re: #72 Targetpractice

The French had a concept, what really sold their proposal is they were willing to agree to allowing the Aussies to build whatever design came of that concept domestically while the Japanese and Germans were only willing to sell them the subs. And even that was falling apart as the French already announced in 2019 that a third of the originally agreed work was being shifted back to French workers.

Really, that’s the biggest crime on the part of the Australian government in all this, that they insisted on treating the procurement of a next generation attack sub as a jobs program. So much of the money already spent was sunk into trying to bring facilities and training up to snuff to build what would have ended up being second-class subs. And then they either lied or were lied to about the total cost of the program, trying to sell the $80B price tag as the cost of the whole thing over the life of the subs rather than just the cost of building the damned boats.

Weaponized Keynesianism. Imagine if instead they just spent that money to create jobs to make people’s lives better.