The F35 is the jet that ate the Pentagon.
It's devouring the budget and it's devouring the pentagon's air capability.
What it looks like now is we're probably going to spend twice as much
as we thought on the system -you're talking about one and one-half trillion dollars.
One and a half trillion dollars for a plane that so far has not worked.
At a time when we're cutting the budget for cops and teachers.
It's extraordinary, phenomenally expensive, and it's never been in combat.
The airplane is so complex and horrendously designed
That we'll be lucky if we can fly it every other day.
It won't be ready for combat on the current schedule until about 2019 -almost
10 years late
The biggest beneficiary of the F35 is Lockheed Martin.
War profiteering is very easy source of money
if you don't worry about what's right and wrong.
Lockheed Martin is getting thirty six billion dollars a year of our tax money and much of that
rolls over into profit.
These people are being paid with our tax dollars because most of the money that these
defense contractors bring in are taxpayer dollars through government contracts.
I think a lot of what the contractors do is basically legalized greed.
The f35 was sold as sort of this great bargain for the country
The whole purpose behind F35 was to develop a family and lower the total cost.
The idea was we could make the unit cost of this very inexpensive if we got all the services-
-the air force and navy and the marine corps -to buy a version of the f35.
We're very focused on giving the taxpayer in the Department of Defense very good value
for a dollar that is spent
But it's just the Rube Goldberg contraption.
We've got all these complex things that you're trying to do -building around the same
air frame.
It tries to do all sorts of things, none of them well.
So there was this whole series of things that could not do-
-so in that sense it was probably the worst possible choice in terms of an affordable
aircraft.
But it's great for Lockheed Martin because they're going to have cost
overruns.
Because they're not ready -they don't work yet. And they're going to fix the things later
at our expense.
but they're already building them in the hundreds.
Right from the start, Lockheed had a terrible program plan to make sure that the money flow
would never get interrupted and that was the idea of concurrent development.
Concurrency is a wonkish term for buying the airplane as you're developing it
and purchasing what you think are going to be combat-ready models before you finish
the testing.
And by the time you've tested the airplane and realized it's a disaster -
You've already bought a huge number -you're committed as we say in the Pentagon.
You've gotten pregnant -right? And that's the whole purpose of
concurrent development is to get the public, the taxpayer, the congress -everybody
committed to
this flow of money before we know anything about whether the money is going for anything
worthwhile
Lockheed Martin is the number one defense contractor in terms of spending
Since 1989 Lockheed Martin has made more than 21 million dollars in campaign contributions
to Congress
So Buck McKeon for example, who heads the Armed Services Committee in the House
gets three-quarters of a million dollars for his campaigns, just since 2009.
Then for the defense industry -the life blood on Capital Hill is lobbying.
When big defense contractors paid lobbyists in Washington,
it's actually some in the best money they spend.
The return on their investment tends to be huge.
They have a thousand lobbyists or more. About 2 for every member of Congress.
The amount of money that's gone in
to making sure that this plane kept flying
that the development kept going -there's been so much spin on this in terms of
Convincing Congress -and convincing the American public, too -that this is a wonderful
plane.
And of course they're funding about one out of every ten members of Congress as part of
the Joint Strike Fighter Caucus.
Members who got may be part of an engine built here,
tires built there - and they get behind it because they can say, y'know, it's jobs for
my district.
The defense manufacturers are selling, big time, the jobs they say they're creating
What we found there was that the numbers were grotesquely inflated.
In other words they don't just count line workers riveting wings at the Fort Worth plant,
They also count the McDonalds off the plant because somebody going home was gonna buy
a Big Mac.
And that of course is a job generated by the F35, they claim.
That's an effort to get the hook in with members of congress
to intimidate them that if they side against the airplane
it was going to mean X number of jobs lost.
They'd say, "Oh my Goodness, this is going to cost a million jobs!
Never mind whether it works or not!
We gotta keep building cause we gotta keep people working.
But the defense budget is a lousy engine for jobs.
If you take any dollar of government spending -education, health or just tax cuts-
-you get more bang for the buck than you do in defense.
A billion dollars is about 11,000 jobs if you put it into the military,
transportation generates about 17,000 jobs
about 19,000 if you put it into health care
-even more if you put into education... putting all that spending back into the private
economy
generates more jobs than are generated by Military spending.
Contractors are all interested in making sure that their programs have smooth sailing
through the Pentagon and through Congress
and a key mechanism to make sure that happens is the revolving door.
People who are in positions of power
in the Pentagon can leave their government jobs where they've been in
positions of approving contracts
and after a short cooling off period can then go to work for the very companies whose
contracts they approved.
So what this revolving door system does, is make sure the F35 program survives,
no matter how screwed up it is.
The F35, touted as tremendous boom
to American airpower in fact is a terrible weakening of American airpower.
Every extra F35 we buy means American air power has gone downhill.
First because every one we buy will be essentially useless in combat and a danger to the pilot,
Secondly, because of the huge expense.
There's huge overhead; they're not adequately audited.
We don't know where all that money is going.
because the program hasn't had that kind of audit.
It desperately needs that kind of audit.
If you or I can't pass an audit, we're in trouble.
If the Pentagon can't pass an audit, we throw them another $700 Billion as if nothing's
happened.
The most important thing people can do about it is to demand the truth,
to write to their congressmen about the horrible waste of money
to vote against congressman who vote for it, and to demand that the media come up with
the truth.
Cutting defense is the only way to reform this monster
People are gonna start to understand if you look carefully at what the Pentagon and the
contractors are doing,
Much of this is not defending us. It's just defending their bottom lines, it's not defending
the country.