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Each year, the United States military spends billions of dollars on equipment that has a good chance of being lost or abandoned in the line of duty at some point. Its members are obviously trained to minimize the chances of that happening, but the USS Harry S. Truman is struggling on that front now that two fighter jets have fallen off the aircraft carrier just eight days apart.
The military-industrial complex is built on a foundation of the production of pricey equipment that is essentially designed to be disposable in the grand scheme of things.
It goes without saying you don’t want to lose tanks, ships, planes, and other vehicles in combat, but that’s always a possibility, and even if they’re able to avoid befalling that fate, they’ll eventually reach a point where they’re decommissioned after becoming inoperable or obsolete.
It also goes without saying that you don’t want to simply lose a piece of equipment that costs tens of millions of dollars to produce, but the Navy has run into a bit of an issue on that front based on what’s recently transpired on the USS Harry S. Truman.
The aircraft carrier, which has been in operation since being launched in 1996, is currently deployed in the Red Sea to support operations targeting the Houthi rebels in Yemen.
On April 28th, a F/A-18E Super Hornet with a $67 million price tag that was being towed into a hangar fell into the water as the ship was making a hard turn that forced its crew to execute a maneuver in an attempt to avoid a Houthi missile strike.
According to NBC News, another mishap led to an F/A-18F (a two-seat version of the model) meeting the same fate on Tuesday during a botched landing where the fighter jet that costs around $60 million failed to catch the arresting cable that’s used to slow planes down when they hit the flight deck.
The two pilots aboard were able to eject before it hit the water and were successfully rescued by a helicopter that was dispatched to retrieve them.
It has not been a great year for the carrier, which has not only lost those planes but also fired its former commander in February after the vessel collided with a merchant ship near the Suez Canal.
Content shared from brobible.com.