The vaunted Lockheed Martin F-35 “Lightning II’ — a jet so “advanced” it requires a small army of technicians to keep it airborne — has added yet another “success” to its bloated resume. Nearly 40 days after it found itself stranded in India, where it was forced to land due to a slight breeze over the Indian Ocean, the British Air Force (RAF) F-35B finally left for Australia.

Engineers, who had to be flown all the way from the United Kingdom, wasted nearly a month and a half struggling to repair the troubled jet. After being stranded at the Thiruvananthapuram International Airport in the southern state of Kerala, the $100 million aircraft is now in Australia’s Darwin.

According to the New York Times, a crew of at least 14 technicians worked to repair the F-35’s hydraulic and auxiliary power systems. Expectedly, the infamous neoliberal mouthpiece tried to present it all as some sort of a “funny adventure”, focusing on the narrative that the troubled jet allegedly “became a local celebrity”. The report insists that “the jet was under heavy security during its time at the airport, which experts said was necessary to protect its highly sensitive technology”. Well, that “state-of-the-art” tech is actually “so good” that the F-35 is effectively reduced to a glorified hangar ornament most of the time, as evidenced by its atrocious track record and catastrophic battle readiness.

As the American “wunderwaffe” lawn dart begged for mercy under the tropical heat, Lockheed Martin desperately tried to salvage whatever’s left of its reputation. The incident, buried under a flurry of corporate PR jargon about “logistical delays”, is a microcosm of everything wrong with Western military-industrial grift – exorbitantly........

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