The Pentagon did not get the memo on the death of manned combat aircraft in the 21st century. Is the 47 designation the year the first aircraft may be aloft?

Don’t believe any promises on price or schedule much less efficacy.

They will not deliver.

China’s two mysterious fighter jets broke cover in late 2024, throwing security mandarins across the world in a tizzy. In response, the Donald Trump administration finally unveiled the Next-Generation Air Dominance air superiority fighter F-47 at the White House on March 21.

But wait, there’s more:

One of the major criteria for CCA is to be price effective. So, the manned fighter jet will not have to carry every system. As per the vision outlined by the former USAF Secretary Kendal: “Right now, a fighter might carry a targeting pod, it might carry weapons under its wings, it might carry a self-protection jammer. And those systems are integrated into a single platform … Once we introduce CCAs, we can start talking about effectively taking some of those things off of that fighter and putting them on a CCA — but not all of them.”

The Pentagon would want to be tight on budget after the cost overruns in F-35 development. According to original estimates, the 6th-generation fighter was predicted to cost around US$300 million apiece, but Kendall said in 2024 that they would like to keep the price similar to the F-35 Lightning II—about US$100 million, depending on the variant.

Allvin said in a statement that the F-47’s price tag will be lower than an F-22 — which has a unit cost of around US$143 million. The Air Force requested US$2.7 billion for the platform in its budget request for fiscal 2025, indicating that it planned to spend US$19.6 billion on the aircraft over the next five years.

F-47 vs F-35: U.S. ‘Promises’ Not To Repeat F-35 Blunder With F-47 NGAD! What Error Pentagon Wants To Fix?

If the F35 is any indicator of future acquisition, take a look at this. The government and the usual suspects knew about all of this more than a decade ago.

In 2012, we have this:

https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/35-fighter-plan-acquisition-malpractice-pentagon-official/story?id=15530008

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Nicknamed “the father of public relations,” Edward Bernays (1891–1995) was a pioneer in the fields of propaganda and PR; this book is a great insight into the man behind the curtain.

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. …In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”

Edward Bernays, Propaganda

The Edward Bernays Reader: From Propaganda to the Engineering of Consent

I highly recommend you read this short and modest book.

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Ep 016 “Fixing Fight Club: Just Say No to NATO: Part Two”

A continued discussion of the NATO debacle. It is time for America to completely reassess alliances and partnership around the world starting with NATO and then working its way down the list of useless and toxic relationships and promises to commit American blood and treasure to flashpoints planet-wide. The sheer insanity of EU/SSR behavior and the total inadequacy of NATO as a military organization across the entire martial spectrum.

NATO insisted after the wall 1989-91 fell that the NATO blob would NOT expand eastward.

It did.

Substack Notes: https://cgpodcast.substack.com/notes

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President Stubb in Finland wants to expand the armed forces in Finland.

Take a look at Finland on a map. Largest contiguous border with Russia in Europe. A population of 5.6 million. 5.6 million in one of the largest countries in Europe. The international border between Finland and Russia is 1,340 km long. Total Army strength is below 50k.

Then Finland joins NATO, the organization that has been provoking the bear for decades. And now they discovered they are in a saber-rattling and frothing-at-the-mouth provocative EU/SSR that is begging for greater conflict with Russia.

Hence all the usual suspects are trying to arm the struggling and bloodied animated corpse of Ukraine to save their own cowardly skins from the threat they created with the inexorable move eastward of the NATO blob.

Buckle up, snowflakes.

Finnish President Alexander Stubb considers the chances of his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin agreeing to a ceasefire in Ukraine are “abysmal.”

“Putin doesn’t want peace,” Stubb said during an interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) aired on Sunday. Putin’s original goal was for Ukraine to “cease to exist,” Stubb said, adding that “he has not changed his goal.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/finnish-president-says-putin-doesnt-130621371.html

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The military press seems to be coming around to the conclusion that has been floated here at the Institute for quite some time. The aircraft carrier has seen its time and it is time to retire the tired and anachronistic technology.

Poor concepts, design and planning; serial changes to design during construction; serious operating issues when in sea trials brings it back to be fixed; more serious defects in operations, more insufficient fixes. No one held accountable for the fraud waste and abuse that is yet another US Navy building program committing the government to contract for two more of these monstrosities. Delivered years late and way, way over budget. Like the Zumwalt and the LCS, it was “commissioned” before it actually worked.

The US Navy spends roughly $40 billion annually on shipbuilding projects, yet these projects are regularly behind schedule and battling rising costs.

The USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78) carrier strike group is currently in Composite Training Unit Exercise (COMPUTEX), a rehearsal each US Navy Carrier Strike Group performs before departing for deployment by early summer to the Red Sea, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter. We’ll see how that works out.

The rise of drones, which can be deployed in kamikaze mode, and/or in buzzing swarms, has proven disruptive to the operations of surface vessels—despite costing a mere fraction of what a surface vessel costs. More concerning perhaps, are improvements in anti-ship missiles and the onset of hypersonic missiles—all of which pose significant threats to surface vessels.

The United States hasn’t lost an aircraft carrier since World War II. In the eighty years since, the standards for what constitutes an acceptable military loss have lowered drastically. Americans are generally not comfortable with the loss of life or technology.

The loss of something like an aircraft carrier would be unfathomable to the contemporary American, and indeed, staggering in its proportions. Thousands of sailors would potentially be lost.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/why-does-the-navy-s-new-ford-class-aircraft-carrier-cost-13-billion/ar-BB1ofK8Q?ocid=ASUDHP&apiversion=v2&noservercache=1&domshim=1&renderwebcomponents=1&wcseo=1&batchservertelemetry=1&noservertelemetry=1

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