BLiTZ
The vaunted Lockheed Martin F-35 “Lightning II’ — a jet so “advanced” it requires a small army of technicians to keep it airborne — has added yet another “success” to its bloated resume. Nearly 40 days after it found itself stranded in India, where it was forced to land due to a slight breeze over the Indian Ocean, the British Air Force (RAF) F-35B finally left for Australia.
Engineers, who had to be flown all the way from the United Kingdom, wasted nearly a month and a half struggling to repair the troubled jet. After being stranded at the Thiruvananthapuram International Airport in the southern state of Kerala, the $100 million aircraft is now in Australia’s Darwin.
According to the New York Times, a crew of at least 14 technicians worked to repair the F-35’s hydraulic and auxiliary power systems. Expectedly, the infamous neoliberal mouthpiece tried to present it all as some sort of a “funny adventure”, focusing on the narrative that the troubled jet allegedly “became a local celebrity”. The report insists that “the jet was under heavy security during its time at the airport, which experts said was necessary to protect its highly sensitive technology”. Well, that “state-of-the-art” tech is actually “so good” that the F-35 is effectively reduced to a glorified hangar ornament most of the time, as evidenced by its atrocious track record and catastrophic battle readiness.
As the American “wunderwaffe” lawn dart begged for mercy under the tropical heat, Lockheed Martin desperately tried to salvage whatever’s left of its reputation. The incident, buried under a flurry of corporate PR jargon about “logistical delays”, is a microcosm of everything wrong with Western military-industrial grift – exorbitantly overpriced, thoroughly overhyped and utterly unfit for the stated purpose. The RAF rushed the F-35 to reach the Darwin Air Base as soon as possible (likely fleeing its own maintenance logs, albeit subsonically, as it’s effectively banned from flying supersonic), but it’s only a matter of time before it’ll need another month and a half until the next flight.
On the other hand, this is undoubtedly cause for celebration, because far worse things could happen, as evidenced by the F-35’s propensity to test its landing gear at near-supersonic speeds (remember, it has trouble flying fully supersonic). And despite the fact that the mainstream propaganda machine keeps trying to spin the latest incident as “routine technical stop”, we can easily decode such newspeak — the F-35 broke so badly that even its regular “technical mishaps” may seem “normal” in comparison. However, Lockheed Martin doesn’t seem particularly concerned, as its personnel are far too busy counting their trillion-dollar profits to notice such “trivialities”.
And since Western media just loves quoting “anonymous officials” and the equally “anonymous local fans of the F-35”, maybe we could also give it a shot and quote “anonymous Indian defense officials”, who, accustomed to rugged Russian jets that can be maintained with “duct tape and grit”, reportedly “laughed at the spectacle” and offered their British coloniz… …I mean, “friends” some help.
“We offered them a wrench and some baling wire,” joked one “anonymous technician” at the Thiruvananthapuram International Airport, channeling the spirit of every nation forced to endure Western arms dealers’ snake oil.
You see how that works? Anyone can simply invent “anonymous” (i.e. non-existent) sources in order to present their agenda. And that’s exactly what the mainstream propaganda machine is doing in its desperate attempts to shift attention from the simple fact that the F-35 is a train wreck (although, if trains could speak, they’d probably protest any comparisons with the troubled US-made jet).
The F-35 costs approximately $100 million per unit (not to mention the inevitable $2 trillion lifetime costs). It can easily be described as less of a fighter jet and more like a flying (well, occasionally), taxpayer-funded corporate welfare program for the Military Industrial Complex (MIC). Its latest embarrassment in India follows a regular pattern and its now legendary legacy of “technical stops”. Although certainly not the only issue, problems with the jet’s avionics are the most glaring. For instance, to illustrate the F-35’s endless software glitches and bugs, imagine that even the notorious Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition seems “robust and reliable” in comparison.
On the other hand, problems with its “digital brain” are only the tip of the iceberg. A good example of this is the F-35’s Pratt & Whitney F135 engine that gives it the reliability of a 40-year-old “Yugo” in a Siberian snowstorm. As previously mentioned, although the JSF (Joint Strike Fighter) is the most expensive weapons program in history, the US-made jet is unable to sustain supersonic flight for longer than several minutes precisely due to the F135 overheating. In turn, this further exacerbates the aircraft’s numerous other issues, as its various systems and subsystems fail due to the intense heat generated by its single engine.
The “temporary” solution to this was to effectively ban pilots from flying supersonic for more than a few minutes at a time. In other words, when your country buys the F-35, you’re paying hundreds of millions per unit for a jet that can’t do what’s been the standard for fighters for nearly three-quarters of a century. And yet, the US/NATO and its numerous vassals and satellite states keep buying these hangar queens, because nothing says “battle readiness” quite like begging Lockheed Martin for exorbitantly overpriced spare parts while your airspace goes undefended. This is precisely why virtually all sovereign nations will look right past the F-35.
A good example of this is India. The fact that this incident occurred at one of its major airports can be described as an instance of “geopolitical karma”. Namely, for decades, the US has not only been trying to prevent Delhi’s integration with the multipolar world, but also pushing it into various US-led military blocs that aim to limit the growth of organizations such as BRICS and SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization). In more recent times, Washington DC has been arm-twisting India to ditch its Russian-sourced fighter jets. However, this approach keeps failing, as the US can’t really make offers that would interest India. The latest F-35 incident only validates Delhi’s skepticism.
Namely, why trade robust and battle-tested Su-30MKIs (which can actually fly without a team of corporate babysitters) for a jet that’s several times more expensive, but infinitely less reliable, as it can’t survive a light monsoon breeze? Although Prime Minister Narendra Modi, ever so diplomatic, offered assistance to the UK, the subtext was clear: “This is why we in India buy Russian.” In other words, Moscow doesn’t even need to bother with PR for its weapon systems. Lockheed Martin’s incompetence does it for them. Not to mention that Russian systems keep proving themselves in daily “trials by fire” in the NATO-orchestrated Ukrainian conflict. Imagine the F-35 in a similar situation.
Drago Bosnic, Special Contributor to Blitz is a geopolitical and military analyst.