The story is that tax payers gave his company money to buy our F18s from us so that he can accumulate a force of enemy aircraft. His company will also train pilots specifically as the enemy would.
And while he will do this at a considerable profit, it will theoretically be better executed per dollar that the military doing it in a separate division. Another post claims he will generate sorties more than twice as efficiently.
So the above is either true or false.
If it is false and the contract costs taxpayers more than the military would then, as you suspect, it is entirely a pork-barrel waste of money. The fact that other nations with highly regraded military don't do this theoretical efficiency boost strongly supports this.
If it is true and the contractor is somehow more efficient, then that is even more worrisome. Scarier still is that it is taken as an inevitable state of affairs and no one seems concerned about it. That US destroyers have a catastrophically bad helm UI supports this, even though that would be conspicuous pork-barrel in it's own right.
Same with the fact the sale was F18s. Either the enemy has them or not. In one case it's pork-barrel, in the other case the US has somehow sold fighters to an enemy.
> That US destroyers have a catastrophically bad helm UI
Hadn't heard of this. Apparently the US Navy are reverting an 'upgrade' to its destroyers which gave them a dangerously poor touchscreen-based helm control UI. The decision was made in the wake of a fatal collision with a civilian vessel in 2017.
That is the purpose of the Navy, just like all the rest of USA armed forces. They haven't won a war in my parents' lifetimes, but just think of all the trillions of dollars that have gone to armaments manufacturers!
We never stopped fighting in Iraq, so in what sense did we "win"? More to the point, we never left Saudi, which was the direct cause of 9/11, which also was not a win. Except, of course, for the armaments manufacturers. For them, 9/11 was most definitely a win.
"Serbia/Kosovo(ish)", whatever specifically is meant by that, is about like "Grenada" mentioned above. When you grasp at such tiny straws, you confirm the point rather than refute it: USA military exists to funnel money to weapons manufacturers and their employees in politics and media while killing mostly innocent, mostly brown people.
The strategic objectives of the two main phases of those conflicts was achieved. Remove Saddam from Kuwait and remove Serbia enough to stabilise Kosovo.
I don't disagree about the Saudis and US military industrial complex but that wasn't the point I was making
Look at how our government managed a virus. Now imagine WW3.