Don't feel too bad, Bernie's got a lot of practice at this. He's been duping liberals and
progressives since most of us were in grade school (and before a lot of us were even born).

The good news is, he has been vetted by the Democratic Party and found lacking. Now we know what a crappy Senator he has been.

... and even that one arrived late (could he not decide?) And even then, it looked to be the politically expedient thing to do after he saw the "writing-on-the-wall" for his state anyway.

if she were the nominee. Then he went on to say they were both great candidates! Poor Bernie. Only people who worship him from afar seem to be able to stand him!

so I just checked. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/02/09/bernie-sanders-loves-this-1-trillion-war-machine.html

But man, pretty damning stuff...

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"In 1985, for example, protesters massed at the General Electric plant in Burlington, Vermont, where Sanders was serving as mayor. They were protesting the fact that the plant was manufacturing Gatling guns to fight socialists in Central America."
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"“There were protesters who were unhappy that General Electric was manufacturing Gatling guns at the plant, and so they would lock themselves to the gates and engage in civil disobedience. And so the mayor, Bernie, finally got cops to go in and arrest the protesters,” Condon told The Daily Beast."
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"When it comes time to make speeches, Sanders has slammed defense corporations for political gain.
...
But when those defense corporations come to his own backyard, he quietly welcomes them in."
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"“He behaves more like a technofascist disguised as a liberal, who backs all of President Obama’s nasty little wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen,” wrote Thomas Naylor in the magazine. “Since he always ‘supports the troops,’ Sanders never opposes any defense spending bill. He stands behind all military contractors who bring much-needed jobs to Vermont.”"

OOPS!

good find, thanks!

is just another schill in the deep pocket of the MIC. lol.

Just your average forked-tongue pol. Disingenuous and deceptive.

I watch big defense projects pretty closely, and here, from my readings on this plane, is the problem.

Almost everyone here has a smartphone, right? You can use it as a camera, a web-surfing machine, a movie-playing machine, a telephone, a walkman...Thirty or forty years ago if you wanted some of that functionality - mobile phones weren't popular because they were really expensive, but you get the idea - you needed a lot of different devices. Today, everything is in one little box.

And thirty or forty years ago, there were three services who used fighter aircraft - the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps - and they all needed different things out of their planes. The Air Force needs to haul a LOT of ordinance into an area and drop it on the enemy as accurately as possible. The Navy needs to be able to operate from aircraft carriers, and the Marines want to land airplanes like helicopters.

We therefore have three different approaches to fighting out of airplanes and, in the olden times, we handled it by purchasing different airplanes. We gave F-15s and F-16s to the Air Force, and they did well with them. We issued the F-4, F-14 and F/A-18 to the Navy, who also prospered. And we issued the Harrier to the Marines for those times when you just HAVE to operate with no runway. (In reality, the best thing we could have done to the Marines was issue them the Apache and tell them to suck it the fuck up - the only thing the Harrier does better than the Apache is go fast.)

Fast-forward to the 21st Century when we've managed to wear out all those planes and need new ones. Someone at DOD looked at his (I'm certain it was a guy who did this) smartphone and thought, "why can't we make one plane that can do it all?"

Because you CAN'T, if you have three conflicting requirements: short takeoff/vertical landing, or STOVL, capability, light weight and one set of fuselage molds. If you want to STOVL it you need some way to get high-velocity air to come out the front of your airplane. The Harrier does it through ductwork - there are ducts running from the back of the plane to the front; when the pilot needs to land vertically he diverts air through them. The F-35 uses a fan driven off the front of the engine to do the same thing. This part actually works pretty well.

Unfortunately, the Marines' insistence on STOVL limits the plane to a single engine, blocks the pilot's view of his "six," cuts down on the amount of weapons it can carry and pushes the price tag higher than the plane will ever fly. F-35 is intended to replace at least six airplanes: F-14 Tomcat, F-15 Eagle, F-16 Viper, F/A-18 Prowler, A-10 Warthog and AV-8 Harrier. With the exception of the F-16 and AV-8, all those planes have two engines for many reasons but the one the pilots like best is, if one of them quits running during a mission you can get the airplane home.

The F-35 is three airplanes with one number. What they SHOULD have done is named a Common Engine and had all three services design a plane suited to their needs around it. They would have gotten twice the plane at two-thirds the price and one-third the hassle.

"What they SHOULD have done is named a Common Engine and had all three services design a plane suited to their needs around it. They would have gotten twice the plane at two-thirds the price and one-third the hassle."

And no one with authority to present this concept thought of this?
When you're given a blank check from the US taxpayers, I guess the thought just never crossed their minds.

Great post, thank you.

The military has never been known for an overabundance of brains in its contracting procedures. Easy example: the M247 Sergeant York Divisional Air Defense Gun. It was a simple-enough concept: take an M48 tank chassis, lose the 90mm main gun, fit two Swedish Böfors 40mm cannons to the sides of the turret, use the radar out of the F16 fighter as a fire control system, and fight alongside M1 Abrams tanks and M2/M3 Bradley Fighting Vehicles. Well, simple except the M48 is (1) wore the hell out and (2) about half as fast as an Abrams and (3) the F16 radar was never intended for this use. The logical thing to do, since we were trying to invent this piece of shit while the Soviets were in Afghanistan, would have been to offer the Mujahideen a $10 million bounty for an intact Soviet ZSU-23/4 and reverse-engineered it because one of the few things the Sovs got absolutely right was the Shilka. Well...after pissing away a billion dollars trying to get this thing to do anything except leak oil and miss targets, the media finally showed footage of the Sergeant York radar-locking on an outhouse instead of the target drone it was supposed to be shooting at, and the Army gave up in embarrassment.

And as for the replacement for the Vulcan and Chaparral ADA systems? The sergeant major of Fort Lewis, Washington's air defense artillery battalion invented it: he duct-taped two Stinger missile launchers to the pintle mount for a .50-caliber machine gun, stuck it on a gun pedestal in the back on a Humvee, asked Boeing Defense to send an engineer down to the base, took the guy out in the motor pool, pointed at his duct-taped creation, and said, "make us that." They call it an Avenger and it is wonderful. Everyone likes it: it's cheap, easy to use and makes holes in airplanes.

Thank you.