So the USAF has done its best to promote bad aircraft designs, and sabotage good ones, for decades. And now the USAF has a new aircraft design to love: the F-35. The USAF loves the F-35 more than any other project in history. You can guess why: Because it’s a disaster. The biggest, most expensive, most shameful procurement scandal in American history. I hear you asking, “Wait, wait—are you saying it’s even worse than the F-104 Starfighter, the plane the Bundeswehr called ‘The Flying Coffin’?” Yes, I am. Because as bad as the F-104 was, it didn’t cost $337 million per plane. That’s the projected cost of this godawful flying pooch, the F-35. $337 million per plane. Yes, folks, for slightly more than one billion dollars, you get three very bad airplanes.
A Top Gun reboot featuring an overweight and alcoholic Maverick at the controls of an overseas drone with a small picture of a young Goose taped above the screen, interspersed with racist grumblings about "towelheads" and a soliloquy about how the Russian adversary was a "gift from God ( not Allah)"- that all the younger enlistees roll their eyes at- is way overdue. Get on that one, Clint Eastwood.
I would so watch that. Hell, I'd remake the hell out of Deal of the Century: There's an extended scene in which Luckup Industries' new drone (designed by Syd Mead of Blade Runner/2010/Gundam fame) terrorizes the assembled brass of the pentagon because the computers in its controller trailer don't do well with heat. Thus the ridiculous chain of events that brings Chevy Chase in from Equador or wherever he is selling 3rd rate used ordinance to peddle frontline attack aircraft to someone that is quite clearly Saudi. It's a criminally under-rated, unknown movie. It was Lord of War in 1982. I think William Friedkin (Exorcist) wanted to make a blacker-than-black comedy about the arms industry and the studios shoved Chevy Chase and Gregory Hines on him; redo that film with Christopher Walken and Richard Pryor and you've got something. It's worth watching just to see Wallace Shawn playing a defense contractor. Or Ray Manzarek of The Doors as a skeezy gunrunner. Love this film.
Man. This would be one of the few things that would be justifiably re-done. LOW could've definitely been more farcical (Nic Cage's facial expressions would have been more apropos) but the proxy conflicts we're creeping in to now seem riper than just iterating over African conflicts we still get to call "no foul" on and could actively point to something we're directly involved in. I can't think of anything off the top of my head (documentaries excluded) that's gunned at the system that put us in Iraq (this time) other than In the Loop and not just focused on the troops themselves, abstracting the conflict to the point of making it just seem like an inevitability or a situation someone happens to be in. Or blatant propaganda. It's kind of a shame that everyone has been trying to make the film about Iraq/Afghanistan without letting the dust settle. It makes sense though, documentaries featuring facts and information and exposed secrets flying like shrapnel. The film of the 2010s will just be an excel document calculating the likelihood of a target of interest and then cut to a gopro strapped to Hellfire aimed at a house the same color as the barren land surrounding it.
Have you ever read the article Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels? I suggest everyone read it. It's a classic. So basically, if Lockheed wants to empty its stock, we launch a war.Prior to joining Lockheed, [Bruce] Jackson had served as executive director of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the think tank whose principles included Dick Cheney. PNAC served as the Bush administration's blueprint for preemptive war and authored a 1998 open letter to President Bill Clinton calling for military force to oust Saddam Hussein.
The more history I study, the more parallels I see between America and feudal Europe. The CIA was a gentlemen's club of adventurers who were all well-connected; the Federal Reserve was created by business interests for business interests. I think I read that article back when it was topical. No one was surprised. Ben Rich, director of Lockheed's Skunk Works for the Stealth Fighter and beyond, put it pretty succinctly: defense contractors exist pretty much on the constant dole of the government and who gets what project is much more a matter of need than a matter of successful design. He was talking smack about the Rockwell B-1 bomber at the time but the mirror could certainly be held up to the F-35.