This is pure protectionism, effectively there are people elsewhere who will do the work cheaper of better. The way to compete against this is to lower your overheads rather than trying to get the government to be your friend.

The American VFX artists are getting the government involved because the foreign VFX artists are being subsidized by their governments up to 60%. RTFA

German Grundgesetz:

Article 5
(1) Every person shall have the right freely to express and disseminate his opinions in speech, writing and pictures, and to inform himself without hindrance from generally accessible sources. Freedom of the press and freedom of reporting by means of broadcasts and fi lms shall be guaranteed. There shall be no censorship.
(2) These rights shall find their limits in the provisions of general laws, in provisions for the protection of young persons, and in the right to personal honour.

What (1) giveth, (2) taketh away.

Knock knock.

"Hello?"

"Can we search your house?"

"No."

"You're under arrest." (hauls off occupant)

Knock knock on the same door, another occupant answers.

"Hello?"

"Can we search your house?"

"No."

"You're under arrest." (hauls off occupant)

Knock knock on the same door, another occupant answers.

"Hello?"

"Can we search your house? We'd like to remind you of what happened to the last two people who said no."

"Uh, okay."

If you want to invade a foreign nation and retain any semblance of the moral high ground there's a thing called proportional response

The fact that we don't carpet bomb entire villages shows proportional response. After WWII the allies would execute, expel or burn the homes of inhabitants of a town known to harbor remaining Nazi resistance. They stopped harboring such people rather quickly and the resistance effectively ended in 1945. It was brutal, but effective. We have been extremely nice at the cost of the lives of our own troops.

If you want to take Iraq specifically, we were not foreign invaders for the purpose of these problems. We invaded, kicked out Saddam, and then remained with the permission of the new government, and then the troubles started. We functioned as the government's security force against terrorists. As their own police force and army were trained to effectiveness, they also became targets for attack by the insurgents.

The F-117 had to open its bomb bay doors, making it a target. Stealth is not absolute, and they already degraded the stealth of the F-35, giving it a radar signature much larger than that of the F-117.

Let's see, for its close air support role it also carries a pitifully small amount of ordnance, but you might get more if you used the wings, killing stealth. It has one engine and no armor, so survivability is low. The thing has serious problems across the board.

So, you're saying that civilian casualties should be on the native terrorists/freedom fighters who have to hide to avoid being slaughtered outright

If you hide among civilians, it is you who are putting them in danger. If you care about the civilians at all, you will separate the fighting forces from them. If they die because of an attack targeted at you, then it is your fault. The attacking force bears no responsibility.

The alternative is absurd, that the opposing force can never, ever attack you for fear of killing your human shields, but you can attack them with impunity.

rather than on the foreign invaders who are actually murdering civilians by employing scorched-earth tactics?

We don't use scorched earth tactics. The complaint here is that a precisely targeted bomb or missile may kill civilians.

Yes, but would the AAA have been able to hit the plane in the first place?

Most likely, yes. They just put up a cloud of AAA, and anything that went through was in danger.

Would a faster, higher, stealthier plane have ever been shot at?

We had the perfect plane for that, the F117. Alternatively, we have the B2, or even the F-22. But even then, we lost a 117 over Yugoslavia, shot down by an old SA-3. Nothing beats the A-10 for close air support. Other things besides the F-35 do other kinds of missions better too.

The wing fold should be easy, since it's designed to have the wing beyond the pylon blown off anyway.

History didn't begin with bombers or even catapults you know. Admittedly raping and pillaging tended to increase the casualty rate as well.

Regardless of the technology, purposely killing, starving and terrorizing the civilians was part of the war strategy. Now exactly the opposite is the strategy, although we can never be perfect.

It's called asymmetric warfare.

It is a known strategy. However, if they want to endanger civilians then the civilian casualties should be on them, not on us.

The critical point is who makes the decision to fire. If it's a machine, that just tweaks things in the minds of the peopl, machines going crazy, all that sci-fi stuff happening.

As far as the rate of collateral damage, it's lower now than in any point in history. While starving and terrorizing the civilian population used to be a standard tactic in warfare, we take great care to minimize civilian casualties. Given the choice of a $500 dumb bomb that will kill everybody in the vicinity, and a $35,000 smart bomb that will just kill the bad guys, we spend the money to help spare the lives. That one Hellfire now would have been a full bomber load way back when.

Of course, civilian casualties could be greatly reduced if it weren't for the standard practice of our current opponent to use them as human shields, and to otherwise attempt to blend in with them.

That sounds like time for a modernization effort. The A-10 has many upgrades through the years, mainly avionics and more recently a new wing. But go all-out. Take the same basic proven design, and do some minimal R&D for improvement. A modern engine is probably better than the one in the A-10, and I'm sure there are much better alloys availabile than there were in the late 60s to make a more survivable airframe. And I'm sure many maintenance lessons-learned can be applied to make it easier to maintain.

Basically, just re-work the plane for the modern age using current, easily-manufactured technology. Crank up production of 500 of these guys, and it'll be far cheaper than the F-35. The A-10B.

In the Iraq War, CPT Kim Campbell had fragmentation AAA go off right next to the tail on her A-10 over Baghdad, resulting in hundreds of hull piercings, basically a shredded tail. She lost her right-rear control surfaces, her right engine, and both hydraulic systems (there's a redundant one). She was able to fly back to base entirely on manual controls.

So, how would an uber-expensive F-35 do with AAA going off right next to its tail? It would have become a lawn dart.

I don't think we'll ever go full-bore on autonomous machines until AI takes a dramatic leap. We only have a few autonomous machine guns in the Korean DMZ, in an area where absolutely nobody is ever supposed to be, where people would have had to walk through a minefield to get there in the first place. IOW, anything in its field of view needs to be shot, no matter what. And even then we have people monitoring the guns.

As soon as you're talking any place a friendly or civilian could possibly be, the political fallout from a machine killing them would be unacceptable.

Once the military figures out that they can get socially maladjusted people to fly the drones

This is kind of what they already do with Special Forces. You really don't want normal people in those jobs. But it's not about a lack of emptahy, but being able to handle insane, inhuman environments, and even thrive in them.

Seriously, people want a CAR. Because it's electric doesn't mean you need to hop your designers up on LSD before work in order to have it stand out. I kind of liked the specs of the Leaf, but it has looks that turn off almost all potential buyers.

It also helps that the Tesla S was designed from scratch as an electric car. The Leaf is using basically the same platform as the Cube, so it's just a gas car with an electric chucked in. The Tesla Roadster was just an electric Elise, but it was really a limited-run testbed, and it could sell as a high-performance car at least (given it could out-accelerate a conventional Elise)