The F-35 kluge...

The F-35 kluge...  It's a wonderful, frank, and straightforward description of how the government (in this case, the military) can totally screw up almost any procurement.

I was particularly interested in his explanation of why, as he puts it, “stealth is a scam”.  It boils down to this: all the stealth technology does is to “hide” high frequency radars, the kind that most Western countries have been building since WWII.  High frequency radars have many, many advantages – from higher resolution to smaller, lighter components (especially antennae).  The lower frequency radars are actually simpler technology, but they are bigger and have lower resolution.  Stealth technology, though, hardly affects their operation.  I first ran into this phenomenon when reading about the Bosnian war (where the rebels successfully shot down an F-117A, a stealth plane).  They detected the plane with a WWII-era Soviet radar, just as this fellow talks about.  Later I read about a hobbyist in Nevada operating a U.S.-made WWII radar, along with more modern radars – and reporting that the older radar was seeing planes that were invisible on the modern radars.  This video is now the third time I've heard references to that stealth vulnerability – which I find completely plausible, and utterly devastating to the whole idea of aircraft stealthiness...