Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Even the Americans are Saying that Harper is Crazy to Buy the F-35s


From the Pentagon to American military experts, those South of the border, where the F-35s are made, are warning Canadians to stop the nonsense and scrap plans to buy those F-35s.
"You're getting an underperforming airplane for a huge amount of money," said Winslow T. Wheeler, director of the Straus Military Reform Project of the Centre for Defense Information in Washington D.C. Winslow, who was in Ottawa yesterday at the invitation of the Rideau Institute and Physicians for Global Survival, said the estimated price of $75 million per plane is too low. "Nobody on this Earth is going to be buying F-35's in flyable condition at $75 million a copy. That's not in the cards," he said.
And he is also warning us of the real costs:
A U.S. defence analyst says Canada's new fleet of stealth jet fighters will cost almost double what the Conservative government is projecting. Winslow Wheeler, of the Centre for Defense Information in Washington, injected himself directly into the federal election by providing his estimate at a news conference on Parliament Hill. Wheeler says the unit cost of the F-35 jet will be about $148 million per airplane --an estimate that is in line with what the parliamentary budget officer has projected.
I guess this is why Flaherty left this expenditure out of his budget.

"Vets not Jets", Ignatieff says. We should listen.

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