Tag Archives: Pentagon

Uninvited: Sen. Baldwin Denies Access to Constituents Who Oppose the War Machine

Tammy Baldwin Denies Access to Fundraiser Ticketholders Who Have Been Vocal Against the F-35 Bomber Deployment in Madison
By Amy Anderson, Aug 26, 2021

 

[pictures & links – bottom]
The latest battle to stop the planned F-35 bomber deployment to Air National Guard’s Truax Field in Madison took place at the entrance to Senator Tammy Baldwin’s annual summer BBQ fundraiser last Sunday, August 22nd. Held at the picturesque Fields Reserve reception barn on a wooded hill near Lake Kegonsa, some residents came to express their alarm and dismay about the harm to the Madison community that they say the stationing of these jets would bring.

 

However, several constituents who had paid for entry to the $50-$1000 fundraiser received email cancellations and refunds of their donations from the event staff just one day prior to the event. The seven constituents were all members of Safe Skies Clean Water Wisconsin, a group calling for the halt of F-35s coming to Madison.

These seven individuals came despite the cancellation but were not allowed in as eight security officers and three Dane County sheriff deputies guarded the driveway. So instead they joined the picket organized by the No F35 Action Faction, who brought 35 local residents to picket and pass out flyers. Donors attending the event waited in lines in their cars, sometimes for 15 minutes or longer while a single event staff person checked tickets against a list of names to determine if each passenger was on the approved list for entry.

One of the most vocal members denied entry was Tom Berman, a northside
homeowner for 37 years who has also operated a small business there for 32 years.
He expressed desperation that his beloved home and place of business will be
officially condemned as being within an “uninhabitable” zone once the F-35 jets
arrive and the frequent practice drills begin.

He quotes the Air Force’s Environmental Impact Statement that there are already 6222 sorties planned each year for the F-35s once they arrive in 2023. This is a 27% rise over current flights from Truax Field. He explained that the noise levels from takeoff of F-35s are traumatic to humans and more than four times louder than the F-16s which currently regularly practice over Madison’s east and northside.

David Williams from the No F35 Action Faction called the blacklisting of Madison residents from the event a sad but unsurprising disappointment in light of the Senator’s continued stonewalling against the growing voices from her own hometown against this deployment. “Our original picket slogan was We should not have to pay to be heard. But now we realize that even for those purchasing a ticket, we still don’t get to be heard.”

 

Mr. Berman reports that after the event was over Senator Baldwin did stop and let him give her his letter on her way out, saying she would have one of her staff get back to him.

 

The Safe Skies and Action Faction groups have been working for over two years to raise public awareness and to pressure Senator Baldwin, who has been a supporter of deploying F-35s in Madison rather than a sparsely populated area where it would be easier to mitigate the impacts.

 

Objections to the F-35 deployment include:

  • regular traumatic and unhealthy noise levels for Madison residents
  • the expense and hardship of relocating multiple Madison residents
  • decrease in property values for east and northside residents
  • impacts will affect low-income and minority populations the most
  • increase of PFAS “forever” chemicals commonly used in firefighting drills at Truax which  have already contaminated local waterways and many municipal wells
  • the well-documented dubiety of the F-35s as a military investment
  • the danger of bringing these nuclear-capable planes to Madison
  • the escalation of out-of-control military spending and endless war

 

Find Safe Skies Clean Water Wisconsin and sign up for updates.

Like  No F-35s Action Faction on Facebook, and they welcome people to join the cause.

 

Pro-Peace and Pro-Justice Letter to Senator Baldwin August 2021

August 22, 2021

Dear Senator Baldwin

You are our Senator, representing us in congress.  We have supported you in the past, but it is getting more difficult because for many years now we believe you are not representing us in your votes promoting militarism.  Militarism, as Martin Luther King Jr. stated, is one of the triple ‘evils’, along with racism and excessive materialism, that harm our American society.  As you know, the U.S. government spends more on militarism than the next 11 countries combined. We would like the money we spend on militarism moved to spending on human needs, such as health care, housing, food, education, and a green energy economy.

Therefore, for our continued support we ask that you commit to:

Lowering the 2022 spending from the 2021 present military budget of 740 billion dollars, over 60% of the total US discretionary budget.  It is against  our values when the Department of Defense gets more of our taxpayer dollars than all the other departments of our government, education, health, housing, State, etc. combined.

Withdrawing your advocacy and support for the F-35 being based in Madison.  This plane, a major polluter of the environment, air, water and noise, is considered by many military experts a “boondoggle”, too big to fail.  Madison and Wisconsin residents have made it clear they do not want it. 

Stop supporting increased funding to the largest industrial polluter in the world, the US military.  In a world on the brink of climate destruction, we must lessen our support for major polluters.  War is nonsustainable and only leads to more wars with destruction to continue.

Supporting more jobs in education, clean energy and health care over military jobs.  We know that “1 billion in military spending creates approximately 11,200 jobs, compared with 26,700 in education,16,800 in clean energy, and 17,200 in health care.” https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/economic/economy/employment  

We will gather in front of your office on the square on Sept. 11, 2021 at 10:00 am to hear your response to these demands.  We would like you or your representative to be present and show us that you hear us and will represent us.  We wait for your response on 9/11 at the Madison Farmers Market, a day we remember the terror of 9/11 and also celebrate sustainability.

Sincerely,

Wisconsin Coalition to Ground the Drones and End the Wars

[email protected] 608 239-4327

Lockheed’s F-35, The United States of Amnesia & War Profiteering

Video : Project on Government Oversight : The F-35 in 2 Minutes

The point and the goal of the US government is to enrich the ruling elite, those in the 1% of the 1% who continue to consolidate wealth.

When your legislators are unable to achieve the most basic tasks, remember what their real purpose is.  When our presidents fail at most everything but enriching the biggest bank owners, some of the richest people on the planet, realize their purpose.  When the courts give what you think is justice largely to a bunch of old white guys, know what they are doing.

We do not have a quality healthcare system for our people. Our public schools and other commons are constantly under attack by those who want to steal those assets. We have a huge problem where worker wages are stolen, we haven’t enough food that makes it into the mouths of our children, the government can’t enforce laws on the powerful…

But the US can drop a bomb on anyone at anytime, and once in a while it might be a bad guy.

 

The F-35 and Other Legacies of Failure – Dan Grazier

 

“For 20 years, the Pentagon’s program to develop the F-35 aircraft appeared invincible, even as the project hit repeated delays and went well over budget. And then, just within the span of a few weeks, official support for the F-35 has seemingly evaporated. It could not come soon enough.

At the end of the Trump administration, the acting secretary of defense called it a “piece of…” The Air Force chief admitted the F-35 would never be able to live up to its original purpose. And now, the chair of the House Armed Services Committee said we should stop throwing money down the F-35 “rathole.”

This all comes as the program is rightfully on a list of programs facing a Pentagon review that could result in recommended cuts to the total number of aircraft to be purchased. It signals a tectonic shift in support for a program that previously received near universal official support from the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill.

This shift is due to the sudden realization in Washington, despite years of warnings, that the F-35 is too challenging and costly to maintain.

And if there are to be major changes to the F-35 program, now is the time to do it. Otherwise, if the program does manage to squeak through operational testing, Congress could then authorize a bulk purchase of F-35s, something the program office and the manufacturer have wanted for years. But even if the plane is technically deemed operational, such a move would saddle the services with hundreds of flawed, high-maintenance aircraft, which will depress readiness rates, further strain the already harrowed maintenance crews, and require years of costly retrofits.

At the very least, further production should be halted until the program completes operational testing. Testing continues to reveal design flaws in the F-35 —at last count in January, there were 871 of them which is only two fewer than the year before. Until the testing process is complete and engineers work through solutions to these problems, the F-35s purchased now will be built with these flaws, and then later require extensive and expensive modifications later on to fix problems that have yet to be revealed in the testing process.

The usual suspects in the defense industry have responded forcefully to the threat to the program on which they have staked their future. They are arguing that the services need to purge themselves of older, so-called “legacy” systems—the typical argument made by defense contractors to make sure there is little choice but to purchase new weapons from them.

But there is nothing inherently wrong with older aircraft. As long as they are maintained properly, a well-designed aircraft can provide useful service for decades. The B-52 is an excellent example. There are even 172 DC-3 airliners that debuted in 1935 that are still flying and making money for their owners.

Pentagon leaders are right to review troubled programs, and they shouldn’t allow a program to drag on for 20 years before doing so. And if the Pentagon’s budgeteers want to make cuts, they shouldn’t start with weapons like the F-16 and A-10 that continue to prove their worth in combat. Air Force chief General Charles “CQ” Brown Jr. said recently that capabilities and not age should be the central question of any review. “I really think about it from a capability perspective. Is that capability going to be relevant today, relevant tomorrow? And if it’s not going to be relevant tomorrow or it’s going to be, you know, overly expensive to make it relevant for tomorrow” it needs to be retired.

The F-35 is the poster child for programs that are too expensive to be made relevant for the future. It should have been canceled more than a decade ago with its 2009 Nunn-McCurdy breach when the development and procurement costs doubled. Cutting it off now could save about $200 billion just in acquisition costs.

Along those same lines, the Pentagon would have saved billions by killing off the “legacy of failure” programs like the Littoral Combat Ship and Zumwalt-class destroyers when it first became apparent that they were falling far short of expectations. Taxpayers paid $30 billion for a versatile class of small surface ships with the Littoral Combat Ship program. What they got was a fleet of fragile boats that can’t perform many of the roles for which they are intended, with four of them already on their way to being mothballed. The Navy is spending more than $23 billion on the Zumwalt program, a ship design that failed to perform its originally intended role.

Uniform and civilian military officials need to be reminded that it is not the end of the world to kill a new program. In 2011, the Marine Corps cancelled the troubled Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle after sinking $3 billion into the program because of spiraling costs and technological failures. After a reset, the service developed the far simpler Amphibious Combat Vehicle for a fraction of the cost.

Spending our grandchildren into poverty pursuing unworkable technological boondoggles is not the right way to compete with our potential adversaries. In all matters military, the simplest possible tools are always the most effective. Decision makers in Congress and the Pentagon should be far more skeptical when defense contractors make lavish claims about technology they haven’t yet demonstrated and have the courage to stop programs when it becomes obvious they are failing.”

Federal officials worried about F-35 jet boondoggle; Wisconsinites should be as well

Cap Times Editorial link |  19 May 2021

 

“The authoritative publication Defense News reported late last month that key members of Congress are objecting to proposals to increase funding for Lockheed Martin’s F-35 joint strike fighters in the upcoming fiscal 2022 budget. They say they will not support any increase until the Pentagon and the manufacturer address what Defense News refers to as “a laundry list of problems” with the planes.

Defense News – F-35 in the crosshairs

Defense News: more on F-35

Officials in Wisconsin should be paying close attention to the growing debate over the F-35 boondoggle, as the U.S. Air Force plans to station a squadron of F-35 fighter jets at Truax Field in Madison.

There is a lot of opposition to that move in Madison, especially from residents of the Eken Park neighborhood, which is located not far from Truax. But people who don’t live anywhere near that east-side neighborhood over which the planes would fly should also be concerned about the prospect of basing these messed-up planes in Madison.

Noting the many problems with the planes, U.S. Rep. John Garamendi, the California Democrat who leads the defense readiness subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, said in April, “The program is over budget. It fails to deliver on promised capabilities. And its mission capability rates do not even begin to meet the service thresholds.”