While there is no hard proof that Lenin said it, the term "useful idiots" applies to some of the F-35 fan-base.
For the rest, I suspect fraud is the justification to harness taxpayers to fund a faulty and obsolete weapon system that a country over $16T in the red can ill afford.
Much of the pro-F-35 publicity efforts are stitched up with faith-based arguements, hearsay and meme-theory all rolled up into a thana-marketing package which will hurt DOD combat readiness.
For years.
Consider the lastest effort by the cheerleaders at Second Line of Defense (SLD). Their "Gold Sponsor", Lockheed Martin, also the maker of the troubled F-35, want you to believe that delivering F-35B (short take-off and landing variant) Joint Strike Fighters to Yuma, Arizona is a good thing for the United States Marketing Corps.
The USMC leadership is using the same kind of plan that they used to field the MV-22 Osprey: market, hype, market, and get a woefully undertested aircraft to an operational test squadron as soon as possible.
The F-35B is not ready.
The mission software for the aircraft is not ready. The helmet and its visual cueing, (the aircraft has no heads-up-display) is not ready. The logistics system for maintenance people is not ready. The flight envelop is not fully expanded. There are no working weapons. This would entail a wide range of clearance scenarios and hitting actual air and surface targets.
SLD's big problem with being a zombie marketer of the Joint Strike Failure is that the U.S. DOD just handed an operational test squadron a non-ready aircraft. Operational test squadrons are supposed to figure out how to use a weapon for war and write up the procedure for operational training so other training squadrons have a solid (and safe) training program.
All that is pretty hard to do when the development testers are far from finished. Hard to work on tactics when you are just trying to make the aircraft work.
What we have is another piece of the puzzle of the F-35 fraud:
Produce the appearance of capability; meet "milestones" to get big pay-days and for the military leadership, advance your career.
At any cost.
I am curious when Congress--who have run out of other-peoples money to spend--will realise that their shift to the Pacific is depending on what the U.S. Justice Department and FBI in their world would call: "a criminal enterprise"?
Pinning the RICO Statute on all of this is not hard to do.
As America's combat readiness gets worse because its' "Department of Defense" buys a long line of dud combat systems (LCS, F-35, DDX, obsolete carrier air wings, amphibs with no well-deck, etc) the best strategy for the U.S. is to avoid war because we are not capable of winning.
And, propaganda from the likes of SLD won't improve that situation.
