A Lockheed Martin F-35B crashed at an Air Force base on Thursday in Fort Worth, Texas, and the footage went viral. The thirty-seven-second video showed the plane hovering steadily over a runway before landing, bouncing, and the front wheel dislodging, which caused the plane to nosedive and spin counterclockwise. The pilot then ejected before suffering serious injury. This was just the latest in a series of crashes for the F-35 — there were two other crashes earlier in the year, the most recent one in October at an Air Force base in Utah.

#Breaking New much clearer video, courtesy Kitt Wilder, of STOL variant F35 B model landing JRB Fort Worth, and pilot ejects. Condition of pilot still unknown. @CBSDFW pic.twitter.com/BeERIeyhtO

 — Doug Dunbar (@cbs11doug) December 15, 2022

The footage went viral, I suspect, partly because of the confounding and absurd manner of the crash — the F-35 looked like a paper airplane tossing and spinning in the breeze, rather than a plane worth $100 million — but also because the F-35 has become the objectification of the United States’ mismatched priorities: the bipartisan eagerness to fund tools of war rather than rebuild and expand affordable housing, address racial and economic inequality, provide maternity leave and childcare for Americans, or do other things with federal dollars that could be considered socially productive. Seen from this perspective, the failures of the F-35 become a mirror to our own, to the United States’ perennial inability to look inward as opposed to outward to solve our problems. Innovations in warfare are demanded to satisfy our anxieties about “competition” with China, about the future of American primacy.