It would appear this nation's military is a fat, bloated welfare recipient, feeling entitled and too powerful for anyone to do anything about it, impoverishing the nation.
We all know it has many brilliant and capable individuals and teams in it who can do great work, but the system is anything but.
The money ultimately goes to people, meaning we are paying people to do unproductive work, though I'm sure plenty of it goes to executives extracting rents without working productively. Weapons are not the only way to make a nation secure. Collaborative relations with other countries and less disparity of wealth help too. Imagine the security that money could create if used to help others instead of threaten them, or invested into entrepreneurship or helping keep the government accountable.
History shows what happens to cultures where the people can't rein in its powerful who look for more power. I hope we figure out how to.
I'm a realist, so I understand and accept that the Pentagon's main goal is keep its budget healthy. What I don't understand is why can't we do that in a way that gets us good airplanes?
I'm a wary optimist. Trust, but verify. Hope, but plan for the worst. I don't understand enough to know whether we're living in a Pax Americana or a Pax McDonalds. I hope it's the spread of globalization and liberal democracy, but I'm willing to spend the money just in case it's actually the shadow of the American military machine that keeps our relative peace. If my fears are justified, however, it's our military machine, not our military budget that keeps nation-states polite.
I can be a ruthless critic. I'll buy spin (multi-role is cheaper) only as long as I don't think much about it. But, now I'm thinking about it. It's obvious that an F-35 is a joke. 2500 of them is less funny, but still not nearly as awe-inspiring as it could be.
But, I'm apparently naive. I don't understand why some ambitious politician can't take this opportunity to really do something of note. Why can't somebody take this political machine we've built, with contractors lined up in many states, and repurpose it to produce useful, best-of-breed airplanes? I would buy the spin that it's cheaper and easier to design four different planes each tasked do one job extremely well than it is to design one single plane to fill those four roles simultaneously. There is such a thing as the opposite of synergy. Somebody could coin a phrase here, sell the public something huge, and come out looking like a hero for making good on the money we're inevitably going to spend. Let the Pentagon have their budget. Let the politicians have their jobs. And let me have a military with the best equipment in the world.
> "An upfront question with any program now is: How many congressional districts is it in?" said Thomas Christie, a former senior Pentagon acquisitions official.
The military-industrial complex runs deep...and it goes to show how little we can rely on politicians to confront it. If you were a Representative from the few regions that still has an industrial base, it would be easy to justify just another "Yes" vote, for something that brings 50-500 well-paying jobs and is ostensibly there to "help America"...and hard to justify why you were one of the few to say "No" when ultimately, your share of the pork is small. But spread that attitude across dozens of representatives...and then you have a pork train that's too hard to stop, even if it is subpar in meeting its objectives. Maybe most projects are like this, it's just that this one kept going for a few hundred billion too far.
The problem with this type of spending, whether or not it does create jobs, is that it is inherently wasteful. If it were a good plane, and not a political show pony, I'd let it off the hook. But billions are being poured into this fancy paperweight, when that money could more readily benefit programs like NASA (I am a fan of private space enterprise, but if we are going to go nuts with the political budget, might as well be on things that are useful). This type of spending creates a false economy that is not a meritocracy but (for lack of better words) a porkocracy.
He's right about so many things. Especially what is the F-35 good at: "spending money". The whole idea of multi service multi mission fighters is laughable, like saying you only need one programming language to write everything imaginable. Having worked on the F-16 I still think it's an amazing plane with a great track record of doing exactly what it was designed to do.
Good interview. Problems he's mentioning is basically true for any complex engineering problem:
- stakeholders with different agendas building a common product does not work well
- one size does not fit all
A lot of what's made the F-35 such a disaster is the Marines' obsession with VTOL/STOVL capability. That requirement and the desire for commonality between the A/B/C models meant that all F-35s had to be designed around a fuselage wide enough to accommodate the lifting fan of the F-35B. That had a direct impact on the reduced maneuverability of the aircraft, pilot visibility, etc.
War is Boring over at Medium has a lot of great coverage of the F-35 program and all the huge missteps and disasters along the way.
(When I've recommended them before, I've had someone point out that their coverage is quite biased against the F-35. This is true. That bias does not mean, however, that they're wrong).
This isn't Reddit. I don't come to HK to read memes or "jokes." Please contribute something more substantive.
You could have made your point about hunger and priorities without it turning into an "America!!!" gag. Then maybe someone else would have replied and the conversation would have moved forward.
To be fair, almost a half of that NASA budget was used to pay for the Space Shuttle, that was a plane with many technical problems that use suppliers from almost the 50 states to gain political support in the congress.
Untrue according to your own source. It was $513b from 1980-12, and that's in 2007 inflation adjusted USD. If you used 2014 adjusted USD for both NASA would have come out worse.
We're just lucky that this sort of boondoggle only happens in the military. Imagine how much trouble we'd be in if the rest of our government were engaged in this kind of corruption and/or ineptitude!
It happens in most institutions of size where the goal is to control as many people as possible and the incentive is to create even more layers because then you've got "more people underneath you".
GM had/has an amazing number of levels of mismanagement.
Go after multiple solutions. Sure, cut spending, eliminate bureaucracy, but improve the process of improvement as well: Figure out how to make government changes on a smaller and more agile level. Figure out how to make flatten the legal landscape and make it more accessible.
I recently called my senators and congressman about this issue. None of the staffers were able to provide me with their public opinions on the project. Two mentioned that they haven't received any calls on the matter. If you care about this issue, and are a US citizen, call (http://www.contactingthecongress.org/) your elected officials.
This is by design. Lockheed first learned how to game congress with the B1B (another useless plane).
Here's the recipe:
Talk to the military, see what's giving them a hard-on these days. Get them to start coming up with a project to put on contract.
Military issues Request for Information/Request for Proposal based on requirements you told them to use
Contact any and all congressman. Let them know that you intend to make widget X for Aircraft Z in their respective District. Ensure that virtually every congressional district in the country contains a business that is making at least one or two parts for the aircraft.
A new general comes in who is honest, realizes the weapons system is useless, wants to can it. Congress says no, we need it. Who wants to be the guy who threw away jobs in his district?
Critical general leaves, is replaced by politically minded General who wants to be in charge of a "successful" program, drinks the kook-aid and pretends its not a giant boondoggle.
Seems like I remember (back in 2005-6) taht the JSF/F-35 was well within budget and on time BEFORE the F-22 was cancelled because of the explosion in costs that now confronts the F-35. Can anyone corroborate that or am I totally off? It really seems that once the F-22 was cancelled the F-35 became the new 'cash cow' so to speak.
They're worried that if they charged $400bil and the government paid with a 400 billion dollar bill, someone could just pocket it. This way, they'd have to make change for $1 billion from the till.
FWIW defense spending during the WWII and the Cold War did wonders to spur technical innovation. Silicon Valley in fact was a product of WWII defense activities (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley).
While I don't necessarily agree with the end product and how it will be used, I say defense spending like this is ultimately good for the tech sector. It's funding innovation that wouldn't otherwise get funded and creates lots of attractive jobs in technology that will hopefully bring more people to the field.
War, the military industrial complex, and homeland security are our biggest money black holes our tax dollars go into and not things like food stamps. People need to start to get clued in...
I would like to make sure Lockheed Martin gets mentioned as the incompetent manufacturer in this debacle.
I believe you are wrong about that. While defense spending is big, it's not the highest. Health and Human Services and Social Security are both significantly higher portions of the budget. Unless there's a bunch of "off the books" spending?
It seems to be expensive, but what would have been the alternative to JSF or to the F-35?
The trillion dollar budget was postulated by some already long beforehand. Bill Sweetman wrote that into his book ten years ago already: http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Fighter-Lockheed-Martin-Strik...
Unfortunately, with this being what it is, nobody believes the companies' presented combat aircraft prices.
Just a while ago, the French Dassault Rafale doubled in price, some time after winning a huge fighter order competition in India, and it's a plane that's been operational already for fourteen years!:
http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-dna-exclusive-100-price...
Maybe two or three different aircraft could have been developed, and it would have been faster and cheaper in total - since each design could have been more straightforward, more specialized for its mission. Who knows? This is far from obvious to me. Pierre Sprey advocated this line. But even his favorite optimized light weight fighters were adapted to multiple roles and replaced many more specialized aircraft.
Another alternative would have been to develop nothing really new, just keep operating old airframes, maybe manufacture some minor updates (F-15, F-16 and Super Hornet are being manufactured). They don't have stealth, though some versions have some minor stealthiness. Russia and China are developing at least reasonably stealthy aircraft (PAK-FA, J-20, J-31). The F-22 is not manufactured but AFAIK the tooling is preserved. But it's a more specialized aircraft anyway. I think doing nothing would not have been a politically possible path.
Everybody complains but there aren't that many better directions. Some countries could at least buy European or Russian generation 4.5 fighters if they want to avoid JSF, but that's mostly it.
The problem isn't just that the F-35 is multirole but is trying to cater to the various quirks of multiple services. I mentioned it upthread, but an example of this is the very shape of the aircraft was determined in large part due to the Marines' vertical take off requirement. This necessitated a huge lifting fan in the fuselage, which had major ramifications on the maneuverability of the aircraft and the pilot's visibility out of the cockpit. Then there are all the modifications made to the C variant to accommodate carrier landings for the Navy.
The end result is that you have an airframe that was meant to save money by being common between all three services which has ended up with a parts commonality of only 25-30%[1] and whose performance has suffered because of the requisite compromises made to chase that goal.
I think one of the other big things that gets lost in these conversations is that the F-35 was meant to be cheap and widely fielded. The problem is that the program's bloating to the point that they're getting too expensive to field in numbers that would replace the existing force.
The response is usually that the high tech gadgetry in these planes will save the day. That's problematic. This is going back to the F-22, but RAND ran a widely-circulated simulated
conflict in the Straight of Taiwan a few years back[2]. The result was that the F-22s held their own... until they ran out of missiles and were overwhelmed by the sheer number of opposition planes that were being thrown at them.
So, basically, my answer to your question would be forget the super planes and focus on cheaper, more, and good enough. Accept that fighter, bomb truck, and stealth is a pick two proposition. Design something light, cheap, and modernized to fill the multirole capability of the F-16 today; it's very difficult to replace a $40M jet in the same kind of numbers with a $150M one. Supplement the F-22 with new production F-15SEs. Look into things like the Textron AirLand Scorpion to fill the permissive environment CAS role that the A-10C fills today.
This isn't a party political issue anyway, both the Democrats AND Republicans support this program and have for quite a while. As the article says contractors exist in 45 states, so that's 45 senators who have a vested interest in its future.
This 10,000 pound gorilla has been around for quite a few years before Obama and while it would have been political suicide to try and kill it, it would be interesting to see if Obama could have killed it (since he is in command of the military, but congress actually makes a lot of the acquisition decisions).
I'm sure Obama could have ordered the US military to not buy the F-35 anymore but then what? The contracts still exist and the military's budget is based around those purchases (i.e. the money likely cannot be used for alternatives without approval).
oh yeah, all military spending is just soooo stupid ... say people writing comments on something originally funded by the very same military-industrial complex, living in an area largely funded through said complex after ww2.
but we like drones and robots, right? boston dynamics, the darpa challenge, ... oh what a WASTE.
and the technology invented and developed for this plane will appear nowhere else, ever. that's how tech innovation works, all dead ends.
[+] [-] spodek|11 years ago|reply
We all know it has many brilliant and capable individuals and teams in it who can do great work, but the system is anything but.
The money ultimately goes to people, meaning we are paying people to do unproductive work, though I'm sure plenty of it goes to executives extracting rents without working productively. Weapons are not the only way to make a nation secure. Collaborative relations with other countries and less disparity of wealth help too. Imagine the security that money could create if used to help others instead of threaten them, or invested into entrepreneurship or helping keep the government accountable.
History shows what happens to cultures where the people can't rein in its powerful who look for more power. I hope we figure out how to.
[+] [-] rickdale|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adamtj|11 years ago|reply
I'm a wary optimist. Trust, but verify. Hope, but plan for the worst. I don't understand enough to know whether we're living in a Pax Americana or a Pax McDonalds. I hope it's the spread of globalization and liberal democracy, but I'm willing to spend the money just in case it's actually the shadow of the American military machine that keeps our relative peace. If my fears are justified, however, it's our military machine, not our military budget that keeps nation-states polite.
I can be a ruthless critic. I'll buy spin (multi-role is cheaper) only as long as I don't think much about it. But, now I'm thinking about it. It's obvious that an F-35 is a joke. 2500 of them is less funny, but still not nearly as awe-inspiring as it could be.
But, I'm apparently naive. I don't understand why some ambitious politician can't take this opportunity to really do something of note. Why can't somebody take this political machine we've built, with contractors lined up in many states, and repurpose it to produce useful, best-of-breed airplanes? I would buy the spin that it's cheaper and easier to design four different planes each tasked do one job extremely well than it is to design one single plane to fill those four roles simultaneously. There is such a thing as the opposite of synergy. Somebody could coin a phrase here, sell the public something huge, and come out looking like a hero for making good on the money we're inevitably going to spend. Let the Pentagon have their budget. Let the politicians have their jobs. And let me have a military with the best equipment in the world.
[+] [-] danmaz74|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaxytee|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jebblue|11 years ago|reply
This can also be said in regards to a large populace of Democratic voters.
[+] [-] danso|11 years ago|reply
The military-industrial complex runs deep...and it goes to show how little we can rely on politicians to confront it. If you were a Representative from the few regions that still has an industrial base, it would be easy to justify just another "Yes" vote, for something that brings 50-500 well-paying jobs and is ostensibly there to "help America"...and hard to justify why you were one of the few to say "No" when ultimately, your share of the pork is small. But spread that attitude across dozens of representatives...and then you have a pork train that's too hard to stop, even if it is subpar in meeting its objectives. Maybe most projects are like this, it's just that this one kept going for a few hundred billion too far.
[+] [-] gavanwoolery|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] couchand|11 years ago|reply
[0]: http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21600700-expense...
[+] [-] cipher0|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldcode|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sz4kerto|11 years ago|reply
Same is true for software, etc.
[+] [-] commandar|11 years ago|reply
War is Boring over at Medium has a lot of great coverage of the F-35 program and all the huge missteps and disasters along the way.
https://medium.com/war-is-boring
(When I've recommended them before, I've had someone point out that their coverage is quite biased against the F-35. This is true. That bias does not mean, however, that they're wrong).
[+] [-] lostgame|11 years ago|reply
$399 billion could virtually end hunger in America.
...
Or, you know, we could kill more innocent people halfway across the world. Yeah, let's do that.
America!!!
[+] [-] Maakuth|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Someone1234|11 years ago|reply
You could have made your point about hunger and priorities without it turning into an "America!!!" gag. Then maybe someone else would have replied and the conversation would have moved forward.
[+] [-] cdr|11 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7989659
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7906501
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7111843
[+] [-] datahipster|11 years ago|reply
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Annual_budget.2C...
[+] [-] gus_massa|11 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program#Budget
[+] [-] Someone1234|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joelgrus|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] altcognito|11 years ago|reply
GM had/has an amazing number of levels of mismanagement.
Go after multiple solutions. Sure, cut spending, eliminate bureaucracy, but improve the process of improvement as well: Figure out how to make government changes on a smaller and more agile level. Figure out how to make flatten the legal landscape and make it more accessible.
[+] [-] chrisbennet|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carlosft|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JPKab|11 years ago|reply
Here's the recipe:
Talk to the military, see what's giving them a hard-on these days. Get them to start coming up with a project to put on contract.
Military issues Request for Information/Request for Proposal based on requirements you told them to use
Contact any and all congressman. Let them know that you intend to make widget X for Aircraft Z in their respective District. Ensure that virtually every congressional district in the country contains a business that is making at least one or two parts for the aircraft.
A new general comes in who is honest, realizes the weapons system is useless, wants to can it. Congress says no, we need it. Who wants to be the guy who threw away jobs in his district?
Critical general leaves, is replaced by politically minded General who wants to be in charge of a "successful" program, drinks the kook-aid and pretends its not a giant boondoggle.
Profit.
[+] [-] marktangotango|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tloewald|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dotcoma|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] washadjeffmad|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] claudiusd|11 years ago|reply
While I don't necessarily agree with the end product and how it will be used, I say defense spending like this is ultimately good for the tech sector. It's funding innovation that wouldn't otherwise get funded and creates lots of attractive jobs in technology that will hopefully bring more people to the field.
We may not have even had the microwave oven today if it wasn't for defense spending on radar technology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_oven#Discovery).
[+] [-] 01Michael10|11 years ago|reply
I would like to make sure Lockheed Martin gets mentioned as the incompetent manufacturer in this debacle.
[+] [-] wuliwong|11 years ago|reply
You can easily see here in this extremely user-friendly document http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2... :-p
[+] [-] allthatisgold|11 years ago|reply
Note: it's a long article
[+] [-] Gravityloss|11 years ago|reply
The trillion dollar budget was postulated by some already long beforehand. Bill Sweetman wrote that into his book ten years ago already: http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Fighter-Lockheed-Martin-Strik... Unfortunately, with this being what it is, nobody believes the companies' presented combat aircraft prices. Just a while ago, the French Dassault Rafale doubled in price, some time after winning a huge fighter order competition in India, and it's a plane that's been operational already for fourteen years!: http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-dna-exclusive-100-price...
Maybe two or three different aircraft could have been developed, and it would have been faster and cheaper in total - since each design could have been more straightforward, more specialized for its mission. Who knows? This is far from obvious to me. Pierre Sprey advocated this line. But even his favorite optimized light weight fighters were adapted to multiple roles and replaced many more specialized aircraft.
Another alternative would have been to develop nothing really new, just keep operating old airframes, maybe manufacture some minor updates (F-15, F-16 and Super Hornet are being manufactured). They don't have stealth, though some versions have some minor stealthiness. Russia and China are developing at least reasonably stealthy aircraft (PAK-FA, J-20, J-31). The F-22 is not manufactured but AFAIK the tooling is preserved. But it's a more specialized aircraft anyway. I think doing nothing would not have been a politically possible path.
Everybody complains but there aren't that many better directions. Some countries could at least buy European or Russian generation 4.5 fighters if they want to avoid JSF, but that's mostly it.
[+] [-] commandar|11 years ago|reply
The end result is that you have an airframe that was meant to save money by being common between all three services which has ended up with a parts commonality of only 25-30%[1] and whose performance has suffered because of the requisite compromises made to chase that goal.
I think one of the other big things that gets lost in these conversations is that the F-35 was meant to be cheap and widely fielded. The problem is that the program's bloating to the point that they're getting too expensive to field in numbers that would replace the existing force.
The response is usually that the high tech gadgetry in these planes will save the day. That's problematic. This is going back to the F-22, but RAND ran a widely-circulated simulated conflict in the Straight of Taiwan a few years back[2]. The result was that the F-22s held their own... until they ran out of missiles and were overwhelmed by the sheer number of opposition planes that were being thrown at them.
So, basically, my answer to your question would be forget the super planes and focus on cheaper, more, and good enough. Accept that fighter, bomb truck, and stealth is a pick two proposition. Design something light, cheap, and modernized to fill the multirole capability of the F-16 today; it's very difficult to replace a $40M jet in the same kind of numbers with a $150M one. Supplement the F-22 with new production F-15SEs. Look into things like the Textron AirLand Scorpion to fill the permissive environment CAS role that the A-10C fills today.
KISS.
[1] http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/lightning-rod-f-35-fight...
[2] http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2009/RA...
[+] [-] jebblue|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Someone1234|11 years ago|reply
This isn't a party political issue anyway, both the Democrats AND Republicans support this program and have for quite a while. As the article says contractors exist in 45 states, so that's 45 senators who have a vested interest in its future.
This 10,000 pound gorilla has been around for quite a few years before Obama and while it would have been political suicide to try and kill it, it would be interesting to see if Obama could have killed it (since he is in command of the military, but congress actually makes a lot of the acquisition decisions).
I'm sure Obama could have ordered the US military to not buy the F-35 anymore but then what? The contracts still exist and the military's budget is based around those purchases (i.e. the money likely cannot be used for alternatives without approval).
[+] [-] pinaceae|11 years ago|reply
but we like drones and robots, right? boston dynamics, the darpa challenge, ... oh what a WASTE.
and the technology invented and developed for this plane will appear nowhere else, ever. that's how tech innovation works, all dead ends.
[+] [-] aburan28|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CalRobert|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justinpaulson|11 years ago|reply