An Introduction to the Military Reformist Movement

The most insidious psychological operation you've never heard of

Si vis pacem, para bellum (if you want peace, prepare for war). - Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus

Messing with someone who is well-armed is never a good idea, be it an individual or an entire nation. In short, military reformists are to nations what hoplophobes are to armed citizens. However, there is an entire rabbit hole of corruption, petty politics, good old-fashioned military stupidity, and probably some drugs necessary to explain what this movement is and how to recognise if someone is either part of it or has been influenced by it.

If you didn’t make note of the reading time, I’m warning you now that this article is probably the longest I’ve ever written, so grab a tall glass of your favourite poison and get comfortable, because you’ll be here for a while. If you couldn’t already guess, this article is way too long to be read in email.

Seriously, you cannot do this sober, I tried, and I ended up drinking five pints of Arrogant Bastard Ale (7.2% ABV BTW) and two bottles of wine in a single night instead. Needless to say, this gave me a headache.

Our story begins in 1949, when the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb. This officially began the era of Mutually-Assured Destruction (MAD), the single greatest deterrent of direct military aggression between the USA and USSR. MAD was maintained until 1957, when the Soviets launched the first artificial satellite using the first inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM), which was soon spotted in the skies above America. The public freakout over Sputnik 1 was one thing, but for the military, there was an even scarier revelation: if the Soviets had rockets capable of launching an object into orbit, then they also had the capability to launch nuclear weapons at any target on Earth, which could not be intercepted and shot down like long-range bombers could be. Meanwhile, the US did not yet have any ICBMs of their own, so the whole point of the space race was to be the public front for the development of new military weapons in order to restore MAD. In 1960, the CIA confirmed the military’s suspicion of the Soviets having enough nuclear-armed ICBMs to kneecap the entire US military after flying a spy plane over Siberia… a spy plane which was shot down, because even though the Lockheed U-2 has a service ceiling well above that of any interceptor, do I really need to point out that if the Soviets could launch an object into space, they could easily develop a surface-to-air missile (SAM) capable of shooting down a plane cruising at 80,000 feet (24,000 metres)? Was the CIA really that stupid? Yes, and it still is. Despite the fact that the CIA is the great boogeyman that Communists see as an all-powerful devil constantly sabotaging their attempts to create utopia, the reality is that most of the CIA’s hare-brained schemes (like its many attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro) fail spectacularly. Anyway, while NASA was busy developing rockets, as a stop-gap measure, the US Air Force commenced Operation Chrome Dome. What is that, you might ask? Watch this:

Anyway, this is where petty politics start to mess things up. Thanks to this situation, the Air Force, and subsequently military aircraft manufacturers, was effectively run by a group called the Bomber Mafia. This meant that all available resources were devoted to the development, production, and maintenance of long-range heavy bombers. This sort of military branch monopoly on hardware is hardly unique to the US during the Cold War, in fact the whole thing is somewhat reminiscent of the British Royal Navy’s own monopoly on similar resources during World War I, which almost derailed the development of tanks. If you feel like going off on that tangent, here’s a video that explains it which will also have you positively laughing your arse off:

Anyway, in the case of the US, this meant that medium bombers, fighter bombers, and pretty much everything else was ignored, leaving a lot of gaps in the US military’s capabilities. This posed a problem for the air arms of the other branches, since they would have to get… creative… in order to get planes that did what they needed them to, e.g. refurbishing old WWII planes or buying planes from other countries. Stick a pin in that thought, because I’ll come back to it later with examples of each.

In order to explain the development of military aircraft during this period, it is necessary to backtrack a bit, because some of the myths of World War II, which I am positively sick of writing about, persist to this day, even among military veterans, whom you would think would know better. One of these is the myth of the tankbuster. The number of tanks actually destroyed by ground-attack aircraft, be they converted dive bombers like the Ju-87 or purpose-built like the IL-2 or Hawker Typhoon, is a fraction of what the pilots actually reported. The reason is fairly simple, and while this is something that every air force in the war had a problem with, the explanation of what was really happening comes from a source I never would have guessed: the NKVD.

IL-2 pilots would routinely report numbers of kills which simply did not add up, as they were apparently destroying more tanks than were even on the battlefield. What the NKVD found (and don’t ask me how they found this out) was that pilots would launch their rockets (yes, even WWII planes were armed with rockets) at tanks, the rockets would explode upon impact close to the tank and kick up enough smoke to obscure the tank, giving the impression it had been destroyed, even when it hadn’t been hit at all. Another pilot would then fire upon the same tank, repeating the process. Bear in mind that communication between the pilots was virtually nonexistent, as the Soviets did not have enough wireless sets to be able to equip all their planes with them. The Red Army had the exact same problem with its tanks, but at least tanks could communicate with signal flags just like ships did in previous decades. Anyway, despite having wireless sets in every plane, the British and Germans had a similar issue. Ju-87 “Ace” Hans-Ulrich Rudel claimed to have destroyed over 500 Soviet tanks, despite the Soviets not losing this many tanks to aircraft, let alone a single plane. Still, even if ground-attack aircraft didn’t work well in practice, the principle was sound, right? Well…

No plan survives contact with the enemy. - Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

There are loads of military theories that armchair strategists love to pontificate about that absolutely do not work in real life or even in real-time strategy games. A significant portion of these armchair strategists are military veterans, and so the uninitiated will uncritically parrot everything these people say because their credentials give them an air of credibility that they don’t deserve. This is but one step removed from stolen valor, and I’m using the American spelling of “valour,” because as far as I know, it is a phenomenon limited to the United States. Stolen valor, for those who don’t know, is the practise of being a military imposter. While the practise of civilians pretending to have served in the military when they really didn’t is the best known and the easiest to expose on account of the fact that most civilians don’t even know what an MOS is or how to properly wear the uniform, it isn’t the most common. Far more common, and far more difficult to spot, is a military veteran pretending to have served in a capacity for more impressive than their actual position, e.g. a supply clerk telling people that he was in special forces (or a certain vice presidential candidate claiming he retired as an E-9). Anyway, this is somewhat important to keep in mind, because a lot of armchair strategists get undue attention whenever new technology enters the picture, as every idiot has an idea about how to use this new technology in a hypothetical future war, only for everything they think they know to be proven wrong as soon as some greedy politician or incompetent diplomat gets the country into a war. This is exactly what happened in Vietnam, and it comes down largely to the work of US Air Force Colonel John Boyd.

To call Boyd a controversial figure would be an understatement. He had friends in high places, some of whom, unlike Boyd himself, are still alive. Boyd is still deified by the US Air Force because he invented the OODA loop, which virtually no-one outside the Air Force has ever even heard of, despite every Chair Farce veteran proclaiming its “wide-reaching applications.” In reality, the OODA loop is an over-simplified way of explaining how people think that’s been re-complicated to the point where no-one can comprehend it and the instructor bringing it up can feel intellectually superior whenever anyone tries to put it into their own words. I had a flight instructor who was like this when trying to explain instrument flying to me, evidently not knowing that I already had extensive experience with radio frequency direction finding equipment on the ground. Using a VOR is basically the same. It’s a pain in the arse in practice (pilots with instrument ratings will tell you how much fun “chasing the needle” is), but identical in theory to using a direction finder on the ground to locate an ELT or other type of transponder. Have I sufficiently established that I do in fact know what I’m talking about? Good. Anyway, Boyd made a name for himself as a combat flight instructor, despite not being a combat veteran. He taught his students very specific procedures, and was able to beat them in mock dogfights in 40 seconds every single time. When pilots from this school entered combat, they got obliterated. The US Navy, meanwhile, had its own flight school which actually taught pilots to win, rather than just letting the instructor show off. This lent itself to a much better aerial combat record, despite relying on “inferior” planes. The Air Force was reliant on the old trope of “the gun always beats the missile,” and “upgraded” their F-4 Phantoms with a nose cannon. The Navy, which never operated the upgraded F-4, proved the Air Force wrong, and a massive divergence took place in 1964.

1964 was an interesting year for aircraft development, as it saw the first flight of the A-37 Dragonfly and the F-111 Aardvark, two planes that were highly influential on the Fighter Mafia, albeit for different reasons. Stick another pin in, because I’ll explain how later. 1964 was also the year that the Air Force brought in John Boyd as a consultant to work on Project Blue Bird… which would eventually become the F-15, but I’m getting ahead of myself. It is no coincidence that these weird groups are called “mafias,” because they really were power-hungry mobs that cared more about their own influence than actually doing what made sense. The Bomber Mafia, for example, tried to secure continued funding for long-range nuclear-capable heavy bombers, despite these things having been proved to be obsolete. The first American ICBM was launched in December of 1957, a mere two months after Sputnik 1 was launched. By 1959, the US military had a fully operational ICBM program, nuclear-capable heavy bombers would soon be on the chopping block anyway, and the number of Broken Arrows in the following decade wasn’t helping the Bomber Mafia’s case. Like the Bomber Mafia, the Fighter Mafia had their heads collectively stuck in the past, specifically a mindset that romanticises World War II, which is one of several reasons that WWII is my least favourite war to talk about. Soldiers and Marines in Vietnam weren’t fighting the same war that their fathers fought against the Japanese. When pinned down by suppressing fire and needing support, soldiers would typically call in an artillery strike to knock out the enemy’s area denial system. If close enough to the shore, that supporting artillery would be the guns of a warship. In Vietnam, this wasn’t an option, hence the modern concept of close air support (CAS). At the time, there were no planes that could do this particularly well, so most CAS missions were done by helicopters. Thus arose the need for a plane that could be called in, identify friend from foe when both are in fairly close proximity to each other, and rain hellfire on the correct target. Why a plane, when helicopters did just fine? Because Air Force, that’s why. Pure political bullshit, in other words, and here’s where the story gets really weird.

One of the first attempts at a CAS plane (mind you, we are still in 1964 here) was the AC-47 Spooky, an old passenger liner from 1935 turned military transport turned gunship. It is armed with three M134 miniguns, giving this plane the ability to dump up to 18,000 rounds per minute at any given target. The only problem was that it could only operate at night, possibly because the plane itself was so outdated and the easiest thing to shoot down even during WWII… at least if my experience in Jane’s World War II Fighters as a kid is anything to go by. The Air Force wanted a CAS plane that could operate during the day, they insisted that it be a gun plane, and they eventually got it in 1972. The Marine Corps, meanwhile, wasn’t going to wait, and adopted the British Harrier jump jet in 1971. However, before we actually talk about that, it is time to introduce the single most infamous person in the entire military reformist movement, someone whose lies have spread far and wide, but unless you are a military vehicle enthusiast or otherwise already acquainted with the reformists, you’ve probably never heard of him: Pierre Sprey.

Sprey began his career as a statistician working for Grumman, way before its merger with Northrop. This is the extent of his involvement in aircraft development, but that did not stop him barging into a meeting of actual aircraft designers working on Project Blue Bird and giving them a list of “requirements” for the design, which amounted to removing certain pieces of hardware he believed to be useless, such as modern radar and navigation instruments. Considering that most single-seat civilian planes today have GPS units and altitude-encoding transponders, this seems retarded to any aviator in the modern day. Have I mentioned that military reformists do not know what they are talking about? Anyway, here is the relevant passage from The F-15 Eagle Origins and Development 1964-1972:

Note the phrase “too expensive, incorporated high-risk technology, was unnecessarily complex, and would not achieve its advertised air superiority performance.” This is the mantra of the military reformists, as they have recycled this exact criticism for almost every new military plane, and omitting the final portion, every new piece of military hardware in general. The very next passage in this document (page 73-74) begins with the following sentence: The Air Force and Navy were not impressed. HA! For those who don’t know, that is military-speak for “he was laughed out of the room.” Anyway, despite the fact that Sprey liked to claim that he was designer of the F-15, the above passage is the complete extent of his involvement in the project. There is a pattern that soon emerges, and it looks like this:

The Sprey Loop

The F-15 is, today, the single most successful jet fighter ever developed, but the reformists absolutely hated it when it was initially designed. However, there is another plane that first flew in that same year, 1972, that the reformists absolutely love: the A-10 Thunderbolt II, the final project of Alexander Kartveli, the designer of the P-47 Thunderbolt back in 1941 and many other planes in between. The A-10 was the CAS plane that I mentioned earlier, but despite having been developed specifically for this role, it’s not very good at it. Stick another pin in, because this is yet another example of the reformists being wrong, but having enough influence in both the legacy media and politics that they keep getting their way. I’m trying to keep this in chronological order as much as possible, and sometimes, it takes a while before someone’s predictions are vindicated or debunked by reality.

One of the most successful ground-attack aircraft in Vietnam was the A-37 Dragonfly, which was a modified T-37 trainer, sometimes called the Tweety Bird after a famous cartoon character on account of its high-pitched engine whine. This might have been the primary inspiration for the A-10, considering the A-37 was armed with both a minigun and bomb racks. CAS missions require a unit to move in quickly, and the troops on the ground don’t always know what they’re up against. This is why CAS aircraft, both helicopters and aeroplanes, are armed with a wide variety of weapons. Depending on how close the two opposing ground forces are to each other, this may require the CAS unit to make a highly precise strike… which the 30-mm GAU-8 on the A-10 cannot do, so the A-10 also carries bombs and missiles. By 1977, when the A-10 was finally adopted into service, the Soviet Union was fielding tanks that were completely invulnerable to 30-mm cannon fire, as well as radar-guided anti-aircraft vehicles such as the ZSU-23-4, which made it impossible for planes to get close to a Soviet tank column and strafe it with gunfire. However, this didn’t stop US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel James Burton from designing yet another gun plane as a replacement in 1978:

I think it’s obvious where Burton was getting his inspiration from. Despite once describing this thing as “a derpy version of the Me-262,” I would say that this is a derivative of the A-37, while ignoring the most important thing about it: the A-37 could carry bombs.

Guns were becoming much less relevant on planes as bombs and missiles became more advanced. Burton’s design was rejected outright, and a year later, two things happened which would slap the luddites in the Fighter Mafia in their smug faces: the 1979 live fire tests in Europe, which resulted in European countries losing interest in the A-10, and the first aerial kill by an F-15. Despite the constant caterwauling about precision weapons being useless expensive garbage, Sprey and his bum-buddies were proven wrong. The dogfight died in 1979, and was buried in 1980 during the opening operations of the Iran-Iraq War, when rookie pilots in the Iranian Air Force were able to target and destroy Iraqi planes flown by veteran pilots from beyond visual range (BVR). The Iranians were operating the at-that-time brand-new F-14, and the Iraqis were operating the much older MiG-23 and Su-20. So much for “the good pilot will always beat technology.” Have I mentioned that a remarkable number of Chair Force veterans don’t know shit about combat or even flying? Speaking of not knowing shit about combat…

James Burton did not take kindly to his design being rejected, and hooked up with Pierre Sprey to propose the Joint Live Fire Test Program (JLF) in 1984, which the Navy and Air Force wisely declined to be a part of, but the Army agreed to for some reason. Burton’s entire purpose was to settle a score with the Pentagon by poking so many holes in their newest vehicle, the M2 Bradley IFV, that the program would either be cancelled, or Burton would be allowed another shot at designing a vehicle by coming up with a replacement. The real story is documented in The Bradley and How It Got That Way by W Blair Haworth. Burton’s apocryphal version, meanwhile, is presented in his memoir titled The Pentagon Wars, which was adapted into a black comedy in 1998. The short version of the story is that Burton’s refusal to understand the testing protocol just because he wanted to blow up a Bradley ended up getting him removed from the JLF and transferred to a position outside the Pentagon, a transfer which he rejected, and opted to retire instead. Nonetheless, thanks to his temper-tantrum, the Bradley has a public image synonymous with corruption and runaway military budgets, despite being one of the most successful military vehicles ever developed, beloved by its crews, and whose development was under-budget, costing $8 billion out of an expected $12 billion. That is not to say that the military never has a problem with budgets running away, just look at the advanced combat rifle (ACR) program or its successor, the objective individual combat weapon (OICW). However, to prevent this article from going past the 10,000-word mark, I’ll just tell you to go look up those two things on either the Fat Electrician’s channel or Forgotten Weapons.

Incidentally, the “military reformist movement” was born out of the Fighter Mafia hooking up with other people involved in different sectors of military procurement. This is why the reformists concern themselves primarily with planes, even though a much larger portion of the US military budget goes toward ships. Bear in mind that the price tag for an aircraft carrier is $14 billion, but the reformists rarely bother to mention that. The only people who want to retire the massive, inefficient super-carriers are the forward-looking ones, and as we have established, the military reformists don’t like new technology. I’ll get into this when I talk about the F-35 in a bit.

The next major blow to the reformist movement came during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, but they found a way to deflect and capitalise on it all the same. Despite the predictions that it would be “Bush’s Vietnam,” Operation Desert Storm was the single most successful military campaign of the 20th century. The newest ground vehicles, the M1 Abrams MBT and the M2 Bradley IFV, proved their mettle, despite being “untested.” However, the war was won primarily down to air power, notably the F-15, but other planes made major contributions as well. The F-111 Aardvark, a plane that the reformists absolutely despise for the same reason that they despised the F-15, destroyed roughly 1500 armoured vehicles, and may have even single-handedly ended the war. No, I’m not making that up:

However, everyone knows of the A-10 as a tankbuster, despite having destroyed only half the number of tanks as the F-111 while flying double the number of sorties. Why isn’t the F-111 known as the tankbuster instead? Because big gun go brrrrr, that’s why. This is when the popular narrative first appeared that Pierre Sprey designed the A-10, and the VB-200 Blitzfighter was his original prototype. Wait, didn’t I just say that Alexander Kartveli designed the A-10, and the Blitzfighter was James Burton’s replacement for it? Yes, you read that correctly, Sprey had been taking credit for other people’s work, which he had previously criticised, for at least 30 years. If that’s not a case of serial plagiarism, I don’t know what is. Anyway, as a result of the reformists’ massive influence in the legacy media propaganda machine and even the US Congress, the F-111 found itself on the chopping block shortly thereafter, meanwhile the demonstrably inferior A-10 remains in service to this day, only finding itself on the potential mothball list after the death of Senator John McCain, who was also a major obstacle to the development of the F-35, which will eventually replace the A-10 and pretty much everything else currently in service whether you like it or not.

By now, you may have noticed a trend. The military reformists are known for pissing and moaning about the expense of new weapon systems, even though their own efforts to derail the development of these systems end up costing a lot of taxpayer money all by themselves. The accusation of military procurement being a circus is pure projection, and the accusation of it being a money pit is a case of tu quoque. The reformists do not “mean well,” they are charlatans, simple as. The more astute among you have probably already figured out why I think that the military reformist movement is a pro-war psyop, but for those who haven’t, I will explain at the end. For now, it’s time to talk about the F-35, why it represents the future of aerial combat, and what its real shortcomings are. So, I’m going to go through the single most comprehensive article on this subject, which the author made the mistake of dropping into my lap after I had accused him of simply regurgitating legacy media narratives recycled from Pierre Sprey…

Source

…and debunk it point-by-point. Won’t this be fun?

If we continue like drunken sailors to throw money at the F-35, it’ll be an effective fighter jet. But the biggest issue is that we don’t need it. Predator and Reaper drones are just the beginning of a new generation of pilotless aircraft that promise to be more effective.  Why?  Because we need not risk pilots getting shot down.

Since this article was originally written, it has been shown that 90% of American drone strikes failed to hit their intended target. Furthermore, the F-35 is designed specifically to coordinate with drones via datalink, which older aircraft don’t have. The F-35 is also meant to be armed with long-range missiles such that it need not even enter dangerous airspace in most missions, and if it does, that’s what stealth is for. Only once was a stealth plane ever shot down, and it was a one-in-a-million lucky shot. Stealth technology is no mere gimmick, despite what the Serbs might say.

The Vietnam War proved that, in aerial combat, pilot training and skill matter more than technology. That’s why the U.S. military established realistic training at “Top Gun” schools.

But subsequent wars overturned this way of thinking, as I previously mentioned. What years was this guy in the Air Force? 1985-2005, was it? He should know better.

Winslow Wheeler reveals the high cost and serious limitations of the F-35 here and here. Wheeler knows his stuff. He’s the Director of the Straus Military Reform Project of the Center for Defense Information, part of the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) in Washington, DC, and is the author of The Wastrels of Defense: How Congress Sabotages National Security (US Naval Institute Press) and Military Reform: An Uneven History and an Uncertain Future (Stanford University Press). Another critical article is by the legendary Chuck Spinney here with the telling title “F-35: Out of Altitude, Airspeed, and Ideas — But Never Money.”

This is a veritable “who’s who” of the military reformist movement that the author is positively gushing over like a horny schoolgirl lusting after a smooth-talking bad boy, but there is one name notably absent here. Dan Ward, another retired USAF Lieutenant Colonel (they seem to be over-represented among reformists) quoted Franklin “Chuck” Spinney from Defense Facts of Life, the manifesto of the reformist movement, in Simplicity and National Security. In fact, Ward is someone I took pot shots at in one of my earliest Substack articles on the subject of simplicity itself, because Ward is a huckster, a salesman pretending to be an engineer… not too different from Astore, incidentally. The exact same arguments that these exact same people were making against the F-15 forty years earlier are being recycled here verbatim against the F-35. Have I mentioned that “self-plagiarism” is a thing? Well, now you know.

I’ve worked on two Air Force software programs.  Both were overly complex and plagued with coding problems that drove up costs and extended schedules while degrading performance.  The software on the F-35 is yet another example of this, as this report indicates.  The F-35 continues to slip in schedule as costs rise due to software flaws, even as reports emerge that the software is vulnerable to hacking.

Given that I am a CNC programmer and have a basic working knowledge of programming languages other than industrial g-code, I can tell you that this is hardly unique to the military. Pretty much any software project designed to perform complex tasks is going to have these issues, it’s unavoidable. What you will notice is that a lot of problems that the F-35 supposedly has are shared with many other modern products, given the sorry state of American manufacturing in the 21st century.

 The AF is now claiming that A-10s need to be eliminated to free up maintenance staff for the F-35.  If the venerable A-10s are not mothballed, initial operational capability (IOC) for the F-35 will be delayed, according to Lt Gen Bogdan.

The AF has never liked the A-10, since it was designed to provide close air support for ground troops.

That last sentence is a complete lie. As I previously stated, the Air Force wanted to build a CAS plane, lest the entire job of CAS be given to helicopters and the Air Force not having a slice of the pie! If the author is willing to lie about this, one must wonder what other lies he’s telling people about the US Air Force, or perhaps his own service in it. The only thing I won’t question is that he was a Lieutenant Colonel, for reasons I just explained.

In this video, Pierre Sprey, the designer of the F-16 Fighting Falcon,

Another lie, Sprey was not the designer of the F-16! Robert Widmer, the lead designer of the F-111, was the designer of the F-16. I was able to look this up on Wikipedia of all places, which used to credit Sprey as the designer of the A-10 before being corrected some time after his death.

Not surprisingly, given its design flaws, the F-35 is distinctly inferior to the F-15, F-16, and F-18 in dogfighting capability.  Even worse, its cockpit design seriously restricts a pilot’s ability to “Check Six” (to look behind, often the most likely sector from which an enemy plane will attack).

Muh dogfighting! Right, even if that were true (it’s not), who cares? Criticising a modern fighter for not being able to dogfight as well as its predecessors is like criticising a modern soldier for not being as good in hand-to-hand combat as a mediaeval knight. Modern fighters are designed for BVR engagement, so if a fighter pilot finds himself in a dogfight, it’s because something has gone horribly wrong. Furthermore, the F-35 is hardly the only fighter that has poor rearward visibility. The F-4 Phantom, F-111 Aardvark, and F-117 Nighthawk all have the exact same issue, and that never seemed to be a problem, so “checking your six” clearly isn’t all that important for situational awareness. Meanwhile, the A-10, which doesn’t have the same issue, has extremely poor situational awareness compared to these other three planes.

While most on Capitol Hill are supportive, some naysayers continue to offer criticism. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has remained vocal in his staunch opposition to the F-35 program.

“There is nothing a gold-plated F-35 can do in close air support that can’t be done better by a silver-plated A-10,” he opined.

I know this section in particular is satire, but one must appreciate the delicious irony of someone whose entire shtick is being anti-war being supportive of one of the biggest warmongers in Congress. But then, I did say that the military reformist movement is a pro-war psyop, don’t worry, I will explain myself soon.

The F-35, by the way, is already the most expensive weapons system in history. As of March, its acquisition price tag was $400 billion. However, the cost of operating and maintaining the fleet over the next several decades stands at an estimated $1.45 trillion.

This is flat-out false. If you bother to adjust for inflation, the most expensive weapon system is… drumroll please… the F-15, which cost roughly $6 trillion in today’s money! However, this author is economically illiterate, and only bothers to bring up the topic of inflation when it supports his argument… because he’s a Communist. No, that’s not a pejorative, every time he opines on the economy, he repeats at least one point of The Communist Manifesto. I will explain when I publish what I hope will be my final polemic against him, which is almost done, but I still need to get some information from my alma mater regarding… you know what? I’ll let you take a wild guess.

Every point in the article I just responded to has been recycled ad nauseam on Bollocks Views, though any subsequent mention of Sprey is suspiciously absent, which is why I never retracted my accusations of plagiarism. It is insufficient to cite a source once and then never bring it up again while repeating the same message. However, there are two other points that have appeared on Bollocks Views about the F-35, one was about the infamous ejection seat malfunction, and the other was the revelation that its airframe has a lifespan only about a third that of the F-15. I won’t touch on the ejection seat thing, but the lifespan has a two-fold explanation. First of all, I’ve already mentioned that nothing is built to last anymore, and the F-35 is probably just another victim of that. Second, however, is that not all materials have long fatigue cycles to begin with. Steel lasts basically forever, as long as it isn’t subjected to high pressure. Aluminium does not, and as a direct result, airframes have a definite lifespan before they need to be completely rebuilt. The F-35, however, is not built primarily out of aluminium, but out of some rather exotic composites, and I cannot reveal the exact composition because, frankly, I don’t know what they are. I was never high up enough in the aerospace industry to need a security clearance, and even if I was, I’m not a materials scientist, so the exact material makeup of the F-35 is something that I wouldn’t have been privy to anyway. Everything on these high-level projects is done on a strictly need-to-know basis, which is one of several reasons that they take so much longer than they used to. This isn’t a bug, but a feature of increased bureaucracy in the name of secrecy, security, and safety. All that being said, the F-35 does legitimately have problems that aren’t simply symptoms of a much wider phenomenon, but amateur historians are never going to pick up on them because of the single most overlooked subject in military history while arguably being the most important: logistics.

The F-35 is actually three different planes. Despite their similar appearance and a structurally similar airframe, each of the different F-35 models have only about 20% component commonality. This is something that would cause a real engineer like yours truly raise an eyebrow, but is not something the reformists ever bring up, almost as if none of them are really engineers. Anyway, the idea of a Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), which was a single airframe that could fulfil three different roles, goes back to 1995, and designing such a plane, especially one that is jam-packed with the latest instrumentation necessary to stay on top of a modern battlefield, is no mean feat. Very frequently, when a new machine is designed to perform a number of complex tasks, the first iteration will be quite complicated, but then subsequent iterations will be simpler as other engineers revisit the concept, as I showed with the development of firearms and apple peelers.

The same applies to planes, as the F-15 is, in many ways, a simplified and more effective version of the F-111. LazerPig once said that the F-35 is to the F-15 what the gun was to the crossbow, so some problems with the first generation JSF are to be expected, just as there were with the first guns. For this analogy, it would be better to say that the F-35 is to everything that came before it what the wheellock pistol and matchlock musket were to the crossbow and longbow. The F-35A is the baseline air superiority version, the lightest, most manoeuvrable, and most widely used. The F-35B is the VTOL version developed for the US Marine Corps to replace the Harrier, and is also used by a number of other navies, notably Japan. The F-35C is the carrier version used, as far as I know, exclusively by the US Navy. It is a larger, heavier version of the F-35A whose structure is capable of handling the stresses of carrier operations, specifically being launched by a catapult and landing with an arrestor cable, both of which would tear apart an F-35A if it tried to do that. The F-35B, being a VTOL aircraft, doesn’t have that issue and can land literally anywhere, but the massive lift fan right behind the cockpit takes up valuable space and adds extra weight, so the F-35B has the shortest range of all three.

So, why does the 20% component commonality make me raise an eyebrow? Well, for starters, that’s pitifully low compared to the 70% component commonality across all variants of the F-15. The primary downfall for pieces of military hardware is ordinary wear and lack of proper maintenance. This is painfully apparent not only throughout history, but also on both sides of the Russo-Ukrainian War. You don’t even have to be in the military to know this, because complex vehicles, especially planes, are in a perpetual state of being broken once they reach a certain age. If you can’t get parts, these things become multimillion-dollar paperweights. This is one of several reasons that invading armies are always at a disadvantage compared to the defenders, but sometimes, the defenders are so woefully under-supplied that any home territory advantage is negated. The Ukrainians currently have 14 British Challenger II MBTs, but are capable of fielding only 7 because the British cannot supply enough replacement parts, so half the tanks are kept in “reserve,” when they are really just being cannibalised. I expect to see a similar situation with Ukrainian F-16s. The Russians, meanwhile, abandoned half of their own vehicles within the first week of fighting because they had not been kept in proper working order, and many of them had even been stripped of equipment for sale on the black market (something that happens a lot in the Russian military). Both sides’ soldiers are hilariously under-equipped, using outdated weaponry (which still works, admittedly) that has been pulled from Soviet-era warehouses and even museums. For every Russian soldier armed with an AK-12, Russia’s latest combat rifle, you will count three armed with a Mosin M91. For every PKM on either side, you will count a DP-28, an MG-42 (on the Ukrainian side anyway), and several Maxims. Rebels in Donetsk even re-activated an IS-3 back in 2014 and drove it right off its plinth… and then immediately abandoned it, because it hasn’t been possible to get ammunition for 122-mm rifled tank guns since 1993, when the T-10M was retired. LazerPig has made the claim that Russia cannot produce enough artillery shells and is instead getting them shipped in from North Korea, which may be true (more likely it’s an inside joke among Russian artillerymen), but LazerPig also thinks that Ukraine is winning, which is false, that Putin wants to rebuild the Soviet Union, which is also false, and that Russian propaganda is behind every anti-globalist movement like the Brexit campaign (he even called Carl Benjamin of the

Lotus Eaters

a Russian puppet), which is psychotic. Then again, LazerPig thoroughly discredited himself with the T-14 Armata engine fiasco, so he really should not be considered a reliable source of information about anything going on in Russia, and you really should only view his older, short-form content for its comedic value. Even his rebuke of the reformists is somewhat lack-lustre, such as claiming that Pierre Sprey’s story of involving Hans-Ulrich Rudel in the A-10 program would have gotten him arrested; evidently LazerPig doesn’t know about Operation Paperclip, the sheer number of former Nazis who held high-level positions in NATO, or the west’s collective downplay of Nazi atrocities until the fall of the USSR.

I will conclude by explaining why I think the military reformists are part of a massive pro-war psychological operation. First, they are not anti-establishment, despite what they proclaim. Not only are they almost all former Pentagon insiders pretending to be whistleblowers, their influence over Wikipedia, which only started to diminish after Pierre Sprey’s death, demonstrates that they are very much a component of the Cathedral. Any anti-establishment rhetoric the reformists spout is purely performative. Not all of them are even nominally anti-war, case in point: John McCain, darling of the Democrats and proponent of forever wars. If the war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous, as George Orwell pointed out, war-winning strategies and weaponry may not be employed. Outdated equipment and poor leadership keeps the war dragging on, which is how the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex sucks up all our money. Quick, decisive campaigns like Operation Desert Storm don’t lend themselves to massive upward transfers of wealth, and it has been theorised that, under Sprey’s guidance, admonishing the US military to “remember the lessons of Korea and Vietnam,” the 1991 Persian Gulf War could have dragged on for years, and possibly even been lost. This is not to say that the war was necessarily justified, and certainly wouldn’t have been were the US 100% energy independent at the time, but a façade of militantly naïve idealist pacifism does serve the reformists well, because after all, who is unironically pro-war, other than psychopaths? The military reformists do also like to fantasise about war within their own country, as William S Lind has done in his own fiction novels, despite routinely bitching about both the F-35 and the Global American Empire in articles he writes for The American Conservative. I have previously referred to him as “a less loquacious version of Harry Turtledove,” but if I’m being honest, that’s unfair to Turtledove, who is neither a reformist nor a warmonger as far as I know. You will also note that the reformists aren’t partisan; there is a roughly even split between “left” and “right” among them, and those are just the ones whose politics I know. The “rightists” within the reformist movement are establishment right, i.e. neocons, as opposed to dissident right, and the Bradley IFV, one of their favourite punching bags, is frequently compared to “overweight warmongering sociopath” Donald Trump. Meanwhile John McCain is a hero!

These people are all Democrats

Yeah, that alone should tell you that this movement is not anti-war, and any reformist who claims to be anti-war is lying if they’ve ever praised the likes of John McCain, Barack Obama, Lindsey Graham, or Joe Biden. Furthermore, despite being ostensibly about helping out America, there is a paradoxical amount of simping for Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union within this movement, such as the weird notion that Hans-Ulrich Rudel was somehow involved with the development of the A-10, the reformists’ favourite plane, or that outdated Soviet hardware is better than modern western equipment (conveniently ignoring that Russia modernises too) because “muh simplicity.” This narrative originates with Sprey, and you can still find traces of it on certain Wikipedia articles, e.g. the one about Rudel himself, at least as of my writing this article.

Reminder, the A-10 first flew in 1972, four years before this conference. The source linked is the transcript of an anti-tank warfare seminar, not aircraft development.

Furthermore, a lot of reformists have a schizophrenic relationship with the legacy media, since they like to lambast it as being in the pocket of the “military-industrial-congressional complex” (one of their made-up terms), even though the reformists themselves are the ones writing all these articles in legacy media publications about how shit the F-35 is. Reformists like to piss and moan about the legacy media being more full of shit than the combined intestinal tract of the fat acceptance movement (thanks, KC!) while uncritically parroting every single one of their talking points in the very next breath (you will find a lot of TDS-sufferers in this crowd). They will unironically say that the media is the enemy of the people, but then turn round and criticise you for saying the exact same thing if you disagree with their politics! This isn’t about principles, it’s about power. Both Lind and Astore (who are not politically aligned, obviously) have outright advocated for “1984-style censorship” as tactics for advancing their causes, despite claiming to believe in “American values” like free speech. Both have denounced stochastic terrorism, but both have also engaged in it, just like MSNPC. Do not kid yourself into thinking that either of these men have the interests of the American people in mind, they don’t, they are in this for their own egos and nothing more.

So, what is to be done with these frauds? Simple: shut them out. Make note of their names, and if you ever find yourself in a position to organise an anti-war event, do not merely refrain from inviting any reformists, make it clear that they are not welcome. Personally, I’d have armed security and order them to shoot on sight, because if nothing else, it will get the rest of the reformists to come out of the woodwork, and maybe we’ll find out who is truly behind them. Granted, some of them are lone wolves, like Mike Sparks (who is insane, by the way), but Astore and Lind are definitely part of a larger operation, much like the original Fighter Mafia. If any member of the reformist movement approaches you and asks to be given a speaking role at an anti-war demonstration, tell him to his face (there are no women in this group as far as I know) that his cult is a detriment to the cause of peace, because “your constant lies make the Pentagon look good by comparison, your very existence discredits the anti-war movement.” I put that in quotes because that is the exact line you should use, and should you get into such an argument online, let them know where you’re getting this from.

As for me, I’m probably done talking about them unless I run out of ideas, in which case I might start debunking the trash on War is Boring or some other reformist blog. In any case, the reformists must be purged from the anti-war movement if the cause of peace is to advance. Seeyas!