Donald Trump announced a $600 million cut to the cost of the F-35 joint strike fighter. That sounds pretty good, unless you look at the $600 million stacked up against the total program cost, which is going to be nearly $1 trillion by the time the first-order fleecing is complete. [cnbc]
When you’ve got over half a trillion dollars at stake, people will do or say pretty much anything. So it gets hard to figure out what’s going on when you read headlines in the form of “X is an ongoing disaster” alongside of “great cost-savings achieved via X” for any given X. It’s hard to be both a tremendous success and an ongoing disaster. I am, naturally, referring to the latest news about the F-35 program.
In computer security transitive trust is when system A trusts B, and system B trusts C – in that case system A trusts C but doesn’t usually realize it.
Who needs infrastructure, arts and culture, or medical care – when you can have an F-35!? It’s stealthy!
Kinda.
It’s a great fighter!!
Not really.
It does VTOL off the deck of support ships!
Sorry.
It’s a little hard to sort out the grifts when they’re so many-layered. So, please bear with me.
Apparently Trump’s pressuring Lockheed Martin squeezed around $700 million off of one of the F-35 contracts.
Some of the servicemen hurt/killed in Yemen during the special forces raid were heroically wounded by their own airplane, a CV-22 Osprey.[fox]
Dozens of times in the last decade, I’ve encountered information security tropes about cyber-espionage, usually accompanied by a pair of pictures:
Conservatives will tell you they favor small government, reduced taxes, and traditional social values. Oddly, in the US today, that somehow translates into “there is no amount of money that is too large to spend on the military.” We’re treated to a constant barrage of pleas for financial assistance from the pentagon, particularly, and its bootlickers, in general, in spite of the pentagon’s claiming it doesn’t have any way to tell where the money is going. Basically, the taxpayers are pouring money into a bucket that has the bottom knocked out, and the crooks holding the bucket keep shouting “It’s EMPTY! Pour FASTER!”
In 1612 Miyamoto Musashi and Kojiro Sasaki fought a duel on the beach of Ganryu Island. Both were excellent swordsmen, well-matched. Kojiro was famous for his “swallow cut” style and his extra-length sword* “clothes hanger-pole” which gave him a bit of reach, which he had taken great advantage of in several duels.
A couple years ago, I was invited to do the closing keynote at the ISSA world conference in LA. It was a pretty memorable evening for me because I took the stage after a panel consisting of Richard Clarke, some FBI executive, and another speaker – and they were talking about cyberwar and the need for more government oversight to protect us against cyberterror (in particular) and terrorism (in general). So, I started my talk off by saying “I know it’s inappropriate for a keynote speaker to start off by rattling off a critique of the panel ahead of them, but there was a lot of lying going on…” Things went downhill from there.