I guess the power that be wanted an F4 Phantom with stealth capability and the ground attack capacity of an A10 all the while padding a lot of wallets.

Certainly the F-35 and the F-4 were designed around similar principles. The F-4 was called the "Smoking Thunderhog" back in the day with two massively powerful engines designed to make up for its godawful lack of manoeuvrability. And it made a lot of contractors and designers very rich – but wasn't terribly useful in actual combat until John Boyd came along to explain how to fight with it.

I know its military Keynesianism but it seems uncommonly stupid to rely on wunderwaffe when you r society is crumbling in peacetime and on the verge of civil war and huge chunks of the population are illiterate.

The USA is preparing to go to war with poverty. That's the real enemy that the F-35 is designed to fight. It's a colossally stupid weapon for any other war. The goal is to spend money – bucketloads of it, helicopter-loads even. And in that mission, it succeeds better than anything that has ever come before it.

I guess the power that be wanted an F4 Phantom with stealth capability and the ground attack capacity of an A10 all the while padding a lot of wallets.

Its no wonder it won't work well.

As for war prep, I keep wondering what we are preparing for exactly?

We aren't going to war with China. or Russia or the Norks do to nukes and now proven useful by the COVID 19 germ warfare. That leaves us exactly who?

I know its military Keynesianism but it seems uncommonly stupid to rely on wunderwaffe when you r society is crumbling in peacetime and on the verge of civil war and huge chunks of the population are illiterate.

Yeah, I agree on all points. The F-35 is indeed designed as a sci-fi fighter. Very badly written science fiction at that. The F-35 is a horrible idea with terrible execution based on an idiotic series of premises that envisage a world that, as you rightly point out, simply does not exist.

The Russkies are a land power, and a very, very tough one. And their jets are actually capable of putting up a real fight – including the Su-57, which costs less than half as much as an F-35 and looks like it could run rings around the Joint Strike Flying Piano. But they don't have enough of them to mount a serious offensive challenge.

The Chinese are great at ripping off other people's designs… very badly. As I said in my podcast a couple of weeks ago, their J-20 Chengdu looks like someone described an F-22 Raptor down the phone – in English, which was then translated literally.

The big difference between the American versus Russian or Chinese way of war is that America believes in technological superiority as the key to winning wars, whereas the other two believe in making do with inferior technology and superior tactics.

The most advanced carrier fleet in the world, using space-age fighters that shoot lasers and fly at Mach 7, are totally useless against hypersonic missiles that can kill those carriers at long range, and high-powered cheap lasers that can boil the eyes right out of a pilot's skull at relatively short range.

The F-35 is going to go down in history as the greatest and most expensive military disaster of all time.

The F-35 doesn't do any of the jobs well, and does them for a hundred times the cost. The engineering genius that went into it should have been used to simply update the coffin or create an entirely new version singularly designed for the role… I know that the hornets are aging badly, but it would have been a thousand times better to simply design a new fighter to fill the hornet's role and update the harriers (if you really wanted to waste the money) and maybe even update the black hawks… The potential for designing decent strike craft is still there, as evidenced by the really marvelous King Stallions replacing the old Stallion fleet.

The problem is that even newly-manufactured old equipment is often better than any other force can drop. The Chinese are great at updating their munitions, but their craft are crap. They are all about disposable war material and expendable troops. And the Russians? Land Warfare is their thing, and even the venerable hinds are still unbelievably tough nuts to crack.

The f-35 is a weapon for a warfare style that doesn't exist and cannot exist. It's like… designing power armor for underwater infantry with blue-green assault lasers to penetrate enemy force fields. There are no underwater enemies, no reason for underwater infantry, and no force fields to crack. By the time there may be, the idea would be antique. The F-35 is basically designed for science fiction.