alt Hacker News>No, obviously that's not what they're saying.
It is what they are saying, because they have misunderstood the point:
You talk about 'efficiency' while there are children dying, limbs severed, bombs still falling.
The F35 is there, it has one purpose: murder.
Turn that immediately into another, singular purpose: life.
Nobody is saying "manufacture new F35's that only drop pansies".
The point is, de-weaponize. That can be done with far greater ease than anything else.
And that is the only point that matters, while limbless children are dying by the minute.
All of this random F-35 shit is completely missing the point. The F-35 isn't "there" - no aircraft is "there" because the costs to operate them far eclipse their acquisition costs, always.
If you said "scrap the F-35s, spend money on humanitarian purposes" - you'd have a cogent (albeit naive) point. "Use one of the most expensive per-flight-hour aircraft in the world to do a mission it can't do and wasn't built for" is not intelligent.
Roughly, just considering fuel: the F-35 burns ~10,000 lbs/hr of JP-8 and can haul just 18,000 lbs of relatively small/multiple payloads. A 747 burns ~20,000 lbs/hr and can haul over 300,000 lbs of palletized loads. See the issue?