Do Not Weep For Jim Molan, by David Archibald.

High expectations were held for Senator Molan. This was a bloke who once ran the entire Allied war effort in Iraq. If anybody knew where the bodies were buried, it would be him. But he has been as silent as the grave.

Nothing on the travesty that is the F-35. The latest on that is that the foreign buyers — that includes us — are being stuck for a last job lot of aircraft while the US Department of Defense takes a fraction of its supposed long term share of production. A historical precedent is the F-104, in which the foreign buyers, in part bribed by Lockheed, took the bulk of production. Like the F-35 the F-104 had poor handling characteristics, which made it a poor fighter.

Nothing either on the French submarines. The RAN is persisting in building them with lead acid batteries, a technology from the 19th century. Now South Korea has announced lithium-ion battery power stacks are being developed to increase the underwater endurance of its Chang Bogo-class submarines by “two to three times, offering four to five times the power density of the Type 209’s current lead-acid batteries and as much as twice the power density of Type 214’s BZM 120 fuel cells”. …

The Japanese and South Koreans must be thinking that we have lost our minds. That is true in part, but it is more that the people running the country don’t know and don’t care.

Read it all at the link.