The F-35, by virtue of three decades of development and crowding out all other alternatives, has become a singularly perfect metaphor for spending trade-offs made by the US, in a way that "guns & butter" never was.

I have so much more to say, but that's where I want to start. https://twitter.com/Ilhan/status/1330935540888330243

What I think is especially sticky about the F-35 as a unit of measure (a thing I have consistently embraced, see: https://jscalc.io/calc/TuYzNETZTIQkKXlM) is that there's also a massive quantity ordered. Between Air Force, Navy, Marines, it's around 2,400 jets, purchased by the dozens every year

Asking "why are we buying so many F-35s?" and offering up other goods or services that amount of money could go to is a way to get at the heart of a question behind the entire Pentagon budget: "are our lives actually secured by this spending, in this way?"

I think it's worth asking that question all the time; I wouldn't be on this beat if I didn't. But there's another important part to it, which is "if that spending could go elsewhere, why doesn't it?", which is harder. Not least because the F-35 is designed to survive Congress.

More than stealth or STOVL or comms or sensors or whichever of the several Cs or ISR it is contributing to, the F-35 is a jobs program with hooks in every state and many, many, many districts in those states https://twitter.com/ValerieInsinna/status/1331221136936476675

Part of that jobs program is the promise of the F-35 as an export product, in a way that the F-22 never was. The export market subsidizes US spending on the jets and locks-in ~future markets~ and allies. Export alone doesn't really support the F-35's costs, not by a long shot.

Another part of that jobs program is that, by and large, the kind of direct government investment seen in the US economy in the last 70+ years has been defense spending. The post-war economy, really, was the Cold War economy, buoyed by the demands of the 1947 NatSec State.

There's a lot of other facets, obviously, to military spending, but I think it's silly to leave out the role in the economy, especially when Lockheed et all cultivate supply chains that reinforce legislative seats in favor of further purchases.

And there is the real question of what kind of war are planes like the F-35 built for. I'm broadly of the opinion that, past a certain early point, a conventional war against a big nation where stealth would matter becomes nuclear, and then nothing matters. (This is disputed).

The F-35 then becomes a central figure in long arguments about readiness and capability and capacity and conventional deterrence and all sorts of "well, what are we actually getting from it?"

And, sometimes, "is that worth more than feeding kids?"

I don't know what the *right* number of $82-104 million stealth jets is to meet what needs the US imagines having above the battlefields of the future. What I can say is that it's nice to have a Congress willing to ask the question, even if cutting the funding is unlikely.