patrick.net

I've always liked Ron Paul. It's a damned shame the GOPe stole the primary from him four years ago, replacing him with their favorite son Mittens. Ron had a good chance of winning vs Obama and could have taken steps to limit damaging policies. We'd probably have been in a boom economy for the last three years.
His advice here on military spending is solid. We've had enough military adventurism, and foreign "aid" is just coercion by another name that has almost never done anything to better the lives of the citizens in countries that receive it. Rather, "foreign aid" is usually given to tyrants and despots in exchange for policies that favor US business leaders or globalist political agendas. These policies we buy with taxpayer money never benefit the taxpayer, but only the ruling administration's smaller coalition of political and business supporters.
And when the ignorant taxpayers object, the administration says "well, America is the most generous country in the world and we should keep up that legacy!" This puts a charitable spin on the situation, even though the money involved usually winds up in the numbered Swiss bank accounts of dictators and their cronies.

Ron Paul has issues on the economy, such as thinking depressions are easy to overcome. If they are caused by credit they are not easy to overcome. He has problems with racism and feels that helping someone with social security is stealing. So there is a lot wrong with Ron Paul. But on war he is right.

The F-35 was obsolete before it ever a single squadron was fully Combat Operational. Not only was it never as stealthy as it was supposed to be when the contract was signed, it's totally visible to L-Band and AESA radars, now coming into common use. That's the problem when it takes 15-years to field a jet.

My favorite excuse was it was supposed to be the cheaper, more numerous 'low' part of a 'high low mix', filling in the F-16s role today. The thing is so ridiculously expensive to operate, and it went from being a fighter-bomber to "a strike aircraft with some standoff air-to-air capacity" - a bomber-interceptor. Yet another F-105 style missilier that will be creamed in real combat (only saving grace is the high training of US pilots, which will suffer if they get very little actual aerial practice as the F-35 costs more to fly per hour than the median household income).

There is so much waste in these large firms - caused by the Lawyers that work there, not so much the engineers. But to come to the defense of the Lawyers they need to create strong contracts, without diluting the work effort.

At the end of the day the few engineers we have left are being worked 80 hours a week. They are as valiant as many service men and woman.

Rep/Con/Teas don't worry about spending,
They start a war & don't fund it.
If there's a problem, just borrow the money.

Folks don't realize how Yuge of a disaster the F-35 is.

In 10 years, the F-15 and F-16 airframes will be dangerously old; and it makes no fiscal sense to refurbish them - cheaper to build a new. We only have 200 F-22s. That means the only plane in the USAF inventory will be worse at dogfighting than 1970s era airframes, and Radar-Guided AAM fighter-to-fighter combat is unproven at best (Sparrow had a 9% kill rate in Vietnam - 10 needed to be fired to down a 50s era Soviet Jet)

"Oh, but that was the 70s, electronics so much better."
"Yeah, it was the 70s when the MiG-21 export models had no threat detectors, or terminal countermeasures like chaff or jamming."

The only way to do this is have legal reform and have 18-20% of the jobs related to manufacturing, R&D, Science, Technology.

We need legal reform and a new Progress Era like the US did 100 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Era

Obama missed this opportunity, - he was too hard over on trying to deal with social ills, that ironically he may have actually made it worse.