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.
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."
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.
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.
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...