16, and created the A-10 and optimized its safety features, draws a vivid analogy. “It’s as if Detroit suddenly put out a car with lighter fluid in the radiator and gasoline in the hydraulic brake lines,” he told me. “That’s how unsafe this plane is. Plopping down a fighter this full of bugs and this untested in the middle of a populated area is just nuts.”

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Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it.