[thorwasdfasdf]

but why in the world does it need to cost that much?

what's wrong with just using the jets we already have. I mean we have like a gazillion of those things. what percentage of the military/armed forces is currently being used or has been used over the last 10 years. I'm guessing it's a very small percentage.

[Kranar]

Because the U.S. military basically runs a massive socialized jobs program and every politician works to get a piece of it for their state.

No politician wants to be the one to make the case to shut down the factories that produce these things, even when the military has advised Congress to do so [1].

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-end-of-t...

[bluejekyll]

What I’ve always found strange about this is that there would be far better areas to spend money that would directly benefit society. Education, rail, manufacturing modernization, health.

Instead we have jets we don’t need, and tanks sitting in a desert unused.

[imtringued]

Additional housing would even pay itself back on its own. Yes the government would take on debt but it would also receive rent payments that pay the debt off. The economic benefit of more housing in large cities is undeniable. Lots of people move to the city to work there, the end result is that you have employed both the construction industry and the future resident. There would be a net tax gain even though its a jobs stimulus program.

[goatinaboat]

what's wrong with just using the jets we already have.

Two words: metal fatigue. Every airframe only has a finite amount of hours it can fly before its structure becomes too weak. Fighters in particular that regularly perform high-g manoeuvres. So they have to be replaced anyway.

The war in Afghanistan saw Western militaries burning off airframe-hours at a phenomenal rate using expensive fighters designed for neer-peer conflicts to drop dumb bombs, when you could have done the job for a fraction of the cost with simple propeller planes like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_EMB_314_Super_Tucano

[cabalamat]

> what's wrong with just using the jets we already have.

The problems with the F-15/F-16/F-18 is that Chinese and Russian missiles might be able to shoot them down more easily than the F-22 or F-35, since the F-22 and F-35 are stealthed.

The problem with the F-22 and F-35 is high unit cost, so they can't have as many as they'd like.

It's also possible that their stealth might not work so well on future Russian/Chinese radars, for example they might use different frequencies. You can be sure both those countries are working on countermeasures to stealth aircraft.

Possibly the solution will be an unmanned aircraft. This would be able to pull >10g manouvers, which aircraft with a pilot in can't.

[souprock]

Restarting production, long after all the workers have been laid off and moved to other cities, would take decades. If those workers don't keep working, the capability is lost. The timeframe for recovery makes this dangerous.