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Lawman and SurelySerious covered some big picture points. A healthy time spent on JWICS doing some true threat study (well beyond 3-1.threat) will provide a lot of supporting evidence as to why we need the F-35 (or 5th gen capes period), in addition to the big picture things already mentioned. Additionally, this is NOT a jab at all, just a simple observation: you don't know what you don't know. This is applicable to a whole shit ton of people who continuously ask, "why do we need it and what's so great about it anyways? Can't we just do this with Block 60 vipers?" I can assure you it is very necessary and no Block X viper, Silent Eagle, etc. will match what it will bring. Despite my support for the program's existence and necessity, I by no means am trying to downplay the heinous running of the program at all levels. I completely agree it could and should have been ran much better, on a quicker timeline and at a lower cost. It is the poster child for how fucked our acquisition process is and ludicrous levels of mismanagment on multiple parties' accounts. That said, we are way too far into it to go back/start over with something else - this is our 5th gen multi-role fighter; the 6th gen boat has essentially left the dock (i.e. no use in arguing adding things to the F-35 to make it closer to "6th gen") - we need the F-35 ASAP because God only knows how many decades it will be until 6th gen is even worth talking about.

This whole "digital music" craze is probably going to blow over, too.

Well for 1, you can't just keep flying the current fleet forever. That's the thing that boggles the mind when I hear people say "let's just build more _____s" Silent Eagles are up over the hundred mil mark at last check. The A-10 tooling is gone, along with rooms full of file cabinets to actually make the tooling and the engineers are retired by now. Yes we could buy Blk 60 Vipers or even say F it and go to a land version of the next gen Super Hornet Boeing is pimping if one wanted to. Here's the big problem though, the money on F-35 is already spent. Any "cost savings" at this point will be massively cut into by all the country partners in the program wanting their money back. So we will spend near the same money and now not have a 5th gen jet fleet.

Time to drop a few neutron bombs.....

I think it's unfortunate that this gets painted wholly as race relations, when the police abuses are becoming ever more concerning across all of society. No-knock raids on the wrong houses, where people and dogs have been killed, and in one instance, a toddler burned so badly his family has over $1 million in medical bills...medical bills the SWAT team says they aren't responsible for because they were doing their jobs. Another no-knock raid on the wrong house ended with a 7-year-old girl dead from a gun shot wound in the head. The LAPD beat a white guy to death over the course of about 30 minutes...pretty sure he was done resisting well before that. Now, I don't think these rioters have the right answer. And I certainly will not argue that Michael Brown was a good person, nor that Eric Garner wasn't breaking the law. I'm also not arguing that every cop who shoots someone in the line of duty is a murderer and should be tried. On the other hand, we will clearly not reach any kind of solution as long as the police continue to view themselves as military units, going out to face hostiles every day, instead of PEACE officers, going out to serve and protect the people paying their salary. We keep hearing that it's a few bad apples that do this sort of thing...but I haven't seen very many police stand up and say "hey, that cop was a bad guy, I don't want him on the force anymore" when these abuses do happen. So no, I don't think the riots will solve anything. And no, I don't think one segment of the population is being oppressed. But I also don't think that every police officer is a saint and that all of them have only my well-being in mind.