The Lesser Absurdities of 2020

Each year Conn Hallinan of Foreign Policy in Focus looks at some of the weird things that we do every so often, rates them in terms of absurdity and gives awards. He looks at about twenty areas and evaluates them in terms of absurdity. It's an interesting read. Here are the top three in his words.

The Golden Lemon Award goes to Lockheed Martin for its F-35 fifth generation stealth fighter, at $1.5 trillion the most expensive weapons system in history. The plane currently has 883 documented design flaws, including nine “category 1” flaws.

The latter, the Project on Government Oversight explains, “may cause death, severe injury, or severe occupational illness” to pilots and “major damage” to weapons systems and combat readiness (which sounds like those TV ads for drugs that may or may not treat your disease, but could also kill your first born and turn you into a ferret).

But the company got right to work on those flaws — not by fixing them, mind you, but by reclassifying them as less serious. As for the rest of the problems, Lockheed Martin says it will fix them if it gets paid more.The company currently receives $2 billion a year to keep some 400 F-35s flying, a cost of $500 million a plane. It costs $28,455 an hour to fly an F-35.

U.S. aircraft are following industrialist Norman Augustine’s prediction that war plane costs increase by a factor of 10 every decade. He predicted that by 2054 the Pentagon will be able to buy just one fighter plane.

The Silver Lemon goes to the U.S. Navy for moth-balling four of its Littoral Combat ships after less than two decades in service. All 10 Littoral ships apparently have a “fundamentally flawed” propulsion system. The ships cost over $600 million apiece. There are plans to build six more.

The Navy plans to build 82 ships overall in the next six years at a cost of $147 billion, including — at $940 million apiece — 20 frigates to replace the Littoral Combat ships.

The Bronze Lemon goes to the U.S. Army for spending $24 billion to replace its aging, 27-ton Bradley Fighting Vehicle with… ah, nothing? Not that it didn’t spend all that money. First there was the M2, but its armor was too thin. Then it built the Future Combat System, but it was too big and also had inadequate armor. Then they built the Ground Combat Vehicle, which was a monster and weighed three times more than the Bradleys.