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Comment by zipwitch | Hacker News Reader

What does the F-35 actually offer in the field that couldn't be provided by a cheaper, simpler, more reliable weapons system?

It offers Lockheed Martin one-point-five trillion dollars, much of which will be spent in key Congressional districts.

That's all.

I suspect that those responsible for making decisions about the F-35 are perfectly fine with this. Rhetoric aside, our government and military appear to think they exist in a world where direct Great Power military conflict is not a possibility. The F-35 seems perfectly adequate to swiftly wreck anywhere on Earth that is not Europe, China, Japan, Russia or India. And that seems to be our actual goal in terms of capabilities for the immediate future.

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Have you ever looked at the IDIQs? The list of subcontractors is amazing. And, 20 states have received over $100M.. and only 4 states haven’t received any so far. Everyone is happy! Except the public and the soldiers, of course.

But, seriously, I’ve walked through some of these subcontractors sites. They’re often small businesses run by a politically connected ex-officer, a few revolving door phds (to establish their R&D creds), a disabled (or minority) vet, and a mass of warm bodies to pump money into the local economy. (Ironically most of the money goes to Walmart and eventually goes overseas).

Corruption conquers countries more often than war.

Due to the nature of the goods they sell a surprising amount of Walmart's supply chain is domestic. Basically anything that doesn't benefit from dirt cheap assembly labor or lax environmental regulations is produced domestically or in Canada/Mexico.

This is what always happens with government spending. When this is not the case the system only is in an unstable state and will eventually collapse into corruption.

I mean the cynic in me agrees there's a lot, and I mean a lot, of porking barrels going on, but at some point you are going to have to build unreliable bleeding edge systems so that the next generation can become mass market

sucks to be an early adopter, but this is no different than a gen0 Apple hardware, to draw some parallels.

what really gets me is that because of rules upon rules on acquisition, making such thing and marketing them as they really are (tech demonstrator, prototypes, unrefined products, whatever you want to call them) would never fly. you have to twist those as great budgeting opportunities, inflate the earning options of export versions etc etc.

it's like generations of rotten politics coming into play, portraying it as a greedy company and some unscrupulous congressmen is not wrong per se but a little reductive.

The rules are always flexible enough. They never matter.

The power structure, the actual humans making decisions are all that is important.

And currently that behemoth is hell bent on not giving a fuck about itself, its components [the humans] are mostly looking out for themselves, there's not enough institutional inertia to change this, etc.

I'm not saying it needs to be dismantled, torched to the ground, blablabla, but of course there needs to be deep, systematic, qualitative and quantitative changes. Personnel, ideology/dogma, leadership, training, culture, process, structure.

"Congress" (or more precisely the upper echelon of the power structure - Congress/courts/administration are just the venues where the show happens) is in a gridlock over moral issues, that means everything else is at best performing at the level of the status quo, at worse things become chips in the very high-stakes poker game.

Why is everybody so afraid of violence? Do you think politely discussing on HN the pros/cons of King of Earth owning 79 oil rigs is going to get him to see the error of his ways? That he should stop funding F-35s to bomb his neighbors while he bangs 42 Swedish models per day? "Please sir, that's bad of you."

The problem seems to be not too much pacifism. Quite the contrary. Both sides, every party is able and willing to escalate. Both in domestic and in geopolitics.

This of course leads to a lot of inefficient posturing and back-and-forth, and the preservation of the gridlock.

Building 1500 of the early-adopter version is madness though. What we should be doing is something like what's ended up happening with the much-maligned Zumwalts: build a handful of the gen0 fancy stealth tech and experimental weapons, some of which aren't going to work out. Then take the lessons into the next mass-production system.

It’s not like F-35 is the first at anything. I bet you can’t name one thing it is that hasn’t been done before.

I think the F-35 is the first stealth VTOL fighter-bomber. F-22 was just a fighter and wasn't VTOL (and was similarly expensive). Harrier did VTOL but isn't stealthy and only carried IR missiles until recently. B-2 and F-117 are stealthy but are neither fighters nor VTOL.

Done before in a lab, sure. For a service aircraft the full-VR helmet and the lift fan are new, and while the B-2 is reportedly "compatible" with the F-35 data link functionality I can't find anything claiming clearly that that means it's been validated in the field.

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