I believe the point is that doing supply drops with C130s and C17s is vastly more efficient than any hackjob you could do with F35s, both in terms of throughput and cost.

With that in mind, if you were to say the US should spend more on cargo planes and humanitarian aid drops and less on fighters like F35s and starting unnecessary conflicts around the globe, I'm totally with you.

While I would much rather see medical kits distributed to Gaza today than bombs, this could (and should) be accomplished not by converting F35s.

Dismantle the F35s, and drop supplies with a C130 or other military transport capable of airdrop, which will be VASTLY more cost/fuel efficient, thus allowing you to do a lot more of it than you ever could with a fleet of F35s.

Which I'm 95% certain is exactly what the other folks you're arguing with are suggesting.

> you can't possibly be saying XYZ...rant about XYZ, among other things

No, obviously that's not what they're saying. There must be some reasonable interpretation then, right? Let's look at the chat thread and see what we can find.

> be very cautious about evil uses of seemingly safe technology when developing initial capabilities

>> that's super hard since most things can be repurposed

>>> (your other comment) it's actually easy though, just look at how we could repurpose these death machines

>>>> (their comment) but...that's wildly inefficient

The subtext to their answer is going an entire opposite direction to your rant. People are saying that turning anything into a killing machine is easy, and their comment is saying that doing so is sometimes Pareto-suboptimal, and so wildly so that no semi-rational-at-least-a-little-bit-sometimes military is going to bother trying to weaponize your silicone basting brush or what have you.

They're not saying that you should mass-murder people, as you, yourself speculated.

„We spent money on weapons, let’s use them“ is actually a frighteningly common argument.