Hegseth is pitching Netflix from the Pentagon podium while the F-35 fleet’s readiness crumbles.
The NPR quiz from July 17, 2026, caught the Pentagon’s press shop in a moment worth noting. Two weeks back from vacation, the briefing room fielded questions about Jurassic Park, U.K. politics, conspiracy theories, and what kind of coin you keep in your pocket. The room laughed. The joke was on us.
Because while the press shop was running movie trivia, the GAO’s 2025 reports on F-35 readiness show mission-capable rates have fallen from the high sixties into the mid-forties. That is not a rounding error. That is a fleet that cannot get off the ground four years out from the next great-power contingency everyone in the building claims to be planning for. A pilot in that fleet does not get to laugh at the quiz. She is checking the maintenance log to see if her bird is even flyable today.
You want to know what a forty-four percent mission-capable rate looks like on a flight line? It looks like a hangar full of jets that need parts the supply chain cannot deliver on time. It looks like a crew chief working twelve-hour shifts six days a week because there is nobody to hand the jet off to. It looks like a young mechanic on her first enlistment, twenty-two years old, telling a senior captain the inlet seal is on backorder and will not be in until October. That captain takes the jet anyway because the deployment tasking does not wait for parts. The mechanic takes the risk because that is the job.
The contractors are still billing. Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics — same five prime contractors we had when I was in the gunner’s seat in 2003, same five we had when my brother shipped out in ‘07, same five we have today. They sit on cost-plus contracts, which means the slower they deliver and the more overruns they run, the more they get paid. The wrench that should cost a depot thirty dollars costs three hundred because the part is serialized and locked to a proprietary diagnostic tool the prime owns. The Abrams tank I crewed in 2003 still uses many of the same parts, and many of those parts still cost what the parts catalog says they cost, not what they would cost in a competitive market.
I know a Lockheed plant in Marietta, Georgia, where the F-22 line used to run. I know a Raytheon facility in Tucson. I know a General Dynamics shop in Sterling Heights, Michigan, where the Abrams transmission is built. Those plants employ real people — welders, machinists, electricians, QA inspectors — and they do real work. But the contracts those plants work under reward the company for delay and overruns, not for delivery. The cost-plus markup is not a calculator error. It is the business model the general named in his farewell address.
Eisenhower, in his farewell address of January 17, 1961, paragraph 24, warned the country. He had just spent eight years as President watching the permanent arms industry grow around the Department of Defense. He told us the “potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist” at the intersection of defense procurement, congressional appropriations, and the press of the arms industry on the rest of American life. The general who won the war in Europe told us what he saw. We did not listen.
The men I served with in 2003 are in their mid-forties now. Most of them came home to towns that did not have a plan for them. The plant jobs they had been promised were gone or going. Some of them worked two jobs to keep the household together. The VA’s most recent annual suicide report puts the rate at 35.2 per 100,000, and that number has not moved in the right direction over the last several reports. The 2025 report includes veterans of that cohort. They are in the rate. They are in the number.
The VA has also cut its disability claims backlog substantially in the last few years. I want to say that clearly, because the people who do that work deserve the credit. A check that arrives on time matters. A claim that gets processed without a two-year wait matters. The men and women who do that work are doing it. But the same period that brought the backlog down brought the readiness numbers down with it. The Pentagon that cannot field a fighter at mission-capable rate more than forty-four percent of the time is the same Pentagon whose press secretary wants to talk about Jurassic Park.
The contractors will still be billing next week. The F-35 readiness will still be in the forties. The VA’s suicide report will still include the names of the cohort I served with. And the Pentagon podium will still be pitching something other than the truth about what the military is for, who profits from it, and who pays the price.
Now, I’m just a simple man, but I know what a torque wrench at the wrong setting will do. I know what a parts catalog with a serialized lock will do. I know what a cost-plus contract rewards. And I know what a press podium pitching Netflix while the planes cannot fly looks like. It looks like the thing Eisenhower named sixty-five years ago, wearing a Netflix hoodie.