Drums of War

ETA

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https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/22/asia/nuclear-testing-china-russia-us-exclusive-intl-hnk-ml/index.html
From

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Ben Affleck Reaction GIF

@anon87143080 - you keeping up with these events? It just keeps unraveling up there in Northern Kosovo…

[ETA] More comments from PM Kurti…

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More on this over here…

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Defense stocks are white hot. Thanks Putin.

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Lockheed Martin says thanks too. The F35 will be the NATO standard fighter.

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Have fun with it, guys!

[…]
For reference, the DoD’s goals for the F-35A is a mission capable rate of 90 percent, while it wants the B and C variants of the F-35, with their more complicated short takeoff and landing and carrier launch configurations, to have an 85 percent rate.
[…]
The F-35 fleet, with its variants fielded by the US Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps, have been suffering from poor readiness rates due to maintenance challenges at the depot and organizational levels, leading to a backlog of more than 10,000 F-35 components waiting to be repaired.
[…]

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It’s also sort of repeating the F-104G quagmire from a technical point of view. Feature creep, basically.
I’d say that more or less the only “one fits all” multirole plane that sort of worked well was the F-4 Phantom II. After a couple of iterations, anyway.

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I think with the F-35 contest LockMart benefitted greatly from Boeing making a competing design that was about as ugly as a plane can be, with its big mouth and droopy wings. Pilots want to fly something that looks cool.

(Please pay no attention to the spilled hydraulic fluid under the JSF)

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“Damn, Jim, she wet herself again.”

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