The baseline cost of a military at the ready is massive, whether you use it or not.
What often happens is someone with an axe to grind grabs a portion of this baseline cost and assigns it to whatever it is they are hyperventilating about.
In reality, taxpayers were going to spend that money anyway. It's a false equivalency; it would not have cost $0 to keep that plane on the ground. If they claim this to be the case they are lying.
Simpler terms: You own a trucking company. It costs nearly the same to have a truck parked and ready to roll at a moments' notice. The tank has to be full (or you have to have the money to fill it up when needed), you have to pay the loan, insurance, have an office, receptionist, computers, customer service people, order takes, drivers, mechanics, etc. All at the ready in order for that truck to roll. You would have had to spend and allocate the money whether it rolled or not. If it rolls, then there are some marginal costs that come into play, of course. Not much different with a fighter plane in a hangar.
As to the legal matter, that's a different story and one I am not qualified to comment on.
While the fixed costs of any aircraft are significant, flight time is a definite extra cost. Apart from the obvious cost of the kerosene the aircraft will accrue flight time and fatigue. Every component has a flight time clock, which dictates when it must be serviced and replaced. F-15C are very expensive to operate, $40k per hour would be quite possible.
Let me forestall arguments about incidental training. For training to count towards maintaining readiness it must be carefully designed and supervised. No training benefit would have eventuated.
If the money 'would have been spent anyway' then it would have been spent for a correctly determined purpose, such as training. Diversion to other purposes is not free.
Good to see you’re being reasonable.
People are routinely convicted or given poor discharges because of much smaller thefts, like inaccurately claiming living allowance. Using NG combat aircraft for distinctly political purposes is far worse than theft.
Using the military for partisan political purposes, specifically surveillance and intimidation of political demonstrations.
As for your “worse than theft” comment: “By your logic I could steal $10k from your bank account”
That’s you, equating this issue, with theft.
Quite to the contrary. It is more informed and accurate than you might think. I am not one of those people who posts comments without having any context or knowledge in the matter at hand. If I don't know something with a good degree of certainty I don't participate in the conversation just to add ignorant noise.
At the simplest possible level of abstraction, a military base is allocated X dollars per year to function. This money is spent. Period. Fly or don't. That's the cost. They don't pull out credit card every time they need to fly a plane or drive a truck.
If someone wants to claim that this flight cost taxpayers ADDITIONAL money they need to prove there was a requisition as a result of that flight and show costs incurred over and above the baseline. They can't, because the entire cost attribution is 100% fake. In some cases they are pulling numbers out of the anus, just making stuff up. How?
Politician: "General, how much does it cost to fly that plane per hour?".
General: "$10K"
Politician: "This incident cost taxpayers $100K!"
No, it did not. That money was allocated and spent already. The operational cost the general quoted is the baseline, fly or not.
You have air bases with thousands of people, thousands of pieces of equipment, systems, hardware, etc. The baseline cost is massive. One flight here and there is truly a rounding error. Base Operations Support, as a budget line item, is in the tens of billions of dollars per year. Look it up.
Here, start with this. Try to find a $100K flight in there.
https://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudg...
Uninformed and inaccurate? Please.
Flying time and jet fuel is specifically a cost that is monitored across the Air Force to make sure it is not wasted. Diversion to crap like this is part of the USAF pilot retention problem.