Thanos Thanos:
Canadian_Mind Canadian_Mind:
Thanos Thanos:
Weapons and military equipment manufacturing development is too subsidy-intensive. It's far better to let other nations do the actual building and then retro-fit it to our own needs upon purchase.
not when everything arrives late.
Explain further please.
Alright. Say you order a computer, on March 31st. It almost completely suits your needs as far as process and graphics power goes (say you are a gamer or digital artist), but you expect that when you recieve it you will want to replace the standard keyboard and mouse with fancier equipment. All the parts of the computer come from different companies; they do the building, you do the buying.
You expect this computer to arrive on May 15th, which is good because you have alot of major jobs you want to get done over the summer you can't do with your current machine. However, the damn thing keeps on getting delayed, and it doesn't arrive until July 1st. Now you've lost a month and a half's worth of quality computing time with the new computer. You can't very well build the entire damned thign yourself unless you ordered all the outsourced parts yourself, and knew how to assemble it.
Same thign with our military purchases. We needed the Chinooks yesterday, but weren't expecting them till 2009, now we possibly wont get them till 2011. Unless the mission in Afghanistan is dramatically increased, we'll never get the things on time to be of any use to us in that theatre. Now, we potentially could get our aircraft companies to manufacture our own heavy lift vehicles, but that would take a fair chunk of time, as we don't have any designs of our own ready for production.
Now, we could simply pay Boeing for the manufacturing rights to the Chinook, and get Bombardier to build em. But would the states or the company allow it?