The F-35 still has a long way to go
warisboring.com
warisboring.com
Why? Well, to get user facing software working properly, you need a tight, low friction OODA loop (ironically in context, a concept perhaps most notably studied in air combat). Develop a prototype, put it in front of domain experts, prospective users, get feedback, develop an improved prototype, rinse, repeat.
But that's exactly what's very hard to do in a huge project with massively rigid bureaucracy. Conclusion: those capabilities should first have been developed in a skunkworks project, an X-plane, before committing to them for the do-everything plane that half the world is supposed to end up using for the next half century.
General cross-domain conclusion (at least for domains where the ostensible product is the real goal of the project, which in this case it arguably isn't, as previously discussed): if the big expensive thing you want to build, wants a radical new capability, see if you can develop the radical new capability in a skunkworks project before committing to it in the big expensive project.
Defense contractors probably have something like this internally and that may be why they won out over bureaucracy, but that then leads to companies blaming one another for changes/scope/spec problems. Prototypes probably aren't focused on enough to shake out issues early on and throughout.
Or maybe do more x-prize type events for skunkworks starting and recruiting. Self-driving cars really came from this with the DARPA Grand Challenge.
With DARPA like challenges, as a side benefit, ideas can both be military and commercially available and it helps people understand that military funds aren't just for blowing things up but lots of great tech come from it.
So the pilot isn't using his senses to decide what to do or his reflexes to control the plane. Why is the pilot in the plane?
At the time they were the antidote to the "Bomber Mafia." However as time went on the ethos of the pilot and "airmanship" as the most important aspect of the Air Force continued to dominate.
That said, there is an argument to be made for pink and squishy still in the cockpit - though too long to argue here and I'm not the right person to do it. However if anything, the amount that the AF has dedicated to UAV/RPA/UCAS operations over the last decade has really shown that if it works, the AF will do it regardless of where the flight control monkeys (derisive term for pilots) physically sit.
* Manned space flight, e.g. putting a man on Mars, is going to catch the public's attention more than unmanned flight, and IMO anything which helps popularise the sciences is generally a good thing.
* Human space flight is a goal in itself. People have been exploring the Earth for centuries despite the risks, so exploring space (in person) is just an extension of that. There also may come a time where living off-planet may be necessary, or at least desirable, so having the knowledge to do so may be useful.
The best-case scenario for manned space flight in our lifetime is that we go to Mars. Robot probes, on the other hand, can go to some wild places in the solar system, including places that would be lethal to a human crew. And they do so at 1% of the cost of manned missions.
I'd wager the excitement per dollar spent is higher for robot probes.
People cheered for the man landing on the moon, all over the world, even in the communist block, despite loosing the space race with that very event. Why? Because it was about people! Because the even the ordinary people could relate to the event.
Think about here on Earth. You can get high definition photo and video from anywhere on the planet. But people still love to travel. Because it's no substitute for the real thing.
The reason why the post-Apollo space program has been so uninspiring is that the only part of Dr. von Braun's vision we actually brought to fruition was the least inspiring part that still went outside the atmosphere - and that only because the Air Force signed on, needing spy satellite mechanics and finding it cheaper to chip in on someone else's otherwise doomed program than to fund a novel one of their own.
Of course, now they can use a robot in that role, and do. No reason to spend any more money on a boondoggle of a space truck, so now our best hope of resuming manned spaceflight rests with a couple of creepy, etiolated billionaires. For someone raised in the vision of Dr. von Braun, to describe this state of affairs as merely dispiriting is to beggar language.
By now we might have been living in orbit and on the moon - we might have been sending men and women to Mars, and preparing to establish our first colonies there. Instead, we fill our sky with robots tending robots and send robots as proxies to mail us their snapshots of the solar system's wonders, while we stay at home - because to do otherwise would cost too much, and besides, someone might get hurt.
If you can manage to find that inspiring, you're welcome - and also quite rare.
Also a lot of the ISS work is experiments, each with their own setup and criteria.
Obviously at some point this will be solved, but there is still the point of having humans in more places than just the Earth.
One of the odder requirements for experiments in the Shuttle was that they had to require human interaction. NASA didn't want to send a spaceship full of astronauts up to babysit fully automated experiments.
I'd say that reason alone warrants a pilot.
Hint: it's squishy, on average less than two meters tall, and riding in the cockpit.
Now granted, that can technically be done from outside the airplane, but if contact with the plane is lost for any reason, you lose that bit of wetware seated at the helm.
I agree with this, but this wasn't your original point.
Because of latency. I have read several articles about drone pilots. The latency is a really big issue, the biggest of all.
Because of limited bandwidth.
Because of jamming.
Because pilots care better for the multimillion$ equipment if their life is also at stake. (This being the least important)
Because while human life is at stake military and political leaders think twice before starting a war and sending in the fighters/bombers.
Adir has special kit which may replace some of the problem components in the stock American version, but the air frame itself isn't a "long way" from being combat-ready.
[1] http://www.airforcesmonthly.com/2017/03/07/have-israels-new-... [2] https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/video-footage-israeli-j...
One of its primary purposes is air-to-air. Don't take my word for it: https://www.f35.com/about/capabilities
The A version of the F-35 has three seconds worth of gun ammo. It would only be two seconds, but there's some lag between the trigger pull and the gun being fully spun up.
Of course, the F-22 would eat them up as well, but it's a stealth air superiority fighter while the F-35 is a stealth multi-purpose strike fighter.
If you're asking what its role was in that specific strike: Israel doesn't have any other stealth capabilities. So its role would be to fly over troubled territory rather freely, given the capabilities in the region. The F-15s and F-16s they have can't do that.
But at least it's also a terrible ground attack plane and bomber too.
This is why Dick Cheney exists!
This is why he went from sec defense, setting policy for contractors, to heading haliburton, to VP underling of GHW and starting a new war - the longest, most expensive war the US has ever known.
Now lets bolt on a new defense project to funnel even more money...
Why do you think Tom Ridge left DHS to join the board of Lockheed??? MIC revolving door.
The other option is the US did it with the plausible deniability that israel would be blamed in order to test the f-35.
I mean, if it were you, wouldnt you want to test the damn thing in an operation after all the spending and PR the plane has received. Even behind closed doors you'd want to be able to say "See! It works"
Why? Is Israel paying now?
http://mondoweiss.net/2016/12/israels-free-ride/
Also worth noting that the 2nd link above says Israeli media reported it too. Are there any credible denials which suggest which aircraft was actually used? Everything I can find only says it's "unlikely" but won't go further. Who are the numerous experts? Why would they use aircraft which aren't stealthy while Russia has an ever-increasing presence in Syria?
For a history of fighter costs:
E.g. One WW2 battleship could defeat every ship on Earth combined as of ~1830. (and it probably cost more than all of them too).
But, this is an amusing observation.
The US's four Iowa-class battleships were quite useful, mostly for shore bombardment. They required a huge crew, 2,700 for WWII, Korea), and, after some modernization, 1,800 in the 1980s and 1990s. It's the crew size that led to their retirement. Each turret needed 90-110 people.
There was naval interest in building some "bombardment ships" intended for shore bombardment of countries that didn't have a significant capability for shooting back. But that went nowhere, since most of the US's enemies in recent decades have been too far inland.
The Japanese government was afraid to send the Yamato into battle, but that had nothing to do with money (after all, its sister ship was deployed at the 2nd battle of Leyte Gulf). The problem was they'd used it as a centerpiece in their war propaganda, and they thought losing it would be a PR disaster that outweighed any possible utility in battle.
A handful. Nowhere near enough. The Battle of Midway wiped out the bulk of them. The Zero rapidly became obsolete, too.
What you need in a big war against a worthy adversary is the ability to quickly innovate and iterate on designs, and having a single design that try to do everything is about the worst option available for that.
In a war against an adversary that isn't worthy, you can use whatever and you will still win.
It's hard to say for sure, but in a way it seems that the Hood and the Prince of Wales actually stood a much better chance of causing serious damage to the Bismarck than the Ark Royal did, even if that's not how events happened to play out. (And in fact damage from the Prince of Wales's guns did help to slow the Bismarck down and force it to attempt to go to port to refuel.)
Battleships sided aircraft carriers for two reasons: one was to thicken their inner defense ring a little, and the other was because battleships alone, without a friendly air wing to keep the other side's strike aircraft away, were doomed.
Only because neither the US nor the Japanese had carriers in those engagements. The writing was on the wall when the Brits crippled the Italian gunship fleet with a single obsolete aircraft carrier in 1940.
20% better at 3x the cost is usually a bad bargain in a battlefield increasingly dominated by dispersion strategies and that was what eventually killed the Battleships, they were to expensive for convoy duty and too slow and vulnerable to torpedo and air attacks for the line of battle fighting that actually happened doing WWII.
That's what you might think with a certain naive look at WWII. All indications are that in any modern conflict between countries with the capability to manufacture this kind of hardware, it'll be all over before there's time to design or build anything. You win with what you have when the war breaks out, or you lose. Assuming you're lucky enough for it to not go nuclear, since any country like that can also build lots of nuclear weapons and delivery systems, and they pretty much all have already.
WW2 battleships proved their worth as late as the 1990s when nothing else could deliver the shore bombardment capability.
While the Phalanx CIWS is inarguably impressive in specification and testing, the thing about the US military is that, whenever we get into a fight, we're always 150% ready - for the last war. It takes us a while to figure out what we're doing in the current one, and it costs us. I see no reason to imagine this pattern shouldn't hold in a new war against an opponent equipped with Moskits.
Think of the problem:
- At Mach 3, the missile is flying at roughly the same speed as the unguided bullets the thing is firing. If it's additionally doing evasive maneuvers it's going to be pretty hard to hit.. (though I guess at Mach 3 it's not going to do very much acrobatics, but perhaps even a little bit is enough to make the CIWS miss?)
- Mach 3 is close to a km per second, and I guess the realistic range for a 20 mm cannon isn't that much, lets say 4 km for the sake of argument. And below, say, 1 km it probably doesn't matter if you keep firing at it or not, it's likely to hit you out of sheer inertia even if you hit it. So that gives you around 3s time to fire and adjust the aim. Not very much..
I have seen some mentions of a move toward missile-based defense, which would probably be a more effective option, but most of the same considerations apply - each missile might be much more likely than an individual CIWS round to score a kill, but many fewer missiles can be carried, and the launchers still need time to reload once they exhaust their magazines.
This is also, incidentally, the real reason why DEWs and hypervelocity kinetic weapons - lasers and railguns - are such a matter of interest in the naval research establishment at the moment. They're justified as being a more cost-effective means of dealing with low-level threats, but this is America - the last time our military services had reasonably to worry about being short of funds was no more recent than the mid-1930s, and nobody since has given any meaningful fraction of a damn about the cost per shot of naval weapons - and frugality would militate against the very considerable R&D cost of new systems without new capabilities, in any case.
A much more plausible reason why these new systems receive such interest is because they might eventually offer a solution to the currently insoluble problem of how to defend against a mass attack with supersonic AShMs. You don't see that discussed much in public, because no one with a stake wants to suggest that our enormously expensive carriers no longer offer the power and prestige that merits the cost of keeping them active, but nothing else makes as much sense.
It would take a lot of ships, but it could be defeated.
This also stands for a single class of ship, as BBs are expensive, and provide only limited power projection capabilities. As it turned out not superweapons, but decent stuff in insane amounts won the war.
What would actually happen if you sent a US battleship against a age of sail fleet commanded by competent people would be that the battleship would spend all of it's fuel trying to find something to shoot at while civilian shipping kept getting sunk, and then end up destroyed by saboteurs when returning to port for refueling. And that's the dream scenario in the real world you never see that kind of a technology gap persist for long.
Look what happened to the Airbus A400M. They agreed to a fixed price, and then when the program ran away over budget they blackmailed the EU defense ministers into renegotiating by threatening to cancel the program, close factories, or even go bankrupt. It's just politically impossible to hold the line on these deals.
But there have been some contracts (NASA commercial cargo to the space station) that have had fixed milestones for releasing money to contractor.
Big .gov orgs have a lot of leverage, because they can make or break the sales force.
The end result is that the vendor prices in the risk and overhead. Depending on the political situation and project, it may be worth paying that premium to displace the blame to the vendor. But for something like the F35, the cost is astronomical.
IMO the F-35 is fine from a capability standpoint. It's just far too expensive.
For reference, 1.5 trillion is more than double the Apollo and Space Shuttle programs, combined.
frankly i'm sure that if it came to it, your average clip on tie beltway bandit employee would be more useless than 5 year old in time of war, but i think thats the thinking
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-22_Raptor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...
This isn't "revisionist BS." If you actually go back you'll find that the two planes were designed for different uses. The DOD may have dug themselves a hole while trying to sell the plane to taxpayers by saying it will do everything better than any other jet. That was not the original intent.
http://m.aviationweek.com/defense/center-fuselage-rebuild-co...
If you don't like it, what exactly should be done with the program? Should it be cancelled? Do you still think it should be cancelled if that means maybe agreeing with Trump?
This kind of argument is what's wrong with people voting the party line instead of voting with reason. Who the hell cares if Trump is right? Do what's right because you think it's right, not because of some petty political squabble.
I do not pretend to understand how complicated such an expensive program is and what all the effects of cancelling it would be, but based on what little I know it seems like it would be a good idea to cancel the program and put the funds into something more productive.
Like I said in a cousin comment, I'd be concerned about what the future would be for aircraft if we did cancel this program. I'd hope to see a plan for what we're going to do for the aircraft we need to buy and replace over the next 30 years before they moved forward with cancelling it.
TL;DR: The scope of this project (intentionally) means there are customers in 10s of countries, with most of them also contributing portions of the plans and so invested in the sales of the others. Just in the US alone contractors account for more people than the Coal industry we're hearing so much about right now.
I have not got nearly enough information to say if it's a good or bad plane. But I find it extremely interesting to think that to a large degree, it doesn't matter.
While the US is already committed to the F-35, discussion of the plane's shortcomings is important for NATO and other allies who haven't yet signed up to buy the plane (e.g. Canada). Maybe the plane will mature into an effective platform, or maybe it will never be anything more than an expensive turkey. Right now it seems like the right thing to do is hold off making a purchase.
For the US, I'd bet the primary utility of this plane is the health of the defense complex because it is probably the last traditional major fighter program. They'll switch to fleats of networked AI "manned" drones and that will be the real prize. (Prize because it means force projection without political risk.) But one require a healthy defence industry to make these significant investments. And one requires significant expertise in a workforce in place. But the technology probably isn't there for another ten or twenty years or so for complex/flexible missions.
This is clearly the way that things are going. Within our lifetimes the Western way of making war will be a fleet of drones endlessly circling above "enemy" territory, firing a Hellfire missile at anyone a Facebook-trained face recognition algorithm deems to be a threat.
By "enemy" I mean "the entire rest of the world" of course.
None of that is actually true, especially the "terrible visibility" part. In fact, it's the only aircraft flying with literally 2 pi steradian (the full sphere around it) visibility.
The author of the linked article has a vendetta against the F-35. There are legitimate criticisms, and he outlines some of them - they don't mean it won't be an effective system within a few more years.
Could the procurement have been done more effectively? Of course, and I hope future procurements learn a lot from the problems of the F-35 effort. In particular, there has to be a realistic plan to incorporate technology improvements during the development process! I'm also dismayed that computer modeling didn't predict issues like the weak wingtips of the F-35C.
All that said, how about a little balance from people who've actually flown the plane in simulated combat...?
This pilot flew the F-35B against F-16s and F-18s:
"Mo: I was leading a four ship of F-35s on a strike against 4th Gen adversaries, F-16s and F/A-18s.
We fought our way in, we mapped the target, found the target, dropped JDAMs on the target and turned around and fought our way out.
All the targets got hit, nobody got detected, and all the adversaries died. I thought, yes, this works, very, very, very well.
Never detected, nobody had any idea we were out there."
You can read many more complimentary words at the link:
http://www.sldinfo.com/the-moment-pilots-first-realized-the-...
"not enough ammo in a gun it won't be able to use for years, and can't carry the most useful bombs yet."
The gun will almost never be a combat factor. As to the "most useful bombs", there is always something new isn't there...? The baseline SDB-1s are plenty useful in their own right, along with the various JDAMs and other munitions available.
A documentary by NOVA about the JSF competition between Lockheed Martin X-35 (which became F-35) and Boeing X-32. Official PBS link [0].
Here is the official site [1] with full transcript and behind the scenes about the making of the documentary (quite insightful).
> The rule, although often violated, is that normal aircraft are to be designated in a strict numerical series according to their basic mission. The easiest examples are found in the Fighter class of US airplanes: F-14, then the F-15, F-16 and so on. But, there are exceptions. For example, the X-35, which was a research plane, was later redesignated the F-35 when it became fighter capable, even though the next number in the Fighter sequence was F-24.
Which happens to be the Suame Magazine workshop district in Ghana.
Ghana may wind up deciding the outcome of the next major war.
A low-wing / high-engine version would be closer to the a-10, but that is almost style over function imho.
Low-mounted wings also give the A-10 a very low stall speed, improving its ability to loiter over a battlefield.
It's all about tradeoffs.
[edit]
From wikipedia:
F/A 18-D 2 × General Electric F404-GE-402 turbofans
F-15 2 × Pratt & Whitney F100-PW-100 or −220 afterburning turbofans
F-22 2 × Pratt & Whitney F119-PW-100 turbofans with thrust vectoring in pitch-axis
F-35A 1 × Pratt & Whitney F135 afterburning turbofan
The strange thing is that at extreme speeds the SR71 engines were high-bypass, with most air bypassing the blades altogether to be burnt in the afterburner as a ramjet.
But jesus, the fact that lockheed made the SR in the 60 just freaking astounds me.
I can only imagine what they have been making these days for the breakaway civilization!
Could you please expand on this statement? Why do you think this that only this community could rebuild them?
That takes really nimble hands at the lathe and milling machine.
Every machinist / fitter and turner I've worked with in the metal fabrication industry could do that if they felt like it. The small machine shop across the road from where I work now has the tools necessary to build a low-tech diesel or gasoline engine from solid-stock and hollow-bar, or if necessary whatever was laying around.
Truck bodies are trivial to knock together from scrap because they can have very simple suspension, and limited scope for handling characteristics.
Turns out the B-52 is hopelessly obsolete for its original design purpose, but as a cheap truck for delivering huge quantities of bombs on target it has found a lot of utility.
The A-29B is in US inventory and being actively procured mostly for the purpose of assisting 3rd world allies like Afghanistan, and the British version of the navy's T-45* jet trainer have seen combat in the far east.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_EMB_314_Super_Tucano https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAE_Systems_Hawk
http://www.pogo.org/straus/issues/weapons/2017/f35-continues...
Wow. I did not realize it had been in development for so long.
> The scale of the challenge yet remaining with the F-35 is easily quantified in this year’s DOT&E analysis. According to the report, the F-35 still has 276 “Critical to Correct” deficiencies—these must be fixed before the development process ends because they could “lead to operational mission failures during IOT&E or combat.” Of the 276, 72 were listed as “priority 1,” which are service-critical flaws that would prevent the services from fielding the jets until they are fixed.
I'm not an expert on designing fighter jets, but that sounds bad.
> The problem is bad enough that Lt. Gen. Bogdan has admitted the F-35C will need an entirely redesigned outer wing.
Will someone more knowledgeable tell me just how bad this is? I do know a bit about defense contractors and missiles (I worked at a defense contractor for a hot minute as an engineer), but this just sounds like a clusterfuck of epic proportions. The cynic in me believes the congressional-military-industrial complex has run wild in order to maintain cash flow.
Where things aren't so good is that the three versions were originally supposed to have over 80% parts commonality. That is now down to something like 20%. That is bad in terms of economies of scale.
All that said, in principle there is absolutely nothing preventing a single, mostly common, design from filling those three roles. Whether the F-35 team has done an exemplary job of doing that is certainly a question.
In terms of sheer engineering, it can be argued that the F-35B is the most impressive of the three versions. It's the first supersonic VTOL fighter ever.
This quote from the article reinforces my view that the VTOL requirement does effect the other version of the F-35.
* https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-04-04/is-the-f-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...
We have the ability to defend ourself, we have the most powerful military and navy in the world many times over. Lets just see what the heck we could accomplish in one year alone with respect to social and economic services.
In hindsight it seems obvious that they were less concentrated with actually getting a capable fighter anytime soon and a lot more concerned with, well, paying money to the US.
This has caused a rift between the two countries that is still lasting.
(Side-note: as a new HN user I really, really hate this throttling. I think I actually managed to submit this on the 9th try, waiting about ten minutes between each attempt. I kept seeing "You're submitting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks."
I really, really don't think is good for conversion stats.)
Maybe Japan and South Korea?
I don't like the idea of being dependent on a few large customers. Not saying you should listen to me. I have a horrible track record in speculation. I was clearly overly skeptical of the Y Combinator darling, Dropbox. I bet Y Combinator is glad they didn't listen to people like me.
It just makes me feel uneasy.
Making predictions is hard, especially about the future.
Building a complex system is rife with complex risks. There's the initial sticker shock, and that's even if costs can be reasonably estimated years in advance for technology which is not only unproven, but undemonstrated. Then there's the quite significant nonrecurring engineering costs. Want to divide those costs over 200 aircraft instead of 300 - bam - 50% cost increase, thank you madam taxpayer. Still need those 200 aircraft by a given date - discover it costs more because manufacturing facilities come in "chunks" of price-to-capability - under-build and miss the target - over-build and per-unit is higher. Discover your estimates of deliverability, even if made with honest efforts, are off by a few years, and the price only goes in one direction. Try to keep certain components really (relatively) inexpensive to meet price requirements, and discover, like every aircraft manufacturer in history, that adding lightness is difficult after you had to add strengthening material in certain problematic areas, like, oh, the wings. And of course, politicians change their minds - keeping 10,000 engineers engaged during a lean period so that you can re-engage them when political winds change is a nontrivial task too.
And with all that, to be a successful long term project, there's some future events that have to be estimated - tell me what the threat will be in 20 years? What will the political will to engage those threats be? What munitions will there be? What survivability is desired? What's the desired lifetime? Will AI be good enough to dump pilots entirely?
As much as I'd love to build the next generation manned fighter-bomber, it's not a palatable risk for anyone not ready to lose their entire investment. Even Paul Allen has got to feel a little sensitive at the billion dollars he lost with his effort at Eclipse (during the time I was losing far less).
I recently went through (most of) a technical incubator in the area I live in. There were several investors involved that were quite knowledgeable about aviation. I couldn't get any of them interested enough to engage in my autonomous air ambulance idea (the Marine's have said in advance they want such a thing - but it has to be good, fast, and cheap) - and the translation to a future civilian capability is pretty obvious.
That's one reason I'm cheering for the effort by Boom to build a new civilian supersonic aircraft. Yeah, it's going to be hard to meet price targets, and it's refreshing to see someone willing to take a $30MM chance on a complex project, and that's just to get a demo built and flown.
Building a future capable fighter is a whole other ballgame.
I want the federal government to declare "war" on Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati and other poverty stricken areas. Maybe then these impoverished areas might get some infrastructure improvements which will generate jobs in the short term and help attract businesses in the medium-long term.
Why did it take almost a whole year to get $170m (or just one F-35) to the people of Flint? Why is a military toy built to fight a fictional war against nobody more important than actual people who are suffering?
The US will happily declare war on Iraq and spend $1.7 trillion, but just the thought of spending a dime within the country turns everyone's stomachs! We need to declare war on poverty, we need to declare war on collapsing infrastructure, we need to declare war on lack of public transport, and we need to declare war on shitty internet stifling the country's competitiveness.
This is all GDP generating. Every dollar we spend on infrastructure provides almost twice that in GDP. What is the F-35's rate of return?
Everyone does that assessment on the opposing force, to get an estimate of how credible they are. For the US that goal is two wars at the same time, anywhere. Right now they USAF has the problem of being 'hollow': not being able to meet their readiness requirements due to lack of people, operating airframes, or building technical debt through over-using equipment and people.
So they have the 750th A-10 because they did the math. It's not about heroes, it's about being organised. The force is more than the individuals or the gadgets.
Reelection of politicians in areas with military industry, of course.
That's also the reason why the Airbus plane parts are built, shipped around all over Europe before final assembly - in order to provide funding to EADS/Airbus, European politicians wanted to secure jobs for their specific countries, even if this adds significant logistic and cost challenges.
Even science suffers from this "localism"... just look at ITER.
Summarized: No one will dare to cancel or significantly reduce any major weapons/science/collaborative project, because any politician who votes for "shut down a program that employs people in my voter area" will face the consequence of not being reelected.
Most poor people just need a little bit of a leg up to get them out of the hole, and then are able to crawl the rest of the way out and better themselves without much additional help, often within the same generation.
Instead we formed an endless number of programs, targeted at specific regions, minorities and groups, with an seemingly endless number of bureaucrats to run them, and we end up only one or two pegs ahead of where we started. I just try to imagine how far we would be had we instituted a minimum income in 1975.
The current political climate is because of perceived government overreach (real or imagined) - where the overreach comes from however depends on your political stripe (the right blames environmental and regulatory issues, the left, the national security circus/military-industrial complex) in the end the people are tired, and the attitude of the country has seemingly shifted (if even only perhaps temporarily), people want a return to normalcy, so I fear for a generation or so more, the chance may be lost.
Every dollar you spend on weapons also increases GDP. Because GDP is not a measure of economic good, only of economic activity.
In fact, wars create huge jumps in GDP. That doesn't mean they're economically good.
And anyway, you can't measure military deterrents by "rate of return". The F-35's rate of return is "we don't have to fight another world war", because potential adversaries will understand they don't have a chance of winning and thus won't start a conflict.
Huge jumps for all the wrong reasons.
> The F-35's rate of return is "we don't have to fight another world war"
The F-35 budget overran due to mismanagement, not because it just costs trillions to create the technology. I can see China working with Russia being able to afford their own competitive machines. There doesn't seem to be a clear "we don't have to fight another world war" end game.
Because as someone mentioned, a comparable Rafael craft cost < $100b to fund and procure.
Meanwhile, the F35 barely goes toe to toe with the Rafale F3, which is cheaper to produce and maintain.
But I guess you can reuse it elsewhere. Whooo.
it these programs where actually used for DEFENSE, then I believe most people would not dissapprove of them, but the US has not been on the defensive for a number of decades now.
Of course you can make the claim that programs like this are the reason, however I think would could spend the same amount of every nation on the planet complained and still provide a proper defense, unlike today where we spend 2x or 3x more than every other nation combined.
Money Pits like the F35 are jobs programs not defense programs
This sounds catastrophic.
http://www.airforcesmonthly.com/2017/03/07/have-israels-new-...