01/21/15 – William Hartung – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Next up is William D. Hartung.
He is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy.
And his latest for the, nope, not the Washington, the Huffington Post, is can the F-35 be stopped?
What a good question.
Welcome back to the show, William.
How are you doing?
Good, good.
I'm doing real good.
Very happy to have you on.
So here's the thing.
Before we get to the question of can the F-35 actually be stopped or not, we got to get to the question being raised in the first place, which is why should it be stopped?
And I was wondering, here's my challenge for you.
I want to see how many things wrong with the F-35 you can name in one breath.
Ready?
Go.
Unaffordable.
Unneeded.
Unworkable.
Well, I guess that was my breath.
I was reading this thing the other day.
They were talking about the machine gun doesn't work.
The camera can't pick targets.
Obviously, as we all know, you can't fly it in the rain.
The fuel can't be stored anywhere where there's a desert nearby because the fuel won't burn if it's too warm.
So I guess they need new refrigerators for the gasoline trucks.
Anyway, on and on and on I was reading.
The helmet doesn't work.
The stealth doesn't work.
It can't hit ground targets.
It can't do a damn thing.
Is it true that the F-35 could be killed by any other fighter jet in the Air Force or Navy's inventory, the F-16, the F-18, if they got an old scrapped F-14 out of the junkyard?
Could it kill one of these things in the space of 10 minutes or what?
I don't know about the time frame, but they're certainly more effective.
I mean, the F-35 is trying to do so many things at once that it's not really doing any of them very well.
But certainly, I think because they're designed for a specific purpose, the other aircraft that are in the inventory would do a better job.
I actually saw an interview with the guy that designed the F-15 and 16 saying that the F-35 works perfectly at its actual mission, which is transferring taxpayer money to Lockheed.
That's what it's for in the first place, and it's doing great at that, so don't criticize.
It is highly successful in doing that, that's for sure.
Now am I just being too harsh on the thing when I rattle off that list that you can't fly it within 50 miles of a lightning bolt and all these kinds of things?
Is that really true?
All these things are true.
I mean, have they tweaked one of them and fixed it?
Maybe.
I mean, they have so many things to work on.
They've also had problems with the software, which is sort of an endless issue for them.
So they had the engines start on fire, and they had to take it out of flight for weeks and weeks at a time.
So yeah, I don't think any of the things you mentioned are ...
I think they're all accurate.
Because I admit, I sound pretty hyperbolic, and I'm kind of just going off the top of my head, so it sounds even worse.
But then, yeah, no, it's all true.
That's the expert opinion.
Scott's hyperbole couldn't be much better than that, unfortunately.
All right, so now is there any other reason why this thing costs so much?
I mean, is it stealthy at all?
Or I mean, is there anything special about this plane, really, that makes it cost so much more than, say, a F-15, which already is pretty expensive, you'd think?
Well, there's a lot of things they're trying to achieve.
And even when they fail, it costs money to make the effort.
So they're trying to give it stealth capability.
They're trying to make a version that can do vertical takeoff and landing on a marine ship.
They're trying to make a version that can land on an aircraft carrier.
They're trying to make a version that can do aerial dogfights.
They're trying to make a version that can be a bomber and do close air support for troops.
So I think part of it is all the compromises and just strange twists that are involved in trying to make an aircraft that can do all those different things.
And they originally said it was going to be cheap.
It was going to be the Chevrolet of the skies.
Although Chevrolet's not really flying that well.
But in terms of money, you know, the Chevrolet of the skies.
And part of it was because there was going to be all these common components, even though they have different purposes.
Well, it ends up the vast majority of the components are not common.
So for each different version, each of the three versions, they've got to machine different parts and they kind of put together slightly differently.
And so there's a lot of waste involved in that piece of it also.
They're really building three different aircraft with a very compromised design for all of them.
Yeah.
It sounds like it could be a weekly comic strip, this F-35.
I remember one from a few years ago where the pilot got stuck and the cockpit wouldn't open and he's stuck on the tarmac for a couple hours so they could, I guess, manufacture the right tool to pry the damn thing apart and let him out of there.
It really seems crazy.
But now I remember there was a big fight back a couple of years ago.
We may have spoken about this when Robert Gates, he actually gave a big speech, really, I think, challenging the Pentagon bureaucracy, or at least part of it, and saying, listen, we're over the F-22 now.
And you know, you might imagine dogfights in the air against a power with, you know, big fighter jets, but that's not likely to happen.
Our wars are against civilians on the ground in their own countries, and we need to be able to bomb them on the ground, and the F-35 at least can do that, where the F-22 cannot.
And it seems like they actually won that fight.
As you wrote in the article, well, you say in here they ended the F-22.
I guess I had thought they were still selling them abroad and that they still had some in the inventory.
I'm not sure the details.
You cite that as kind of a victory and maybe something that we can build off of when it comes to challenging the F-35 itself.
Yeah.
Well, Lockheed Martin pulled out all the usual arguments, including that it creates a lot of jobs when actually Pentagon spending is about the poorest way to create jobs one could imagine.
And they got, you know, governors to write letters for them, and a couple hundred members of the House of Representatives, and, you know, the Machinist Union was supporting them.
But the thing is, it was so expensive, and it was so limited in what it could do, that, you know, there was a coalition of a combination of conservative deficit hawks and liberalish Democrats who were able to defeat it.
And they overcame the pork barrel argument because there were enough people who didn't have pet built in their state that they were able to vote their conscience without worrying about getting flack back home.
But of course, the problem, which you kind of alluded to, is Gates said, well, yeah, because we have the F-35 in the wings, you know, so we'll be fine.
And now we're seeing that we're not fine.
Now, so what is the price of an F-35 compared to an F-15 or an F-16?
Because I know that those things aren't cheap either, right?
Well, there's various ways of calculating it, but one commonly used price for the F-35 is around $120 million, and an F-35 could be 50 or 60, F-16 even less than that.
So you're talking about at least twice and sometimes three times as much to buy one F-35 as to buy a current generation aircraft.
And then so what's wrong with the F-16s and 15s?
I mean, I guess they're not stealthy, but do they really need to be?
Who are they going up against anyway?
Well, that's the issue.
I mean, you know, the whole argument of the Air Force and the Pentagon is we need a fifth generation fighter plane, which basically means, you know, primarily more stealth characteristics and able to move more quickly and accelerate more quickly and so forth.
None of which the F-35 is doing very well.
But, yeah, the mission, you know, I mean, there hasn't been a war that the United States has been in in a long, long time where the other side had an Air Force to speak of, much less an aircraft that could shoot down U.S. planes.
So there was no need for, you know, the fanciest fighter in the world, even if the F-35 could meet that standard.
And so all you have left is China.
And are we really going to have aerial dogfights with Chinese fighter planes, two nuclear powers duking it out on China's border?
I don't think so.
You know, so I think that the China threat is kind of just a demon that's placed out there to help, you know, get money from the taxpayers more than a realistic threat in terms of needing fighter planes to confront them.
Well, especially, I mean, it doesn't sound like even on its very best day, grading it on a curve, F-35 would be any better for fighting the Chinese Air Force than a fleet of F-16s and F-15s would be.
In fact, they've already, they're on like service pack three.
So they've kind of worked out their bugs over these years.
You know, well, thanks for your great article.
And thanks for your time again on the show, William.
I appreciate it.
Yes.
Great talking to you.
That's William Hartung, everybody.
He's at the Center for International Policy.
Follow him at William Hartung on Twitter.
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