The American public and its political leadership will do anything for the military except take it seriously. The result is a chickenhawk nation in which careless spending and strategic folly combine to lure America into endless wars it can’t win.
That would fund the NIH at current levels for 50 years.Total cost overruns, losses through fraud, and other damage to the taxpayer from the F-35 project are perhaps 100 times that great, yet the “Solyndra scandal” is known to probably 100 times as many people as the travails of the F-35. Here’s another yardstick: the all-in costs of this airplane are now estimated to be as much as $1.5 trillion, or a low-end estimate of the entire Iraq War.
It's interesting to contrast the cost of the Iraq war (in the years since "Mission Accomplished" was declared) with the costs of the Marshall plan. According to Tony Judt, the Marshall Plan cost the US about $200 billion in modern dollars at the time he wrote "Postwar" (published in 2010, but he was probably using 2005ish dollars). That was to rebuild all of Western Europe. The difference, or course, is that we had partners who were interested in seeing their societies flourish, so every dollar was merely a lubricant to get financial markets flowing and trade between nations reignited. The multiplier effect of the money injected into Europe's economies was massive. The lesson there is that not all spending is created equally. There's no point in building an oil pipeline that will be destroyed tomorrow. But there's no consequence to the people that built it when they no that they have the money to build another one the day after. It's sad that we get nitpicked if we spend $3,400 on supplies for our experiment, when we said in our budget that we were going to spend $3,100, but that they have (literally) palettes of fresh new $100 bills that no one can account for. Where does it end? $1.5 Trillion for a plane that's not even needed?!? The kill ratios of the F-14, F-15, and F-16 are already so embarrassingly high that no country can hope to match their air superiority in this lifetime. I'll vote for any politician from any party who runs on a platform that the military is out of control.