Trump.... what would turn supporters against him

Yeah I don't make the rules in regards to the military but the 2 war front is the goal of the US Armed Forces. Well at least it was a few years ago, things may have changed since then I'm not sure. Those sort of decisions are way above my pay grade and they don't really discuss that sort of stuff with us too often. We just go about our daily duties mostly dealing with this terrorism issue.

There's nothing wrong with the F/A-18 it's a great plane. Our problem is that we still operate based on Cold War mentalities which is both good and bad. We always try to stay one or two steps ahead of the enemy in terms of weapons systems so we keep creating newer and better fighter jets. We are still fighting theoretical wars on paper. If Russia has an Su-37 with thrust vectoring engines that can do cartwheels in the sky then we need something like that. What the general public doesn't understand is that Russia may have cool acrobatic fighter jets that can do cartwheels in the sky, being able to do cartwheels in the sky doesn't matter. An AIM-120 AMRAAM missile doesn't care how many cartwheels you can do, it will still shoot you down from 30 miles away anyway.

Plus what Russia and China don't have is money. Sure they may have a cool plane that you can watch on youtube doing fancy tricks, but what they don't show you is that they have a total of like 5 of the things, 4 don't work, and the only working one is the one you saw in the youtube video that they parked on the ramp after that and it hasn't moved in 6 months. And if we ever went to war with either of these nations then we aren't going to allow them to start launching waves of fighter jets. We'd be bombing their runways and sinking China's one old piece of crap aircraft carrier within the first 12 hours of the offensive. These nations are not the threat they so desperately try to portray. Yes they are powerful, but if all hell broke loose and America went after one of them full force they wouldn't stand a chance in hell. Don't get me wrong, it would be a war, it wouldn't be us rolling through them Desert Storm style and it would be nasty with a lot of casualties on both sides. But I've been reading articles and just talking to family and friends and there seems to be this huge misconception that Russia or China can actually win a conventional war with the US. No, we would crush both of them, even in our current state. Trust me. That's without nukes. Throw nukes into the equation then we all just die so it's a moot point.

But yes that was the point you were making that I also agree with. What we have now is good enough. I understand keeping one step above the enemy but like I said before the Pentagon goes overboard with this stuff sometimes and if they had their way they would be out there asking Lockheed Martin to build them a trillion dollar X-Wing they could fly around space with for no reason.

One of the things I praised the Obama Administration for was halting the production of F-22's. It's a state of the art fighter, and it's a damn good one, arguably the best in the world, but the thing is expensive as hell. We don't need 500 of the damn things. We don't dogfight anymore, the last dogfight was nearly 30 years ago. We just launch missiles at you now before we even see you with our own eyes. We have F/A-18s, fighter wings full of F-16s, F-15s, and plenty of F-22s already. We have 10 aircraft carriers, 18 Ohio class subs, and I have no idea how many other destroyers, and cruisers, and other ships out there. We have like 6000 tanks, hundreds of Apache helicopters, etc. China has ONE aircraft carrier that they can barely get in the ocean and so does Russia. At some point we have to stop and say ok we have enough (*)(*)(*)(*). It's time to stop building more stuff and ordering new stuff when what we have now is already much better than anybody else. Just start repairing and keeping operational the huge military that we already have.

Don't get me wrong, if we could afford this I am all for the US building whatever they please. If we had unlimited funds then yes by all means build a fleet of X-Wings and laser cannons and whatever else we can dream of. But we don't have unlimited funds, we have a budget, and for some reason the Pentagon seems to think the best way to use the defense budget is to keep buying more and more advanced crap when we can already bomb the entire world into oblivion with our so called "out of date" fleet of B-1 bombers. There guys are like the folks who buy a brand new 2017 car because the starter went out on their 2016 model and they "don't want to have any problems in the future" so instead of spending 200 bucks to replace the starter they'll spend $30,000 on a whole new car.

And wonder why the hell the military fleet is in such disrepair with F/A-18 fighter squadrons only having 20% of their planes operational because the Pentagon thinks it makes more sense to just buy a brand new plane instead of fixing their perfectly good state of the art 2016 model planes. (They were built before that but its just an analogy).

 

Well if Trump wants to continue to impress me then he will continue to do what he did in regards to the F-35 program, the thing costs too much, make it cheaper or we aren't buying any.

What Trump needs to do is take that business mind of his and start poking around the defense budget and see just where all this money is actually going. The Pentagon itself needs to start being more stern with these weapons and equipment companies and stop letting them virtually turn the Pentagon upside down and shake the change out of their pockets at will.

Take this example. Once again we are getting new uniforms in the Army. Sitting behind me right now is a closet FULL of different colored crap from years of service. BDU's, ACU's, FRACU's, multi-cam, and now we are moving to this new uniform style that looks virtually identical to the old one we are about to replace. Each time they replace the uniform pattern they have to reissue millions of dollars of new pattern equipment to the troops. It's almost staggering to see just the sheer amount of crap ONE Soldier gets issued. I mean you literally walk into the issuing facility and walk out with 2 shopping carts full of crap. Roughly 90% of the crap in my closet has been sitting there since the day I joined the military, in the plastic wrap or boxes that it came in. We don't even use the majority of this stuff they just give it to us. I mean I get it, they give troops equipment to ensure they are adequately prepared for ANYTHING, and in theory that is good but at the same time it's also wasting money. If I never put on any of this stuff because none of it is ever necessary then what I am left with is roughly $8000 worth of Army stuff that is literally just sitting in a closet gathering dust. That I also have to lug around with me every single time I move because the Army refuses to let me give it back to them because I might need it one day. What they need to do is start going through the different MOS's (jobs) in the military and give you stuff that is necessary for your job and not just a blanket list of stuff for everybody.

But the reason we are changing uniforms AGAIN is because the old designer got greedy and tried to jack the price up on the contract and thankfully the government told them to pound sand and found another manufacturer who would make virtually the same pattern for less money. So every once and awhile the government stands their ground, I just wish they would do it more often.

Yeah I get the whole "everyone is a Soldier" thing, but the reality is that no everyone is not. I'm not a grunt, I'm a pilot, I don't need 16 kinds of infantry load bearing equipment. I don't wear this stuff, it's never left the box, but they make me take it and the Pentagon pays for it for me to take it. Our arms room at work is FULL of various types of weapons. We have loads of heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, tricked out M-4s with nice scopes and attacked laser sights and underside grenade launchers. I'm like what the hell do we have this stuff for? It makes our enlisted kids happy because they think it's cool but I always tell them the same thing. "Man if YOU are ever personally firing that thing at the enemy then we are in BIG TROUBLE, you're a crew chief, not a grunt, if the bad guys ever got this deep into the base then yeah we're screwed".

We're basically arming everybody to the teeth like they are all front line infantry troops with state of the art munitions. I understand being prepared for anything but damn, once again, who is buying us all this stuff? Buy us parts to fix our broken aircraft, stop buying our aircraft mechanics expensive tricked out guns from Call of Duty. They don't NEED that, they NEED engine parts. And the worst part about it is that we NEVER even use this stuff, not even in training. Yeah they'll go out and shoot the rifles a few times a year but as far as those heavy machine guns and grenade launchers and stuff, never. Stuff has been sitting in the weapons locker since the day I got here.

The problem here is whoever is negotiating these contracts with these arms manufacturers. These companies LOVE the government because they seemingly get free will to nickel and dime the living crap out of the government. Like I said before I don't understand how this works, all I see are the results, but I swear it's almost like these companies have the Pentagon by the throat and basically say either you buy 10,000 rifles or you can't buy any or something. Or knowing the Pentagon it wouldn't surprise me if they were like "Yeah we want EVERYBODY to have super duper rifles with lasers and scopes and stuff, even the desk clerks, how much? No problem we'll take it!" I have no idea, what I do know is that it's unnecessary.

Army can no longer afford to give the traditional pension to it's Soldiers.....meanwhile the girl working the front desk at the local dentist clinic has a $5000 M-4 with lasers and optics on it....

We don't have a budget problem, we have a budget mismanagement problem.

 

Well IIRC the Marines still use the M16, just an updated version of it. I've heard it's because they just don't like the M-4 and they don't want it. It may also be because the Marines are the least funded of the services and they usually tend to be the last ones to get updated equipment so that may also play I part. I'm honesty not sure. As far as the M1s and the older M16s I'm not sure where they are. I think the US sells some older stuff to other countries and we probably just scrap the rest. As far as I know gate guards don't carry rifles unless the threat level is higher than normal, they just carry pistols but I understand your underlying point and I agree 100%. Those who actively fight need these more advanced weapons, those who are in support elements don't really need them as much. Now granted in today's times with these terrorism wars the lines between combat and non combat units have blurred quite a bit. Support units were out there doing foot patrols like infantry units all the time over the past decade. But even still, the majority of people deployed overseas never leave the wire and huge chunks of troops are stationed on installations the size of bases located here in the US. Equipped with Taco Bell's and stuff...It mainly just depends on where you are and that will determine what you probably need as far as weapons are concerned.

The Army has this thing where it wants every unit to regardless of who they are to have a certain standard weapons loadout to be able to fight and/or defend autonomously in whatever situation. That's why we have mechanic units equipped with heavy machine guns and stuff. It theory I guess that makes sense. It's not really the weapons themselves that I'm talking about, those actually don't cost that much and many of them have actually been around for a number of years especially the machine guns, it's the expensive add-ons that the Army thinks EVERYBODY needs that costs so much. Yeah everybody needs a rifle regardless of your job, you are still a Soldier even if you're the desk clerk at the hospital. But you don't need a multi thousand dollar optic sight and laser on the thing. But once again that goes back to the way unit's are allocated funds. Big Army gives a unit X amount of money per year for whatever, so when the unit runs out of necessary stuff they start ordering unnecessary stuff to make sure they spend it all so the Army doesn't give them less next year. So that in turn results in the desk clerk at the local MWR having an assigned M4 with lasers and optics on it, or an empty room in a building full of 100 brand new computer chairs...

It's not uncommon at all for the unit "supply guy" to walk in and say "Hey guys what do you want? We have to spend X amount of money by next week". Happened all the time during my last deployment recently. Each of us was allocated a certain amount of "free" money PER MONTH to order military stuff from an online catalog that the Army runs. It's to help us replace equipment that we wear out while in the war zone....in theory. What actually happens is we just go online and buy random crap because the Army gave each person money to do so. So what's the result? Us spending the Army's free money on random stuff that none of us needed and/or used. By the end of the deployment we were actually just saying screw it and letting the money go to waste because we were literally running out of room to put stuff. We left home with 2 bags and came home with 4...

So what was the Army trying to do with this "free" money thing? Support it's troops by making sure they had new and fresh gear if necessary while deployed. What did the Army actually do with this "free" money thing? Fund everybody's private hunting trips when they got home. Literally, that's what everybody was buying this stuff for, and I'm not kidding.

As far as the fighter jets are concerned we do actually sort of do what you were saying only we do it backwards. We keep the state of the art jets home and we deploy the less sophisticated ones to the war zones. You won't see F-22's flying over Iraq, they don't do that they stay in the US and in Europe and I think there's some in Asia. But not the actual war zones. We sent the F-15s and F-16s there. It's mainly because its cheaper to fly the older planes and also because we REALLY don't want the negative publicity of one of our super advanced F-22's getting shot down. But in all reality we have A LOT of planes and almost all of them are like 40 plus years old. So we are both keeping the brand new state of the art fighters home and we're also keeping loads of old planes home while also sending lots of them off to fight the wars.

In regards to the cost of maintaining this stuff it's basically the same concept as owning an older car. The smart thing to do is to keep fixing your old car until it just becomes more financially logical to buy a new one. As in it costs less overall to just buy a new car than it does to spend X amount on repairs every year for your older car. That's basically how it works with these aircraft. You have to remember that a lot of our fleet are old planes that we just keep updating with more advanced avionics. The F-15s and F-16s are 40 year old planes that we started building back when the Vietnam war was still going on. So the Pentagon IS sort of trying to do the logical thing and just keep fixing the planes we have until it becomes financially illogical to do so. That's why they want the F-35 which is a new plane that is supposed to replace pretty much everything else in the fleet across all branches of military. They're overall plan is to eventually scrap all of the F-15s, F-16s, F-18's etc and replace all of them with just a whole bunch of F-35s and then go from there. That was the plan, the problem is that after the cost of that thing kept going up it's starting to become illogical to buy it instead of just continuing to fix what we have. Plus in some cases what we already have, although old, is actually BETTER than the F-35 and costs less. So that's another debate going on in the military right now.

My problem with this whole program is for one the cost of it and two I'm sitting here trying to figure out how the budget is going to support keeping all of those things operational. We don't even have the money to repair half of our current aircraft, what makes them think they can afford to buy a fleet of brand new more expensive ones and find the money to keep those operational? But once again I'm about to dive into things I honestly don't know much about, but I'm thinking we already have F-15s and F-16s. We know how to build them...the most advanced F-16 that we have now costs about 20 million bucks per plane, the F-35 costs about 120 million bucks per plane...I'm like hell just build more F-16s that other plane costs FIVE TIMES AS MUCH. Yes it's a much better plane it's stealth but there comes a point to where the cost of these things needs to match the benefit. Buy a few of them to supplement our existing fleet but don't buy like 500 of them to replace everything. How are we supposed to afford that? I'm sure the folks up there much smarter than me have calculated all of this I suppose.

I don't know, I may very well be way out of my league even trying to talk about or understand any of this financial stuff. I don't know much about it. To be honest it just personally irks me to get told the Army can no longer afford to give traditional pensions to it's troops when I see the Navy buying a brand new 13 BILLION DOLLAR freakin aircraft carrier. I'm like we have 10 of those things already holy crap. Or the Air Force getting ready to shell out billions of dollars for a bunch of new stealth bombers.

The Air Force and Navy are where most of the money goes as you said. The financially ignorant part of me is just sitting here saying hey Navy, can you PLEASE not buy another multi billion dollar ship and give that money back so the military can afford to pay it's troops their traditional retirement plan. I know it doesn't work anywhere near that way but I wish it did.