Photo by Pete Kiehart/Bloomberg via Getty Images You heard them before you saw them. I was standing at an intersection in Washington DC and the sound of the F-35s flying overhead filled all four of the boulevards around me so that you couldn’t tell where the jets were coming from. They shot past, flipped upside down, pivoted and then seemed to pause in the sky before twisting back down towards Earth. They looked more like spaceships than fighter aircraft, moving in ways that seemed to defy the laws of aerodynamics. The urge to shout “hell yeah” was mixed with the sense you were in some remote Afghan village circa 2010. It was like the assault on DC in Alex Garland’s film Civil War. If what people choose to do on their birthdays points to what they care about, then perhaps an F-35 should be