Rosanne Greco: One Flew Over the F-35 Cuckoo Nest

http://vtdigger.org/2014/10/06/rosanne-greco-one-flew-f-35-cuckoo-nest/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rosanne-greco-one-flew-f-35-cuckoo-nest

Rosanne Greco: One Flew Over the F-35 Cuckoo Nest
Commentary Oct. 6 2014, 7:00 pm

On a recent mid-summer evening, I settled down to read some articles from national and international media assessing the world’s largest defense program, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. It didn’t promise to be a night of light reading with titles like: “Will the F-35 be another ‘Widow Maker’ for the Canadian pilots?” “The F-35 Fighter Jet is a Historic $1 Trillion Disaster,” “The Pentagon’s $399 Billion Plane to Nowhere,” “Americans Have Spent Enough Money on a Broken Plane to Buy Every Homeless Person a Mansion,” “Rough Ride for the F-35” and “The Troubled F-35.”

Midway through the articles, the sheer absurdity of what we were undertaking struck me as manically hilarious. Were I to title this summary, I would call it “Bombers, Bellylaughs, and Burlington or One Flew Over the F-35 Cuckoo Nest.”

We intend to spend $1.4 trillion to acquire and operate the F-35. It is the world’s most expensive weapons project — ever. Originally, the cost per plane was promised to be $35 million. Now, the average cost per plane has risen to $160 million. Cost overruns are projected to be over $167 billion.

The $1.4 trillion we are spending on the F-35 could:
• Provide health care for over five million veterans for 32 years, or
• Pay off all of the student debt owned by all 37 million Americans, or
• Repair all of our national infrastructure (roads, bridges, railway, etc.), or
• Care for the thousands of children on our southern border, and fund every other humanitarian crises around the world, or
• Feed all of our 55 million schoolchildren (K-12) for the next 28 years, or
• Purchase a mansion for every one of the estimated 600,000 homeless Americans living on the streets.