The F-35 Is a $1.4T National Disaster (2017)

The big takeaway: with non-challenging, small fry, projects you can play all the politics you want and still land them; challenging projects have a much stronger need to be guided by actual practical project concerns & engineering or you substantially increase the risk of failure.

The Manhattan project, and the incredible post-WW2 military engineering, worked because the brains got money and control so they build to the challenge at hand. When Porky Pig has first dibs the merely 'insanely hard' becomes impossible... Alan Kay said something to the same effect about the golden age of innovation at Xerox Parc: (brains + money) - BS = profitableSurprises.

I guess the war machine needs to function so that we only focus on the left hand, and ignores what the right hand does.

I'm a bit of a cynic, so I would readily cast a negative eye to the entire corporate media machine and assume they're void of integrity and merely interested in what grabs eyeballs and money ('if it bleeds, it leads')...

In that vein I don't think the media has attention. "Media" throws anything it can to the wall in hopes of making money, and find a public who cares very little about either insane deficit increases. Point of fact, even the Stormy Daniels sex scandal barely registers in terms of meaningful public reaction... Time was a President would be out the door for a hint of something like this.

I blame the people who have removed civics, and civic history, from childhood education. The same people who have eliminated previously sacred media segregation laws, and also eased campaign finance laws to the point of shadowy billionaires openly bankrolling national candidates and extremist agendas...

" There are certain sad appreciations we have to come to about human nature on the basis of these recent wars. One of them is that suffering does not always make men better. Another is that people are not always more reasonable than governments; that public opinion, or what passes for public opinion, is not invariably a moderating force in the jungle of politics. It may be true, and I suspect it is, that the mass of people everywhere are normally peace-loving and would accept many restraints and sacrifices in preference to the monstrous calamities of war. But I also suspect that what purports to be public opinion in most countries that consider themselves to have popular government is often not really the consensus of the feelings of the mass of the people at all, but rather the expression of the interests of special highly vocal minorities — politicians, commentators, and publicity-seekers of all sorts: people who live by their ability to draw attention to themselves and die, like fish out of water, if they are compelled to remain silent. These people take refuge in the pat and chauvinistic slogans because they are incapable of understanding any others, because these slogans are safer from the standpoint of short-term gain, because the truth is sometimes a poor competitor in the market place of ideas — complicated, unsatisfying, full of dilemma, always vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse. The counsels of impatience and hatred can always be supported by the crudest and cheapest symbols; for the counsels of moderation, the reasons are often intricate, rather than emotional, and difficult to explain. And so the chauvinists of all times and places go their appointed way: plucking the easy fruits, reaping the little triumphs of the day at the expense of someone else tomorrow, deluging in noise and filth anyone who gets in their way, dancing their reckless dance on the prospects for human progress, drawing the shadow of a great doubt over the validity of democratic institutions. And until people learn to spot the fanning of mass emotions and the sowing of bitterness, suspicion, and intolerance as crimes in themselves — as perhaps the greatest disservice that can be done to the cause of popular government — this sort of thing will continue to occur."

The US engaged the Germans on land but that went very poorly, so they kept doing strategic airstrikes, notably taking down the German synthetic fuel production capabilities. This forced Germans to advance east. Meanwhile America supplied the Soviets with trucks and boots, helping the Soviets fight the Germans, a successful plan that resulted in heavy Soviet casualties.

The Pacific front was a different story.

For example, the 737 uses high bypass turbofans optimized around fuel burn, the fighter has a low bypass afterburning turbofan optimized around weight. Huge divergence. (And by the way, on both the civilian and military sides, engine development programs are yuuuge and very long. There's a reason for that that isn't simply due to greed.) The 737 has a standard weather radar, the fighter is able to focus megawatts in a narrow arc across less than a square centimeter of its nosecone and employs all sorts of trickery to resist (and possibly inflict) jamming, while detecting small targets that are trying to evade by blending into ground clutter or disappearing into something called the Doppler notch. Another huge divergence. Meanwhile the entire aircraft has been designed with stealth in mind, and that's a skill set with no civilian counterpart -- when was the last time you heard of an electrical engineer calling the shots on airframe design? Even designing for high supersonic aerodynamic performance (maneuvering, not just cruising) is pretty much a military-only skill, and supersonic analysis is wildly different from its subsonic equivalent. It just goes on and on -- I haven't even brought up guided missiles, which result from substantial development programs of their own and benefit little from civilian technology.

Now, there might be some subset of military products for which there aren't as many valuable differentiators -- I'm thinking of things like logistics assets, vehicles and infrastructure designed to move war materiel where it's needed. And there's precedent for that, where for example civilian airliners are converted into tankers. But on the whole, you can't take what you've learned building a 737 and apply that to building a competitive jet fighter inside of any reasonable time scale.

So, could you go to war with a 737 and a bunch of bombs hanging off it? Against insurgents, probably, yeah. But it's going to cost a lot more than, say, an A-10, the ground troops won't get any guns passes from you, and a single Su-27 is still going to ruin your whole day.

Another attractive option might be to skip a generation of hardware. But an important thing to remember is that every time a wise head retires from military aerospace, valuable skills and knowledge are lost. Sure, things are documented, but you can't easily replace human know how. So what happens when you go 20 years without a major fighter program? Experienced hands get thin on the ground and you spend a good amount of time and money climbing out of that hole. The upshot is that even if you'd like to get off the military upgrade treadmill for a while, you're going to pay some significant fraction of that savings down the road, whether in increased cost, schedule and/or reduced product performance.

Having said all this, I believe there are better ways to do what we're doing, and I think the F-35 was a foundationally ill-conceived program. But hand-picking a few basic military technologies to nurse while leaving the rest to whatever the civilian market will support is not the way to fix it.

When that happens, there will be no satellites. There will be no way to remotely operate any equipment. Mere navigation and communication will be difficult again.

Any sort of unmanned equipment will have to operate autonomously, making deadly decisions in an unfamiliar and hostile environment. That's a tall order for modern AI.

Yes, but the F-35 was also dreamed up as a way to dramatically reduce costs by sharing components. Parts commonality was supposed to be something like 80% between variants but in reality it's more like 25%. It was supposed to be substantially cheaper than the F-22 but it is almost just as expensive per unit.

And all of that points to the fundamental truth that the F-35 is not as capable as it could be because it was built with a fundamental compromise in mind. In particular, designing the airframe for the V/STOL requirement meant it had a wider radar cross section, worse cockpit visibility and worse aerodynamic performance from the start.

Had they at least broken off the V/STOL requirement into a separate airframe they could've end up with a higher performing aircraft that may have been cheaper to boot. Instead they took the mistakes of the F-111 program and doubled down on them.

Given that the F-35 was built with the latest tech that no other advanced economy even has I have no idea how anything could be built in the next 10-15 years that will significantly outclass it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell

The country that is at a disadvantage because they cannot compete with the F-35 will simply nuke the other country. We're talking desperate actions from desperate nations at this point. The F-35 is not useful in proxy wars because proxy wars are not allowed to get that hot. If they were to get that hot that F-35 is necessary, then nukes are very much on the table.

Some F-35s have already seen combat for one.

Yes it's expensive but the per unit cost will be cheaper than already existing jet platforms and we plan to use this one for 50 years.

So first of all, the US will never buy 3,000 of the planes. You can easily cut that in half or more. I'd wager on 1,000 or less. They'll end the program and move on to the next thing/s, like they always do.

Second, they'll of course never fly for 50 or 60 years. 35-40 from today would be more plausible as an end.

Now you're down to more like $800 billion total including the next 40 years. The cost will move higher per plane, the US will buy less planes than projected, and the total outlay will drop substantially as they shift funding to new weapons programs. $20 billion per year for its life, out of what will probably be a $900b to $1t averaged military budget over the F35's life, or ~2%.

Because they always manage to receive a ton of clicks? If you look at every new US weapons platform for the past 60 to 70 years there has always been huge amounts of negativity. This is really par for the course.

People used to call the F-22 the "Craptor" and I bet if we had the internet in the 50s and 60s that people would be shitting on the Saturn V.

We're stuck with a less than optimal aircraft; but it's still the best we can currently build. And we need to recapitalize Marine aviation as well as provide a stealth aircraft for the Navy and AF. Otherwise there's just too many areas they won't be able to penetrate with the Teen fighters.

The F-35 has many variants, and can fulfill many roles.