Fightin’ Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) was on fire once again recently, turning the screws on the Secretary of the Air Force to procure aircraft that actually work. You read that right — we are spending a ridiculous amount of cash on planes that don’t work. Say what you will about the flamboyant Florida Congressman; this fight he’s picked with the Department of Defense on this issue is highly necessary. Gaetz deserves both credit and support for taking up this particular mantle.
Our federal government spent a staggering nearly $6.2 trillion last year, having taken in only $4.5 trillion from taxpayers. Because the government continues to spend trillions more than it has, it is high time for the taxpayers to take note and for more members like Gaetz to aggressively sound the alarm that we must slam the brakes on aggressive nonsense spending.
Smart members of Congress know that you go to war with the military you have, so a critical part of their job is to keep tabs on how our military is doing, particularly where all that money we throw at it is going. Now more than ever we never know when the U.S. may need to go to war, and we need working, effective next-generation weapons at the ready now.
In a congressional hearing referenced above, Rep. Gaetz pressed Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall about the readiness of a key weapon system: the noted F-35 fighter jet. Kendall responded that the “operational availability” of the plane is at 55%.
“Do you think that’s a good number or a bad number?” Gaetz asked.
“I think that’s not a good number,” Kendall said.
It is not a good number.
The real number is far worse than that. As the Tampa Free Press explains. “Full mission capable rates varied by variant from a low of 14.9% to a high of 36.4% in 2023, according to the GAO,” and “Most of the trouble could be attributed to a backlog in maintenance and the Air Force’s inability to source new parts.”
The Government Accountability Office itself found that “The F-35 fleet’s overall availability has trended downward considerably over the past 5 years, and none of the variants are meeting availability goals (i.e., the percentage of time the aircraft can perform one of its tasked missions).”
We’ve rooted for the F-35 long enough and it is high time our patience ran thin. The troubled plane continues to swallow a ton of resources and cash and yet sits useless two-thirds of the time. “This unreliability renders the entire program ineffective,” the Project for Government Oversight concluded in a February report.
Again, we need working, effective next-generation weapons at the ready now.
Our military has been caught unprepared before. At the start of the Korean War, American forces lacked both anti-tank guns and effective infantry anti-tank weapons and had been equipped with obsolete 2.36-inch (60 mm) rocket launchers and a few 57 mm recoilless rifles. Americans died needlessly, and we nearly lost that war in its opening days.
In the decade ahead of World War II the U.S. Army stood at fewer than 200,000 men ― unprepared to defend the country, much less carry the fight to foreign shores. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and wiped out a fleet’s worth of battleships. We were also caught lacking in preparedness ahead of World War I. We have plenty of lessons to draw upon about the consequences of being under-prepared militarily, and at this point, we should certainly know better.
Ours is a land of plenty, and there is plenty of money available for a strong, properly prepared defense. But not for waste. Our men and women in uniform deserve and must have nothing but the very best when it comes to the equipment we supply them with.
With that in mind, we need a national come to Jesus, as they say, when it comes to the failed F-35. Too much money, time, and effort are being wasted on a single ineffective program. “DOD estimates the F-35 program will cost over $2 trillion to buy, operate, and sustain over its lifetime,” again, according to the GAO.
“It doesn’t actually matter what kind of dazzling capabilities the F-35 may one day be able to perform: If the aircraft can’t be relied upon to perform when needed, then any potential capability is useless,” concludes the previously cited Project on Government Oversight report.
When more elected leaders like Gaetz stand up fiercely for us, our military, and our treasury, we won’t bankrupt ourselves for the military to have weapons that work. Enough with the F-35.