Pierre Sprey on the F-35 Boondoggle (Video)

I appreciate that handsome introduction. Let me start by quoting Mark Twain from about a century ago because he said something that’s very germane to what we’re all up against here.  He said in this country there are two things that are so disgusting that no American should be forced to witness them.  One is the making of sausage and the other is

the making of legislation.  And among the most disgusting parts of the making of that legislation that I’ve personally witnessed up close and personal is the making of the defense budget. I raise that because everything that’s wrong with the f-35 for Madison is the result of that terrible disgusting process by which we put together our defense budgets.

Noise. So what’s wrong with the f-35? I’m gonna be very brief about fairly complicated subjects and I hope leave lots of time for you to ask questions about the part you’re interested in.  The ramifications of this can be endless.  What’s wrong with the f-35 for Madison is encapsulated. It’s an unconscionable amount of noise for a dense urban area. The f16 is already too noisy for Madison, as much as I’m committed to the f16 having worked on it.  Using the afterburner and the f-16 should never happen in a community as densely populated and as close to the airport.  The f-35, despite everything you’ve heard from its defenders, is substantially more noisy, substantially worse, more harmful to people’s health, to children’s development, people’s sleep and so on. It’s really loud as you heard from Chris and the numbers that are put out by the Air Force in the environmental impact statements on should be largely ignored.  They’re mostly concocted.

Safety. What else is wrong with the f-35 besides the obvious, the really obvious noise problem. The second thing is a safety problem that you may not know about. Let me start by saying that two-thirds of all airplane crashes or within five miles of the runway because takeoff and landings are more dangerous than any other part of the flight.  When an aluminum airplane crashes in a city, we’ve had that happen, it’s bad because the fuel burns the aluminum.  The plane doesn’t burn the fuel burns and you burn down a few houses.  We just had an incident a few years ago in Norfolk like that, fortunately nobody got hurt, but several houses got burned down.  When an f-35 crashes it’s not an aluminum airplane it’s what in the trade we called a plastic airplane.  Its composite materials which are fibers, carbon fibers, and it’s a very advanced form of epoxy.  The plane structure burns in addition to the fuel and when that plastic burns it’s incredibly toxic it is corrosive to lungs.  It lets out all kinds of carcinogens and so on when you add to that the stealth, remember this is not just a plastic airplane like some of the newest airliners, this is also a stealthy airplane.  Stealth is an order of magnitude worse. I cannot tell you the number of cases of people poisoned by stealth chemicals, even when they haven’t been burned, like production workers have had terrific problems from breathing the fumes of stealth coatings and when it burns, of course, the results are far worse.  If you think about it the crash of an f-35, I mean it’s fairly unlikely but the crash of an f-35 in a densely populated urban area like Madison would be a disaster way beyond a terrorist chemical attack. If you think of a couple of Isis terrorists coming here with a cylinder of chlorine and letting it loose somewhere, in a densely packed suburb of Madison that would be trivial compared to what a burning of 35 can do.  It can cover blocks and blocks and blocks, thousands of people can be exposed to very very damaging, lung corroding heavily carcinogenic fumes.  People don’t even know how to put out the fire.  That’s the other part, if such a disaster happened your local fire departments would have no idea what to do.  All this is too new to fire people, they don’t know what’s necessary.  First of all they don’t even know what’s necessary to put out an ordinary plastic airplane fire much less a stealth fire.  Much less

how to deal with the victims.  This would be a real real catastrophe.

Nuclear Capability. Then in one sense,  maybe even even more dangerous than this possible crash scenario that I’ve just sketched for you, of even way larger consequence is the nuclear role of the f-35. The Air Force and the National Guard have told you that the f-35 can’t carry a nuclear weapon. The Secretary of the Air Force, I think, has told you that it has no nuclear mission.  Those statements are meaningless. The Air Force has a commitment to make every single fighter they’ve ever had since the early 50s, to make it nuclear capable and the reason they’re telling you that your f-35 won’t won’t carry nuclear weapons is because of the horrible mismanagement of the whole f-35 program. 14 years after it started they’re still busy designing this airplane and testing it and changing it.  No f-35’s neither the ones in Madison nor the ones the Air Force owns has any nuclear capability now, because they haven’t finished designing and testing it.  They’re right in the

midst of it and it’ll be finished fairly soon. I guarantee you when they’re finished with that within 10 years the, Madison f-35 will have nuclear wiring because this is something again driven by money, driven by that horrible budget process that Mark Twain kind of pre-saged.  The Air Force will move heaven and earth to put nuclear weaponry on the f-35.

Why does nuclear matter? Now why is that of consequence to Madison? This is a little a little complex I’ll go through it very quickly.  If anybody wants to know more I’ll answer questions.  There won’t be nuclear weapons stored here, that’s not the issue at all. The issue is that if you have an f-35 Squadron here it can be activated at any time by the President and since we now have this tradition that every time there’s little trouble in the world we deploy bombing airplanes to the trouble spot, at least in order to threaten people if not to actually bomb them. So your f-35 could easily be deployed in a crisis and I think that the crisis we’re talking about, we’re thinking about say on the Russian border there are countries that have big Russian populations like Lithuania and Ukraine.  You get some neo-nazi nut cases who decide they want to slaughter some native Russians in Lithuania or in Ukraine, the Russians would clearly move to threaten. Putin has already said he will do it and that would have every reason to do so they move up divisions close to the border. We have single-seat f-35 so that we’ve just deployed because some imagine possibly unstable president might deploy them, show his macho qualities and they’re sitting there on nuclear alert and a airstrip in eastern Poland within range of Russia.  And they’ve got fighter pilots sitting out all night with a nuclear weapon tucked up in the belly of the airplane on nuclear alert and it’s a frighteningly unstable situation.  What if that pilot is hung over? What if he has a sudden mental breakdown?  What if he’s, you know, himself a neo-nazi? This is the single most dangerous destabilizing aspect of nuclear weaponry. There is the single-seat fighter with the single pilot in control. There’s no other place in nuclear weaponry where you don’t have a crew to stop something from happening if somebody goes rogue. Think about that.

Obama/Trump. Now, how does that impact Madison?  Of course, obviously Madison wouldn’t want to be the source of a squadron that had a rogue pilot that started the nuclear holocaust, but the the consequences for Madison are perhaps even more direct because we’ve unleashed a whole new nuclear build-up, and I’m sorry to say it was Obama who started it in 2010, about a trillion dollars of extra spending that he spent pretty much as abroad to the military-industrial complex.  So they they would let him get on with the arms of limitation treaty that he was particularly keen to negotiate. The horrible mistake for the world when he least that trillion dollar program in and of course Trump has made it bigger and worse but it was Obama who opened the door for it and the worst thing he opened the door for was the idea of small precise nuclear weapons. Now why are small precise nuclear weapons dangerous? Because they have revived an old and totally discredited concept that you can have little controlled regional nuclear wars and just drop a nuke precisely here and make sure it’s not too big a drop. One there and the enemy is all impressed and it gives up this is the concept of now called flexible response. That’s even worse than the reigning concept of the nuclear holocaust balanced by terror on both sides because again this is inviting some future unstable president to make a little demonstration with a little small nuke and the small nukes were unleashed by Obama in 2010 and specifically the first one that will come online is the one that was designed for the f-35. Something called the b61 – 12 which has all sorry history of itself it’s the latest in a long family of nuclear weapons that were supposed to be carried under the wings of Fighters and this one was unleashed under even more false pretenses. It’s about to come to fruition. It’s designed for the for the f-35 and to make all this much worse this is where Trump’s contribution comes in. Trump commissioned a new nuclear policy review in 2018. Those are very important documents that are put out every four years. In truth they’re

documents to justify spending more on nuclear weapons but they’re taken by the world as a statement of American strategy with nuclear weapons and this one states for the first time ever it mentions a fighter as part of America’s strategic forces and it mentions the f-35 eight times by name. That’s never been done any previous nuclear review.  You can imagine how seriously the Russians and the Chinese nuclear strategists to take this. I’m sure they read it more carefully than we do.

What’s the consequence of that for Madison?  Very simple, once that strategic posture review says the f-35 is an integral part of America’s strategic nuclear deterrent that makes Madison a target.  So having f-35 here will transform Madison from just any old National Guard base into a guard base that carries a nuclear platform that the Russians and the Chinese view as a threat. That means you wind up on a target list. So this really, really unsuitable basing of this noisy potentially disastrously toxic airplane that could unleash the nuclear holocaust and will certainly make Madison a target. We’re doing all this for an airplane that is one of the most mismanaged stretched-out overrun delayed and and flawed, deeply flawed weapon that we’ve ever developed. And it happens to be the most expensive weapon we’ve ever developed of any kind.

True Patriotism. So when people attack you for opposing the f-35 here, as they attack me of course, as unpatriotic I think it’s very easy to answer. No, the real patriotism is to oppose an airplane that is this disastrously ineffective, dangerous and unsuitable. That’s true patriotism.