F-35’s gun that can’t shoot straight adds to its roster of flaws
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I remember hearing from the chief program officer for the software of the new joint fighter the F-35, in the US, five or so years ago. He said "I'm the chief software program officer, and I'm absolutely certain that the approved requirements for the software for this plane cannot be met, and there's nothing I can do about it because there are so many forces being brought to bear on these requirements." (45:45 - 46:18)
[1] https://www.heidelberg-laureate-forum.org/video/lecture-hint... (27 August 2015)
With F-35, the data packages necessary for operation in given theater are generated in one or two laboratories in USA, and so far there were no guarantees of anyone getting one of their own.
In addition, ALIS was dependant on Lockheed-maintained servers in USA by design, something that made it problematic even for US forces as the amounts of data that had to be transferred were too big for ship-based units - and you needed to sync at least once a month to ensure the aircraft is capable of flying.
There’s more. I just couldn’t find it quickly.
While I understand the need (and the benefit) for selling arms abroad, having the ability to defang them if they try to use them against us seems very useful and seems like it could even expand the countries we're willing to sell to.
I think about this every time I hear about Iran flying F-14s
In that hypothetical no-one wins.
I'm sure there is an obscure plan for that somewhere in say the UK MoD filing cabinets.
I know the US war gamed invading Canada as both a training exercise and contingency plan.
Assuming competence in the halls of the MoD these days seems to be naive.
The world is more complicated now than the (relatively) simple alliances of the Cold War.
No one really thought Trump and Brexit would happen, and Turkey was looking like it might join the EU.
The problems with “we’re all besties forever!” are clear now, but that’s hindsight.
[1]:https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/defense/2019-10-30/l...
It sounds more like they switch to an existing system that works.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-pentagon-f35/f-35-log...
I wouldn't be so sure:
"ODIN will be based in the cloud and designed to deliver data in near real time on aircraft and system performance under heightened cyber security provisions, Lord said."
Independently of that "cloud based" ODIN as a replacement of ALIS ("Autonomic Logistics Information System"), the mentioned ALIS doesn't seem to me as what Lampson's source worried about.
What's the total spending on the F-35 program so far, going back to 2006?
As of 2018, the estimated program cost was ~1.5T, or 1500 billion dollars.
"""The F-35 currently costs between $94 million (F-35A) and $122 million (F-35B) for low-rate initial production run 10, though sustainment cost projections are as big a concern as production costs for a program that is expected to cost $1.5 trillion over its 55-year lifespan."""
https://www.aviationtoday.com/2018/09/04/f-35-program-update...
“Oh, but now that money is lost, and now we actually can’t afford to spend money on our own citizens,” say the next couple generations of warhawks as we spend $2.7 trillion on a drone army made of caviar.
We can do better things with our money.
Countries that don't do regional-deficit spending in this manner (that seems economically inefficient) end up having severe problems, particularly after the GFC. Much of Europe is easily in this bucket. The F35 is part of the reason the US isn't in as much hell economically speaking as Europe is.
Redirecting that money to small business grants would provide a much bigger boost to general societal well being.
The US defense-industrial complex may not always have a high need for people who can design stealth fighters, but it definitely prefers to keep a few around in case it does suddenly need them.
Small business grants may not be a good way of meeting the same need.
The other issue is that some fraction of defense spending seemingly can be viewed as funneling public money into a get-your-friends-rich scheme. I don't think you can find much net upside to that aspect.
Think back to Boeing's problems with the Dreamliner, where Boeing tried a new model of splitting out the design to a bunch of subcontractors and ended up with tons of problems with the integration ranging from missed design milestones due to problems with the composites to miscommunications leading to battery problems in production and so on. Those are a small taste of what happens when the engineering-management hierarchy is broken up and fractured across organizations. It becomes a lot worse when they are fractured across time.
The US famously lost it's top launch capabilities with the Saturn V and we didn't have a domestic replacement until the Falcon Heavy in 2018! By their very nature, maintaining the capabilities needed for weapons of war that can be deployed anywhere in the world is even more expensive if you want to have any sort of certainty that they'll work when the shots are fired instead of once a few years when you want to launch a satellite.
Whether or not the cost of the F35 program is an efficient way to maintain those skills is a different issue altogether that gets at the fundamental structure of our government and how money impacts politics. That's a much more difficult discussion than "can we reasonably defend ourselves in the future."
I honestly have no idea.
Also, I disagree, I don't think anyone in that realm of government would knowingly sink that much money into a project they intended to fail - they might be overly optimistic about the success, they might be trying to funnel money into their retirement but it takes clout to secure a budget like that and people had to work hard to secure it initially and keep it going - so a failure is probably going to fall under one of these categories - un-achievable, poorly managed, or wholly corrupt.
The money "injected" into the economy must come from somewhere, and that somewhere is the economy. I.e. it's zero-sum.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
Funds are never 'spent' as such, the money always circulates around even if you do buy metal platypuses - someone is going to get a salary and spend it somewhere or invest in their future by buying things that improve their productivity.
In this case, the trade is one-way; the F-35 is effectively a black hole. The transaction to defense workers is immensely lossy. Ultimately, the program is funded by taxpayers whose money went into building a $1.5 trillion boondoggle instead of any number of useful purposes. The unseen harm of using the public’s funds in this way far outweighs the benefits the defense industry brings. It’s the same as taking five dollars from everyone, paying people three dollars to throw two of every five dollars into a campfire, and calling it economic growth. Sure, some people get paid, but the net gain is negative. The two dollars isn’t used to create things that other people want; it is locked inside a metal platypus.
How does it 'end up' there? - A human being is paid in the end. This is the notion I don't believe you're accurately looking at.
Say you were to pay the cashier $100 for your groceries, s/he wouldn't end up with the money either it would go to suppliers and seep back into the economy. Money is a bit like energy to a degree it can't be destroyed it ultimately ends up being spent again and again. Unless of course it goes into a bank account that is locked and never spent - for which inflation will tax it and even that would leak back.
The F35 is deliberately built in very high deficit areas to have the largest multiplier effect- this results in extremely good stimulus spending. Just to throw some numbers out there money spent this way (even if the end product is useless) ends up increasing GDP 30-60% more than the original spend. E.g $100 spent => $130-160m. It depends on the unemployment rate in the area but it can be as high as 3x. There is hardly a government program that can be as effective unless its building infrastructure, where it can stretch to as high as 7 (read Japan roads to nowhere)
The F35 is certaintly not a black hole. Almost certainly if you look at it in the way we buy things and consume them - then yes it is, almost 100%, but in terms of the economic effects its a very helpful project. If France had for example done this type of spending it would not be sitting in economic contraction territory at the moment - wheras the US hardly sees contraction because of this type of deficit spending.
This does not take into account the deleterious effect of extracting the stimulus money from whence it came.
Again, that assumes the "initial amount" came from dead or poorly invested money. I have seen no rationalization or evidence that this is the case.
Consider that 37% of Federal Income Tax revenue comes from the 1%. The 1% are the most effective investors, because that's how they became the 1%. Government spending would have to be incredibly good to outdo the best investors.
If the money is just being taken from tax-payers and then distributed to a much smaller group of tax-payers, including some of it making a very small number of people very rich, I would need to see a lot of evidence to convince me that it's beneficial to society in the way that the term "jobs program" makes it sound.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
I am sorry, as EU citizen I have to ask, in what hell am I? Forgot to notice being in hell :/
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
The broken window fallacy/parable has no notion of outside money being inserted into the system and is a poor characterization of the F35 program/deficit fiscal spending.
That is the critical difference. Also these forms of spending are already empirically proven as being net beneficial due to a financial multiplier/accelerator.
The most efficient way of redistribution would be to use the money spent on the F-35 to directly fund social programs and jobs programs for the poor in these economically disadvantaged communities; this would redistribute all of the money to people who actually need it and will spend it, rather than send huge chunks of it into defense executives/shareholders’ pockets in the currently lossy transactions used in defense contracting.
Using all of these resources to instead build a poorly functioning aircraft is not in society's best interest.
Funny, I've never seen a trailer park in Europe. And oddly, the infrastructure is typically way better too. Bizzarely, fewer people seem to die of preventable disease as well.
Clearly Europe is doing something terribly wrong, and needs to adopt the American model.
If you want a jobs program, fix bridges and roads. If you want a "stealth" jobs program, declare it a national security threat and use the military budget too.
Every state and territory has infrastructure that is an absolute shambles.
America loves to build things but it sure seems allergic to maintenance.
That and the press loves to pulverize people over spending money to avoid disasters, but celebrates those that help when disaster strikes, even if it was entirely preventable.
Oh, and "Infrastructure Week" has been going on for about three years now.
I think the problem here isn't in public opinion - it's strictly a matter of corruption at the political level.
"Suppliers in all nine of the program's partner countries are producing F-35 components for all aircraft, not just those for their country."
However, the Russians sold Su-35s to China at a cost of $83 million a few years ago. So the quoted Su-57 numbers certainly appear fraudulent. The real unit cost is probably twice the claims. There is minimal transparency in such things as it pertains to Russia.
So far it appears they can't afford or deliver their supposedly cost effecient plane:
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/russias-stealth-fight...
[1] https://www.defensenews.com/air/2019/10/29/in-newly-inked-de...
EDIT: They used components from the F-16 and F-15 programs. Being a black program, this was hidden in spare parts needs for these other planes. I have congress report lying around somewhere which complains about excess spare needs for the F-16 from that period. So, maybe some of the F-117 costs are driving costs of other programs.
I think being able to focus was a big part of it. The F-35 (and F-32) is a 'kitchen sink' of a plane: multi-purpose sounds great in theory, but rarely works out in practice. Especially if you try shoehorning VTOL into the picture.
If they had tried focusing on the F-35A and C variants, perhaps things should be less complicated.
if you look into the history - F-35 started as VTOL, ie. Yak-141, as Lockheed didn't have any VTOL and needed a response to Boeing/Harrier - onto which the "kitchen sink" of everything else was shoehorned/bolted-on. The Yak-141 was never intended and never imagined to be a good fighter plane or a good attack plane, etc., its primary and the only raison d'etre was VTOL as USSR/Russia just hasn't been capable of having real aircraft carriers.
The requirements for the F-117 were basically that it had to be stealthy, and had to be able to carry a minimal payload a reasonable range. There was no radar, no vertical takeoff, no carrier landings, no air-to-air, no sensor fusion, no datalinks, no cooperative engagement, etc etc etc.
It's poorly understood how the combination of high performance requirements, complexity, and flexibility mix. Optimizing a system for performance generally requires cutting across domains. Subsystems need to be designed jointly to wring out performance. This means there are many dependencies between the subsystems, so if one thing changes on one subsystem, it may affect a number of other subsystems. If you then add flexibility to the mix -- you want a modular system like the F-35, all of this optimization work has to be done on every combination of parts. Now combine this with a complex set of mission requirements -- every change has to be optimized for multiple missions and multiple aircraft variants. Due to the optimized and complex nature of the aircraft, each change will also affect many subsystems.
Because the system is so complex, no person or even a small group of people can have the entire system in their head, so it's hard to know exactly what will be affected with a subsystem change. Subsystems affected by a change will furthermore not even be built by the same company. This all means that each change has to go through very slow formal processes to make sure it keeps working.
All of this is to say that layering on all of these categories of requirements has an exponential effect. If the F-35 didn't have to be high performance, or if it didn't have three variants, or if it didn't have to perform multiple missions, the project would have been much easier.
The result is the most expensive weapons program in history.
(And the Marines liked it because no one was going to spend the money to build a stealthy V/STOL strike fighter for them unless it was part of someone else's development budget)
(And the Navy IIRC just wanted their fucking A-12 [0] already)
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_A-12_Avenger...
And the osprey itself is still getting adopted in more places - I think carrier onboard delivery is its latest role.
...
> January 2014, the case was settled with Boeing and General Dynamics agreeing to pay $200 million each.
Quite the settlement
All of that is to say it can be done, but you're going to pay, and it might not be delivered on time.
This is true for nearly everythoing, and war reflects it, as up to the Industrial Revolution things (strategy, tactics, weaponry...) evolved gradually. Nowadays nobody knows anymore how all this really works, therefore there is less and less way to predict (how/what/why/when/...) sufficiently accurately in order to prepare/act adequately (for example to equip soldiers).
Hence the need for "something which can cope with any situation".
Fun fact: this 'something' has to be complicated, adding up complication to the complicated global state of affairs, nurturing the very cause of the underlying challenge.
VTOL is a very specialized capability, and there's never been another airplane that has VTOL as an optional feature. You have to design the plane and its engine around this capability, and you compromise on many other things to get it. The A and C models then have to live with many of these design compromises. Even the basic shape of the aircraft, with such a wide front fuselage reduces the performance of the F-35, even though on the A and C models there's no need to be so wide since there's no lift fan.
Meanwhile, it's not even clear that the Marines need a VTOL airplane. The B model has the ability to operate off Navy helicopter carriers, which gives them significantly more punch, but there's basically no real scenario where a helicopter carrier would need it. In a real war, there will always be full deck carriers anywhere a helicopter carrier is. In theory the helicopter carriers would offer additional capacity, but carrier air wings have been scaled back, and full deck carriers only go to sea with 60-65 aircraft even though they have the capacity for 90. If the Marines wanted more of their own air assets they could have just bought C models and operated them off the big carriers like they already do with the F-18.
The B model is also significantly lower performance. It has to takeoff at lower weights, and it has the huge extra weight of the lift fan. This means it has a much shorter range and carries less weapons. If they had simply bought C models and put them on the big carriers, the overall capability would be greater.
In 2010, the UK decided to make the QE carriers ski-jump and operate the B model for cost reasons, however they considered making them CATOBAR and operate the C model. If the B model had not existed, they would have simply spent another couple of billion dollars to make them CATOBAR.
It's probably not practical from a budget and political standpoint for Japan and Italy to make CATOBAR carriers, but does it really make sense to compromise a 3200 aircraft program that's the backbone of the USAF and USN's fleet so that Italy and Japan can buy 72 aircraft? Italy and Japan could just buy tanker aircraft for long range power projection.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...
This. The only thing the F35 doesn't do it blow the pilot and hand him a beer. Since nobody is willing to settle for a plane that can do everything and sucks at it (and rightfully so) it's turned into this massive project where there's a billion dollars in man hours spent arguing over each little nut and bolt in order to find the compromises needed to create something that satisfies all the stake holders well enough to get sign off.
I think a lot of this is driven by the fact that we have no real enemy at present. It's much easier to say "no we need a system that can do X and Y and we need it now, Z can wait" when you're worried about the USSR having the jump on you. There is no such pressure for competency at present.
For a small airforce, a jack-of-all-trades fighter makes a lot of sense (hence the popularity of the F-16 among small airforces), but for the US, it makes no sense to abandon all specialised fighters in favour of a single compromise.
Basically the navy pretended to update the Hornet (F-18A, F-18B, F-18C) but actually built a completely new plane. Clearly it isn't the same, because the airframe is dramatically larger. There is a tiny bit of stealth (nothing fancy) but otherwise it looks like the Hornet... except way larger.
It was designed very quickly and cheaply. That was the requirement, and it was met. The whole project was sort of an open secret, pretending to be a revision of the Hornet while actually being an entirely new aircraft. This seems to have evaded lots of bureaucracy.
(Great planes though, yeah!)
I've submitted the story here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22200328
Of course, having only one nation in the program helped a lot keeping the specifications consistent over time. I strongly doubt the NGF currently being developed with Germany and Spain is going to be that smooth...
[1] delays were incurred by the end of the Cold war: the so-called peace dividends, resulting in military budget restrictions.
However if you look at the a400m or eurofighter programs, you see delays and budget overruns. The issue lies in the spec creep by the funding parties of these programs. For example the french took deliveries of the first a400m because they needed the plane, but it could not drop parachutists in the first version !
Airbus really is a collection of companies, so it can be hard to figure out exactly which part does what. I hope Dassault remains the project manager on the NGF, although in the end spec creep really is the biggest program killer...
But instead it has fighters that don't work.
Do you maybe need a few minutes to actually think about that statement? Because it doesn't reflect well on your critical thinking capabilities...
The legal requirements to collecting money on defense contracts pretty much always does this.
So happy my tax dollars are going towards this rather than feeding the hungry or providing shelter to homeless kids.
"you would be much more careful with all the government spending and putting much more pressure on doing the right thing"? what exactly can I do to be more careful about government spending besides voting for my preferred candidate?
Are you fully in control of everywhere your tax dollars are spent? Do you protest every dollar that is spent on a program you don't agree with?
All in all an odd statement but best of luck to you and I wish you well.
You displayed support for "feeding the hungry or providing shelter to homeless kids". Therefore you are a "socialist".
"Socialists" want the government to take people's money, and spend it on all kinds of dubious rubbish.
Your are complaining that your taxes are being spent on dubious rubbish.
Ergo, your position is hypocritical.
As far as the socialist charge from the poster above you, I am not against taxes, I just believe they should be used to create a society where the least among us are provided for instead of endlessly feeding the military.
unfortunately in this country (USA) people who want the government to feed the hungry, provide health care and ensure a clean environment are called socialists while those that want the government to spend trillions on the military and the fossil fuel industry are called conservatives.
Hint: read "you" as the generic taxpayer. As I said, it is not an attack to a person, but a comment on taxpayer mentality that tax have to be paid, so the only thing to be cared of is what the tax money is spent on: not true, this is what I am trying to say. It is a false dilemma.
Working at that place, I heard stories from other defense veterans detailing massive, unending incompetence and graft.
While it might sound a tad simplistic, I can’t but see some truth in it.
This is also a classic: https://www.military.com/daily-news/2014/12/18/congress-agai... (2014)
As for "maximizing output", I'm failing to see big returns here. Afghanistan? Iraq? Vietnam? The only output that was maximized was cashflow to the military industrial complex.
I do believe in national security but the way we do it is not only inefficient, but manufactures more insecurity that feeds into the cycle.
The sad reality is that it is easier for people to accept a massive military budget than to accept a large National Endowment for the Sciences, or to accept direct government grants for a strategy of technical development (that would be 'government interfering in the market'). Of course, this reality was created through a lot of fear-mongering propaganda, and through a lot of anti-"socialist" propaganda.
So I pointed out how they admit that Government funded make-work projects can have a positive effect on economies. So why not just switch from military spending to other tech spending? Why is it the military is the only government run make-work programs that R's support?
What sort of tech spending? I mean military spending paid for development of the internet, jet engines, satellite communications, radar, a million other real actual things that people use everyday. Modern day Silly Valley piggybacks on all this stuff and uses it to show us ads...
Less truth please :|
Benefits for the well off are ‘subsidies’ and ‘tax breaks‘, such as the fact corporate health insurance is not taxed, while benefits for the less well off are ‘handouts’.
The military follows orders. The president is commander in chief. If the president doesn't want to buy something, then the military doesn't want to buy something.
Given that the date was 2014, saying "the military doesn't want" was exactly equivalent to saying "Obama doesn't want".
Fully retired members of the military, not seeking to gain something like a DoD or cabinet-level position, might be able to speak more freely to congress.
1.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impoundment_of_appropriated_fu...
We may have a situation where the military really wants the equipment, but isn't permitted to admit it. They follow orders. The orders, coming down from the president, are that the military is to claim that they don't want the equipment.
Example: the military really wanted the F-22, then we got a new president, and suddenly the military isn't interested in the F-22
The military is not free to speak.
I've been collecting data about F35 specfically, 'cause it's so recent and the cost overruns are just mind boggling.
Anyway, here's an article from last year [0] that discusses how project management for the F35 prorgram reclassifies "blockers" and "criticals" into "major" and "medium" (severity levels of the issue). Especially like how the IFF transponder fails to send out a distress call if a pilot ejects, or how the arresting hook (for carrier landings) bends the airframe.
[0]: https://www.pogo.org/investigation/2018/08/f-35-program-cutt...
"The fly-by-wire flight software for the Saab Gripen (a lightweight fighter) went a step further. It disallowed both subroutine calls and backward branches, except for the one at the bottom of the main loop. Control flow went forward only. Sometimes one piece of code had to leave a note for a later piece telling it what to do, but this worked out well for testing: all data was allocated statically, and monitoring those variables gave a clear picture of most everything the software was doing. The software did only the bare essentials, and of course, they were serious about thorough ground testing.
No bug has ever been found in the “released for flight” versions of that code.
Henry Spencer
henry@spsystems.net"
Never worked on any real time stuff. Looks like they are very big on using a flat finite state machine model. At least at Saab. I’m guessing they didn’t use C++, either, but who knows.
The F-35? C++.
Now you could argue as to whether those were bugs or requirements deficiencies, but in neither case were the faults caught in preflight testing.
Wasn't the above comment in reply to there being no bugs found in software released for flight?
In any event, I'd love to take a look at that source code. I try my best to keep forward-only control flow, at least at the conceptual level (I.e., I don't eschew loops, but I try to keep data flowing from A to B to C to D without having it go back and check a preceding component for what to do in a given case).
Thank you. We have a weird obsession in software with ascribing characteristic deficiencies and unique blind spots to ourselves, and treating ourselves as children next to the real "grown-ups" in other fields. (I think we're overcompensating for the "arrogant nerd" stereotype.) In any profession they are aware of their stereotypical tendencies (their déformation professionnelle) and joke about it but don't get obsessed with their own inferiority or paralyzed by stereotype threat.
We don't even use it in a way that helps us find the best knowledge from other fields to apply to our own. We start with our own deficiencies, project some idealized version of another field to serve as the opposite, and then try to learn from our imagined idea of how that field works. Early in my career, this took the form of thinking that building architecture and construction did not suffer from the planning and execution difficulties that software did.
For example, in Austin the ownership group of the new soccer team is constructing a stadium that is planned to be ready for the start of the 2021 season. When I was a wee software developer in the early 2000s, I was taught that unlike our immature industry rife with childishness and careless arrogance, people who design and build physical structures are careful, methodical, mature, and too aware of the responsibility riding on their shoulders to make mistakes in design and planning. A stadium isn't some silly computer thing; it's part of a multi-billion dollar professional sports league with complicated travel logistics, bound by the obligation of tens of millions in presold season tickets! This responsibility is entrusted to serious people in a mature industry, and everything is planned out meticulously via responsible processes to avoid delays.
Seriously. This is how people in software, at least the ones I was exposed to, talked about how to improve the profession. The question was not, what can we learn from other fields that struggle with complicated design and schedule and budget problems, but what is personally wrong with people in software that we have not mastered this process that people in other fields OBVIOUSLY have.
But of course when talking to the season ticket sales rep, when we asked about the possibility of the stadium not being ready when the season starts, he said great question, construction delays happen, it has happened to other MLS teams in the past, and the league will rearrange the schedule so that the team plays nothing but road games for the first several months of the year and has their home games later. This has already been figured out, because the "mature" design and construction industry that meets its schedules through the magical power of seriousness only existed in the imagination of circa-2000 software process consultants.
I want to prove that it's not restricted to our industry, and understand how we can improve the process.
Some of the aircraft flown by the USAF and the US Navy have higher annual operational costs than the sticker price of those same aircraft. The F-35 is an attempt to avoid repeating the same mistakes, but obviously, easier said than done.
Buy a kayak for $100? You need around $100/yr in storage, cleaning and upkeep for it.
Buy a glider for $10k? You need around $10k/yr in maintenance, hangarage, taxes, insurance etc.
Buy a jet for $1M? You’ll spend that much on a hanger, crew, fuel, taxes, mechanics, parts, insurance etc etc.
Get an aircraft carrier for $1B? You’ll spend that much on crew, ports, maintenance, munition, training etc etc.
Sure you _can_ do it cheaper, but it’s a good rule of thumb from a budgetary point of view.
I think that if nothing else is learned from this program, it's that 'cost estimates' regarding it fit someplace between 'meaningless' and 'fraudulent'.
Designing a plane that can be used by the Air Force and Navy can be done; adding the vertical flight to it, you break it: it makes it fat (aerodynamic), heavy and all this for a use case that is rare and useless to the other branches. For example, an F18 can be used by USAF and Navy, a modified F16 can be adapted to carrier operation with a reasonable cost and still you have good planes. Take one of these and put the VTOL in it: there is no high-performance VTOL plane ever built, so what are we dreaming about?
Then again, I know nothing about designing war planes so.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...
The two main candidates are the F-35 and the F-18 Super Hornet (the Saab Gripen is unlikely).
There was much drama with this because the previous government announced a sole source contract. Then there was confusions as to how much it was actually going to cost. The original plans got cancelled, and now we have an RFP.
Of course the F-35 is a so-called fifth generation fighter, and there's already sketches about six generation stuff:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth-generation_jet_fighter
Soemtimes I think Canada should skip the 5G, buy the Super Hornets (and perhaps some Growlers), and then leap frog to 6G.
I suggest we trade SAAB Gripen aircraft for Bombardier Super Scoopers at a 1:1 ratio. List prices look roughly similar.
* Continuously changing list of requirements
* Incoherent decision making process
* Unrealistic deadlines
* Upper management that pats itself on the back for ridiculous decisions
It really is a good case study for failed communication in big organizations.
There's a difference between the classic definition of BVR meaning slinging a missile at a blip no one has seen 30 miles away, vs the F-35 concept which is to have excellent sensor suite leading to the pilot having excellent situational awareness so the pilot can shoot down the other plane before the other plane knows they're present, etc.
Its tricky to get into visual range to visually identify the target as a mig-21 and not a 767 full of civilians without at least some dogfighting performance.
And that's not even getting to the part that the only reason why L band can even detect F35's and F22's is because that they have features like vertical stabilizers which are too small relative to the wavelength. B2's and B21's do not have this issue.
Finally the idea that one F-117 shot down somehow invalidates that fact that the F-117's stealthiness provided it protection with 99% effectiveness is absurd. The reason why it was shot down was because of USAF's arrogance in flying identical flight paths day on day and a SAM operator realizing this and succeeding in targeting it the moment it opened it's bomb bays, when it's stealth was degraded.
The very same hubris caused trouble in Vietnam, which were fixed with rapid re-introduction of guns to fighters, and dogfighting to fighter schools. Sad to see this lesson having been lost.
Back in initial production in the Carter years they discovered awful metal fatigue problems in the wings. In the early Reagan years they bolted on braces to toughen up the joint. Still kept failing. Around the turn of the century barely before the GWOT the air force realized the wings were failing so fast they'd run out of replacement wings around 2010, so right after the GWOT started (which is getting to be one human generation ago...) they rushed a contract thru to slap repairs on the existing wings and then replace entirely with new wings. As of late 2010s the wing replacement project (about $2B) and the air force desire to get rid of the A10 were dueling with each other, kinda crazy. AFAIK that battle continues today. With new wings we'll be flying those things into mid century.
There's never been an engineering project that hasn't had teething problems.
Currently, the F35 does not have its wings falling off, the gun mounts merely need beefing up. Thats better than the A10 track record. If thats the worst problem the F35 has, that's pretty good!
There's also a lot of irony in that the A10 has been under seemingly continuous avionics upgrades for its entire life; you could probably build a F-35 with 1970s avionics for an 1970s price.. so unfair to compare a price tag for a 1970s plane that's been infinitely upgraded since, with a 2020s plane and its 2020s price tag. Also the leadership of the air force has been trying to get rid of the A10 for some decades now. Some doctrine insists close air support should be an army helo job, not an air force strategic bomber job.
The problem with the A10 is if you don't expect soviet tanks to pour across Germany there's no point in a giant flying gun. And if you need air launched anti-armor, the army does a better job with human on board helos and the air force does a better job with drone launched missiles. It just doesn't seem to have a point anymore. It can be made to work, and has worked, but the alternatives are a better match. The troops can and have been supported with a A10, but they'd be better and more quickly supported with multiple apache helos or a swarm of existing drone platforms for the same cost and effort.
It's more than that. The amount of service, casualties dealt that any other aircraft I would dare to say. At the Gulf War in 1991, teh A-10 destroyed more than 900 Iraqi tanks, 2,000 other military vehicles and 1,200 artillery pieces. The A-10 has more casualties than the F-16 with more than 4k built againts just a 700 production of A-10. I think it's remarkable, just as comparison. All aircrafts had problems and were upgraded. All of them. Some of them with bigger problems others minor. The problems in the A-10 came after 8000 hours of service.
You should check out some videos on YouTube of the A-10 in action in Afghanistan and Iraq - particularly the ones from soldiers on the ground. It’s a devastating and effective weapon. The only thing that delivers comparable capabilities is the helicopters (and maybe the AC-130), but none of them have a gun like the A-10.
I’m not military, but know plenty of people who are (and I’ve read a lot about this). My understanding is that ground forces love the A-10 for what it can do for them. They can communicate with it and give the pilots precise instructions about where to deliver the rounds. Drones can’t do that.
The A-10 was specifically made for CAS against Soviet armor. It's essentially a 30mm cannon with wings. The nature of warfare has made that role much less feasible, though; armor is more effective, anti-aircraft weapons are more deadly, and detection methods are more accurate. There isn't a lot of room for big, slow, low-flying planes like the A-10 in modern warfare.
Nowadays it obviously isn't used against mass formations of Soviet armor. Drones are capable of delivering the same kind of support that the A-10 is used for, just not necessarily the drones the US military uses today.
That isn’t true. We can target with laser precision from the ground, using a drone as the weapons platform. The A-10 was great at making a big mess (like an artillery barrage, but calling in drones can unleash hellfires with the accuracy of hitting a Honda Civic.) Drones can also stay on station for 12+ hours and you don’t have to wait for them to show up.
In a similar vein, the gun on the F-35 seems more of an afterthought. I think the capacity is super limited even compared to F/A-18s. But it's again supposed to be dropping GBUs- not strafing targets. And besides, modern air doctrine for air to air combat is going to be at the extend of sensor range. I wouldn't be surprised if the sixth gen fighters ditch cannons in lieu of more fuel/more misses/better radar evasion profile.
[1]. https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a18236/why-the-a-1...
The non-responsive aircraft is expected to wise up, realizing the situation, and then land or leave the territory.
The rumors are that the leadership in the Marines would much rather have more single engine turboprop aircraft like the T-6 or A29 for Close Air Support missions, aircraft which cost at least 10x less to run.
What the US really needs are a small number of stealth fighters (F-22), a larger number of air superiority fighters (F-15 silent eagles), a whole bunch of light attack aircraft (A-29s), and something to replace the A-10.
Sure, an A-29 is a prop plane that stands no chance against an F-15, but it is phenomenally cheap to operate, and fits a very large number of mission needs that the high performance jets are too expensive for.
Whereas an A-10 may roll in for a gun-run at low altitude the F-35 will be dropping precision SDBs (Small Diameter Bombs) from high altitude instead.
I would be astounded if the F-35's gun gets anywhere within spitting distance of "regular" usage, especially since getting into gun range puts your exceedingly expensive plane into range of MANPADs.
I agreee that it is a requirement of the design but I have serious doubts it will ever be actually used that way.
If all that is actually needed is the high altitude stuff, then the F-35 may be sufficient, but is that a valid assumption?
One of the things that is supposed to make the F-35 as capable as an A-10 in CAS/COIN (counter-insurgency, despite the wildly different approach, is it's "Sensor Fusion" system. Basically it gives the pilot so much information that it offsets the "fast-mover" disadvantages (and then some). Whether it lives up to the claim is no something I can comment on.
Of course, when it comes to recent wars, everything the US military uses is massive overkill and massively expensive (apart from drones, maybe).
The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_Attack/Armed_Reconnaissa... is supposed to be the "cheap COIN" aircraft for these kinds of conflicts.
There is a popular view held that the Airforce brass doesn't like CAS/COIN (They all about killing MiGs) and that prop planes aren't sexy enough which is why this program has been taking so long.
"Of the 29 returning Apaches, all but one suffered serious damage. On average, each Apache had 15-20 bullet holes. One Apache took 29 hits. Sixteen main rotor blades, six tail blades, six engines, and five drive shafts were damaged beyond repair. In one squadron only a single helicopter was fit to fly. It took a month until the 11th Regiment was ready to fight again. The casualties sustained by the Apaches induced a change of tactics by placing significant restrictions on their use.[11] Attack helicopters would henceforth be used to reveal the location of enemy troops, allowing them to be destroyed by artillery and air strikes.[3]"
The problem is really casualty aversion - we lost 10’s of thousands of airmen in WW2 and that’s not sexy. The fighter mafias in the USAF and USN are real things, driving the specification of unrealistic capabilities in fiscally constrained universes.
Fiscally affordable wars are going to require less bling and a higher tolerance for losses.
Extending your thought we should expect F-35 shortcomings to lead to tactical limitations due to operational risks leaders will be unwilling to take when facing a real peer.
Same with the F-22. Other than a token deployment to the Mideast with a sortie or two in Syria, they won't see combat unless we get in a hot war with a peer. And until recently, they lacked the required capabilities to attack ground targets. No need to risk them for bomb truck missions.
My real worry is that our risk aversion will cause a conventional war to go nuclear in short order, when a more robust conventional military would be able to prevent that. Imagine if we lost a CVN to the Chinese? 5000+ sailors and airmen dead.
That wasn't in their design briefs.
They're for low- (and maybe medium-) risk areas; they're not for Day 0 (or perhaps even 1) operations.
But "victory" is often achieved after a bit of a slog over hill and dale, and high-end gear may not be need for for all of it. Yes, the tip of the spear may need pricey kit, but the baseball bat of suppression may be able to do with a bit less.
This may be getting in "jurisdiction" issues, but if the USAF doesn't really want to do CAS/COIN, why can't the Army do it?
The USAF keeps think clear at >3,500 feet (1000m), and Army CAS planes mops things up for the folks on the ground. If extra muscle is needed USAF ordinance can be dropped or an AC-130 be requested.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Republic_A-10_Thunde...
If their command responsibility was transfered to the Army instead of the USAF, how much would change on the logistical back-end?
Curious:
Are helicopters and CAS/A-10 planes effective in the same situations? How much overlap is there?
You end up doing a good amount of work just to try and protect a very expensive plane from Air Force politics. Ideally, the Air Force would just settle on an inexpensive prop plane that could perform the same missions as the A-10 at much less of the cost.
I'm not knowledgeable on how effective a helicopter is for CAS.
Almost every MANPAD uses an IR seeker, not radar. The A-10 engines are mostly hidden from the ground, inside a wrap-around tail. There are few angles from which the exhaust can be seen. It is in fact a very simple form of stealth. The aircraft turns of course, changing the view and causing simple heat seekers to loose the aircraft. Of course, the aircraft also carries flares and other decoys, and it can be accompanied by a Growler.
If the A-10 does get hit, it will probably be fine. It has quadruple-redundant controls. It can fly with the loss of an engine, half the tail, and 2/3 of one wing. MANPAD explosive charges are small. The A-10 engines are spaced apart from each other, making it unlikely that a hit on one engine could disable the other. Experience shows that the aircraft is tough: they often return to base after getting hit by a missile even larger than a MANPAD, such as truck-mounted Russian equipment.
And against a modern AD system, it'll be toast. Whether it's a Tunguska or worse, it can't survive on the modern battlefield until these systems are attritted via SEAD.
The A-10 of course is capable of SEAD. It carries the equipment. However...
There is no requirement that the A-10 go alone. It can be accompanied by the EA-18G or F-22.
If it mattered, we could have the A-10 carry the AN/ALE-50 towed decoy system. The threat isn't serious enough to bother, but we could.
The A-10 is not tasked with SEAD. The only weapons it could use in that role would be Mavericks, CBU, dumb bombs, and the GAU. It carries the ALQ-131 pod, but that's only for self-defense (jamming). Also, the operational envelope for ALE50 is too high to be useful for the A-10, unless it's going to just be used as a bomb truck at medium altitude. Plus it only has two "buddies" so it's of limited use.
If you can get your hands on some of the literature regarding it's intended deployment in Europe if the GSFG rolled through Fulda, you'd be horrified at it. Both it and the Apache would have attrition rates that would never fly with today's voters.
And it's not that the threat isn't "serious enough to bother", but that it wouldn't be cost effective to increase the A-10s survivability. If the conflict gets too hot, the USAF simply won't deploy the A-10.
Until such a conflict, our enemies have weak air defense.
So either way, the A-10 works. Either we are in the mood for serious war with serious losses, or we're fighting an enemy that can't put up much of a fight.
Yeah, well, they kind of said that with the WTC attack, and I guess it's carried us through on a multi trillion dollar war against a bunch of countries that never attacked us, and a growing surveillance hellscape. Pretty sure most people are sick of it. I know I am!
Another attack on US territory; well, if they took out certain areas of the government, I'm about at the point where I would welcome them as liberators.
Night raids would have cut losses markedly and achieved no worse accuracy.
IIRC, the A-10 was specially and primarily designed to carry that massive gun.
The A-10 doesn't carry much ammo though, so if it has to hit more than a few targets it will have to use missiles.
Maybe we have different defnitions on "not much ammo" ?
C130, yeah, that plane can literally wipe an entire convoy of cars, tanks, and landforces with thousands of heavy rounds, same as the A-10.
Apache helicopters and A-10.
And the list goes one.
I don't think it's wise to use fighters to attack land targets, more than blowing bridges or targeting tanks with missiles. The amount of rounds and the guns used in these fighters aren't suitable in my opinion. Yes, you can fight with it but that doesn't mean it's practical.
There is a reason why CIA never seemed to give away anti-aircraft weapons while they throw anti-tank weapons at Syrian rebels. Despite manpads would be so valuable against the old Syrian air force.
Guided ammunition has been done for 12.7 mm ammunition. The A-10 carries 30 mm ammunition, so it would be no problem to supply it with guided ammunition.
Mission kill can be achieved by splitting a tread, pitting the surfaces of the sensor lenses, or ripping off an antenna.
Even the most modern armor will fail when repeatedly hit.
MANPADS are not a serious threat. That is just FUD.
Targeting should be less dependent on the pilot IMO.
Of course a ground-attack plane shouldn't be dog-fighting in the first place but you gotta have that multi-role capability
It is not meant to replace an Apache or Cobra helicopter, but to occasionally take out ground targets.
The next big war is going to be won with a lot of small, disposable vehicles rather than a couple of “can’t fail” elite machines.
Kinda like Taranto, where a handful of British biplanes took down three Italian battleships
The F-35 program isn't going anywhere, but the Pentagon and the CIA have been quietly building out drone bases across the world for years.
Autonomous drones are more interesting and perhaps possible in the next generation. But we’re not quite there yet - especially with kill/no kill decisions.
Betting against autonomous drones seems short sighted. It's almost certain to happen in the near future.
Thats not to say we will never get there (as horrible as that future is), but you have to stage things.
You can buy five MQ-9 Reaper drones ($16mil each), or three MC-C Gray Eagles ($31mil each). These things have flight performance similar to early ww-2 era bombers but with tiny munitions payloads. That is, they are very slow, high-altitude, high-endurance and non-maneuverable. Their only real plus is that they are small and thus have a small radar cross section. They are sitting ducks for any sort of half-way decent air defense. I suspect that any fighter jet or SAM built in the last half century would swat such drones out of the sky without breaking a sweat.
I haven't really seen anyone analyze the threat model of attaching a shaped charge & microchip to a balsa model airplane or plastic DJI drone. The cost of those is in the $1000 range (including the chip and warhead), and they're virtually invisible to radar, or to the naked eye for that matter. Hell, for the cost of a single AMRAAM missile you could field > 1000 drones. You lose on range (~20 miles max) and performance (~200 mph), but for close air support, you probably don't need it: just blanket the whole airspace with tens of thousands of tiny drones so that the whole battlefield becomes a giant no-fly zone.
Just because it's still a super cool feat 17 years later, from 2003: https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/model-plane-f...
>11-pound Model Airplane Flies the Atlantic
>Named TAM-5, the 11-pound plane flew 1,888 miles from Canada to Ireland in 38 hours, 53 minutes. It set world records for longest distance and longest time ever flown by a model airplane.
>[...]To qualify for flight records, a model airplane has to weigh less than 11 pounds, including fuel. So, TAM-5 had room to carry just under 3 quarts of gas. This meant that the plane had to get the equivalent of about 3,000 miles per gallon of fuel, Brown says.
>The biggest challenge in building the model, Brown says, was figuring out how to make TAM-5’s engine efficient enough to cross the ocean. Most model airplanes use alcohol-based fuels. Instead, Hill used Coleman lantern fuel because, he says, it’s more pure and performs better. He tweaked a regular model airplane engine to make the valves smaller and more efficient.
>The plane also carried an impressive set of electronics. Every hour during the flight, crewmembers were able to get information about the plane’s location from a Global Positioning System (GPS) device on board. The GPS device communicated with a satellite orbiting Earth to determine the plane’s exact latitude, longitude, and speed.
>The route was programmed into the computerized autopilot, which automatically adjusted the plane’s direction to stay on course. There was also a transmitter on board that sent signals directly to crewmembers on the ground when the plane was within 70 miles of its launch and landing sites.
So that's 2003-class "impressive set of electronics", with artificial fuel restrictions for record purposes to boot, yet nearly a couple thousand miles of range. Only going about 50 MPH granted, but presumably a weaponized design would only need to burst speed briefly and slow loiter might actually be a strength in some CAS scenarios. Napkin math'ing it, seems feasibly dangerous, 3 US quarts of kerosene is about 5 lbs and a couple lbs of shaped RDX is plenty to do some real damage if a pinpoint strike. Just saying that I think you're even more right than you suggest there! A scenario of fielding thousands/tens of thousands of cheap drones offers chances for a pretty radical rethink in doctrine.
Now for more military applications, I think some of the calculations might break down due to weight. Missiles/shell can be in the order of hundreds of pounds, with the heavier ones above a ton.
The use case for military being more oriented toward heavy vehicles, tanks and buildings, I don't think a few pounds of explosive would be anywhere near enough. The plane would have to increase in size (structure and fuel) in similar proportions to the load it has to carry, certainly negating a lot of the efficiency.
Well, if we streamline a model plane as a one off directed explosive, that will eventually be a missile and long range ballistic missiles are not a novelty.
That describes a bazooka warhead perfectly, and they had no problem penetrating tanks. More recently, TOW anti-tank missiles are used to great effectiveness by many armies (including us) and their warhead is only 13 lbs.
One of the amazing things about shaped charges is that penetration depends only on the diameter of the charge, not its weight or velocity, and it can penetrate 7-10x its diameter in armor. So a 4-inch diameter shaped charge can blow through a meter of solid steel.
The other interesting development is that nearly all the advances in armor designed to defeat shaped charges (ceramics, Chobham armor, reactive armor) have an assumption that the same spot will never be hit twice in battle. The first shot basically destroys the (roughly 1 sq. foot) armor tile, which is useless for further protection, but this doesn't matter because in a traditional gun/missile tank duel the chance that the exact same spot will be hit twice is miniscule. This assumption falls apart with advances in robotics and AI. You could imagine a drone swarm where instead of launching themselves at the target, they land on the target, crawl to the most vulnerable parts (on top of turret or on the magazines/engines, for example) or those that have sustained previous battle damage, and then detonate themselves.
I assumed the goal was to have something similar to the model plane and particularly its incredibly range and efficiency. 1 gallon for 1000 miles. The plane shape and aerodynamics certainly help the efficiency.
However if there was an explosive charge to carry, the charge certainly can't improve the plane structure or aerodynamics (hence reducing the efficiency of the plane overall) and I'm not sure the charge could be shaped and mounted in the most optimal way (reducing the efficiently of the explosive itself).
So while the model plane might be incredibly efficient at flying, I question whether it could be anywhere near as good for the new purpose.
Sure the army could build much smaller ones but how would it use those effectively? Would they have to use face recognition to lock on to individual humans?
The F22 and F35 are great pieces of gear. Though obviously flawed, the problems are in many ways overstated.
> Four more heavy guns were intended for the stern, but the cannon foundry could not cast guns as fast as the navy yard could build ships, and Vasa waited nearly a year after construction was finished for its armament. When the ship sailed in August 1628, eight of the planned armament of 72 guns had still not been delivered
I’m not surprised, though; this is typical of defense contracting boondoggles.
Forgetting about budget overruns and malfunctions etc... I personally think that it won't excel in anything (technically I think that it cannot vs. specialized aircrafts), and that putting everything on one card is extremely risky.
The F35 is shaping up to be better than all. Now that it's software limitations have been pushed further it is shaping up to be quite a nimble aircraft[1]. Especially since the legacy fighters have to carry external weapons which add drag. It has superior high AoA to all four. It has better range and payload capacity than all of the aircraft it replaces. A new 100% purpose built aircraft for each role maybe could perform better but as it stands the F-35's shaping up to still be better than the aircraft it replaces. And now reaching $77.9M for Lot 14's the F-35A variant is cheaper than just about any other western modern fighter jet. The legacy jets it replaces also experienced serious issues early in their programs and were decried in the media as boondoggles[3]. They're now considered to be excellent jets.
To really hit the point harder, the only F-22's, which is an air superiority fighter, combat missions and kills have been acting in ground attack missions. The F-15 which is also an air superiority fighter had an entire variation of it later built called the F-15E Strike Eagle which turned it into a multi role bomb/missile truck. In case I'm not making it clear, for all the variation that exists in different possible roles for jets they tend to usually end up centering in doing a lot of the same same work. That's why the F-35 is ultimately going to be very successful.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0hWzaKEeZo [2]: https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/defense/2019-10-30/l... [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkrtxDdaWuM
There's over 2,000 F-16's in the field, and that qty. of F-35's will never be built because of the cost and mfg. capacity.
So likely the F-35 will be used where possible, backed up by thousands of older planes.
To give you an idea of how serious the cost/mfg. problem is, the late 1950s F-5 is in heavy use for the foreseeable future - training, adversarial Top Gun fighters, research, drones - you name it. The little fighter (4,000 made) is saving us billions now.
I think that I remember that the F-5 was in the original "Top Gun" movie, that it was near its end-life when the movie was shown (I investigated after watching the movie), and that in the movie it had the role of a simulated MIG-antagonist. (gosh, I LOVED that movie when I saw it as a teenager)
Maybe the stagnation of engineering/production of F-35 and/or alternative models is caused by Russia/China not pushing for similar capabilities? There have been news about some new fighters but I didn't read anything about them being mass-produced... .
Yes, the program is worth $1.5TN, the most expensive procurement program in history. But that's for its entire lifetime, of about 60 years. Per unit, an F-35 will cost about $100MM (even less than $80MM for the main version, F-35A [0]). A few days ago we've seen the first Boeing 777X taking a test flight. That's a commercial aircraft with a list price of $400MM per unit. It's essentially a big long tube with wings and engines. Yes, the tube is carbon fiber, the wings are foldable, the engines are the newest crown jewels of GE, but it's not a fighter aircraft designed to withstand 10G acceleration, be subject to catapulted take-off and arrested landing on an aircraft carrier, be able to go supersonic, and well, obviously it's not stealthy. So, given all that, the cost of an F-35 is not exorbitant.
Oh, and you bet the F-35 is a huge jobs program as well. But it's not minimum wage jobs we are talking about. It's high end jobs. And the F-35 is a profitable export as well. An export that will benefit the US, but will benefit the buyers too. Poland will buy F-35. Poland is looking nervously at Ukraine, and how Russian troops and tanks are occupying big chunks of it. The day they get some F-35s in their hangars is the day they'll start sleeping a bit easier at night. Japan has some nice naval ships that are aircraft carriers in all but name [1]. But to be meaningful, they need aircraft, and F-35B will do the job. UK's Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carrier will also use F-35B. No other fighter jet will fit the bill, either for the Japanese or for the British aircraft carriers, as they are somewhat on the short side and F-35B can take off on short runways. Israel is already using F-35s for combat missions.
For those who think manned military aircraft are a thing of the past, take a moment to remember the drone that Iran captured a few years ago [2]. Drones can be hijacked, or rendered ineffective via electronic warfare. Manned aircraft less so. The US is not shying away from heavily investing in drones, but manned aircraft will have a place in the military picture for decades to come.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izumo-class_destroyer
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incid...
I'm becoming more and more convinced that we're coasting on the infrastructure of the past and aren't really capable of organizing successful new projects that aren't destined to fail from all the corruption.
Still a few months to go but she is at the top my list right now.
It can be painful but it's not a failure.
It's unclear that spending way too much on the military has any bearing there. Both are probably very poorly spent in terms of ROI.
> Schools in high-poverty neighborhoods are more than twice as likely to be among the least-productive school districts [1]
Regarding the second, I sure hope that we spend multiples of our military budget on services! If we didn't that would be absolutely astonishing. Other than services for the people, what else should our government be spending money on?
But we spend more than many other countries. We put about 15% of our federal tax dollars into military spending, compared to, say, Germany (12%). If we scaled back a percent or three on our military, we'd have hundreds of billions of dollars to spend on schools, infrastructure, healthcare, public defenders, etc. etc. etc.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/connecting-sc...
890.8 billion was spent on defence.
Cutting the defence budget by 20% and moving that to education, therefore, would be a 15% increase to the education budget.
15% isn't going to do shit to the structural issues that plague our education system. If anything, it'd be counterproductive - because it would shift power further towards the federal government in education and reduce the ability of states to try different things.
0: https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year_spending_2019USbn_...
(The US spends about $2000/yr/person on the military, and $8500/yr/person on entitlements)
And the sewer system cost is a fraction of the F-35 cost.
So, I would submit (sadly), that we cannot do much good with a fraction of the F-35 project based on prima facie evidence that you just provided.
I get it - we all want to do good in the world. But some people do not, and we have to protect ourselves against them. Others do not want to do good, but rather, do for themselves, and they hide in the system designed to protect us from those who do not want to do good. Finally, we have the Incompetents, which are scattered all over the place and manipulated by both of the prior mentioned types for their own benefit.
THAT is the problem we need to solve. I have exactly zero idea how to solve it, and so far I haven't seen anyone else solve it either.
=====
EDIT - meant to add that it frustrates me, too.
https://media.nationalpriorities.org/uploads/total_spending_...
Keep in mind, this does not account for state and local budgets, which is where infrastructure like roads is built and maintained.
As a percent of GDP, the US spends about 3% on defense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_...
https://www.aviationtoday.com/2018/09/04/f-35-program-update...
I can't tell if the 55 year period should make the total program cost seem better or worse to me.
If you read the reports of pilots flying the aircraft during Red Flag and other exercises, the plane is excellent. But there's a continual axe grinding over this plane that is factually inaccurate.
So since then, the idea has stuck around that a fighter must ship with a gun. The F-35A models have internal guns, while the B (STOVL variant) and C (Naval variant) can use an external gun pod. This is a tough engineering task since the pod needs to be stealthy.
The value of the gun on all three variants is really limited IMHO. The F-35A only carries 182 rounds, and the B/C gunpod 220. That's just not much ammo for CAS, nor even A2A engagements.
I can spend 500 trillion dollars in an armored rubber duck with an attached gun to it, that does not make me the strongest superpower on earth.