"The F-35 Lightning II Program (also known as the Joint Strike Fighter Program) is the Department of Defense's focal point for defining affordable next generation strike aircraft weapon systems for the Navy, Air Force, Marines, and our allies. The F-35 will bring cutting-edge technologies to the battlespace of the future."
Lurking behind this perky little PR blurb, from the F-35's own website, is the void into which the soul of the human race has disappeared.
This is war consciousness: locked into place, awash in money. The deeply flawed F-35, the most expensive military weapons system in history, is ultimately projected to cost over $1 trillion, but no matter: "It will bring cutting-edge technologies to the battlespace of the future."
What does that mean? It sounds like an ad for the next Star Trek movie, but it's U.S. foreign policy -- or, more accurately, the defining assumption of nationhood: We will always be at war with someone. It's the quintessential self-fulfilling prophecy. When we spend trillions of dollars "preparing" for war, by God, we'll find an enemy.
This is the consciousness we must transcend, and opposing Lockheed Martin's way-over-budget, absolutely-unnecessary-for-national-security F-35 fighter jet, which is supposed to be ready to go by 2019, is certainly a good place to start.
"The F-35 is a weapon of offensive war, serving no defensive purpose," reads the petition now in circulation, initiated by a dozen organizations. "It is planned to cost the U.S. $1.4 trillion over 50 years. Because starvation on earth could be ended for $30 billion and the lack of clean drinking water for $11 billion per year, it is first and foremost through the wasting of resources that this airplane will kill. . . .
"Wars are endangering the United States and other participants rather than protecting them. Nonviolent tools of law, diplomacy, aid, crisis prevention, and verifiable nuclear disarmament should be substituted for continuing counterproductive wars. Therefore, we, as signers of this petition, call for the immediate cancellation of the F-35 program as a whole, and the immediate cancellation of plans to base any such dangerous and noisy jets near populated areas."
At the local end of this travesty, the F-35s, which would be based in Burlington, Vermont, and Fairbanks, Alaska, are so dangerous they could render nearby residential areas uninhabitable. The extreme noise level could cause cognitive impairment in children, according to a World Health Organization report; and the planes' high risk of crashing, combined with highly toxic materials used in their construction, put local residents at an unacceptable risk.
But the absurdity of subjecting people to such risks is magnified exponentially by the needlessness to do so.
Roots Action, one of the organizations calling for the F-35's cancellation, describes the fighter jet as "a first strike stealth weapon designed to penetrate air space undetected. It will be used for massive killing and destruction in more wars like Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Vietnam in which millions of civilians have been killed and wounded and millions of refugees created."
Yet these wars didn't advance any rational agenda whatsoever. They didn't make America safe, much less "great." To confirm this point, the Roots Action site cuts to CIA director John Brennan, testifying before the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee last June:
"Unfortunately," Brennan tells the committee, "despite all our progress against ISIL on the battlefield and in the financial realm, our efforts have not reduced the group's terrorism capability and global reach."
He goes on: "The resources needed for terrorism are very modest, and the group would have to suffer even heavier losses of territory, manpower, and money for its terrorist capacity to decline significantly."
Let's sit in silence with these words for a moment.
In the silence, the word "why" emerges with enormous force, more force, perhaps, than it's possible to bear, at least when one begins adding up the costs of our ineffective efforts. Why are the weapons of war the only tools we choose to wield -- the only tools we can imagine wielding -- against the threat we call terrorism? Why are the multi-billion-dollar agencies of government trapped at such a feeble level of consciousness -- war consciousness -- that they are able to envision nothing but the wreaking of more destruction to "keep us safe," when everything about this activity weakens us, endangers us, makes us ever less safe?
What if we began waging peace against terrorism? That is to say, what if we began to recognize that understanding the enemy is what's crucial, while thinking we can destroy what we fear is an illusion of monstrous proportions?
Consider: "The Defense Department is designing robotic fighter jets that would fly into combat alongside manned aircraft," the New York Times reported in October. "It has tested missiles that can decide what to attack, and it has built ships that can hunt for enemy submarines, stalking those it finds over thousands of miles, without any help from humans. . . .
"Defense officials say the weapons are needed for the United States to maintain its military edge over China, Russia and other rivals, who are also pouring money into similar research (as are allies, such as Britain and Israel). The Pentagon's latest budget outlined $18 billion to be spent over three years on technologies that included those needed for autonomous weapons."
What a world we're planning! I believe there's still time to change directions, but the demand to do so must begin today.
