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Lockheed Martin must be really annoyed at the current administration. Who's going to want to put in new F35 orders now
by somanyphotons 2y ago
Lockheed Martin must be really annoyed at the current administration. Who's going to want to put in new F35 orders now
- justin66 2y agoHonestly, the annoyance probably extends beyond Lockheed Martin corporate. It does not appear to have sunken in that damage to the F-35 export market will affect the per-unit cost of the F-35 and its parts for the US military. Given the amounts of money involved, it seems likely a really big abandonment of F-35 overseas will do more damage to the federal budget than all the oddball firings they're doing could offset.
- libertine 2y agoThey didn't pay Trump like the SV tech oligarchs.
- thrwaway1337 2y agoMust have forgotten to say "thank you"
- libertine 2y agoPublicly, it needs to be done in public.
- pavlov 2y agoEspecially when co-president Musk is tweeting that the F-35 is a dud and the US should leave NATO. That's a double whammy for European countries who signed on to spend hundreds of billions on these planes in the belief that they're part of a NATO security umbrella. Now it seems like NATO will soon be in shambles and the planes might not even fly if that one drunk frat guy with Nazi tattoos running the Pentagon says so. Finland bought F-35's recently, and the Finnish government is saying that nothing should change because America will hopefully be back to normal before the fighters are delivered. I don't think that kind of ostrich strategy is going to pay off.
- ohgr 2y agoI suspect, like the UK, most regional defence agencies have thoroughly reverse engineered this stuff and are shifting to locally manufactured stuff. I have hopes for BAE Tempest.
- pavlov 2y agoFinland can't afford that kind of thing. It's a bit unique because it has a large and well-trained army (by European standards) but a smallish defense budget. The Finnish military basically runs on the collective trauma of the last Russian invasion. There's a general conscription for male citizens, and reserve forces receive regular refresh training to keep their skills active. But you can't transform that kind of spirit into fighter planes.
- LargoLasskhyfv 2y agoSpecialize in laaarge catapults to shoot the stuff from Onkalo into whomevers big mouth. Splat!
- alienallys 2y agoApparently India put in few to escape Tariffs
- scarface_74 2y agoEurope is already moving to de-risk itself from the US. https://www.stimson.org/2024/eu-defense-this-time-might-be-different/ https://www.stimson.org/2024/eu-defense-this-time-might-be-d... I can’t find the article I read earlier. But they are working toward outside alliances also for military manufacturing with Canada, the UK and Japan and are explicitly excluding any US components.
- maxglute 2y agoTBH Lockmart F35 SaaS has been fucking over US DoD long before articles concerned over US fucking over foreign F35 operators. TLDR F35 operators beholden to uncle sam, but uncle sam has been beholden to lockmart fuckarounditis for the past 15 years. I think DoD would rather LM figure out ~2500 F35s the US plans to buy (75% of total) than a few 100 units by others.
- acdha 2y agoI think it’s broader than that: the entire U.S. tech industry has broad global influence due to our past reputation as a mostly-democratic, law-abiding country. Now everyone has to ask what Microsoft, Google, AWS, Red Hat, etc. would do to avoid risking their government contracts or possible consequences for their executives. Even in the open source world we have the Jia Tan example as something which must be in everyone’s threat model.
- jlkuester7 2y ago> Now everyone has to ask what Microsoft, Google, AWS, Red Hat, etc. would do to avoid risking their government contracts or possible consequences for their executives As long as executive compensation is tied to stock performance, coorperations will only care about their stock price and the kinds of things that will affect it. I do not trust them regardless of who is in the White House. Their alignment of values/incentives is diametrically opposed to mine...
- acdha 2y agoI’m not saying you should ever trust them completely but as UIP and the attacks on major law firms show we are now in a new, mob boss-like era where unambiguously illegal demands are not hypothetical. The threats we used to talk about were things like national security letters, which for all of their faults were at least a legal process administered by people who had some boundaries.
- TiredOfLife 2y agoThe one good thing of Trump is that it is now clear that anybody talking about the great American MIC is an utter and complete Idiot.