Originally Posted By: HerrStig
The Japanese won't buy an aircraft from us, and we build the best, unless THEY are allowed to build parts of it they can mine technology from.
Manned fighters are stone age...when you can buy a cruise missle for 1.5 million a pop. They are already de3veloped, require no expensive fighter pilots.
F-35's are 100 million a pop and that doesn't even scratch th3e surface of design costs, deployment, training, expensive constant maintenance. It goes on and on.
A good number of carriers could go away for the same reason. Boomer subs could go away and be replaced by existing Fast attacks that can carry any number of cruise nuclear tipped missiles.
The military bureaucracy isn't designed to think bang for the buck...its how many bucks can we spend for a bang.