It's a very 'agile' project. When will it be done? Don't ask! How much will it cost? Who knows! It's going to be awesome, though!
But... you don't have to wait to see how powerful this weapons system is. The F-35 completely took out the Dutch government before one even rolled off the assembly line!
Note to governments: when ordering your weapons systems it may be a good idea to get a cost-per-unit quote before signing.
Defense systems go over-budget for the same reason software projects do--it's all custom and custom development is unpredictable. It's not like these companies can sell the U.S. stuff they had lying around having developed it for another customer.
I used to do development for a DOD project. At the outset of the project, it's often not clear what you're trying to do will even work. It might not even be clear what you should be trying to do. It's an iterative process of the government telling the engineers what it wants, and the engineers going back to the government with what can be done. That's not the say that projects like the F-35 weren't badly managed. But even well-managed defense projects are unpredictable.
The world just looks very different when you can't count on massive consumer volumes to amortize R&D. Imagine going to Apple and saying "we need you to develop the iPhone, and oh by the way we will order at most a few thousand of these. What'll be the unit cost?"
It's more a classic example of the situation that agile methodologies seek to avoid.
The biggest thing Agile tries to do is minimize up-front planning. The reason for that is that you have the absolute least knowledge available to inform your decisions at the beginning of a project, so decisions made early on are massively more likely to be poor ones. Worse, you tend to get locked into them because other components in the system were designed around these decisions and that creates major impediments to change.
F-35 had reams and reams of design decisions made long before anyone started assembling the thing. To an Agile team that's the worst possible thing you can do. You decide you're going to do X long before you have any idea how long X will take or what it will cost or how well it might work. OK sure, yes, you've written down some numbers on paper, but to be blunt that's just blowing smoke up your own ass. It's inevitable that the end result of so carefully specifying the requirements up-front would lead to a virtually unbounded schedule and budget.
By contrast, an agile project's schedule and budget are theoretically unbounded, but you're supposed to strive to always be at a point where it's possible to ship on short notice so the practical reality (not always accomplished) should be that it's always possible to fix one or the other at a defined point by saying, "OK that's enough, let's ship." Or you can even pull the plug on the whole project if you decide it's just not working, and that's actually a realistic option because by delaying decisions you haven't encumbered yourself with a mountain of contracts and financial obligations.
Which isn't to say you could get away with using Scrum or Kanban on a project like this. Just that the problems you're talking about aren't really emblematic of Agile so much as the problems Agile is designed to fix.
A quote for something like this would be a waste of time. The "rules" are obviously different military hardware projects that have strategic significance: you either need it or you don't and if you have to ask "how much?", you can't afford it !
Agile has fixed delivery date and variable features delivered on that date. Features are prioritized by customer at start of every iteration. Done right, Agile delivers exactly the things customer has chosen to afford.
In my experience unfortunately, exactly 0% of customers (internal or external) are ablet to accept/wrap their head around a variable feature deliverable and demand a fix set of features decided at start and required to be delivered by some date. Aka utter fantasy.
For a defence company Lockheed Martin is actually a surprisingly good* player in the VR/AR community and they always have somewhat sane people at conferences etc.
Interestingly they often mentioned fighter pilot helmets as the best state of the art AR technology but when asked about specifics the answer was usually..."classified, sorry" which I always thought was kind of sad.
While the technology in this helmet may turn out to be pretty great, I still can't view the project as a whole (The F-35) as more than a failure. It's taken them a lot of time and money to develop a mediocre aircraft, here's Pierre Sprey's opinion on it (Designer of the F-16) "The F-35 was born of an exceptionally dumb piece of airforce PR spin" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxDSiwqM2nw
You mean a project that has to try to be everything to everyone is a failure? Say it ain't so! This isn't a shot at you, by any means; it's more a shot at a government program that was destined to fail long before it started. You can't have a 4-wheeler ATV, a tank, a station wagon and an SUV built in the same frame. There are some overlaps, sure, but trying to satisfy each requirement leads to insane conflicts that really can't be remedied in a good way. Thus you get this cludgy, massively over budget product that satisfies no one. And on top of it all, nobody wants to be the politician that's responsible for losing 10,000 jobs for his district, so it lives on.
Former pilots, and aircraft engineers are typically very proud of their machines, relish a more simple time when the pilot mattered more, and won't hesitate to bash modern technology.
This one video always comes up in F-35 discussions. I think you have to take his criticisms with a grain of salt. Of course he thinks the F-16 is better - it would have been better than anything that wasn't just like the F-16 with better performance.
Nobody really knows just how much of an advantage stealth technology provides in the real world. It's going to take a few skirmishes with other top-of-the-line aircraft flown by well-trained pilots before anyone can say it's a failure from a performance perspective.
The one place you point to any sort of certain failure is cost. The F-22 was supposed to be the high performance, high end, high cost plane and the F-35 was going to be the high volume, low cost plane to fill in the numbers. Just like the F-15/F-16 pair. Clearly the F-35 is too expensive to qualify as low cost anything, and the more expensive it gets the fewer they're going to sell, which sets off a sort of price spiral.
> Costing about 250,000 pounds ($400,100) apiece, the helmets will be deployed in all Typhoons, of which Eurofighter has delivered 278 to six air forces and has orders for 429 more.
The nice thing about the public scrutiny of the F-35 program, is all this normally-classified capability information that's released out to the public to get them excited about the project. Such level of publicity of cutting edge weapon systems simply didn't exist a decade ago.
> The F-35 Lightning II is one of the most complicated weapons systems ever developed,
That is the opening sentence. And I will be surprised if it does not send chills down the spine of any person whose life will somehow depend on that airplane.
Nobody knows. We usually cannot predict future conflicts very well.
A number of people think Stealth increases the chance for WVR engagements (WVR = Within Visual Range, or dog fighting). I'm one of them. The U.S. has a bad history of predicting the end of WVR engagements (see Vietnam and the F-4 produced without internal guns). Air superiority is definitely not a thing that can be taken for granted. But many people do because the West has dominated the skies for many decades now.
looking at the low tech - WWII style - war in Ukraine with a lot of civil population and property being hit, intentionally and unintentionally, i'd take high tech any time over it. For example when a full salvo (16) of unguided missiles (from "Uragan" system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BM-27_Uragan) with 100Kg cluster warheads rains over the center of large city (Donetsk) ... i wish that US give Ukraine high-precision weapons so those weapons would be used instead.
In an interview one Russian tank gun operator was boasting "we had a good tank - it had night vision"! In 2015! He said 3 tanks out of their team's 12 were such "good" tanks (and it was regular Russian army unit, not a rebel one). Of course no laser guided, drones, or any "total battlefield awareness", etc... Just shoot whatever you see through that night vision (it was their actual order the night Ukraine forces were making their way out of Debaltsevo encirclement through the narrow bottleneck while Russian forces were shooting at them from good positions from both sides)
The good news is that war kills less people than it used to. Paradoxically, these fantastically lethal killing machines might be actually preventing deaths.
The US/Iraq war and occupation lasted about a decade and there were less than 200,000 direct combat deaths. Contrast with WWII, in which there were quite a few individual battles with greater death tolls... between one and two million people died in the Battle of Stalingrad alone.
Advanced military technology might be one reason why death tolls have decreased. Advanced superpowers with advanced military technology don't wage full-scale wars against each other because the results would mutually assured destruction. And smaller, poorer countries don't dare to engage the larger ones with advanced technology because the outcome would be lopsided destruction of the smaller country's forces.
Don't get me wrong. Even a single death is too much. The world still sucks and there's too much violence. And the ultimate end price of this advanced killing technology might be that we ruin the planet with nuclear weapons someday.
Without such technology, we will be in a world where virtually every able bodied young man will have to serve in the armed forces. Because of such specialized technology and people who dedicate their lives to the craft of warfare, most of our young generation do not have to serve in the military.
I hear what you're saying but that view is too cut and dry and cynical when you look at reality. Some of the most amazing things we've accomplished as humans and some of our best amenities have been born out of military needs or technology. There is also a massive amount of infrastructure that supports this single aircraft and we as a society have benefited from that infrastructure.
Is it sad that the internet has connected the entire world in ways no one foresaw? That through it ideas and information flow so much more effortlessly than they used to? Is it sad that anyone with a sufficiently powerful receiver can contact a satellite and find out where they are on the planet to an accuracy of a couple meters? Is it sad that digital cameras have become ubiquitous and we can capture whatever moment when want on demand? All of those technologies came from the military. Do you even stop to think that America's government is paying for the upkeep of and freely giving access to the GPS we've come to take for granted?
America's Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs are another great example. Mercury and Gemini both used modified ICBMs where they swapped the nuclear warhead with a pod that had men in it. America used those (and the Russians used their versions) to put the first men in space which started the space race which has ultimately given us GPS, and untold knowledge about our planet and what we're doing to it.
To say that the military only creates technology that kills people is disingenuous when all you have to do is stop and think about the modern tech we use every day.
> a stealthy fighter jet years that is often called a flying computer because of its more than 8 million lines of code
For all the critics, all the hate vs drones and leaner fighters and bombers, the F-35 _is_ an impressive engineering feat and a turning point, especially re:software.
At some point, a "Snow Leopard" version of the F-35 will turn out as a very fine piece of equipment, only possibly without the initial cost benefits expectations. Also: most learnings will probably be lost because the project will not have a decisive cost/performance advantage despite its complexity. The plane won't have a successor.
Hopefully we can hear at some point of contractors who worked on its systems.
Lolz!
Who does not recognize this article as complete propagandistic advertisement for a project completely over in time and budget that even fails competing with its competitors.
Just besides that it's a weapon for killing people. Wake up.
That's still interesting technology-wise. I'm clearly not fond of military-related technology in principle, but that's an interesting piece of equipment nonetheless.
What does the context change in this case? That it is (or not) a propagandistic advertisement doesn't change the fact that it's an interesting technology.
Could you argue it's a weapon for saving people? Over 140 Christian students in Kenya were just massacred. An F-35 taking out the perpetrator's training camps could have save a bunch of innocent lives. One of the worst genocides in history (Rwanda) featured machetes being used to hack millions of people to death. How great would an F-35 been against the Nazis? How many millions of people could have been saved?
Weapons aren't evil. Evil is what's evil. Burying one's head in the sand à la Chamberlain led to the extermination of millions. The Khymer Rouge had no advanced weaponry and slaughtered millions.
In Gulf War I, 35,000 total deaths, in no small part because of smarter weapons. An entire country liberated from the Iraqis in just over a month.
How would advanced weaponry have changed the game in wars across history?
Even the Iraq war, which has been one of Anerica's longest has resulted in about 500,000 deaths. In the much shorter WWI it was 16 million deaths.
High tech weapons save lives. Wars will always happen be it with machetes or spears or with billion dollar aircraft systems. A world without war would be nice, but there will always be evil in the hearts of men.
Like the plane, the helmet is enormously expensive. The cost of each custom-made helmet is more than $400,000.
They've come down in price. When I did my honours at a defence science base in '96, it was using a helmet obtained "second-hand and shop-soiled" for $600k - the helmet had a monocle that projected a HUD onto your retina. Apparently it was an Apache gunship pilot's helmet.
So each helmet is custom-made. If you lose the helment (or spill coffee on it or something), then you can't fly the plane anymore? A small thing like the helmet will ground a $200M airplane?
Even if F-35 fails it won't really be a failure, because all the R&D investment paved a way for a new generation of fighter jets. It's not a faster horse, it's a car.
Whenever I see headlines like this I think back to Batman Begins when Lucius Fox says "Bean counters didn't think a soldier's life was worth 300 grand"
[+] [-] furyg3|11 years ago|reply
But... you don't have to wait to see how powerful this weapons system is. The F-35 completely took out the Dutch government before one even rolled off the assembly line!
Note to governments: when ordering your weapons systems it may be a good idea to get a cost-per-unit quote before signing.
[+] [-] rayiner|11 years ago|reply
I used to do development for a DOD project. At the outset of the project, it's often not clear what you're trying to do will even work. It might not even be clear what you should be trying to do. It's an iterative process of the government telling the engineers what it wants, and the engineers going back to the government with what can be done. That's not the say that projects like the F-35 weren't badly managed. But even well-managed defense projects are unpredictable.
The world just looks very different when you can't count on massive consumer volumes to amortize R&D. Imagine going to Apple and saying "we need you to develop the iPhone, and oh by the way we will order at most a few thousand of these. What'll be the unit cost?"
[+] [-] bunderbunder|11 years ago|reply
The biggest thing Agile tries to do is minimize up-front planning. The reason for that is that you have the absolute least knowledge available to inform your decisions at the beginning of a project, so decisions made early on are massively more likely to be poor ones. Worse, you tend to get locked into them because other components in the system were designed around these decisions and that creates major impediments to change.
F-35 had reams and reams of design decisions made long before anyone started assembling the thing. To an Agile team that's the worst possible thing you can do. You decide you're going to do X long before you have any idea how long X will take or what it will cost or how well it might work. OK sure, yes, you've written down some numbers on paper, but to be blunt that's just blowing smoke up your own ass. It's inevitable that the end result of so carefully specifying the requirements up-front would lead to a virtually unbounded schedule and budget.
By contrast, an agile project's schedule and budget are theoretically unbounded, but you're supposed to strive to always be at a point where it's possible to ship on short notice so the practical reality (not always accomplished) should be that it's always possible to fix one or the other at a defined point by saying, "OK that's enough, let's ship." Or you can even pull the plug on the whole project if you decide it's just not working, and that's actually a realistic option because by delaying decisions you haven't encumbered yourself with a mountain of contracts and financial obligations.
Which isn't to say you could get away with using Scrum or Kanban on a project like this. Just that the problems you're talking about aren't really emblematic of Agile so much as the problems Agile is designed to fix.
[+] [-] angdis|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] njharman|11 years ago|reply
In my experience unfortunately, exactly 0% of customers (internal or external) are ablet to accept/wrap their head around a variable feature deliverable and demand a fix set of features decided at start and required to be delivered by some date. Aka utter fantasy.
[+] [-] jacquesm|11 years ago|reply
What makes you think they're unhappy about the outcome?
[+] [-] smegel|11 years ago|reply
Just visualizing this makes me feel sick. Imagine executing high-G maneuvers but seeing an image that doesn't correspond to what you feel...
[+] [-] klodolph|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kriro|11 years ago|reply
They were quite involved in the Virtual World project which is open sourced: https://github.com/virtual-world-framework/vwf
*from my perspective as someone who thinks building weapons technology is pretty bad and something I'd never do personally
[+] [-] ohitsdom|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skeuomorf|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JonFish85|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smackfu|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josefresco|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tsotha|11 years ago|reply
Nobody really knows just how much of an advantage stealth technology provides in the real world. It's going to take a few skirmishes with other top-of-the-line aircraft flown by well-trained pilots before anyone can say it's a failure from a performance perspective.
The one place you point to any sort of certain failure is cost. The F-22 was supposed to be the high performance, high end, high cost plane and the F-35 was going to be the high volume, low cost plane to fill in the numbers. Just like the F-15/F-16 pair. Clearly the F-35 is too expensive to qualify as low cost anything, and the more expensive it gets the fewer they're going to sell, which sets off a sort of price spiral.
[+] [-] trynumber9|11 years ago|reply
> Costing about 250,000 pounds ($400,100) apiece, the helmets will be deployed in all Typhoons, of which Eurofighter has delivered 278 to six air forces and has orders for 429 more.
[+] [-] flyinglizard|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonsen|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] th3iedkid|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] venomsnake|11 years ago|reply
That is the opening sentence. And I will be surprised if it does not send chills down the spine of any person whose life will somehow depend on that airplane.
[+] [-] jacquesm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] encoderer|11 years ago|reply
Who, exactly, are we supposed to be dog fighting with in next 20 years?
[+] [-] ckib16|11 years ago|reply
A number of people think Stealth increases the chance for WVR engagements (WVR = Within Visual Range, or dog fighting). I'm one of them. The U.S. has a bad history of predicting the end of WVR engagements (see Vietnam and the F-4 produced without internal guns). Air superiority is definitely not a thing that can be taken for granted. But many people do because the West has dominated the skies for many decades now.
[+] [-] crusso|11 years ago|reply
http://news.yahoo.com/russian-ships-old-arctic-nato-set-alar...
[+] [-] Altenuvian|11 years ago|reply
extremely low-latency head & eye-tracking, managing depth-of-field, integrating multiple input streams, providing non-distracting information overlays etc.
[+] [-] sschueller|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trhway|11 years ago|reply
In an interview one Russian tank gun operator was boasting "we had a good tank - it had night vision"! In 2015! He said 3 tanks out of their team's 12 were such "good" tanks (and it was regular Russian army unit, not a rebel one). Of course no laser guided, drones, or any "total battlefield awareness", etc... Just shoot whatever you see through that night vision (it was their actual order the night Ukraine forces were making their way out of Debaltsevo encirclement through the narrow bottleneck while Russian forces were shooting at them from good positions from both sides)
[+] [-] JohnBooty|11 years ago|reply
The US/Iraq war and occupation lasted about a decade and there were less than 200,000 direct combat deaths. Contrast with WWII, in which there were quite a few individual battles with greater death tolls... between one and two million people died in the Battle of Stalingrad alone.
Advanced military technology might be one reason why death tolls have decreased. Advanced superpowers with advanced military technology don't wage full-scale wars against each other because the results would mutually assured destruction. And smaller, poorer countries don't dare to engage the larger ones with advanced technology because the outcome would be lopsided destruction of the smaller country's forces.
Don't get me wrong. Even a single death is too much. The world still sucks and there's too much violence. And the ultimate end price of this advanced killing technology might be that we ruin the planet with nuclear weapons someday.
[+] [-] dba7dba|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ta82828|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] njharman|11 years ago|reply
Only the most facile could possibly believe this or any war machine is "just to kill people".
[+] [-] benihana|11 years ago|reply
Is it sad that the internet has connected the entire world in ways no one foresaw? That through it ideas and information flow so much more effortlessly than they used to? Is it sad that anyone with a sufficiently powerful receiver can contact a satellite and find out where they are on the planet to an accuracy of a couple meters? Is it sad that digital cameras have become ubiquitous and we can capture whatever moment when want on demand? All of those technologies came from the military. Do you even stop to think that America's government is paying for the upkeep of and freely giving access to the GPS we've come to take for granted?
America's Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs are another great example. Mercury and Gemini both used modified ICBMs where they swapped the nuclear warhead with a pod that had men in it. America used those (and the Russians used their versions) to put the first men in space which started the space race which has ultimately given us GPS, and untold knowledge about our planet and what we're doing to it.
To say that the military only creates technology that kills people is disingenuous when all you have to do is stop and think about the modern tech we use every day.
[+] [-] pi-err|11 years ago|reply
> a stealthy fighter jet years that is often called a flying computer because of its more than 8 million lines of code
For all the critics, all the hate vs drones and leaner fighters and bombers, the F-35 _is_ an impressive engineering feat and a turning point, especially re:software.
At some point, a "Snow Leopard" version of the F-35 will turn out as a very fine piece of equipment, only possibly without the initial cost benefits expectations. Also: most learnings will probably be lost because the project will not have a decisive cost/performance advantage despite its complexity. The plane won't have a successor.
Hopefully we can hear at some point of contractors who worked on its systems.
[+] [-] foo1423|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ragnarork|11 years ago|reply
What does the context change in this case? That it is (or not) a propagandistic advertisement doesn't change the fact that it's an interesting technology.
[+] [-] briandear|11 years ago|reply
Weapons aren't evil. Evil is what's evil. Burying one's head in the sand à la Chamberlain led to the extermination of millions. The Khymer Rouge had no advanced weaponry and slaughtered millions.
In Gulf War I, 35,000 total deaths, in no small part because of smarter weapons. An entire country liberated from the Iraqis in just over a month.
How would advanced weaponry have changed the game in wars across history?
Even the Iraq war, which has been one of Anerica's longest has resulted in about 500,000 deaths. In the much shorter WWI it was 16 million deaths.
High tech weapons save lives. Wars will always happen be it with machetes or spears or with billion dollar aircraft systems. A world without war would be nice, but there will always be evil in the hearts of men.
[+] [-] vacri|11 years ago|reply
They've come down in price. When I did my honours at a defence science base in '96, it was using a helmet obtained "second-hand and shop-soiled" for $600k - the helmet had a monocle that projected a HUD onto your retina. Apparently it was an Apache gunship pilot's helmet.
[+] [-] Daviey|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] knappador|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] damon_c|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] discardorama|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] njharman|11 years ago|reply
custom made != only works with one aircraft
[+] [-] Daviey|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] puppetmaster3|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dgudkov|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drussell|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fapjacks|11 years ago|reply