George Bush’S Great America [EN]: Chapter 343

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“All this fuss over a single fighter jet! It’s not like they don’t all secretly want the F-35 as their main aircraft anyway!”

British Prime Minister Tony Blair was, in effect, enduring the final trials of his term. These trials were plentiful enough to be tiresome, but he considered this one perhaps the most dreadful. Who would have thought that a mere fighter jet could cause such discord within the EU?

‘I’m really going to lose it at this rate.’

Of course, this fighter jet wouldn’t be the ‘final straw.’ After all, if the EU could fall apart over just one fighter jet, it wouldn’t be much of a union. It would just be something they leaned on when it was convenient.

If you were to ask if the Eurofighter was unusable, you’d be met with confused looks. Of course, it was a notorious piece of junk, but its performance wasn’t *terrible*. Sure, its flaws were serious, but it could still put up a fight against Russia’s Su-27, a potential enemy.

‘The problem is its performance *relative* to its price.’

Therefore, in their hearts, all EU member states wanted to abandon the Eurofighter and switch to a new fighter jet immediately. To be precise, any country that operated the Eurofighter as its primary aircraft felt the same way.

This was the core of the problem. The EU had presented the Eurofighter as a symbol of integration, and *that* was the real issue. And everyone in the EU, as well as the wider world, was growing disillusioned with the Eurofighter. The British people were no different.

In any case, the biggest immediate problem was that election season was approaching, and politicians would soon be recklessly making promises and issuing IOUs they couldn’t possibly keep.

‘And the people see the Eurofighter as an eyesore, and although it’s not a majority, there’s a significant portion who want to leave the EU….’

Most likely, someone would make an ‘EU withdrawal vote’ a key campaign promise. That was just the nature of ‘politicians.’

If a house was on fire and you happened to have a fire extinguisher in your hand, you wouldn’t hesitate to use it. In the same vein, if there was a promise that could rake in votes like this, they wouldn’t hesitate to exploit it.

So, an absurd situation arose where giving up the Eurofighter effectively meant giving up on the EU. This was all thanks to the idiots who made such a fuss about integrated forces and all that nonsense.

If you were to ask if the integrated forces were working properly, the answer would be a resounding no. Everything was going backwards and falling apart. Except for creating multinational forces in a few countries under the guise of integrated forces, it was no different from the days when they were simply bound by NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization].

However, disbanding the integrated forces now was out of the question, as they had already started projects to unify everything from firearms to vehicles. To be precise, it was the modularization of firearms, an ambitious plan to customize them to their liking.

The reason why so many countries were clinging to the Eurofighter, even though it was a failure, was that they didn’t *want* to consider the Eurofighter a failure.

Everyone hated this damn fighter jet, but they were forced to use it because they couldn’t write off a fighter jet that hadn’t been in service for long as a sunk cost. On top of that, they were trying to ‘improve’ a fighter jet they didn’t even want to use, solely because of this ‘integrated force’ concept.

This was the same for the UK. Frankly, they were treating the Eurofighter as garbage and eagerly awaiting the arrival of the F-35, which was promised to be delivered around next year. If they had used it for about 10 years, they might have hesitated to replace it, but it was a fighter jet that hadn’t even been in service for 5 years, so they hadn’t even gained full proficiency with it.

If they could abandon it and use a better fighter jet, they would do so without hesitation. But that was a distant dream. Abandoning the Eurofighter would ultimately mean severing ties with the EU. They *could* operate both the Eurofighter and the F-35, but as long as they were part of the EU, they couldn’t simply abandon the Eurofighter.

“I’m really going crazy.”

Thus, Tony Blair had to suffer from the anxiety that the country might be split in half during the next general election. If there weren’t so many advocating separation from the EU, he would have vaguely explained that the Eurofighter was hopeless and operated only a small number of them until the end of their lifespan, then filled the ranks with F-35s. But the discord among the people made everything difficult.

Tony Blair wished he could postpone the general election. But no matter how hard Tony Blair tried, that was an impossible dream. How could a mere prime minister postpone a general election?

Alternatively, there was a way to ‘give up’ on the F-35, although he would never want to choose it. After all, the UK was developing its own next-generation fighter jet. It didn’t seem likely that a war involving the European mainland would break out while operating the Eurofighter, and it seemed even more unlikely that the UK itself would be attacked.

In any case, to summarize, it was true that the Eurofighter was in danger of being permanently retired from the Royal Air Force, but it could be said that the crisis hadn’t yet become a full-blown reality.

In the United States, there was also a fighter jet in danger of being retired. However, in this case, the word ‘scrapped’ would be more accurate than ‘retired.’ But it *had* been deployed in actual combat for a short time for testing, so for the soldiers working on aircraft carriers, ‘retired’ was somewhat accurate.

Of course, if you were to ask whether it was good or bad for this drone to disappear, it was naturally good because there would be one less aircraft to manage. Aren’t humans creatures that will do anything to reduce their workload?

In any case, the vertical takeoff and landing drone pilots were all repeating the same story. They said that it clearly lost thrust and control during landing and crashed into the sea.

Based on the drone pilots’ statements, this was reported as a technical defect, and the engineers began to cling to a non-existent technical defect.

“They have no idea we hacked them.”

After Russia was hit hard by the United States’ intelligence operation, which exposed and ruined many of their assets, Russia began to pour all its power into intelligence. It is often said that information is power, but few people truly recognize this.

Russia had only vaguely realized the importance of information until it was brutally burned. Now, it had become a country that lived and died by information, and the extent of this had gone too far, eventually surpassing the United States, which poured huge budgets into it every year.

This was one of the reasons why the United States could not find traces of Russia in China. Well, since Russia wasn’t the one who instigated it, it was natural that they couldn’t find it. In any case, the important thing was that they had recovered enough to seize control and steal it.

Originally, the world is such that the spear is stronger than the shield, so no matter how flawlessly you make security, it will eventually be breached if you put in enough effort. Moreover, this fighter jet was not officially adopted but was a test aircraft, so its security was even more 허술했다 [lax]. Isn’t the security of software under development always the same?

And in fact, even if it was hacking, it was questionable whether it could be called hacking. The reason is that hacking usually refers to unauthorized intrusion by exploiting vulnerabilities in program security, but since they used a remote controller that was officially used, it was problematic to call it hacking, and it was more appropriate to call it industrial espionage.

It had been decades since Russia had succumbed to capitalism. During those decades, Russia had become accustomed to capitalism, and through the end of the Cold War and the post-Cold War era, it had gained a valuable lesson that had always existed but had been rejected until the end.

‘There is nothing that money can’t do.’ What a simple, easy, and beautiful saying! The 18 drones that had fallen into the sea were also bought with ‘money.’ All of this was done by Russia solely to hinder the United States.

Russia’s actions were already somewhat divorced from rational calculations of gains and losses. Their intelligence operations, except for preventing the leakage of their own information, were all moving to screw over the United States. This was due to the decision of Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia and its seemingly immortal leader.

However, the movements of the Russian intelligence agency were not solely based on President Putin’s 독단 [dictatorial decisions]. Russian officials, without exception, were grinding their teeth at the word ‘America’ and actively cooperating. It was as if they were Koreans who couldn’t stand Japan and would do anything to beat them.

Thus, Russia became a huge country that only moved to screw over the United States, and it was constantly searching for ways to screw over the United States and repeating trial and error. Especially after the oil war, they had nothing left but 악 [malice] and 깡 [grit], so it was even more so.

Moreover, all the stolen technologies were directly helping Russia’s defense, so these intelligence operations were not useless.

In fact, the only military information that Russia had not been able to steal even a single ‘clue’ about was the F-22 and the Comanche helicopter. The former was too heavily guarded to steal, and the latter was not felt to be worth stealing.

In fact, even in the United States, the Comanche helicopter raised great doubts about the ‘reconnaissance attack helicopter’ concept itself due to the development and evolution of drones. Perhaps conscious of this, the United States actually produced only 60 of these helicopters and considered ‘helicopter stealth technology’ to be its greatest significance.

In fact, they were developing a multi-purpose stealth transport helicopter, and this had also been caught in Russia’s intelligence network. However, this project was so heavily guarded that there was no way to steal its secrets. And the reason why they couldn’t break through this security was solely because they lacked money.

However, Russia, which had poured all its national capabilities into one intelligence operation, had no choice but to lag behind a bit in civilian intelligence. The problem was the mobile phone. It was good that the next-generation mobile phone, the ‘smartphone,’ was contracted and brought into Russia, but it seemed that the smartphone was secretly stealing personal information to the United States.

There was still no physical evidence, only suspicion, but in any case, it was not a good phenomenon. However, it was too popular to ban smartphones. Even though it had been released for several years, some people were still eager to get it, and it was a magical item that boasted convenience that made you want to use it again once you used it, even if you couldn’t use it at all.

Given these circumstances, it was judged that it would be better to produce Russian smartphones rather than ban them, and smartphones were regarded as items that helped to seize power, and Russia was slowly returning to the Soviet era without even realizing it.