The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed
forbes.com
forbes.com
This isn't just planes, this seems to be everything nowadays. Fission was discovered in 1938/1939 and we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. No chance we could do something like that in this toxic environment of today.
I know Peter Thiel is not popular here, but his conversations about technological progress seem to be spot on: we just cant build cool shit anymore. I really did want a flying car, and all I have is 140 characters and promises of AI that never come true.
Maybe, you could say there are some exceptions like CRISPR, but that is TBD.
Nobody else in the industry can achieve what SpaceX have done successfully 40 times.
Elon makes it pretty clear in this tweet it's very financially sound to bring back a booster
"Payload reduction due to reusability of booster & fairing is <40% for F9 & recovery & refurb is <10%, so you’re roughly even with 2 flights, definitely ahead with 3"
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1295883862380294144?lang...
- Reliability and insurance costs - limited number of launches - refurbishment costs of boosters ompared to new ones - heavier and more expensive boosters to make them reusable
This paper was way before SpaceX tried that. And whther or not reusable boosters are really a financial success is impossible to tell without published financials from SpaceX. The paper alsosaid, that reusable boosters become interessting with a high number of commercial launches, something they didn't see to happen. And that part alone makes Starlink so interessting, because it is basically SpaceX increasing its own number of launches.
EASA is the European Union Aviation Safety Agency. I think you meant to say ESA, the European Space Agency? But ESA's not that relevant here, as the European governments fund and develop launch services through Arianespace, a consortium of space industry companies led by the French aerospace companies Airbus and Safran.
Correction aside, I agree with your point that Arianespace did underestimate SpaceX.
I did some analysis based on these numbers in this 8 minute video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36o4UrS9OS4
I highly doubt they hit break-even with only two launches, the math just doesn't add up.
If reusing rocket was so profitable, there is a high chance someone else would have done it before. Landing a rocket isn't totally new tech. NASA did it on the moon 50y ago.
The latest numbers are that the marginal cost of relaunch is $15 million, with $10 million of that the second stage. Refurbishment cost is 27 days with a $1 million refurbishment cost (not $250,000 as I mistakenly said in the video, see description). The net effect is the cost of marginal cost of reflight is approximately 25% but the payload reduction is 30%, which leads to a break even point of 3 launches. After 10 flights, the cost to orbit per kilogram is halved. SpaceX has demonstrated 8 flights of a single booster.
Note, these are all using SpaceX's own numbers (but so was the payload reduction and original reuse cost figures). It depends on recovering the $6 million fairing (which does not happen every mission). All numbers are sourced from an Aviation Week May 2020 podcast that I linked to. Yes, the cost numbers are from SpaceX but the only public refurbishment cost analogue we have is their 27 day turnaround time.
SpaceX are currently operating at a sixth of the rest of the industry and use their cost advantage to launch 60 Starlink satellites at their $15 million marginal cost.
The traditional military-industrial complex with cost-plus accounting is "subcontractors all the way down", and the incentives weren't aligned to make an industry dominating rocket until arguably the 1990s commercial satellite boom (eg, the original Iridium constellation). Until 2008, there hadn't ever been a privately funded rocket reach orbit ever. Until SpaceX. Prior rockets we designed, owned and approved by the US government under World War 2-era cost-plus accounting arrangements.
> If reusing rocket was so profitable, there is a high chance someone else would have done it before.
AFAIK it is only like 10-12 years that computers and engineering software got good enough to simulate everything that happens in a rocket engine, sloshing of fuel etc. Cruder simulations were available before, but not good enough for that.
SpaceX engineers did most of the design and testing on computers. It took them only a few tries in the real world to nail the first landing.
Earlier pioneers would have to try in practice, which would mean a lot more failures and a lot more money, with a possible deadly incident in between.
We can build cool shit, but our government and most companies don't optimize for that.
The F-35, by comparison, was a platform vehicle, with the base suited to adapting to a variety of capabilities and missions. That means more voices demanding priority of features, more expensive engineering to get a variety of polygon pegs into the same round hole, and many first-of-its-kind features for a variety of ancillary tasks.
No real surprise that it didn't work out.
Distribution is much, much harder!
Not really. The SR-71 was the final plane of an extended program called OXCART which created the A-12. The program was nominally to replace the U2, but even oxcart was within a large aircraft design plan. There was even a interceptor (YF-12) that was meant for shooting down Valkyrie-class mach3+ bombers. These aircraft were very similar to the 71, so similar that most people seeing them might not spot any difference. Any assessment of the 71's development costs is therefore very difficult.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_YF-12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_A-12
"YF-12C: Fictitious designation for an SR-71 provided to NASA for flight testing. The YF-12 designation was used to keep SR-71 information out of the public domain."
I'm surprised it got off the drawing boards
> No real surprise that it didn't work out.
For a humorous presentation of this, watch the movie Pentagon Wars:
Ultimately I think the reason we don't have things like flying cars is that the private sector gets stuck in local maxima (such as getting people to click ads) and in the public sector it's very hard to have focused time-blocked short term goals.
There are parts that are like jobs programs, and the contractors intentionally drive up costs as part of their business model, but there are also real expenses to maintaining stability across the parts of the world where our military operates.
It gives money to US manufacturers by giving money to other countries that they have to use to buy US products.
Broken windows fallacy.
The propaganda poster you paint here is dubious.
Have you ever looked at a map? Sunni majority nations KSA, Syria, Kuwait, and Turkiye probably have a lot more to do with it than Israel.
Having been to every middle eastern / near eastern / Balkan / North African nation except Libya, I’m not too afraid of Iran.
Iranians have always treated me better than Israelis or myy my fellow Americans have, even after finding out I’m a queer atheist.
I am. They have sworn to destroy Israel and America. They are developing nuclear weapons to do so. They are funding proxy wars throught the Middle East. They are trying to gain control over syria, iraq, yemen etc. The irgc is probably the best funded terrorist organization in the world https://www.state.gov/foreign-terrorist-organizations/ . I'm afraid of Iran.
KSA, Syria, Kuwait, and Turkiye probably have a lot more to do with it than Israel.
Depends what you look for. Most visible, front- line opposition, certainly. But who does all the high profile bombing and intelligence raids and computer hacking? I think it's Israel.
-Iranians have always treated me better than Israelis or myy my fellow Americans have.
That's fine! I'm not asking you to hate Iranians, and i'm also not asking you to love Israelis.
What i am asking you is to recognize that Iran is a global threat to peace and that Israel can offer the best answer. I think that's true.
Would it be more honorable if they just invaded countries in the Middle East instead, the way the US does? Of course the US is funding proxy wars as well.
If a beligerant and much more powerful country came across the Atlantic and invaded Mexico and Canada, I know I would want some nukes as a deterrant.
Iran couldn't even defeat Iraq during their brutal eight year conflict. Even if Iran wanted to take over the ME, there is zero chance they would be able to.
Where is your belligerant nation? Not Israel surely. Iran was fine with israel before some terrorist inciters hijacked the country.
In the last 20 years the US has invaded two of Iran's neighbors, Iraq to the west, and Afghanistan to the east.
America is funding proxy wars throughout the midde east too.
> What i am asking you is to recognize that Iran is a global threat to peace and that Israel can offer the best answer. I think that's true.
We are at war with eastasia. We have always been at war with eastasia.
Sorry bro, I don’t subscribe to trumpism, zionism or americanism. No nation is more of a global threat to peace than the usa.
Developed nations don't care because their defense contractors get the money.
Speaking as one of those allies... not really. Often times US allies spend money they really don't want to in order to keep the US happy. Canada and the UK probably wouldn't have invaded Afghanistan if not for their obligations as US allies. That certainly wasn't cheap. Canada is soon to replace its fighter fleet. Will it buy to cheaper Saab Grippen? Or will it feel obligated to buy the 35, a US program that Canada has paid into (aka subsidized) for many years without actually receiving any aircraft?
Which is, more or less, the main reason.
EDIT: I think the F/A-18 is a great choice and one hell of a plane. The other options, a potentially obsolete F-15 and a maybe delivered in time F-35 aren't that great.
Take for instance Germany. The federal republic increased their spend to $63.8b last year but that's still a shortfall of ~$27b relative to what a 2% spend would be.
Aggressive estimates (above official estimates) of the UK's (a similar sized ally) spending on Afghanistan in 2011m put the total figure at $26b for 10 years.
The cumulative shortfall in NATO contributions for Germany over that period is more than 10 times greater than the entire invasion and continued operations in Afghanistan during that period.
(edit: grammar and dollar signs)
As they only met 1.31% of their 2% spend (which would be $37.5b) the shortfall is ~$15.3b annually.
Still sounds like a bargain.
Besides there are no good reasons for Russia to occupy the baltic states (or atleast the cost would considerably outweigh anything they might gain from it). Subsidizing Crimea is already very expensive and controlling the baltics (no even speaking about Poland) would cost considerably more (both due to lost income and because they’d have to dedicate considerable resources policing the local populations which (unlike Crimea) don’t want them to be there)
Even if you don't take the threat seriously it is obvious that other neutral states do: https://www.reuters.com/article/sweden-nato-idUSKBN28J1UL
I think you are probably right. But this is the kind of thing where being wrong is potentially catastrophic. And the world can change faster than you can adjust your defense posture.
The UK has Trident and was supposed to be buying F-35s. A number of UK military and civilian aerospace projects were either cancelled (various examples) or crippled commercially (Concorde) because of US interference.
The Afghanistan and Iraq misadventures are still causing significant political costs across Europe. Meanwhile the US has failed to protect the EU against some obvious and immediate threats, including political interference. (Although to be fair it hasn't even protected itself - which is a different problem.)
In any case - the US really isn't a credible victim of exploitation in any of this.
this is just not how economics works at all
Edit: I looked it up and a Cessna gets ~15 mpg.
Due to the many roads and relatively few people using a lot of these high-risk roads, maybe flying cars would be a more cost-effective option here... would possibly also reduce the need for expensive ferries[2].
[1]: https://www.nrk.no/vestland/ras-i-roldal-isolerer-ti-fastboe...
[2]: https://www.nrk.no/nordland/bjornar-skjaeran-i-arbeiderparti...
I guess the Alps are not a big issue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoK4QYwixDc
Not sure which bits you could cut with a flying car - the safety checks, air traffic control involvement, runways, refuelling stop, qualifications/licenses, but it would have to be a lot to make a large difference.
Imagine that scenario with tons of metal that could fall out of the sky when something fails.
...or can't afford the basic maintenance
Note, that's not a put down on said people. I think it's a shame such situations exist. But, if you can't afford to pay for insurance/gas/maintenance, then you can't afford the vehicle.
But, regarding flying cars: I absolutely do not want more people operating airborne spinny death machines capable of destroying considering we've already established many people don't/can't perform basic maintenance on a much simpler and safer mode of transportation. It wouldn't go well.
Or they know it isn’t worth fixing.
I had an engine light on for about 20000km, and sold the vehicle like that, because it wasn’t worth fixing. One competent mechanic talked me into trying to fix it before I tried to sell it, and that wasted $1000.
Another friend had an engine light on, and the workshop said that happened with that model sometimes and it wasn’t worth fixing.
Both of us could afford to fix the vehicles. That said, if an oil light comes on I stop the vehicle immediately.
Contrast to my understanding of Germany's system, where your car must be aesthetically pleasing to the inspector.
But, what some people have been talking about makes sense now. If you get a bad manufacturer who lights up the dash for everything then they're forcing you to spend money.
Hmm, this has different meaning with last weekends context of an engine cover hitting a yard.
There isn't really an issue with that sort of lack-of-maintenance stuff where we're headed. It won't be long until cars either totally refuse to operate in extreme circumstances (due to manufacturer liability), or fall back to some impossible-to-ignore state like Tesla's "limp mode". Tire pressure/oil life being good examples of easily-detectable liability issues that no sane manufacturer would let slide.
The current state of affairs is simply because remote monitoring was expensive/infeasible. Most vehicles today ship with an always-on cellular modem in them.
Even my little 4K pocket gimbal camera won't operate without phoning home to "activate", same for all the drones sold by the same company. Flying cars would be sending telemetry from all local sensor measurements to HQ at pretty much all times.
Its already madness to allow wealthy citizens into space. Tesla and Amazon are one freight flight to space, filled with tungsten rods, away from becoming there own nation - with non-nuclear deterrence. That somebody - whoever it is, out there is getting humankinds tech progress to a grinding halt, is a blessing in disguise. We actually do not even get a honest discussion about the risks on this path.
Problem is though, we always scienced our way out of our problems with our volatile nature. Tap some energy here, create some fertilizer there, oversupply solves the problems we do not want to solve. Exponential supply for exponential unchecked demand.
Enter social tech- in theory we could limit ourselves, could curb our demands, could become starving monks in the desert, hypnotized by coloured lights playing across enchanted stones. This seems to be the road we need to take, for the other road to be traverse-able.
Also if you stream a movie tonight, like millions others, who just have a roof, food and a flickering screen that sand in the dessert might be very fine integrated - and already have gotten everywhere. So nobody is asking you or me, might as well discuss the scenarios.
OK, SpaceX ignores the denial and launches anyway. Elon Musk threatens to destroy Washington DC to gain independence for ... some territory somewhere. Unclear where, or why he'd want that since he already has enormous wealth and influence and doesn't need to run his own military to keep it. The United States arrests Elon Musk and seizes all of SpaceX with overwhelming military might. The end.
Is that really as threatening as North Korea developing nuclear weapons?
Titanium is used in airframes for its strength to weight ratio (it’s not very dense). Tungsten is used in weapons for its high hardness and density.
??
> filled with tungsten rods, away from becoming there own nation - with non-nuclear deterrence.
In WW1, they tried dropping flechettes onto troops. Didn't work.
As for becoming a nation, that's hardly going to work without the launch/recovery site being part of that nation.
We who? You are more than welcome to starve in a desert. Just do not count on any companionship.
I think it's just a placeholder metaphor to represent <hypothetical futuristic "thing" that increases our quality of life as a society>
When one says "we could have had flying cars, but instead we got X", that's the underlying concept. Whether or not the flying car is "practical" is kind of besides the point. Either that, or we need to find some other generally agreed upon term to represent an actually practical but futuristic invention that represents human progress (or the lack thereof).
http://eduard-heindl.de/energy-storage/energy-storage-system...
Well, we would get cheap energy storage and cheap energy. No promises of a superior future, just a cheaper future.
Also, we don't have flying cars because that would be ridiculously impractical. They would be essentially helicopters, which would drink gas and be exponentially more deadly to operate.
There are lots of scientist and inventors around inventing cool new stuff. And there's plenty of research dollars available to anyone with a Ph.D and some grant writing abilities. It's absolutely possible to make a good career out of being an inventor and getting a government to flip the bill on it.
The issue is that we've reach the point in society where technological progress in incremental. Instead of three guys inventing a revolutionary device like the transistor, we have thousands of people working on making marginal improvements to battery chemistry.
Every industry is like that now. Something like four guys entirely designed the original small block Chevy motor, but today, GM has like 400 people designing just fuel system components for the ancestor of that engine. Innovation, it seems, is O(n^2).
Do tell.
NIH paylines (i.e., the percentage of grants funded) are in the teens, with some institutes at/near single digits. NSF is a bit better, but the awards are much smaller. I don't think DARPA, CDMRP, (etc) have explicit Paylines, but the programs are very competitive as well.
if you're proposing something more powerful than that... that sounds like a fantastic weapon. Someone get the Pentagon on the horn, let's get this shit funded!
With apologies to Larry Niven: "A reaction drive's efficiency as a weapon is in direct proportion to its efficiency as a drive."
Republicans (nominally) care about spending, but make an exception for defense. Democrats care less about spending, and are afraid of being attacked for being "weak on defense".
Neither party has any incentive to rein this sort of spending in, so they don't.
The problem is:
1. People need to commute large distances
2. People need to go fast
It can be better solved by removing the majority of commutes and using very fast, efficient, underground mass transport systems to move people when they (rarely) need it.
I’d rather cities and VR were redesigned so the average person doesn’t usually need to go more than 5 kilometers in any direction on a given day.
Basically it's the same PITA when it comes to getting things countersigned, approved etc. for spending $200 in parts as it is for spending $2000 in parts. So might as well order in bulk.
It was very tricky to avoid getting in trouble.
Putting stuff out to bid was the main thing he managed. When possible he just went with previous winners as it cut down the paperwork needed.
Lot of times someone would come in really low on the bid, he knew the people and that it would be crap product. So lots of work to get higher bids approved.
Also apparently if you get a ride in the company limousine, the drivers have tons of juicy gossip.
The hammer is not actually $1,200. The paperwork can easily be.
Do you have McBride Principles stuff done and documented? Have you trained your staff on McBride principles if they might purchase supplies, documented it and maintained proper documentation (this is about something in Northern Ireland which has very little to do with buying snacks for a kids program). Repeat x100. Where I am the ethnicity / race / national origin stuff is huge, and the different agencies don't have a common set of labels. So you are stuck asking everyone very personal questions even they don't understand. I mean, for ethnicity you are one thing, for race there is another set of labels, so you have to ask them the same race question 4 times under each random set of labels that are being used, for national origin another set etc.
The actual quality of your hammer? Never tested. The details on the paperwork - lots of folks looking and nitpicking. Some of this just starts as a resolution at some level, that gets added on and added on over and over. So some politician will say McBride principles are great. 2 years later a contract analyst or internal auditor asks, how are we documenting / demonstrating compliance with this requirement. They then push their vendors to train staff involved in purchasing on the principles. Then they want documentation of that training. Each one in isolation is a small waste, but at scale it's a monumental waste.
What's even funnier, stuff stays forever. There are requirements in contracts to hand out old IRS forms (W-5) for Advance EITC - that program is long gone, but you still have to hand out the forms - and tell staff that if they fill them out and submit them nothing will happen. Sure builds staff faith in govt efficiency.
You can't even argue this stuff, I used to try and it's a brick wall.
I can't stand it, but if you can push paper and have some political pull it's a gravy train, because cost / quality is so low on the basis of selection list. This tends to attract the wrong type of company (ie, scammers get a lot further than they should, and companies delivering good product don't).
https://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-the...
https://eu.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Molex/19285-0084/?qs=KMH...
At this price point one would assume that you are buying a crimping machine.
I don't think they know how. They want cool shit too. Imagine a pork project that also produces cool shit - they would love that.
Look at what states and districts get these big DoD contracts and then look at what committees the congressmen/women are sitting on.
They approve plans that benefit them then direct the funds right into their districts so they can campaign on it.
I mean it's not the worst form of corruption but it's pretty shitty when you realize how our infrastructure and defense is designed around congressional districts instead of what is best for our country.
The cynic in me thinks it has to do with power projection and the economy.
The less cynical part of me wonders if it’s related to a cognitive bias that over-weights threats from rival “tribes” and the need to ensure stability
Especially for the states (and representatives) that the ice storm is 100 year. Dams fail, and when they fail, they don't affect the people that didn't want to live near a dam.
It seems like we’re just really bad at thinking clearly about low probability / high severity risks
The dam flooding isn't random, its an unfrequent event that will occur so it is something we should prepare for.
CEOs are graded quarter-to-quarter and politicians every 2-4 years. Low probability events (plane crashes, infrastructure failures, etc.) may not ever happen during their tenure, incentivizing them to defund preparing for them to favor other programs, understanding full well they’re bound to occur
SpaceX is everyone's favourite private sector success story, but they're basically just a younger, leaner version of Lockheed— surviving off of NASA and doing what they're contracted to do.
I don't think the private sector is ever going to do ambitious things like build rail infrastructure all on its own, nor is the current PPP model necessarily the way either, but maybe there is some option out there to get things done which looks like the bakeoff that NASA held with CRS.
Really this is more similar to VC investment where NASA funded it so they could get a return (better launches), but the future is that a probably large percentage of launches will be for commercial purposes (~50% of 2022 launches are for Starlink).
In 2020, SpaceX did 26 launches. Only six of those had NASA as a customer. The rest were a mix of US military, commercial customers, foreign governments (Argentina and South Korea), and Starlink. Even if you add up NASA and US military, that's still only nine out of 26 with the US government as the customer.
So while no doubt SpaceX does benefit from NASA's business, it is now only a minority.
There is no VC who would have accepted a pre-SpaceX pitch for low cost launches, Starlink, or any of the rest of it. It would have been straight up "lol Iridium amirite, get out."
SpaceX was funded by Elon Musk and later, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Peter Thiel's Founder's Fund. Starlink has been in part funded by a $1 billion investment from Google and Fidelity. And since then further funding rounds have been raised.
The DFJ and Founder's Fund investment was before SpaceX had any substantial NASA development contracts, let along their 2008 $1.6 billion launch contract.
Until the Dragon demo flights in 2012-2013, I think SpaceX would have been hard pressed to raise significant capital from anyone other than Elon's friends. I think the fact that so many private space companies have one or more wealthy benefactors bears this out (Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, Armadillo to a lesser extent).
Another Musk inspired project is the hyperloop and of course the Boring tunnels for electric cars. These are novel transportation solutions that solve for the problem in a more creative way than simply "build more light rails". That's the type of stuff a government will never come up with. There needs to be a creative maestro with massive capital. Musks are rare in the world but they certainly can move in a more agile way when they do appear.
I would also argue, telecommuting has solved for some of the transportation problems alone. Think of how many less cars are on the road as a result of work from home.
Boring/Hyperloop don't have an idea like this. Boring's pitch is using conventional TBMs but making it cheaper by digging a smaller-diameter tunnel than the other guy. Does that meet the requirements? New subway systems are also reducing tunnel diameter by using LRVs instead of heavy rail cars... is there an actual innovation here?
Hyperloop is full of practicality issues, and addresses none of the real problems that are barriers to high speed mass transit projects today— specifically the fights over rights of way and station locations. The fact that it was initially pitched in 2013 as a system for moving around private automobiles should tell you a lot about how much understanding there is of the first principles of transportation— it wasn't until years later that this was acknowledged and corrected [1]. It would be like someone proposing an airline where each plane carries 10 cars instead of 400 passengers ("so convenient, you just drive right on board!")— it doesn't matter how fast the trains are, 840 passengers per hour for a Hyperloop would be a complete nonstarter when a normal subway does 40k/hr.
Maybe Boring/Hyperloop will end up pivoting into something worthwhile, but at the moment there is good reason for skepticism.
[1]: https://www.masstransitmag.com/technology/news/12402366/elon...
The cost of reusing a rocket has not been proven to be cheaper than building a new rocket. Consider factors like the inability to reuse the entire rocket, the reduced payload. At best you can break even. Unless you somehow reuse the entire rocket and do 100 flights with the same rocket the savings are meager.
This isn't something new. The space shuttle suffered from the same issues. Building new shuttles was almost the same cost and less risky.
But now that the basic principle has been proven, really leaning into it is part of the point of Starship— a new clean sheet design that is built for full reusability from the get go.
He just took the 100 year old vac train concept and repackaged it. Back in his original pitch he constantly said and laughed how easy it is. Once the years went by he slowly backed off from every promise and ultimately reduced his involvement to 0.
> of course the Boring tunnels for electric cars.
He promised to make tunnel boring cheaper, yet his only tunnel costs exactly as much as every other tunnel. He constantly advertises 150mph travel when the tunnel isn't even long enough to reach that speed. Have you seen the tunnel? It's so tiny you can't even open your doors if you get stuck in there. If even a single car fire starts in that tunnel everyone in the tunnel will die.
The reason why the USA uses the military as a jobs program is that it's the only thing that gets bipartisan support.
But what real communism did isn't even relevant here, I'm pretty sure GP is talking about imaginary communism in the sense that anything that is good for the general population is somehow called communism in US politics.
Not to mention funding schools, universities, or government research grants.
That's among the things that get called communism or socialism here in the US.
Of course. That doesn't mean the services it provides aren't socialism. For a country on balance to be socialist, more than have of its goods and services would need to be provided by the government.
> that definition doesn't sound useful.
It's exactly what socialism is:
"a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole."
The first definition when googling "definition of socialism". Government is the means by which the community effects socialism.
From 0:
The Soviet whalers, Berzin wrote, had been sent forth to kill whales for little reason other than to say they had killed them. They were motivated by an obligation to satisfy obscure line items in the five-year plans that drove the Soviet economy, which had been set with little regard for the Soviet Union’s actual demand for whale products.
Whaling, like every other industry in the Soviet Union, was governed by the dictates of the State Planning Committee of the Council of Ministers, a government organ tasked with meting out production targets. In the grand calculus of the country’s planned economy, whaling was considered a satellite of the fishing industry. This meant that the progress of the whaling fleets was measured by the same metric as the fishing fleets: gross product, principally the sheer mass of whales killed.
0. https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-senseless-environment-c...
Pure communists think that the government baseline should be enough for everyone, even if it means inferior service.
Pure capitalists think that superior service should be enough for everyone, even if it is unaffordable.
The obvious answer is to find the middle ground and reap the benefits of both.
I personally don't think that the F-35 is falling into that. A jobs program fighter jet doesn't really make sense since it is not a long term investment with a direct return. It's more of an insurance policy against an imaginary foe. Yes, you have jets but unless you use them to conquer land or defend yourself there is no direct return on investment.
As Inread that I think: basic services are too important to miss the feedback loop and become the equivalent of universal low grade government cheese. At the same time, maybe the poor quality of government provided baseline goods and services would incentivize people to attain better, which is an improvement over direct subsidies which act like high marginal taxes when they are reduced in response to income growth. Unfortunately a significant number of basic needs are commodities, such as cheese, and are subject to mismeasure and goal seeking instead of value seeking, similar to the Soviet whaling industry of the 1960s/70s.
The F-35: similar to SLS and Soviet whalers, political considerations are weighted higher than value ones. The F-35 also has the challenge of being developed at a transitional period, in the late morning of a period that will be marked by low observability, human optionality, and high speed and precision impact. The F-35s story isn’t over yet and like other troubled weapons systems there is a lower than likely chance it may blossom like the M-16. It has already passed the Sgt York stage and is in the a state where like the BFV it will find its place within doctrine and eventually battle, or not. I think it is too soon to tell.
Look at it another way. Which countries have walls to keep people out? And which have walls to keep people in?
Barbed wire on the borders, bullets shot without warning at swimmers trying to cross freezing rivers, then families held hostage and tortured to punish and warn escapees - oh Communism was such an awesome experience, I can only wish it from the bottom of my heart to all its apologists.
In a sense it is both good and bad that the Wall has been erased, people forget what it was like. Nobody should forget.
Communists killed local population by millions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Baltic_state...
Crimes against humanity ain’t a minor issue you can ignore. Directly related to communism. Democratic states don’t do that, communist regimes did that a lot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimes_against_humanity_under_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_communist_...
> had higher standards of living while they didn’t
That’s debatable. Might be true in 1910-1920, but by the end of the last century all communist states with planned economy have failed their economies, catastrophically so, with direct consequences on standards of living. China’s the only exception, were lucky to have smart enough people in power to pivot towards market economy, and execute it relatively well.
You actually make a great point, even if the money has to go to defense and not other purposes, it should still be useful for the purpose of defense.
I am reminded how we got existing rail line through much of the U.S. 19th century land acquisition for private parties who built that infrastructure is easy to spin as a travesty. In many cases it was blatant corruption. And the legacy lasts to this day. All of that land and infrastructure is still privately owned.
Fast forward to today. Is it right that the government should build infrastructure to compete with existing private businesses? Should they build and operate grocery stores? Automakers? ISPs? Textile factories?
There used to be some idea that the government should not compete with private industry. That idea is much murkier more recently.
But if you want to build public infrastructure to compete with the likes of Union Pacific, shouldn't you start by nationalizing the likes of Union Pacific?
See also USPS for more interesting examples of public vs private enterprise. Imagine that the USPS contracted local delivery and long-haul transfer. Imagine that a local mom and pop could bid on a local contract. Newspaper delivery bicycle contractors everywhere could double their money for little additional effort. Or FedEx/UPS/Amazon might really sharpen their pencils and win those contracts.
The USPS is legally obligated to deliver mail to every household, 6 days a week. The private carriers don’t come anywhere close to meeting that level of service. Most of the US is incredibly sparsely populated. There won’t be bicycle contractors lining up to deliver mail up the Adirondacks or across the Great Plains.
How would a network of private interests handing off parcels between each other under government regulation deliver better service than a single organization with the problem already solved thanks to 200 years of domain expertise?
I'm not in favor of this approach, either we have a really free market (with some limited regulation for things like anti-fraud) or you have the government manage the service. These public-private partnerships just seem to be grift programs write large. Let's not push for more corporatism. If there is already a private market, then sure, have the government bid for private contracts within that market. Otherwise you have companies whose full-time roles is figure out how to squeeze more money out of government, and they lobby hard to do so, often with much success (at filching taxpayers)
Where I live, USPS doesn't deliver to any household, but UPS and FedEx do.
But that is beside the point. Any party that contracted with the USPS would be obligated to meet the terms of the contract.
You might be surprised at who lines up to deliver mail up the Adirondacks. One of the virtues of a free market is the amazing ingenuity of entrepreneurs to meet market demand in the most efficient ways. The free market provides the motivation for such ingenuity whereas non-profit single-player monopolies often don't.
But still this misses my interest in this discussion. I think there is an optimum balance for publicly-owned infrastructure and privately-owned service providers. But that balance is not always obvious and usually not stable. I think there is great benefit in continuous discussion of the pros and cons to monitor and adjust how we leverage the strengths of both sides of the equation.
I like the idea of "build more rail lines." But it takes more that four words to make this happen. If you are just trying to replace the pork of military spending, then perhaps the details don't matter. Just trade one corruption for another. Let the power brokers beat each other up clamoring for the money.
But if you're making such radical changes to the redistribution of wealth, why not have some thoughtful discussion that people can reference for the next 100s of years. Who are the Lockes and Keynes of 2021? I know they exist. Let's bring them out in public discussion.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with building public infrastructure considering in many cases the infrastructure in question would form a natural monopoly. However, car manufacturers, grocers, textile factories have lots of competition. Those markets are very healthy.
American ISPs fail to provide good service even in wealthy locations. Google had to stop their gigabit fiber rollout. That's definitively a failing market where a baseline of service should be provided by governments. Private companies can always provide superior service and charge for it.
Is there a longer discussion of this that you can link somewhere? I remember the phrase as a derogatory commonplace in adults' political discussion when I was a child, but the concept seems to have drifted out of the discourse since, and having now had my attention drawn to its absence I'd be interested to find out more about why.
This is the outdated proposal that didn't pass. But the current proposal is double this. I've tried to tune out politics for a while but you can be sure that pork is in a $1.9 trillion spending bill as sure as the sun rises.
https://www.politico.com/story/2011/02/senate-dems-give-in-o...
Earmarks are supposedly coming back this year though.
The best we could do is change the way contract funding is performed. Cost-plus pricing without an upper bound is a huge issue. This type of contract encourages bidders to bid low on cost and make up for it with project extensions.
Of course cost-plus is preferred by bidders as they can guarantee a minimum of profit since cost is already covered. However, fixed price contracts are better from the perspective of the government spending. The spend is known up front. It is up to the bidders to determine if they can make a profit or not.
Ideally the government shouldn't care if the bidder is making a profit. It is their duty to spend public funds frugally. Cost-plus makes it impossible to reign in contract spending without terminating the contract.
Because Members of Congress basically need to continuously raise money, there’s always an incentive to spread the wealth among congressional districts.
For the F35, I can think of one company in a rural area who fabricates some metal component for the project. Because of the way it is contracted, acceptance standards, etc they sell it for something like 50x it’s value of you were to order it, and whomever gets the part spends even more to receive it.
Planes are small and have lots of parts, so they suffer more from these issues. We’re still ok at building warships, because you can’t build a shipyard in some coal town in Kentucky.
The problem of pork barrels is that it gets them votes directly by making things worse for everybody else in exchange for local benefits. Disproportionate representation is what enables it as a tactic or at least makes it more disastrous. Something which serves the interests of 30% of the population is closer to benefitting the whole than one for 3% of the population.
In the modern environment, material pork barrel spending is at the corporate/national level. Most congressional districts due to gerrymandering or demographics are very secure... the era of political machines handing out turkeys is gone.
If the craven corruption around defense contracting was only 80% as wasteful as it is today, you could give every member of congress a substantial slush fund to waste and still save money. Plus you would have working fighter jets that are able to compete with countries like Russia, that has a GDP equivalent to Texas but seems to be able to procure weapons.
It just seems to be what people say when these programs fail, but I don't hear this said about programs that have succeeded.
Not for this project.
ARPA was always kind of a jobs program, but nonetheless it created the internet at the same time as NASA was putting a man on the moon, the government was successfully building the interstate highways and Bell Labs was Bell Labs instead of whatever it is now.
Today we get the F-35 and the Big Dig and whatever other money furnace du jour that consumes more resources than the space race but has yet to put a single human on Mars or make fusion work or cure cancer or whatever else things it could have done but hasn't.
Something's different.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._historical_fusi...
So it's different from those other projects.
-The Prophecy of The Thirteenth Marshmallow
...everything in USA military.
Have we won a war in your parents' lifetimes? Have any of our many military misadventures accomplished any of the goals cited as justification? Has anyone in the Pentagon ever been fired for spending too much money? Does the Pentagon even have any idea what it spends on what?
(The answer to all these questions is "no".)
Alas, building machines of destruction seems to the prerogative.
But I believe that one of the things that happened to the military aviation industrial complex was that in the WW2, early Cold War era, planes and military development programs were very much driven by individuals or very small teams responsible for designing the requirements, overseeing the planning, and the outcome of new aircraft. That was how you got such distinctive (and long lasting designs) that served well the needs of the military, even in use up to today. Let's call it (using today's fashionable term, "passion" about the aircraft, and unwillingness to put out a piece of crap.) You could name who was responsible for an aircraft design.
But in the 1970s, 1980s, something happened where the size of projects or the professionalization of military projects caused them to have distributed (read, lack of) ownership by very critical people, and instead by an anonymous/dispersed "committee style" management. Also, the experts within the military often left for better pastures at the contractors (NG, LM, etc).
Add to that the requirement (by Congress, regulation) that you couldn't just use your expert / private connections to other experts to "get things done" and bring in contractors who had expertise, and instead had to farm out RFPs to every company, get their bland input, and fill out a heat map of who did what best, and cobble together a solution "mutually acceptable to all stakeholders".
So no longer was an aircraft project owned by someone who had very certain opinions about what was needed, and not needed, and who something should be designed for. But instead, projects follow a certain recipe, hoping that form produces function, yet not actually produce useful output because of what happens when you lack ownership. You cannot today name who is responsible for an aircraft design (I would say). It is the metaphorical side project among many, of a large dispersed group of people.
It seems to me something was missed in the migration to this new method of working.
But as I said, I would love to hear corroborating observations about whether this was a major factor.
15. Never do business with the (damned) Navy!
- congressional oversight increased, with the result that the purchasing authority is no longer generally the end user. We aren’t just buying a ship (plane, gun, etc.), we’re maintaining a logistics and manufacturing industrial base to produce that type of item (and maintain jobs in congressional districts). So maybe we should buy a few more tanks/ships/bombs than we need so that we don’t forget how. (A bit dubious, but it’s one of the reasons we make the funding decisions we do.)
- risk tolerance shrank. Especially in war time there was a high tolerance for risk if the payoff was big enough. These days our risk tolerance is basically zero. I once had to get an admiral to sign off on a risk hazard assessment with an estimated likelihood of ~1e-18 (you’re more likely to win the powerball jackpot twice). There was a cap that might pop off an item at high speed during flight, and if it hit someone they would probably miss a day of work. By the likelihood/consequence framework for risk management, that meant it required an admiral’s signature. You can’t move fast in an environment like that.
- complexity increased. Old schools systems like a WW2 jeep were designed and prototyped in 40 days because they were incredibly simple and made liberal use of COTS parts. There’s an argument to be made that maybe we don’t need such complex systems to meet requirements, but I don’t think anyone is arguing that we should be replacing all the F-35 fleet with a WW2-style aircraft. (Although there have been proposals to build super-simple aircraft for CAS missions, etc.)
There's a lot of truth here and it plays out in even more ways than that. I look back through documentation of legacy systems and see so many things designed based on "engineering judgement". Sizing for that bearing? Engineering judgement. Thickness of other minor structure? Engineering judgement.
Now, the load on every little thing requires a 50 page engineering calculation report with figures, charts, and tables, that takes 3 months to prepare and another month to get reviewed by everyone. The littlest things now take forever.
In the 50s and 60s when 'engineering judgement' was common, it was a signal to a skilled machinist that "You have more experience with the material, so use your best guess because I don't know what the right answer is".
Things have changed a lot!
1. Material quality is much higher. Which is to say that batch-to-batch variance is vastly reduced. This means that it's worth investing the effort in detailed understanding of the material because that material is more predictable. Which led to ...
2. We understand a _LOT_ more about material science. Our knowledge of materials is vastly higher, so things that used to be 'best guess' are now 'do this because it will reliably work'. e.g. Spallation and galling used to be poorly understood issues that were worked around based on personal experience and guesswork. Now we understand them very well, and any competent manufacturer will clearly explain exactly how to (eg) install their bearing in a way that prevents such issues.
3. Expertise shifted. The 'machinist' is no longer a 20-year experienced highly trained person, but a CNC operator, who probably won't be within eye-sight of the running machine. So the practice of 'increase the RPM until it chatters slightly then back off' doesn't cut it any more. The answer needs to be known up-front to go into the G-code, not 'feel'. This has led to the obvious cycle where more responsibility moved to the engineering end, which increased the demand for exact knowledge, which reduced the requirements on machinists, which led to lower skill, which further moved responsibility to engineering.
So I totally get pining for the era of 'engineering judgement', but it died for a reason and it's not really likely to come back!
It's not so much that I yearn for the era of engineering judgement so much as I yearn for refocusing on work that's important. Not every little decision needs to written up in professional report, circulated around through multiple drafts, signed off by 4-5 people, briefed out in slide deck form, then never read again.
Ironically most modern weapons programs do the exact opposite.
Costs increase.
So they cut orders.
Which just makes the per unit costs increase even more.
So they cut orders again.
Repeat until program fails.
Or useful infrastructure, at least.
Building parks & hospitals doesn’t contribute to national defense, and it doesn’t develop or maintain the skills of welders who can join absurdly thick plates in the hull of a ship, or folks who can work with composites and thin aluminum, etc.
I’m not arguing that the system is working or that we have the right balance. But it’s not a simple “don’t build bombs, build hospitals” dichotomy.
Neither does spending astronomical sums on a system that never reaches operational readiness.
In a "good war" like WW2 we should recognize that fighting that war is worth the risk and that casualties are going to happen. We don't need our own aircraft to compromise their performance to be 99.9% reliable instead of 99%, because we strongly believe we need to e.g. beat Hitler.
[1] http://pippaettore.com/Horrific_WWII_Statistics.html [2] https://www.safety.af.mil/Portals/71/documents/Aviation/Airc...
CAS = Close air support
The US almost never operates in contested airspace. For that, the F-35 (as the F-22 before it) is overkill.
Do you see a need for manned weapon systems that can survive engagement with other manned weapon systems in the near future? I'm thinking semi-autonomous drones can replace a lot of such systems and, if you can build them quickly and cheaply enough (as in it takes a $1M missile from a $50M plane to down a $1M drone), then you can build lots and lots of them to overwhelm your opponents.
It’s a modern remix to the Kelly Johnson and Ben Rich days of developing legendary aircraft at Lockheed’s Skunkworks that you lamented the loss of.
People in the know confirm it’s legit and shocking, in a good way. Especially compared to the failures of the F-35 and even the F-22’s development.
[0] https://www.airforcemag.com/article/ropers-ngad-bombshell/
We saw many advances during world War I and world War II because instead of rewarding companies with contracts that voted for politicians, all everyone cared about was defeating the enemy.
My suggestion is that the military should put out specs for what it wants and then put out big cash prizes for getting it done similar to what was done with the Covid vaccine. Say a $1 billion prize for a modern tank design. And then a fixed price for each one delivered thereafter.
Anyway, k8s is mostly for lower-criticality software to be quickly added/removed, iirc, partly because unlike the normal avionics setup it allows dynamic addition/removal.
First of all how many years have we been hearing about how we'll have fully autonomous vehicles just around the corner? At least a decade.
How many years have we been hearing that human-like AI is just around the corner? At least since the 60's.
I'm skeptical (although optimistic) about massive tech breakthroughs in general. Even more so when it comes to military tech since so many in the mil. industrial complex stand to benefit from the trillions that the DoD sloughs off every few years for the next big thing.
Not an aviator but spent almost a decade in the military. You used to hear all the time about the latest and greatest tech that was going to change the way we fight.
At least in my nearly 10 years nothing really changed in any substantial way. incremental improvements, sure but no massive breakthroughs like are continually trumpeted in popular press.
I hope you're right though!
General AI showing up will be kind of like the discovery of quantum mechanics and the nuclear bomb. No matter how much speculative fiction we write about it, we won't be able to predict ahead of time how transformative it will be on society once it actually exists.
They call it AI, but the "intelligence" there is just a name.
But the right software would cost a lot of money, and since it would be new, it would need customer buy-in up front (aerospace is in some ways very risk averse when it comes to adopting new workflow tech).
I think there's a revolution waiting to happen in bringing down aerospace design cost and schedule and increasing the ability to iterate on designs. I'm hoping NGAD is the sign of something big that will trickle down soon to the civilian aerospace world.
Do things 10x better he says, and then you will have so much network effect that you can do things 10x worse and people still have a hard time getting rid of you.
I think you bring up great points. This could be a case of low hanging fruit being picked. We are at the point where everything being added is just bells and whistles since the foundation has already been built.
Not to mention the F-16 itself, which the F-35 was meant to replace:
1972: RFP for prototypes
1974: Maiden flight of the first prototype
1975: Production begins
1980: The aircraft officially enters service
The sad thing is when a downturn happens those bureaucrats saying you can't change the logo will probably keep their jobs while the engineers who could probably be making pretty cool stuff if they had better leadership will be out of work.
Having encountered the quality (hahahah ... sob) they produce personally, I'm totally unsurprised US Navy and USMC could find funding a new fleet of space satellites cheaper than re-bribing enough senators to get ALIS (and now ODIN) contract reassigned to someone competent.
Oddly, they used F-15s to provide escort. This attack took place after two Phantom F-4-E of Iran missed.
Recognizing that is a big assumption of truth, would anyone here be willing to posit an explanation?
But also opportunity. Even widespread mains electricity is fairly new back then, there were a lot of fairly obvious opportunities to quickly exploit.
For me personally, I think it's just the point we're at in the current technological revolution (in the Carlota Perez sense). We're due for a new one (maybe biotech, eg. driven by crispr, mrna, etc.) so things feel stale.
We don't invest in research like we should.
Basically nobody is willing to take any risk for anything.
This is on every level, from being wrong about a simple decision all the way up to not taking any personal risk with your life.
And it’s impossible to argue against it because at any point you can always make an argument for reduction of risk, and anyone arguing against it is demonized.
How can you argue against more health and safety standards after all? More rigourous engineering standards? More environmental protection standards? More consultation with the public?
But it’s not just a government thing, it’s on a societal level. In large companies it’s the same exact phenomenon of buck passing and responsibility dodging.
Each thing only has a tiny multiplicative cost, but the sum total of all of it is the inability to make any progress.
What else is there to build? Spaceships? For what? We’ve seen Mars and the Moon. More military crap? USA already won now it’s just showing off. AI stuff? Turns out people think it’s creepy and they like to keep their jobs anyway because it makes them money. Mega structures and arcologies? NIMBY!
We’re in the long tail of cool shit now. Each generation gets harder and harder to impress.
That explains it right there if you take the theory as true. WW2, Cold War. I mean even the moon landing was part of that cold war era technology advancement.
So now instead of governments/military pushing for needs, it's now companies trying to innovate for money. Which can work, but you need CEOs to take risks like Musk or even Jobs.
Also, most digital technology is developed outside of the government procurement / military industrial complex, so all the problems inherent to those systems do not apply.
If the Singularity is reachable, it doesn't depend on the ability to create aircraft or weapons of any sort, whereas it would be impossible to reach the Singularity without digital technology.
If you compare the speed of innovation between now and 30 years ago, the change is quite dramatic.
There will not ever be a Singularity.
Sure, probably for them that will just look like how it looks now to us.
Science continues on and incredible discoveries are made all the time. But when it comes to building incredible things... there just isn’t any push for it right now.
The first is that all the "cool shit" we built in the first half of the century was the low-hanging fruit of new scientific understandings and materials.
It's not that we were smarter, it's nothing to do with toxicity, it's just that we exhausted most of what you can easily do with nuclear, steel, engines, etc.
The second misunderstanding is that we're not still building amazing things. Being able to access Wikipedia or Google through speech recognition, or talk to anyone in the world from a cheap videophone in your pocket, is astonishing.
And the third is that flying cars somehow respresent the future. But flying car enthusiasts only focus on the "cool" aspect of it, rather than nuts-and-bolts issues like how they could be fuel efficient, how an average driver will avoid fatal crashes, if we really want urban skies filled with visual, noise and emissions pollution, etc. Flying cars exist. But they don't make any economic or practical sense to use.
If you think we're still not accomplishing astonishing things today, you're not paying attention. Did you notice, for example, how multiple companies put together COVID vaccines in record time? How is that not amazing?
In trying to map out whether I could get from my house to my local airport exclusively on roads with 30 mph or lower speed limits, I had a hard time proving it. All of the obvious routes that I actually use had at least one segment with a speed limit of 35 mph or higher, which is barred by my state law (Massachusetts).
Terrible. Absolutely hopeless. Every few years I have another go at speech recognition, and it still sucks.
Or you're dictating an urgent message on your watch while you're out running without your phone.
Or, you know, you're physically impaired.
I'm actually surprised that the watch would work for that without the phone.
It wouldn't have network, so it works offline by itself and saves the urgent message until it regains a network connection?
I'm very thankful that I'm not physically impaired so I'm not forced to rely on the garbage that is the current state of voice commands.
I find it so infuriating to use that I won't do it, but you go for it. Perhaps your training data will improve it enough to eventually arrive at a usable state.
The first thing that springs to mind is the fact that the covid-19 vaccine was imagined, developed and started to be synthesized over the course of a single weekend.
Piggy-backing off the efforts of mRNA vaccines for the past decade or two, and existing efforts for personalized cancer immuno-oncology vaccines.
There ain't no chance you figure out the lipid nanoparticle magic in a weekend.
(Indeed, it's not really figured out: what we have is inadequate for mRNA drugs, which are the holy grail... but the shortcomings were realized to be useful for vaccines ~a decade ago).
If you give smart people with a good idea a lot of resources to chase it while insulating them from people who want to measure/validate/manage/mandate, you often get good results and sometimes get complete failures.
It is a problem of middle management interfering with the development process, red tape, trying to do everything at once, and requirements that constantly change.
I read a headline and article like that and my immediate reaction is the military leader probably wants to make a name for himself spearheading a new plane – ambition on the part of customers in military acquisition is a real problem. (why are navy ships so big? because navy captains wouldn't feel as important with more, smaller ships)
The problems have little to do with the end-stage production manufacturing, and a lot to do with the engineering R&D.
Until you start executing companies (or CEOs) for incompetence you will keep getting the same results.
And if you have it, the government has already shown it is willing and capable enough to confiscate it.
The only way to make money is to be willing to sell when things look like they are going down the drain.
And if things are ever that far gone, we are back to a barter economy.
Hyperinflation isn't something a central bank is causing. It's a response to an underlying event. It happens precisely when the government has no choice but to print money.
Right now the US government has zero obligations that force it to produce more dollars. The stimulus packages are entirely voluntary and designed to help the economy and therefore reduce the need for future stimulus.
I sadly agree. Unis spend so much time teaching CAD software, processes, etc, you wonder how much understanding engineering grads actually have. I just think we've stagnated as a technological society. We rely so much on computers to do everything, that we can't innovate in the same way anymore. Unless our new x has an onboard super-computer, we just can't get it to do anything.
That's interesting. The popular sentiment in programming world seem to be Unis don't tech practical stuff enough, or interviews for (junior) developers don't test their practical knowledge enough- a point I always found a bit strange.
In an engineering department (as in not CS) I'd say the bias is overwhelmingly towards the math end of the spectrum, partly because faculty largely don't even keep up with the technology. You'd have to heavily revise your course constantly (imagine teaching how to use google products...). Plus it just feels less worthwhile teaching things that will become obsolete in a few years.
Oh and by the way we need to teach them to write better too. Kids can't communicate these days. And economics. And ethics. It ends up being a very tight squeeze we can cram in maybe two courses on programming if it's a top priority.
I think the point might be that there might be a sweet spot somewhere between
- demanding Java code to be created by students using only Notepad and javac
and
- just teaching the latest js trends
I think it is fully possible - and a lot more motivating - to teach theoretical problems hand in hand with practical problems.
In a way, F-35 (but also recent F-16) suffer from related issues, where the complexity of maintenance is staggering, and the tools you're given to help manage that suck too much.
For a humorous take on the U.S. military platform problem, look for a movie called The Pentagon Wars [1] starring Kelsey Grammar and Cary Elwes. It came out in 1998, and very little has changed since then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...
He also was staunch supporter of replicating Volksjäger concept, which was fortunately laughed out of the room (even dumbest Soviet design at the time wasn't that dumb)
> had it through FDA trials in under a year.
That was by political decision, at least that is my understanding.
Nuclear reactor design: mostly already considered by the Navy in the 50s and 60s.
Space Exploration: Space shuttle was reusable too. Rockets that could land were demonstrated in the 90s IIRC (admittedly SpaceX improved on this quite a bit).
Electric/Renewable Powered Aircraft: Soviet Union had a hydrogen powered airliner.
I'm not saying the new stuff isn't impressive. It is and those small improvements add up to a lot, but it's not revolutionary in the way a jet engine or a nuclear reactor was.
The science that made this possible was in the works for decades, and it took Moderna and BioNTech many many years to get the technology right.
So that's many years of effort with the stated goal of getting a vaccine out the door fast when it's needed. But there was relatively little "science" left to be done when COVID struck.
The only interesting aspect here are the logistics to make vaccines in the required quantities, and honestly it's not looking too great, considering where we are with vaccinations. Though maybe it just wouldn't have been possible to make doses any quicker, regardless of effort.
So, yeah, I'm fully aware of it, I was just responding to the comment above, using the same context. (The very point of the mRNA vaccines is that they are a generic and easy to use platform where we can get a vaccine candidate very quickly.)
Want an example of crazy cool shit we just accomplished? Covid vaccine. Creating a vaccine/testing in less than a year and now distributing it at such a massive scale will likely go down in history as an event akin to the Manhattan Project.
We do everything opposite these days: no thinking about requirements, huge teams, no budget, off-the-shelf everything, over-think everything, OK with failure (because golden parachutes, team churn, and "blameless" culture), and wait 5 months for the bulldozers to get shipped here.
The problem today is that we've got no damn clue who we're meant to be fighting against and it's been 30 years since the US has engaged in a war where air superiority was even an issue. The level of development in the US right now isn't "We need to build a system that's better than North Korea's" it's more like "Hey guys, I totally think we could build a system that plucks NK's ICBMs out of the air before they even jettison their first shroud".
There's no reason clear and direct motivation for these systems. So the purpose gets lost and we build something with a thousand bells and whistles because we're desperately trying to find some reason for it to exist.
I think that I am misunderstanding this paragraph. You mean the speed at which a new inventions was put into production, right?
It could be my English failing me but putting it through a translator did not help.
We will probably never learn the truth as none of us were there.
I have always been told that Japan was already ready to surrender and that dropping the bombs was simply the first step into the cold war -- a bombing to show strength to the USSR.
"The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan." - Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet
"The use of [the atomic bombs] at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons" - Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, President Truman's Chief of Staff
"The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment ... It was a mistake to ever drop it ... [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it." - Fleet Admiral William Halsey Jr., 1946
Etc.
That is a shockingly flippant quote that shows a lack of critical analysis. Disappointing.
There was a political message in bombing Japan that communicated to Russia (and supported China). There was utility for the US. The Japanese were both divided and weighing on who to surrender to. The Japanese Imperial Army were notoriously staunch in their bushido teachings and with a lack of cohesion at the highest ranks, some would undoubtedly continue to follow orders. eg There were tens of thousands ready to repel an American land invasion in Kyushu* It had the desired effect in practical Japanese military planning.
* https://www.stripes.com/news/special-reports/world-war-ii-th...
Agreed, outside the US this is a common understanding. If you've visited the Hiroshima museum in Japan, you'll note that's also the stated position of the museum: the purpose of the bombings was not so much to defeat Japan, but to show Russia what the US was technically capable of and willing to pull off (I can't remember the exact words, but this is the gist of the museum's position). I'm not saying the museum is impartial on this topic, of course -- that's just an example, and there are many outside Japan too.
However, I've noticed that in online discussions with people from the US, they often don't acknowledge this. Perhaps because as a strategy it was long-term and cold-blooded. So they focus on how Japan was a genocidal empire, how the average citizen blindly followed the Emperor and would fight to the death, how the atomic bombs helped prevent more bloodshed, etc.
A similar issue is how Band of Brothers, an otherwise excellent show, re-enforced the idea that D Day happened to stop the holocaust. Those who've read a bit more history however know it was to stop the soviets from marching all the way to Portugal, and that the US and allies declined to take even simple measures like bombing the railway lines to the death camps to fight the holocaust. In particular the treatment of holocaust survivors like a game of hot potato afterwards makes clear what the priorities actually were.
I'm also not from the US, and I was similarly surprised when I found their position on this piece of history differs with how it's learned in pretty much the rest of the world.
Speak to someone outside the US about the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: most, if not all, will say it was a terrible thing, almost a war crime. In some (Western!) countries the consensus is that it was a crime, but because it was perpetrated by the victor, it went unpunished. We outside of the US are also aware of the dissenters who spoke against the bombing, how it wasn't necessary, etc.
Speak about the same with someone from the US: more likely than not, they'll admit it was a terrible thing, but emphasize it was necessary to win the war, how the Japanese were fanatical and weren't going to surrender without heavy bloodshed, etc.
If anything, it's an interesting exploration of national perceptions...
But from the American perspective: it's easy to buy into the false narrative that the nuclear bombs "saved lives." We've all been raised with this notion that American is Inherently Good and that anything Bad America did was for the Greater Good.
The Post-911 world has made it more socially acceptable to say that the country isn't inherently good (well, maybe the Post-GFC world). We are allowed to acknowledge the atrocities perpetrated in the past and have more open and honest discussions about it.
I think portraying it as the "truth" isn't very accurate. There's many versions of history and none is the "truth".
Right before the bombs were dropped, the US was in a situation where they were trying to end WW2 and they did not want the Soviets to invade Japan (which they did anyways). Before Trinity, the US was bombing the hell of out of Japan already. ~100K Japanese died in Toyko in a single night [2], and other cities were being bombed also. The US was also under the impression (because of a few previous land invasions) that the Japanese were fighting to the death. There were mass suicides of 1000s because the Japanese wanted to die instead of get captured [1]. (The emperor did not agree to the Potsdam Declaration after until the 2nd bomb was dropped) The US was planning to invade but then Trinity worked and we of course didnt.
I'm from the US, and I did not learn anything I am saying in school, I read it on my own accord. It may be wrong, but if it is wrong, tell me why it is wrong so I can learn what is right.
Basically, if you are not from the US, what scenario do the education systems think would have played out if Truman didnt ok the bombs? Also, given the US avoided the land invasion, how did that not save lives (US lives, but lives nonetheless)?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_Cliff [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo
What I find interesting is how the average US person and the average Westerner (I.e. people in the US sphere of influence during the Cold War) differ on this. To the former, it was a necessary act -- terrible but just -- to end the war. To the latter, it's an abhorrent and immoral act committed by the US.
More importantly, the US seems unaware of how the rest of the world remembers the atomic bombings. It seems many in the US readily accept the Vietnam war was immoral (the domino theory becoming less and less accepted as justification), but not as many think of Hiroshima and Nagasaki likewise.
To repeat it once more: I'm not that interested in discussing whether it was moral or justified (I've had my share of this discussion over the years) but more on why the perception of the US and the rest of the world differs so much.
Japan knew it had lost the war. The only question remaining were the conditions of surrender. Japan hoped that they would be able to negotiate a conditional surrender, with the help of the Soviet Union. Then the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, on August 8, 1945, by invading Manchuria, forcing Japan in accepting an unconditional surrender.
To quote wikipedia: "The Soviet entry into the war was a significant factor in the Japanese government's decision to surrender unconditionally, as it made apparent that the Soviet Union was not willing to act as a third party in negotiating an end to hostilities on conditional terms" [1]
Another quote: "The Japanese army went so far as to believe that they would not have to engage a Soviet attack until spring 1946. But the Soviets surprised them with their invasion of Manchuria, an assault so strong [...] that Emperor Hirohito began to plead with his War Council to reconsider surrender." [2]
Personally I don't think we will ever know why Japan War Council members made this decision. Even if the members were still alive, we (humans) have a tendency to rationalize decisions after the fact. Between nuclear bombs, that new war in Manchuria, loss of lives, and ultimately loss of hope, reasons to surrenders were aplenty.
US will push the US narrative, and dismiss the Soviet Union. Russia will do the opposite. I'm neither American nor Russian so I don't really care one way or the other.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Japanese_War
[2] https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/soviets-declare-...
The key debate within Japanese leadership was what conditions of surrender to accept. They'd known for some time they were going to lose, but hoped to drag out an invasion of Japan enough to get better concessions, keep the Emperor in power etc.
The nuclear bombings ended up not playing a huge role in their decision making. At the time all the major cities in Japan had been firebombed except Kyoto. The fission bomb technology was shocking, but ultimately it meant they did with one bomb what had already been happening via thousands. When the US firebombed Tokyo it killed over 100,000 people in a single night, mostly women, elderly men, and children. McNamara has said he believes he'd have been convicted of war crimes for that had the US not emerged the winner.
Russia steamrolling through Manchuria in just under 30 days, utterly routing the Japanese forces there weighed heavily on the minds of Japan's leadership. Once Russia declared war and was clearly committed to being part of the invasion of Japan, they realized they most likely would not be able to extract concessions by further resistance.
It's a bit more complex than all that, and there is a debate among historians on details of these points, but I believe it's reasonably accurate. The simple narrative that it saved US lives is a way of avoiding looking at just how ugly things got.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_Atomic_Bomb
Great book nonetheless.
We take the miraculous for granted when it’s frequent, sigh about the things we don’t have, and declare its all terrible.
I don’t have a fully formed opinion around how I feel about defense spending, but it’s definitely complicated.
And btw the advancements in batteries and EV is exactly what is needed actually do flying cars, if that is even a good idea in the first place.
Government programs are often massively badly managed, politically captured, this is not new. But it doesn't mean nobody is inventing anything new anymore.
Imo, it is cool shit.
The main point is the classification: Flying Cars vs 140 Characters or Bits vs Atoms. FB is worth almost $1trn. No real technical achievements or advancement. If fb didn't exist, something else would be the friendster. Tesla, Apple, MSFT, Google, etc. are closer to the flying cars end of that spectral dichotomy. We could debate where.
Thiel attracts antagonists in the same way like leftists do. Paypal, Palantir, his capital allocation theories & such are not very performant on his own flying cars VS 140 characters test. It's a hazard of being an idealist. The traditional question a leftist authors get (chomsky, etc) is about selling his books on amazon.
But yes. There certainly is a lot of failure in western economies, especially in the "public-private" realm. These aren't constructive failures, and this sort of stuff is deeply limiting. You know, cutting edge aerospace engineering is risky. Let's take easier examples. Why can't we procure buildings or do basic infrastructure without scandals and runaway costs?
Ancient civilizations managed to build incredible aqueduct systems, public buildings, etc. We've regressed.
This feels like an extreme take.
(Most) Every city in America has a functional clean water delivery network. Every city has electricity. Most cities have sewage. Most cities have very nice paved roads.
This is billions of miles of pipes, wires, roads, bridges, dams... Billions. And you're comparing what the US, and actually most economies, have accomplished in this domain to a handful of ancient roman aqueducts made of stone, transporting barely potable water, and saying that modern society has regressed? That's wild.
The public library in my city of ~800,000 people is twice the size of the Parthenon. Hell, there's a LITERAL 1:1 Parthenon replica in Nashville TN, which they basically built for the hell of it as a showcase for a fair. Across the street from me, they just finished up construction on a (I dare say, beautiful and modern) 32 story apartment building; a building like that would be the singular crown jewel of an ancient civilization, more advanced and useful than anything Rome ever built, and its not even remotely the only one in my 3rd tier US city, let alone worldwide.
Sure, the Pyramids of Giza are impressive. 455 feet tall, probably took a lifetime to build. You know who has a bigger pyramid? Fucking North Korea; the Ryugyong Hotel, 1082 feet tall, constructed in 1992. The Luxor Pyramid in Las Vegas is 350 feet tall, and its part of a fucking casino. The Memphis Pyramid in Tennessee, 321 feet tall, and its a BASS PRO SHOP. The pride-and-joy of Ancient Egypt, the effort of an entire civilization for decades, is nearly replicated in the US, and we use it to sell bait and tackle for fishing.
Is that regression? No. Its progression. We've gotten so good at putting buildings up and laying infrastructure that people are no longer impressed by any of it. Its easy to look at a Roman aqueduct as a massive feat of engineering; no one sees the miles upon miles of pipes below an average city that enable you to turn on a faucet and always have water (anomalous events aside like bad storms or the Flint crisis).
And now, squarely in the 21st century: No one sees the thousands of servers it takes to power google.com. No one sees the billions of miles of tiered fiber criss-crossing the country. No one sees the ten million dollar cooling systems, and the billions of person-hours that went into making it possible for you to search for "boobs" and receive back 1.4 billion fully indexed and browseable results. People ignore the 3.8 million pixels used to display those results on your screen. They disregard the 13.2 billion transistors in their graphics card, capable of 12 trillion floating point operations per second, and that any human in the country can order a laptop that has all of this and have it delivered to their doorstep in 48 hours. Even more impressively; most people can afford it.
The problem isn't that we've regressed. The problem is that we've lost appreciation for where we have progressed. Sure, a lot of it is by private corporations; but a lot of it isn't. And if that's what it takes to actually drive humanity forward, maybe that's the path we need to take.
(It's not even a miserable goddamned eyesore on account of being monumental! If they'd faced it in basalt or nitrided steel, it could be an amazing excrescence of the Blade Runner aesthetic into reality, and I'd love it. But, in a literally blinding display of architectural tastelessness, they had to go and make it reflective...)
> In 2015, the Pyramid re-opened as a Bass Pro Shops "megastore", which includes shopping, a hotel, restaurants, a bowling alley, and an archery range, with an outdoor observation deck adjacent to its apex.
I was going to make a Laser Moon joke [1], but then I read further down in the same article and saw that the Pyramid does in fact now also have laser tag, and I just don't know how to top that.
I'm mean that we're having a very hard time with problems that are ultimately tractable. Pyramids, aqueduct systems and other impressive endeavours were big achievements. They put a lot of resources into these things, pushed boundaries and succeeded. When it comes to public works these days, it seems that fiasco avoidance is the high bar we set.
Can we add a train system to a city from scratch? Impossible. More expensive than WW2. Think smaller. Well... such things aren't impossible. They're just hard. Equivalent projects have succeeded in the past.
Huge communication networks is what the internet does. Social networks always proliferate online. They're not technically that hard to build. Etc. We're not going to want for any of the "goods" that fb provides. That overall space is abundant.
In general I don't think that we've forgotten how to build cool shit. It's just that in a lot ways we don't have the incentive to do so anymore. When we DO have the incentive (like with COVID) we are capable of feats of engineering an innovation that are amazing. More to the point, the incentives now seem to work against rapid innovation. We tend to think of infrastructure projects and defense projects as jobs programs so nobody wants it to be done quickly.
Are capable of.
The SR-71 remains a marvel and it's unlikely that we could build something better today with the same design constraints. Which is part of why the successors to the SR-71 removed the on-board pilot (UAV) or the ability to lift-off without aid (satellites).
This is a strategic approach that both jacks up the price and gives you plenty of powerful allies who will fight to keep the program afloat.
They could very put such an aircraft together at half the cost and time if cost and time were targets for the people deciding to fund this.
[0]: Yeah, I know there are other EV manufacturers, Tesla is really not competing with them at this stage and never really was.
To be rather blunt about it, much of his rhetoric is ultimately just about saying indirect forms of "let John Galt do whatever he wants and be grateful peasant."
This is why he's financially supported Yarvin, who quite literally wants to turn the world into a technocratic monarchy, with some very nasty "scientific racism" style stuff mixed in. It's a drop in the bucket compared to Thiel's wealth, but he clearly has no problem providing millions of dollars in support of this kind of thinking.
Also pay attention to how Palantir does business. They behave very similarly to Lockhead Martin when it comes to over promising their technology and under delivering in order to pull as much money off the table as possible, including from governments.
With regard to Yarvin I have no idea what Yarvin wants because he takes 10,000 words to explain himself and I can never find the energy to finish reading anything by him. He has a much less long winded brother who has a somewhat interesting blog though (totally unrelated topics to the better known Yarvin). I do think it is good that people like Thiel support these sort of thinkers though. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and I'm sure some of their ideas have merit.
There are some great interviews from the 70s on YouTube with some of the first high ranking officials within NASA speaking rather candidly about how terrible it was there. Everyone hated them: Congress, Military Brass, the American public.
I'm actually quite tired of it and I'm looking elsewhere.
Also, well
"Fission was discovered in 1938/1939 and we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. No chance we could do something like that in this toxic environment of today"
I believe some people consider WW2 and the nuclear wipeout of 2 cities of common people to be "toxic environment", too.
Not an affiliate link: https://www.amazon.com/Kelly-More-Than-Share-All/dp/08747449...
The root of the F-35 program's problems is a cost plus style contract that gave Lockheed every incentive to overrun on cost and time table. Ash Carter fixed that by telling Lockheed if they didn't agree to his new contract he'd kill the entire thing. And oh hey what a surprise suddenly the marginal cost of a new F-35 started hitting the target numbers.
The aircraft itself is apparently excellent at what it does, but that doesn't erase just how much grift was involved in this program for decades.
The other big thing driving the Air Force to heavily restructure it's approach is they know they just can't have these decades long development programs. They want to be able to iterate much faster. It's all still classified, but apparently the first few attempts at this more agile approach are in fact actually working, like with the NGAD program.
"Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence'
Human societies have become incredibly more complex over time, and development of communication has contributed to it.
The point I am trying to make here is that this is not cultural decline, but rather a society that has grown incredibly more complex, while we humans have not learnt how to deal with it.
I’m fond of the saying “once you understand people’s incentives, you understand everything” as it applies to contracting.
I will add, however, that fixed price contracts have their own problems as it relates to cutting corners. E.g., it can put downward pressure on retaining talent and performing best practices because it incentivizes under-bidding and then cutting corners to make a profit. E.g., “you cobbled together some VBA in a spreadsheet once 20 years ago and will work for pennies? Congratulations, you’re our new head of software development!”
A lot of the problems can be attributed to poor contract/spec management and poor oversight. Part of the key is having good requirements and also the contractual teeth/intestinal fortitude to hold contractors feet to the fire
I ran across an interesting one earlier, understanding Maslow's Needs by negative example: We usually say that, when someone has food and shelter and safety, when they have friends and feel a sense of belonging, they can pursue higher stuff. And we know at some level that if someone is starving, they will do anything to find food -- civilized behavior goes out the window in that mode. But we forget that if someone has no friends and doesn't feel a sense of belonging, they will also stop at nothing to rectify THAT.
Suddenly so much conspiracy stuff makes sense.
Those are usually called “hygiene factors” in the literature.
"Hygiene" for the record has nothing to do with deodorant, at least not per se, but instead the willingness to remove negative traits. However, just because you remove negative traits doesn't mean you have any positives. Just cuz you took a shower this morning, wear clean clothes, and trim your fingernails doesn't mean you're not an asshole, and that we should friends with you.
Same deal with jobs, cultures, etc. The work may be risky and dangerous, but if there are enough positives to outweigh those negatives, people might stick around. But even if you strip out the negatives, people will eventually float away from jobs that aren't fulfilling or that don't offer any positives.
https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2018/10/02/no-its-not-the-in...
There’s a distinction to be made between excusing bad behavior, but rather they explaining it. The article seems focused on the former, I’m more interested in the latter.
There are intrinsic and extrinsic incentives. I think the important part not touched upon is that for those actors extrinsically motivated (e.g., status, money, etc.) the system incentive will influence behavior much more than those more affected by intrinsic motivations.
The article is right that extrinsic motivations don’t excuse immoral behavior but when morals are lacking external controls are still needed. Developing the right extrinsic incentives provides guardrails for those who tend to lack intrinsic motivation that align. The article seems to think the solution is to “just act morally” which works at the individual level but that’s not really a policy at a system level (especially once we acknowledge everyone doesn’t share the same goals/motivations/morals)
I’ve found people are very risk adverse in this regard and would prefer to select the lowest bid instead of potentially defending their decision during a protest.
select the best solution to meet your needs, mostly irregardless of cost, but be sure you can articulate why you are buying from A.
I.e. You can pick whatever vendor you want, provided you are happy to stand up, under oath, in court and talk about WHY you selected vendor A over vendors B, C and D.
So far so I have no experience in court defending our choices.
I.e. if you aren't willing to stand up in court and talk about why Tootie is better than Tito, despite Tito being 10% cheaper, you better be selecting Tito or looking for another job.
https://blog.theodorewatson.com/understanding-the-federal-go...
I was NOT directly involved in F-35, so I can't speak to the exact amount of sleaze that occurred with the prime contractor.
I'd love to see a real competition! (new contractors, new ideas, new teams, new airframe ideas). And two engines, yeesh.
Anyways, cost plus is great at moving risk to the government. FFP is at the other end of the spectrum, moving all risk to the contractor.
[Unnecessary edit: I'm a fan of the textron scorpion-as a light attack fighter we could modify]
This is why R&D projects can't be treated in the same way as delivery of well understood tech that simply needs to be mass produced well and efficiently.
Of course, the contractors probably skim a little bit off the top of the 20 million back to themselves. They might for example bill for machine team on the CNC or charge $200/hr per an employee and only pay $60 (note that they have expenses for training, downtime, office space, equipment and management which that 200/hour needs to account for so the employee isn't getting screwed that badly.
Less moral contractors might build projects which intentionally fail but meet the specifications so that the gov't needs to execute a change order at which point they would get additional fee as part of the change order, however with the DOD you can get your company put on a blacklist which will mean you cannot win any more DOD contracts. But I have heard of a California construction company doing that repeatedly over the course of 30 years successfully. In the dod world, most companies try to propose improvements to the original contract. Typically they will have yearly goals associated with submitting and winning change orders as its an easier source of revenue than bidding and winning new contracts which typically have a 30% win rate.
I agree with your overall opinion but I do think the govt has a lot of residual risk in cost-plus. When a contractor is incentivized to cut corners, the mitigation is govt oversight. Meaning the contractor can keep cutting corners until caught. Since the govt ultimately owns these systems they can be left holding the bag (particularly when requirement specs are weak)
Take the requirements for example. If they aren’t airtight, you’ll get into a wordsmithing scenario where the contractor claims they met the requirement and it becomes a game where the team with the best lawyer wins. Write the requirements too explicitly and contractors will push back saying “tell us what you want, not how we’re supposed to do it.”
A somewhat silly example is if you specify you want unit testing on all safety critical code paths a contractor may claim they define running a compiler as “unit testing”. A contracting officer may not be technically savvy enough to push back and when the subject matter experts try to leave negative contract comments (that get reviewed when awarding future contracts) they get scrubbed because its not worth the fight in the eyes of the contracting officer.
Unfortunately, just saying “do good work” just doesn’t...work
With DoD you have to add in various accountability steps, political footballs, public opinion, etc.
If you've spent time around the DC area you'd be shocked at the number of adverts for things like the F-22 that you see. One time I took the metro from NoVA to MD, with a stop off downtown, and counted at least 6. They're not just bringing lawyers and playing contractor games, they're aggressively marketing to everyone.
Those kinds of purchases being swayed by subway ads... I really hope it's a joke.
The problem with massive development efforts like this is that there aren't a lot of competitors. In this particular field, there are two, and not really even quite two exactly.
Lockheed, Boeing, Northrup, etc...
The F-20 may have been the last time an aircraft company ever pitched an airplane developed on the company's money. Despite being highly praised by all who flew it (including Chuck Yeager), it's ugly demise at the hands of politics (it was less than half the price of the F-16) was an example to all to never do this again...
Does anyone have any views on what constitutes canonical reading on incentives? Some of the classic game theory works? Would love to hear opinions on this.
In fact, I will go a step further - most incentives are chosen by well meaning people. There is neither malice nor incompetence going on. What happens is that every incentive can be perverted, and will be perverted over time. Over time, then that incentive, that was once chosen with good intentions, becomes perverse.
> When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
In my experience, it might actually be a useful approximation of reality.
I get this, but I also wonder if the same kind of bugs or unintended behavior in a software system aren't just as likely in the protocols, procedures, and chains of command we build for humans to deploy that weaponry. You've got AI doomsday (a la "War Games") on one hand, and bureaucratic doomsday ("Doctor Strangelove") on the other.
For example it's very possible that a "Should I launch the nukes?" algorithm would've come up with a different answer than Stanislav Petrov did[1]. There's a similar story about US missileers disregarding a glitch in their own command and control system on Okinawa but the authenticity is suspect.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_al...
(it's not like these bombers are built to sustain high G forces anyway)
It’s a strategic bomber, not a fighter.
Repeating the same old "lol quadrocopter go 2000g brrrrrt" meme just makes you look stupid.
Though AVM was killed by sequestrations, the work continued in other programs — and of course there was a lot of learning taken from various unclassified programs to behind the green door, so to speak.
For the clueless like me, NGAD doesn't stand for "Not Give A Damn", but for "Next-Generation Air Dominance"; or less pompously, a sixth-generation jet fighter.
The concept of modularity is a sound one. Imagine this: You buy an F35 and it comes with 2 sets of wings. It has a empty bay just behind the pilot, and it also comes with a lift engine and a spare fuel tank, and a tailhook that can be easily slotted into place if you want it. A trained ground crew, in a couple of hours, can swap parts around and turn it into an A, B or C variant, and then into another one for its next mission.
The problem is that the materials needed to create such a F35 kit don't exist and won't for the foreseeable future. So what you end up with is 3 similar looking aircraft that happen to share the same name and have a vague resemblance but have surprisingly little in common, for triple the price.
The common bits are actually really useful to have in common. The radar is expensive to develop. The optical sensors are too. Engines are expensive, and the F135 engine is like 1/6 of the aircraft's cost.
Development is a bit more expensive, because you have 3 airframes with slightly different characteristics, but much of it the same between the three as far as systems that go inside.
It's definitely not 3x the price to develop the 3 different variants.
And they're buying new F-35s for cheaper than a new F-16.
I disagree, there have been cases where it could have been very useful. For example in the 1980s the RAF were operating the Harrier for the close support role (from austere forward airfields) and the RN were operating the Sea Harrier for air defence, but when the Falklands War kicked off, RAF aircraft were brought onto the carriers. The RAF were also operating the Tornado for long-range bombing and another variant of Tornado for air defence, plus the Jaguar. That's 4 different aircraft that could be merged into a "kit" F35 if it were possible to do so.
The F-35B is explicitly the replacement for the Harrier (Sea or regular). The F-35A is designed for both interdiction/strike (it is a "strike fighter"), as well as being able to swing role[0] into air defense. The F-35C is explicitly only for USN requirements. No one else is going to be buying them, because the only allied country that operates CATOBAR aircraft is France, who likes their Rafales.
For all of the F135 being literally the most powerful low bypass turbofan in the world, it's still not enough power to be able to adequetely lift the F-35B without the B being lightened compared to the A. It's not just parts they left off, like the arresting hook, but different parts to shave weight. For example, the weapons bays are smaller. Tails are smaller. Airframe structure is lighter, which reduces durability, and also limits the maximum g-load (22% lower! than the A model). They also had to make the attachment of the wings more difficult compared to earlier plans, because the easier wing attachments weighed too much. The left shoulder of the aircraft are different, because the A model has a gun there that the others don't. These limitations are baked in, and unbaking them would make it too heavy to be able to perform the required role.
[0]: Swing role is more than just being able to do more than one role, but being able to do both of them during the same flight.
Meanwhile F-35B exists pretty much only due to USMC to the point that I would be doubtful of any praise for the F-35 if it came from USMC crew. Then it got pushed as option for export, often seemingly presenting F-35B as being as capable as F-35A.
Meanwhile the ALIS without which F-35 is an expensive paperweight turned out to be a very expensive turd, that finally got renamed as ODIN after awarding the new contract to the same group that fscked up ALIS :/
The F-35B is obviously not going to be capable in the same way as the A. However it's significantly more capable than the Harrier, which is the important part for everyone buying it. There is no other current STOVL carrier fighter jet available. And the reduced capabilities may largely not matter to those users, in exchange for the increased capabilities for being able to launch them off ships/very limited area land strips. I think the only nation that is going to not be launching them off ships is Singapore, which is very restricted in land area.
You speak in the past tense but both are actually in the water now! One of them is working up for her first live deployment.
I personally don't believe that CATOBAR was ever an option on these ships, there are too many clues. One is that both cats and traps are enormous pieces of machinery that need to be integrated with the hull and dissipate enormous amounts of heat, they can't be pasted in afterwards, they have to be designed in from the start. The catapults require steam or electrical power for EMALS, the QE class can't do steam and can't generate that much power. Operating cats and traps needs lots of deck crew, there aren't enough people without growing the RN by a few thousand people all told. And finally keeping pilots current for arrested landings isn't feasible if you want the freedom to embark RAF crews at short notice, who have only used runways. Basically BAe said they could do it as a tickbox exercise in the planning stages, but when the government looked at doing it and switching to F35C, it would have cost as much as rebuilding them both from scratch.
I have heard the opposite from a test pilot who has flown it. He fucking hates it.
https://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/f-35-faces-mos...
Chip Berke is an F22 and F35 test pilot, and the first F35 Squadron commander. He's probably the most qualified person on the planet to talk about fifth gen aircraft: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxK6O5--9Z0&t=203s
EDIT: Although to be fair, I wrote that before looking at your links, I feel like that context is important (although I stand by my statement).
The F35 has been badly politicized, but it has also been the victim of an absolute shitload of criticism from people who want it to be something it was never intended to be and are unhappy that the F22 was cancelled early.
If it were just that Colonel Berke liked the plane, it would be one thing. He really explains it in detail in the video. I'll admit I wasn't quite sold on the the plane years ago, but once I saw this video it pretty thoroughly changed my mind.
I realize the video is a bit long, and I almost never post links to videos -- but this one is well worth the watch.
What made his criticisms ironically stupid was he'd never even SEEN the jet up close, or spoken to an actual pilot, only reviewed documents and read memos, until the very end of his tenure as Director of OT&E. He was not retained when Gen. Mattis took over as SecDef.
I've heard nothing but praise for LtCol. Chip Berke. He is a great fighter pilot, although now retired from the USMC.
The man cannot criticize the project publicly. In fact, he and his squadron probably have real opinions that never leave their base locker rooms.
What Colonel Berke did in that video is quite the opposite of “not criticize”.
A cost-plus contract is a contributor, but not the root of why the JSF program went astray.
The fundamental flaw of the F-35 is that they tried to make one air frame for 3 very different sets of requirements. By doing so they compromised all three variants yet failed to achieve the cost savings they thought they would get from that approach.
Equally as important is the fact that it was politically engineered to be almost uncancelable. The future of US and allied air power was staked on this one platform so all of the stakeholders had very high motivation to keep pushing on long after it wasn't prudent to do so.
Then there's the fact the DoD and Congress removed some of the normal procurement guard rails to try to shorten the timeline, but also made it more difficult to cancel. "Concurrent development" with the JSF meant that series production began before all testing and evaluation was done. This meant that when problems were found there were costly retrofits. It also means that the multitude of serious shortcomings were found after production had began, making it more difficult to justify stopping the program.
Then consider that production of parts for the F-35 is spread out across over 40 states (I wanna say it was 47). Then there's the part where the DoD allowed the contractor to write a significant portion of the requirements. It's no wonder things went sideways.
> The aircraft itself is apparently excellent at what it does, but that doesn't erase just how much grift was involved in this program for decades.
But that's the problem, it is not excellent at what it does. When you read the DOT&E reports about its mission capabilities there are numerous serious defects and limitations to what the aircraft can do. Granted, some of those issues are getting addressed, but the costs of the program makes it harder to justify.
Ultimately the whole reason for the F-35 to exist was that the high parts commonality and the very high production numbers would save big money on costs. It failed to do that.
I think in order to be successful, they probably have to implement some sort of "small teams" approach; I'd imagine a lot of tech developed for JSF/F-35 can be rapidly rolled into a 5th gen+ fighter without reinventing the wheel...but they'd need to firewall the project into small focused teams who really know what they'd want to build.
Sec. David Norquist [1] was another Deputy SecDef who helped reign in DoD costs. He also served as Comptroller before DepSecDef. There was whispers that he did actually fire people for wasting DoD funds.
It failed to replace existing fleet of fighters, like the F-16, and on ground support, like the A10. That is not excellence.
All of the engineering problems of the F-35 have been well known from the early days of the project, I know because I have studied closely ever since Norway decided to buy it. But the massive propaganda from the weapons industry has clouded this debate from the start.
F-35 is a huge fiasco on multiple levels - policy, contracting, diplomacy, engineering, warfare, etc
Reason why it is even bigger failure than the F-22 is that the US decided to sell the F-35 overseas. This exposed the project to more scrutiny and increased the stakes. Can’t be hidden away like the embarrassing F-22.
If US decide to build a new fighter aircraft I predict it will be a failure too.
I love jets and the F-22 is both my favorite fighter and likely the best air superiority fighter in the world, so I get where you are coming from, but it is not an excellent aircraft for the current USAF mission when you look at it as a whole.
Not only is the procurement cost of an F-22 extremely high, operationally it has been plagued by issues that hare only partially elevated by a maintenance program that even by fighter jet standards is considered expensive and frequent. The stealth coating in particular is very finnicky and has to be worked up constantly. Approximately half of F-22 are non-op at any given time, even getting training time is extremely difficult.
The F-22 is like an exotic sportscar. Nobody denies that if it's in the air and functional, it's a great performer, but we would never make the bugatti veyron the standard patrol car for all police - not only would it be mindbogglingly expensive, durability and high maintenance would make it impractical, not to mention overkill in most situations. To make another car analogy, it would be like buying a Ford F350 for picking up your groceries once a week.
It's like some of the pocket battleships produced between WW1 and WW2. The technology was incredible, but expensive. And by the time war actually came, they were outdated. I think the F-22 will meet the same fate (and the B-2 as well). Silver bullets that were never really needed.
I also think many of your criticisms are due to the small amount actually produced. Spares were never produced in adequate volumes, and when a single accident reduces your aircraft inventory by almost 1% it makes you risk averse.
Also pocket battleship mostly refers to the heavy cruisers that Germany built during their rearmament program.
For the UK, five King George class battleships were commissioned after the start of Britain's declaration of war in 9/39. They all saw combat.
France's Richelieu was commissioned in 4/40, and saw limited combat in Dakar.
Even Japan's Yamato class battleships were commissioned before Japan invaded China.
Perhaps you meant that no battleships that weren't laid down prior to the start of WW2 saw combat?
You also might want to consider its extremely good flight record. Until recently there hadn’t been a single crash.
The software issue isn’t great (I blame C++ to an extent) but it’s also improving. The plane is now certified for many different weapons systems.
With stealth as great of a game-changer as it is, the incremental cost of the F-35 isn’t much. Developing a new fighter that pretty well duplicates the F-35 except for stealthy materials probably isn’t worth the cost. The F-35A cost keeps dropping...
As to not replacing “existing fleet of fighters”, that sure isn’t what the pilots are saying. So far it’s been well over 10-1 kill ratios against Gen 4 airframes at all Red Flag type competitions.
Tik Tok stars and Twitch bros and ethots are making multi million dollars playing games.
This country can’t build a functioning high speed rail system, that other countries built 30 years ago. How can we build an airplane now?
Public school teachers and teachers unions are opposed to opening schools. They never cared about kids and education.
US is at bread and circuses stage of decline. Time to accept reality and deal with it appropriately.
And yeah do all this while being cheap and maintainable. It’s basically a unicorn.
What about the long term? Fuck the long term. It is all about quarters, and short term bonuses.
Excellent!
As opposed to the other PayPal dude that is building spacecraft. It's more about what Peter Thiel can't do.
This is the curse with a lot of these technologies.
Well actually we've had 280 characters since 2017. Talk about progress!
JPL just landed Perseverance, and we have had weekly SpaceX launches with successful stage recoveries (thought to be impossible), Falcon Heavy sent a 1st Gen Tesla Roadster which is orbiting Mars as we speak... Thiel's windmill powered Bitcoin operation in Texas, which likely froze last week, is another example of how absurd his statement is. I think Thiel is not liked because he uses hyperbole to make blanket statements that are clearly not true. And his business acumen much like his actual tech skills, are dubious at best despite being immensely wealthy.
The US will always be a leader in innovation in the World, I'd argue this is the larges concentration of talent the World has ever seen, including Florence during the enlightenment.
What we have a problem with is an absurd amount of useless bureaucrats, politicians, lobbyists, Industries that get in the way and all want their slice of the pie for nothing more than being a middleman and ultimately pay no taxes to re-invest in the education of said future talent, all while the entrepreneurs and talented labour take all the risk and get little to no reward for their efforts due to a depreciating fiat currency and ever increasing taxes and more and more diminishing social mobility due the aforementioned concentration of wealth.
CRISPR is not going to solve much if any of your problems, maybe your kid's but not yours. If you think the US cannot build amazing things, and is somehow not a leader in this the problem is with you and, I guess Thiel.
IMO AI progress in the last 10 years has drastically exceeded reasonable expectations.
You can buy a helicopter any time you want.
I meant that we discovered fission and then we built a bomb in under 6 years. Even if you disagree with the outcome of what happen in Japan, the Manhattan Project was an amazing scientific accomplishment, and there is no way the US could do something of that scale, scientifically in 2021.
Still, I think it's pretty hard to compare engineering achievements like this. Is it harder to make a fission bomb in 6 years with 1940s technology, or a COVID vaccine in 1 year with 2020s technology?
Also, I seems like we could be having this conversation in 1940 about an american battleship program.
The COVID vaccine was an achievement, without a doubt, but i still think we need time to see how effective it will be as the virus mutates and make sure there are no long term side affects. If the vaccines achieve herd immunity ends the pandemic then history will be very kind to it and the scientists that created it.
One thought is the actual creating of the vaccine must have been considerable less complicated than the atom bombs if it was really created in one day.
If you're a defense contractor, none of it. If you're a tax-payer, all of it...
The SR-71 was designed to do one thing. Go fast and take pictures. It didn't carry bombs. They eventually tried to put a drone on it and it didn't work and was abandoned.
You don't even have to look back as far as the SR-71 though, the F-22 was a reasonably successful program - bumpy, expensive, but it produced what is the world's preeminent air-superiority fighter. It is not a bomb truck, it does not land on carriers. It does one thing well.
Others are not wrong about the fact that the F-35's merit to Congress was as a jobs program, either. This is in fact what a lot of military spending really is. We build tanks only to drive them into the desert and store them, all to keep those production lines running and keep people employed. They could be building trains or something else equally well.
The underlying problem there is that the US political system has become byzantine and cumbersome. When "played" adversarially with all "players" using the maximum extent of their political powers, it takes supermajority control of all three branches of government to govern. This has promoted a byzantine system on top of that to try and come up with mechanisms to fix a broken, unfair, and non-representative process. Massive over-spending on military as opposed to other types of government-sponsored research, production, etc are only one side effect of that.
The importance of this engineering principle cannot be overstated. It applies to everything - from home appliances to spacecraft to software.
But most importantly those are synergistic, they form a coherent whole, we even say one thing, because it does so well at these things simultaneously that we now consider it almost inseparable.
The year over year progress on computing power/efficiency/size is beyond impressive. Modern computer hardware is an amazing feat of engineering.
The first complete sequences of the Human Genome was completed in 2003, as part of the Human Genome Project which started in 1990. Total cost of $100,000,000. That's actually not so expensive given the payoff is literally a complete copy of our own genetic code. Today, less than 20 years later, the cost of sequencing that same genome is about $1,000.
The LHC? Super fucking cool.
We do build cool shit. Incredibly cool shit. WAY cooler than dumb ass killing machines like fission bombs and space-age fighter jets. And BTW, going from fission in theory to something actually useful for doing something other than killing people did take a couple decades (first nuke power plant turned on in 1954).
We can build all that cool shit you want, too. Flying cars? We've been able to do that for decades. You don't have a flying car because you'd almost certainly end up killing yourself or someone else and probably couldn't afford the fuel to operate it on the daily. There's a reason you can't just rent a Cessna and go out for a joy ride without any training.
The "no cool shit" thesis always uses killing machines and rich person toys as examples. I don't want stupid rich person toys that even rich people don't actually use when they get them (flying cars). I want to be able to Zoom with my parents during a pandemic.
You think that's bad? In Canada my government funded the F-35 program but we're not buying any F-35 jets. Spending a bit less than $1 billion for nothing.
The lobbyists destroyed those types of programs.
We used to have a pipeline for PhD candidates to these government programs, but that doesn't seem to exist anymore.
Speaking of unpopular guys, Musk's Tesla and SpaceX are very much "skunkworks" companies. Maybe the US could, say, incubate more companies like that? The irrational hate of Musk reflects America's deep and strong anti-intellectual anti-nerd anti-engineering popular culture bias. Sure Musk isn't a boy scout, but the list of evil noxious business executive that are objectively worse than Musk in the last 50 years is probably about 10,000 to 20,000 longer than anything Musk has done. Possibly 100,000. Huge numbers of healthcare insurance, petroleum, defense, mining, and manufacturing executives. Microsoft and Intel's run of market manipulation and monopoly. Cable/Telephone companies sitting on their monopolies.
The 50s and 60s still had the overarching group achievement and patriotism from WWII. But our modern era has steadily fallen more and more to greed, apathy, laziness, and especially narcissism.
I think it is more likely for everyone involved, team, management, project, product, client, end user etc, to understand & accept that you have to make tradeoffs when you are on a tight time frame and/or budget. You solve one thing, not a hundred different things, even though they can be equally as important in the grand scheme of things.
F-35 tried to replace fighters in three different branches (Air force, Navy and Marine) and be multirole and also do close ground support, all with a long time frame and huge budget.
Some tradeoffs can be solved with a bigger budget, but many tradeoffs can't. If you want your bombs to be stored inside the fuselage to be more stealthy like the F-35, then of course the fuselage will become bigger, thus creating more drag. No amount of money will change that.
F-35 seems from the outside like a project that didn't understand & accept tradeoffs.
Add to this the office politics, corruption and big players crushing any hint of competition and you have general stagnation.
I have read about the eventual failure of the F35 for years now. The naysayers had solid arguments but were ostracized by people with conflict of interest.
But it is true that when there is no particular urgency, the multiplication of bureaucracy and regulations compounded with the complexity of modern technologies makes it difficult to deliver cheap and fast.
> Fission was discovered in 1938/1939 and we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. No chance we could do something like that in this toxic environment of today.
Are you for real? It is hard to find any more toxic place in resent history then during the horrors of World War 2.
This time saw a holocaust with forced labor and mass killings of religious and ethnic minorities in multiple countries accross at least 3 continents. It saw indiscriminate bombing of heavy civilian population centers in densely populated centers in Asia and Europe. It saw mass famine and starvation in several regions of the world. About 3% of the entire world population died in these horrors, and many more lost their homes and livelihoods.
And you mention the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as some kind of an achievement. Between 129,000–226,000 people died in that terror, and two whole cities were leveled to the ground, with the mass homelessness and medical and social emergencies that follows.
Perhaps it is not your intention to devalue these horrors and you are simply trying emphasize what was possible when the political climate was more unified. But please be careful with your words. Don’t describe our time as toxic while glorifying the most toxic times ever witnessed in our recent history.
The Covid bailout last year was about $60,000 per tax payer (https://www.covidmoneytracker.org/). How much of your $60,000 did you see?
I'm not arguing for or against these programs; I'm arguing for expressing them in comprehensible terms. $6,000,000,000,000 societal total; or $60,000 for you. Do you expect to receive $15,000 of value from the F35 program? I'm not sure I won't: perhaps it'll keep oil/energy prices stable and I spent well more than $300/year on energy...
Also, the $60,000/tax-payer Covid ticket price (though I find that source questionable) is missing averaging out over multiple years as you said yourself. Needs to be consistent with the other number.
This type of comparison reminds me of how people abuse statistics by comparing a city (or even a neighborhood) to another state (or even a country); say the average New Yorker vs. the average Swede.
It's only broken down by category though (e.g. Health, Defence, Education), except for Welfare, which has subcategories (e.g. Aged, Disability, etc).
There's an example and further explanation here on the ATO website: https://www.ato.gov.au/Individuals/Lodging-your-tax-return/I...
There's a certain sense of satisfaction in being able to see in slightly more real terms what my tax is being spent on.
But it's misleading, perhaps deliberately so. The money is not being spent on "Health" but on the "Health department". What percentage of that money actually delivers health, and what merely funds the bureaucracy?
Here in the UK only about a third of defence spending goes on the armed forces themselves. Another third goes on service pensions, which is fine, but running the MoD itself is a full third of the budget! It wouldn’t surprise me if the same was true of the NHS.
Printing dollars what means high inflation what is basically a hidden tax that screws lower and medium class the most?
Theirs is a system called "tributary taxation." How it works is, anybody who is anybody in Russia has a boss. Not a boss like you have a boss, a political boss, think Boss Tweed back in the day. That boss has a boss, who has a boss, and so on until you have the one person in Russia all this money flows to, President Putin.
How much do you pay to your boss? As much as you wish/can. This isn't the mob. The price for falling behind isn't Ivan turning your knees into baseballs. You simply find yourself slowly forced out of political relevance. Pay to play at it's highest and finest. At a certain level you become untouchable by low-level cops and the like.
The government getting its operating budget from us makes the government accountable to citizens in the end. What we call 'corruption' becomes the norm otherwise.
More here: https://www.quora.com/Will-Russia-abandon-the-tributary-taxa...
0: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/how-public-spendi...
1: https://www.economicsonline.co.uk/Managing_the_economy/The_m...
Not exactly what you're describing, but here's where someone did a fairly detailed analysis of which federal, state, and local programs their salary goes to using a Sankey diagram:
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/lkfjea/oc_...
Sure, it's $60k per tax payer by just dividing the total paid by the tax payer cardinality. And in that sense, that much of the federal budget that you have a voice for was allocated in that way.
However, comparing that number to how much tax you're paying in a given year is wildly inaccurate. The mean income tax paid in the US last year was ~$15k, but the median is closer to ~$5k [0] The ultra wealthy pay very disproportionately more of the total income tax and skew the mean upward significantly.
Therefore, the average US tax payer would have contributed likely far less than $300/year at something more like <$100/year.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/average-fed...
I am not saying Federal Reserve actions don't have a cost, but comparing that to defense spending is apples to oranges. The federal reserve buys securities and created SPVs. You could say that is a cost but by some measures the money the Federal Reserve "spent" made money in the 2009 crises. If that were true this time your cost per tax payer is way, way off.
Or to put it in more plain language, you are comparing the cost to tax payers if the US government bought $60,000 of Lockheed martin stock as opposed to paying Lockheed Martin $15,000 for a fighter that doesn't seem to work well. It's more complicated than that even, but still it is a terrible and biased comparison that you are making.
Also, the Federal Reserve spending is not backed by taxes.
For that, you need to calculate the cost of every US govt program and calculate usage costs. Very complicated.
However, this statement is confusing to me. Do you agree to a bailout, as a society, to eventually get all of it back?
And, I also take issue with 100M tax payers. Are these Individual Income Tax payers? If so, what about all the non income tax payers and companiss that pay taxes? For every item you buy, some amount goes to the government in the form of sales tax.
And ultimately, what does the govt spend money on? You and your fellow citizens. Sure, now you are in a position to say you pay more taxes than the govt provides services, but if your kid turns out to be poor and homeless, the govt ought to take care of them, and they pay no taxes while enjoying govt services. So if you compute what you get back, would it be fair to say you have to take multi generational values?
Un-normalized: $6T + interpretation + understanding + doubt that it's really $6T.
Normalized: $60k (get the GAO to provide a standardized number) + interpretation + understanding.
I get that it's imperfect but I have a hard time understanding how the "un-normalized" version is more-perfect or more comprehensible than the "normalized" version.
I suspect politicians would hate my suggestion: they've acclimated us to nonsense numbers. Per Dirksen (maybe): “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money." Again, I'm not pro/con high-speed rail but: CA probably has 15M taxpayers; estimates of high-speed rail ranged from $30,000M-$100,000M; how in the world was a CA taxpayer to recoup $3,000-$10,000 of cost? Put in those terms, it's a lot easier for me to think about the proposition.
I definitely think a Covid bailout was necessary. I do have some questions about where my $60k went...
what's wrong with just using the jets we already have. I mean we have like a gazillion of those things. what percentage of the military/armed forces is currently being used or has been used over the last 10 years. I'm guessing it's a very small percentage.
No politician wants to be the one to make the case to shut down the factories that produce these things, even when the military has advised Congress to do so [1].
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-end-of-t...
Instead we have jets we don’t need, and tanks sitting in a desert unused.
The problems with the F-15/F-16/F-18 is that Chinese and Russian missiles might be able to shoot them down more easily than the F-22 or F-35, since the F-22 and F-35 are stealthed.
The problem with the F-22 and F-35 is high unit cost, so they can't have as many as they'd like.
It's also possible that their stealth might not work so well on future Russian/Chinese radars, for example they might use different frequencies. You can be sure both those countries are working on countermeasures to stealth aircraft.
Possibly the solution will be an unmanned aircraft. This would be able to pull >10g manouvers, which aircraft with a pilot in can't.
Two words: metal fatigue. Every airframe only has a finite amount of hours it can fly before its structure becomes too weak. Fighters in particular that regularly perform high-g manoeuvres. So they have to be replaced anyway.
The war in Afghanistan saw Western militaries burning off airframe-hours at a phenomenal rate using expensive fighters designed for neer-peer conflicts to drop dumb bombs, when you could have done the job for a fraction of the cost with simple propeller planes like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_EMB_314_Super_Tucano
But from the article
> The Air Force alone wanted nearly 1,800 F-35s to replace aging F-16s and A-10s and constitute the low end of a low-high fighter mix, with 180 twin-engine F-22s making up the high end.
> Fifteen years after the F-35’s first flight, the Air Force has just 250 of the jets.
I'd say it's just as valid of an argument to make in this case that I'm not sure I won't see more than $60,000 of value out of efforts to prevent the economic infrastructure of the U.S. from crumbling, especially amortized over 50 years ($1,200/yr in preserved income or purchasing power).
I don't disagree that it's a decent frame of reference to use when looking at government programs...but it's important to apply the same level of rigor to measuring output value.
If you have a decent amount, then yeah, the asset price inflation came from a fire hose none other.
Simple as that.
This is also pretty typical - while many western nations 'care' about human rights, they don't see any problem with arming client regimes who are often gratuitously sadistic, genocidal, etc.
I'm also not sure where human rights come into the picture when you consider the various US wars in the last century. All of them (especially the Korean war) were extremely brutal to civilian populations, and the prosecution of all of them (except maybe the 1990 gulf war?) skirted very close to the line on war crimes, or crossed that line entirely. I don't think there was even lip service paid to human rights in this period.
* Arming the Saudi regime with intent to sustain the horrors in Yemen
* Extrajudicial killings with drones in various sovereign non-warring nations such as Pakistan and Libya often with far more civilian casualties then combatant.
* Illegal indefinite detention and torture in offshore prison such as Guantanamo.
Those are the human rights horrors which the USA military is currently engaging in. History shows us that it is capable of far worse and there is no reason to believe it won’t engage in in the near future.
As far as security goes there is little reason to believe that it extends any further then to secure the interest of private companies engaging in foreign affairs. It seems to me that the human rights narrative of GPs is entirely fiction.
My stonks went up by way more than $60k (that figure is completely wrong and inflated anyway), so I saw plenty of it.
I'm sorry, were you fishing for a different answer?
Do those things even matter?
I’m not defending the F-35 but anyone deeply and intimately familiar with the platform knows and understands that it is a Ferrari. You don’t bring your Acura TSX to a Formula 1 race track to win a race. Just like you don’t bring your Ferrari to the farm to haul material (not anymore anyways).
The F-35 may be a Ferrari; but the thing about Ferraris is that their technology trickles down. Now we have electric cars with carbon fiber shells. The same is true for the F-35. The technology inside it has and will lead to the resurrection and long standing use of older planes like the B1 and U2. Where the airframe is solid but the tech and stealth is not. It will also lead to revolutionary new planes which are cheaper to make and build.
Through the F35s use of distributed computing and treating hardware components and their software as services, we’re not going to be doomed to the same fate as the F16 where we can’t find hardware. Instead, we’ll have more component oriented aircraft systems where each aircraft is no bespoke and can use from a menu of technologies.
So did the F35 fail because we spent too much? Depends on how much it saves us later.
Did it fail because it didn’t replace the F16? What if it makes the F16 viable again? Did it still fail?
Some may see this as a slippery slope. What matters is the objective outcome that comes from this project. Not the success criteria some folks have perpetuated or thrust upon the project.
"Sure, what the PM asked for an laid out was X. But really, in the middle we found out the architecture didn't work as expected. So we pivoted and in doing so found more success using Y's Suggested Architecture"
Innovation and Tech is messy. More often than not, Your definition of success changes as time goes on as you get further into a project that's groundbreaking.
If you fail to meet your original goal because you are not capable of doing it, and then you change your goal to accommodate this reality, it doesn't change the fact that you failed in your original goal.
If my goal is to go to Mars and I only make it to the moon because it turns our Mars is just too far away, even though I did something revolutionary, amazing, and extraordinary, it does not change the fact that I failed in my original goal.
I don't even consider this to be semantics. It's people trying to justify to themselves that there is no failure. You've literally failed by your own definition of what success is. Changing the definition of success doesn't change reality.
We failed in our goal. We also learned and developed things of real value while pursuing that goal.
This is salvaging what can be salvaged to make headway in an adjacent goal. That said...
> Your definition of success changes as time goes on as you get further into a project that's groundbreaking.
Sometimes the goal is, itself, a failure. It was born of not fully understanding the problem at hand. When the goal is stupid, but that is only discoverable by pursing that goal (ie “intent”), then redefining success is the right thing to do.
Simply by admitting this, you've already contradicted the person I was responding to.
His entire scribe is "what is failure? have we really failed? no" instead of "yeah we failed, but we can learn from it"
Failure is fine. Failure is expected. Failure is the best way to learn an iterate.
But then don't say "well we always got what we wanted out of it anyway, which was to learn" when your goal was "to build the ultimate fighter jet at this budget in this timeline"
> Failure is fine. Failure is expected. Failure is the best way to learn an iterate.
and
> don't say "well we always got what we wanted out of it anyway, which was to learn" when your goal was "to build the ultimate fighter jet at this budget in this timeline"
This is my fault, as I was mostly paraphrasing what he said in other comments. So that's just lazy commenting on my part, and probably I deserve downvotes for it.
It might not be a lot. The concept of flying Corvettes is strong, culturally and industrially, but it might be on the verge of becoming like cavalry with the advent of drone swarms.
Look at the recent Nagorno-Karabakh conflict to see how much UAVs are a game-changer:
https://www.csis.org/analysis/air-and-missile-war-nagorno-ka...
It's just really not that simple.
However smart jets will be a thing, as evidenced by the Boeing Loyal Wingman program (awful name). The uninhabited jet will push further into the engagement envelope, pull higher Gs, risk SAM lock-on to take out the SAM, fly in the dust like Tornados used to. And it will get task guidance from the X band data link from a human piloted jet. But that UAV will likely be as expensive as a regular jet (more including development cost of AI tech, retrofitting remote control into other jets).
Swarms of loitering munitions make sense in countering mobile SAM sites, as the Syrians/Russians (in Syria) and Emiratis(in Libya) are finding out -- so many Pantsir-S (SA-22) point defence systems destroyed by Turkish drones. So how long before S-400 systems (long range AAAD) get eaten?
It's possible that the Pantsir-S export firmware isn't as good, but being totally spanked can't be good for export sales. The Turkish drones (eg Bayraktar TB2) have the indigenous KORAL EW system for both sensing and jamming, and given the platform SWaP constraints it must be pretty smart, though I don't know how they are preventing algorithm compromise given drones get shot down fairly often. Crypto presumably.
Given the relatively static setup, it is likely that the positions of the SAM sites is heavily compromised via local informants, leakage from cell phones and aerial surveillance. And rather than integrated A2AD it is probably more isolated sites. But still very impressive for a 659kg drone to be able to take them out.
I was wondering even then, why do we still put pilots in these things? They'll fare better on their own and will have less performance constraints.
I think part of it is the military adolation of the fighter pilot. Probably not the only reason though, a hacked swarm of armed drones is a frightening prospect.
That's not a friendly restatement, no. "Might" does not make right.
It's not about whether it may or may not - It has, that's a definitive statement.
Drones are cheap, good missiles are 1/100th the price of an F-35. It's possible that aircraft will no longer be able to enter contested space without significant risks just as it was pre-ww2 where it was impractical to achieve air superiority or to destroy anti-aircraft placements.
Considering the extreme investment of the US into aircraft as a means of projecting power and winning wars against conventional militaries, there is a chance that an opponent with a much smaller military budget could "win" in a conventional fight - making the multi-trillion dollar aircraft projects pointless.
China has already developed what is effectively an ICBM designed to sink/punch through warships from above.
There is nothing stopping a satellite from maneuvering out of the way of an incoming missle, or for it deploying counter measures.
Satellites can be launched on arbitrarily large rocket boosters with an arbitrary number of in orbit assembly/refueling flights. Anti satellite missiles require that the missile can be deployed to a useful location that can’t be immediately disabled.
So in short your idea won't work in the real world.
It's a tremendous waste of money
my bestguess is, that n a conventional conflict between industrilized states the air campaigns will be over after the first three major engangements or so. Because by then replacing the losses would ruin everyone.
Improved stealth etc is useful, but F-35’s are only slightly better than 40+ year old jets. Thus hardly worth the price vs cheaply manufacturing a minor update of an older design.
Or as the saying goes “quantity has a quality all it’s own.”
Now is that 35 worth the price? If our policy continues to insist for preparing against an impossible push peer adversary landmasses, then maybe. Personally I don’t see those pushes happening, but that’s more due to the tyranny of distance and having like 10 minutes of play time before needing to refuel.
Actual air war looks very different, with a significant focus on cruse missiles early on etc. But again, comparing the F35 with outdated equipment is missing the point.
Further, the F16’s people are talking about very much needed a replacement. The newest was built in 2005 and while it’s a solid multi-role, all weather, air-to-air and air-to-ground fighter the design is showing it’s age.
But, the F35 isn’t simply a modernized F16 now it does stealth, STOVL, etc. So you need to consider what it could have been not compare it to what’s being replaced.
PS: I very much believe stealth aircraft are needed, but the same F35’s are eventually facing the sensors of 2050+. That’s the context where it starts to look very questionable.
Modernization of existing aircraft continued, but the US’s physical aircraft are only going to last to ~2040.
My impression of the present/near future of air combat is a stealthy fighter with AMRAAMs in front, radar off, and a quarterback aircraft in back out of missile range, with the radar on. The front fighter fires and turns around, and the missile gets mid-course updates from the quarterback aircraft. When the AMRAAMs are depleted, you leave. It seems like if you get into Sidewinder range and you're outnumbered, you're going to have a torrent of medium range missiles coming at you from all sides.
It's not clear to me how well newer radars can track the B-2, but it's hard for me to see how fighters could really protect it. I'd expect that in a conflict with China, if they can track the B-2, that the B-2 would be withheld until the fighter threat was neutralized.
F-35s are really going to be doing counter IADS so their loadout reflects that. Maybe you get a couple A2A missiles loaded in, but primarily for self defense. If you want offensive counter air, you're bringing the F-22s (or probably the NGAD) loaded out appropriately.
Anyway all this just affirms the original idea, which is that you can't prosecute a war against peer adversaries with 4th gen fighters. Our 4th gens can still take down the enemy air threat, but the IADS means those 4th gens are not even getting into the air space.
The unknown then is how much can be done with decoys and EW, or even things like cyberattacks on radars and control nodes.
Stating the F-35s are "only slightly better than 40+ year old jets shows a stunning lack of knowledge.
Anyway, we already had the F22, the F35 was supposed to be the cheaper alternative and it mostly delivered on that. But now we have a very capable aircraft with far to many roles to excel at all of them while still being quite expensive to operate.
1. Supersonic stealthy STOL for the USMC. Check
2. Supersonic stealthy replacement for A-7/F-18. Check
3. Supersonic stealthy replacement for F-16. Check
Despite its detractors, the F-35 is an excellent aircraft that is doing quite well in squadron usage. The USMC loves their B model, operating off of their mini carriers. The USAF is getting enough on the line that sustainment costs are bending down, and flyaway costs are cheaper than the newest F-16s that would get crushed by the F-35.
The only service that isn't as in love with the F-35 is the Navy. They've slowly been realizing that the short legs of the F-18 have hampered them in the Pacific. The F-35 has better range, but is still far shorter than older strike aircraft like the A-6.
The F35 is aiming to be both an air superiority and strike aircraft, and do electronic warfare and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, while being stealthy and cheaper than the F22.
Now add F18 missions like fighter escort and fleet air defense which add yet more demands.
You get less stealth, less speed, less range, less payload, and or fewer sensors etc than an aircraft dedicated to a smaller range of roles. Meanwhile you need to pay for all the capacity that aren’t particularly relevant when doing any specific mission.
Sure, generally being capable of Mach 2.2+ for example isn’t such a big deal. However, if you’re deep in enemy territory and low on munitions it’s quite valuable to quickly escape any reinforcements that show up. On the other hand when escorting a fleet all that extra engine is mostly wasted and costing you fuel.
Although personally I think that in the event the US military needs to scramble a bunch of F35s to serve as in legitimate air to air combat we'll have bigger problems than a costly jobs program not producing something useful.
But being caught without either, when you need one isn't a good place to be in.
Even without getting into a shooting war, you could argue your Ferraris will terrify the Benzes from even coming out to play, thus avoiding war. Not to mention the Toyotas and the Volkswagens.
That said, I know some people will argue a peer state war between superpowers (say, US, Russia, China, etc.) will inevitably escalate to nuclear. I don't claim to know enough to say how valid that is.
Also, at full production, the US is supposed to have a ridiculously overwhelming large zerg fleet of F-35s (more than 2000 between the branches, according to wikipedia). That totally eclipses anything planned by Russia or China for their own 5th gen fighters.
When your operational area is most of the planet, you obviously need more than one! I could describe 25 as "squadrons" but that wouldn't be too many.
The vibe I’m getting from this thread haha.
This isn't an art project where interpretation is in the eye of the beholder. This is a taxpayer-funded set of contracts; the success criteria are defined as part of said contracts, they're not "thrust upon" the project by "some folks".
Your trickle down benefits would come from any innovative project, whether it were a success or a failure. They'd just be more generally beneficial due to more extensive application in a successful project (and probably more cheaply usable by other areas of industry). Either way they would exist in either scenario: if their existence is what defines success, then failure is impossible.
Would the company be better off just paying for the things they want in each project and accepting a lower ROI is an open question. I just watch the game, not make the rules.
Didn't they get paid a bunch of money for it?
Don't they get paid again each time there's a rev?
Take the $3e11, convert them to physical banknotes, burn all $3e11 bills in Texas last week for warmth, and according to the grandparent the program would still be a success because the money ultimately provided utility to people!
>Grandparent: What matters is the objective outcome that comes from this project.
No one froze to death! We gained _something_ from the program! Operation successful! /s
The F-35 however was made to do everything, but excels at seemingly none of them.
Basically F-35 is the fighter of tomorrow fighting threats of yesterday.
Meanwhile the F-35 is explicitly designed to control swarms of unmanned drones.
Why would you want to send a human pilot to face drone(s) that does not care for it's survival, can pull more Gs, calculate trajectory and make decisions faster?
Modern fighter aircraft are mobile missile launchers. They are judged primarily by whether they can get close enough to where they need to go without being detected, detect what they need to, and then launch good enough missiles. The missile is effectively the drone. Modern missiles are basically self-piloting autonomous drone rockets. In that regard the F-35 is fine, and automating the pilot is not necessarily a win because the AI isn't going to be doing ultra-high G dogfight turns anyway. The humans job is to react to unexpected situations and figure out something smart in situations where remote control isn't reliable or desirable (e.g. due to risk of detection).
Because an F35 can communicate over direct line-of-sight to its accompanying drones, so the whole package is very resistant to jamming or other interference.
Spending a trillion dollars on a program may lead to some good coming out of it, but it's about as disingenuous as saying that spending $3000 on a shitty computer that crashes all the time is OK because the cat got a box out of the deal. Yes, it's technically true, but completely unrelated.
Compare that to the cold war fighters. High numbers, used by the majority of US allies and even comparable cheap. Desiged to be usable under cold war circumstances. And modernized to this very day.
The biggest issue I see, also with stuff like the FCAS (French and German Eurofghter / Rafale replacement) is cost. Just imagine you loose, say, 50 of them in a war against Russia or China. How many you can reasonably replace? At that price tag? All other enemies, you hardly loose legacy fighters against those. And that is not even taking training into account.
Well, the B-52 is still flying. Maybe it will reach 100 years of service.
As for losing them, yes it would be bad, but it's the most survivable jet being produced today. Recent conflicts have shown just how lopsided a conflict is if you have a technological edge over your adversaries.
Yes F-22's have lost dog fights, that's why their K:D's ratios aren't infinite. I really don't understand what your point is though, because the F-22 has lost a dog fight it's overwhelming win rate no longer is relevant?
And sure the F-22 is a better dog fighter but it doesn't have active production line and the costs of restarting production are exorbitantly expensive.
What really matters is how many F-16s or cold war era aircraft an F-35 could take out before being shot down. There is a discussion of such numbers below.
Radar already now can tag, reliably, the F-35. And will tag next gen stealth jets. The same radar already now can trace 100s of contacts per installation, making saturation difficult. Air combat really is getting expensive... The problem steath jets have , is that you need only a handfull of ground based radars. Which can be develeoped and deployed fatser than new stealth jets. Stealth, so, is loosing its usefullness over the service life of a model. And that service life will be long.
Stealth will still be needed to not be at a disadvantage against other stealth jets, so. Unfortunately for the F-35, it is the fisrt of these fighters.
So many people seem to still buy into the Cold War mindset that we just need the latest bleeding edge platforms or the Soviets are going to invade and we'll all be reading Trotsky.
The US and NATO militaries are so far ahead of the Russians and China it's comical to claim another 1.7 trillion dollars for a "ferrari" is a prudent use of taxpayer dollars.
China can't even field a blue-water navy yet. I guess they're only about a century behind the US there lol
Russia and China don't need a Yugo to out-speed the US's Ferrari, they have ICBMs and the Russians have nuclear subs that work well enough.
And the US's Ferrari did a really, really poor job in the off-road terrains of the Middle East, with Iraq at best a draw (and a huge loss for the local population, but who cares about that?) and a definite defeat in Afghanistan.
Once you get into nukes it's another ballgame.
How does the F35 or its cool successor prevent MAD?
Iraq and Afgh were counterinsurgency fights. Any China or Russian fight will not be the same.
And the US absolutely crushed the Iraqi military within a matter of days in both Desert Storm and OIF. The problem was the "nation building" COIN fight.
it is a key reason the Soviet union collapsed. They were trying match US spending in many sectors and capitalism can outspend communist economies any day.
Diverting spending from say infrastructure to miltary does not help a country in the long term.
Yes, because lots and lots of F-16s have been replaced with something that isn't what it was bought as. So unless you count it as a win that allies now have worse capabilities than they should have had and paid for because it might make them also buy F-16 parts, I would say it is a huge fail.
As in, it hasn't evolved into a complete product that can wholesale replace its predecessors, but its innovations will be incorporated into them over time.
Wait a second. The F35 was supposed to be the trickled-down thing from the F22.
You see it all the time in projects. People look busy and seem like they're building things, so some progress must be happening. Or is it?
Blink an eye, and in a couple years you unwittingly accumulated a platform that served to fulfill every random team's desire to load on requirements, systems, electronics, sensors ("go find out what people want!"), with very few people making the countervailing decision to trade off / cut things for an overall desired outcome ("what do they actually demonstrate -- not say -- they need?").
Well, they didn't have to pay for it, so there was no harm in giving their requirements. And if the actual willing payor (Congress) had little incentive (or technical chops) to be ruthless about costs or actual useful output, well then there's few checks on that happening. Until some top level general says, "why aren't these hugely expensive planes being used like we thought they would be?" Too late.
I guess it kept people employed in the meantime. How can you cut 10% of the workforce in Huntsville when the representative sits on the Armed Services committee? (I don't know that, but just for example...) Which, sometimes, is a national goal in itself for strategic purposes.
It might be good though, to have a more deliberate plan about these kinds of things, if that's the goal.
Yes. After a while was it about building the plane or keeping the aerospace industry employed and engaged? The design tried to do everything for everyone and fulfill every Colonel's dream feature and mission. Its the ultimate story of feature creep.
My flip phone is in the mail. They got me regressing too.
Close. Alabama Senator Shelby is the Chairman of the Committee on Appropriations and the Chairman of its Defense Subcommittee.
Edit: My apologies. Was the chairman. See nobody's comment below.
Nitpick here. Senator Shelby was the chairman of those committees, now he's the ranking member[0][1].
That said, he was the chairman for many years.
[0] https://www.appropriations.senate.gov/
[1] https://www.appropriations.senate.gov/subcommittees/defense
Brazil bought 36 JAS-39E for $5.8 billion. [1]
Taiwan ordered 66 F-16V for $8.1 billion. [2]
Korea is going to get 20 F-35A for $3.3 billion. [3]
[1] https://www.flightglobal.com/saab-brazil-finalise-gripen-ng-...
[2] https://nationalinterest.org/feature/taiwans-f-16v-fighter-j...
[3] https://www.defensenews.com/global/asia-pacific/2019/10/10/s...
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/19/russia-lures-buyers-as-s-400...
Posting countries and dollar figures is part of the picture, but does not tell the whole story.
The United States bid on this contract with the F/A-18E. I can't imagine the U.S. approving the sale of F-35 technology to Brazil at any reasonable price.
And this is not to mention that the Air Force ALWAYS wants something new and shiny.
> Instead of ordering fresh F-16s, he said, the Air Force should initiate a “clean-sheet design” for a new low-end fighter. Brown’s comments are a tacit admission that the F-35 has failed.
(Emphasis mine. Tacit means "implied without being stated".)
It became a Ferrari due to feature creep and an enormously complex and expensive technology stack. The F-16 is not a Ferrari and NATO needs a multirole single-seat fighter that is affordable to purchase and fly.
My most charitable view is the F-35 became a jobs program for Lockheed Martin and subcontractors. People were trained and (allegedly) useful technology was developed. But the price tag appears unreasonable by an order of magnitude, and this puts no accountability on the program management or people signing the checks.
As for arguments about technology trickling down from the F-35:
* The argument needs evidence. I've seen no attempt to identify the value of the technologies developed against the time and money spent.
* Too much time was surely spent on integration and one-off details specific to the F-35 platform, and this is sunk cost unlikely to be recovered in future platforms designed by new teams.
It was cheap to buy, cheap to run (like really cheap for the capability which in the case of the F20 matched F16’s of the era) but because the USAF didn’t want to buy them it got cut off at the knees.
Damn thing has a thrust to weight ratio of 1.16 to 1 (it could accelerate in a vertical climb) and do Mach 2, largely because they shoved a single F18 engine in to replace the two much older engines the F5 had.
Just because you can replace those 10 fighters faster doesn't mean you can replace the pilots with equivalently good ones as quickly.
Great power wars in the modern era will have some of the most decisive action happen far sooner than you can get into production capacity battles. At which point one side will lob several hypersonic missiles into the shipyards, factories, and fabs of their opponents and the ability to replace lost platforms will have been neutralized.
Counterpoints: 1 - Most critical infrastructure is located far inland away from areas that are vulnerable to cruise missiles and the like. 2 - Hypersonic missiles are mostly vaporware still today. Uncertain if people would even use them, as there's a significant risk of escalation to a full nuclear exchange. 3 - Critical infrastructure can be built faster today than it ever could be in the past. Most countries have stockpiles of critical strategic goods with the understanding that they would be able to stand up their own factories before those stockpiles were depleted.
That's not how it works. The F35 will detect those pilots far sooner than they will detect it and shoot them down before they even see them. Combine a battle space with dozens of MALD decoys flying around drawing shots, those poor pilots would have never had a chance because the F-35 pilots would never give their enemy the chance to shoot at them in the first place.
> Most critical infrastructure is located far inland away from areas that are vulnerable to cruise missiles and the like
I can't find the map now, but just about all of China is within reach of US cruise missiles launched from bombers if the need would arise.
> Critical infrastructure can be built faster today than it ever could be in the past
You're not going to build a Fab overnight. If you knock out a radar factory, that's going to be offline for months. Same thing with a turbine factory.
What I don't think you also appreciate is that of all planes to try to claim that someone could win a production race against, the F35 is a very poor target. There are already produced at rates of ~130 per year and expected to rise to 180. There is no existing line that is manufacturing aircraft that comes close. Not only is US Air power technologically superior but they have the numbers.
He said that the ukraine air force was broken and destroyed by the russian system. The same thing happend to Israel, where at the time they had one of the best air force.
Any planes and helicopters werr forced to fly really, really low because of the S300 and S400. The information of a incoming object was given to a mobile squad who where anticipating and waiting for the plane. Then they simply shoot the plane down from atleast two sites with their portable and advanced SAMs.
He also said, that the US is not ready for that kind of war and is not trained for it. The US had always had the assumption of a given air superiority in any conflict. But air superiority is not given, if fighting close to Russia or China. And the russian system showed how easy it would be to contest it. For that reason, the US would lose air superiority in a conflict close to russian border and because you can't always count on stealth fighters, they are too unreliable, specially if fighting far away without a secured air base close to the conflict.
When are we talking now? Because the Israeli's have destroyed numerous Syrian owned cutting edge Russian SAM's using non stealthy F-16's.
>He also said, that the US is not ready for that kind of war and is not trained for it.
The US own S300's which they have trained against. The F35 is practically purposefully designed to counter Russian SAM capability in order to fight in contested airspace. And it is exceedingly good at it. There is no country in the world which is better at SEAD than the US.
> And the russian system showed how easy it would be to contest it. For that reason, the US would lose air superiority in a conflict close to russian border and because you can't always count on stealth fighters, they are too unreliable, specially if fighting far away without a secured air base close to the conflict.
This is quite difficult to take on face value as nothing more than laughable. Russian SAM capabilities have been utterly embarrassing in their performance in Syria.
The biggest problem the US has as far as fighting for air superiority would be fighting near China due to the range of China's A2AD capabilities which would likely flatten just about every runway within range. But that's what the USAF's tanker fleet is for. Ultimately NGAD will provide the range required to neutralize that problem.
It matters when we're talking about full scale war between major powers. For some context, the US alone built 85,000 planes at the height of WW2 in one year alone. Granted planes back then were much simpler, but industrial processes have significantly improved. It's reasonable to say that the Chinese could produce 10,000+ 3rd or 4th gen fighters per year. Even at ridiculous kill ratios of 100:1 for each F22 and F35 it's easy to see that the balance of power would be pretty tenuous there. If the US wants to decisively win, it needs to ensure surge production capacity of up to several thousand stealth fighters per year.
Since the US let the INF lapse it will certainly build longer range cruise missiles. The entirety of mainland China will certainly be within range of those missiles from a variety of platforms within a few years if not sooner.
Not overnight, but it can be done.
Generals in every war for the last 150 years have been sure that technology would let them break the back of their opponents in record time. The reality is that in almost every case wars turn into long drawn out affairs that rarely go as well as one side had hoped before the conflict started.
No it isn't, and it wouldn't most certainly would not maintain any of that capability within a few months of a conflict.
I'm sorry but this line of thinking is simply out of date. The proof is in the pudding: the Chinese themselves are not massing loads of cheap platforms, they're throwing everything into the J-20, putting an enormous amount of effort into fewer more expensive platforms. Just look at their navy. They have cheap catamarans by the dozens. Instead of building hundreds or thousands of those, they're putting serious investments into building large surface vessels which attempt to match America Burke class destroyers.
You seem to be under the impression that if, say China has 10,000 jets to 1,000 American jets where the American jets enjoy a 10:1 advantage that they would at a stalemate. That's just not true.
The CCP watched the first Gulf War with horror as they saw technologically superior American forces wipe out division after division of war veteran Iraqi troops. Their doctrine then was one similar to Iraq, relying on larger less sophisticated forces. The CCP's since trillions of dollars in investments in matching American capability is their assessment of that previous doctrine.
We have no clue what will happen... best ideas are pure speculation.
IMO, it's very likely that any conflict would be limited to a conflict area like how they did in the Falklands war.
Even if there is no formal agreement, both sides might want to limit a conflict zone.
High level requirements: Dog fighting, close in air support, stealth, long range, automatic weapon systems, VTOL variant.
It was said many times over the decade but this plane has no specialization, so it sucks at everything. F-16's can beat it in a dogfight, A-10's are better close support, etc etc.
The Space Shuttle was rightfully cancelled (Still, I was sad) because it was a bucket of requirements that had huge reliability and cost problems.
Don't worry, this will repeat itself. A bunch of specialized tools exist and then someone says "I can build you a swiss army knife" and someone high up gets sold the dream of the multi-function tool. "It's gonna solve all our problems, you'll see..."
The multi-function tool looks f'ing fantastic on paper. It does everything! Until you put it up against actual specialized hardware and then decision makers say "ohhhhh yeah that's why we did it like that..."
As an example - the flyover at Super Bowl 55. Terrifying air power that could wipe out a civilization, but those bombers don't stop some rogue idiots from storming the Capitol, or any number of foreign and domestic hacking threats.
It’s fashionable to hate on the F-35, but let’s face it: if the allies have to establish air superiority somewhere in the world, they will be using F-35s to do so, and I’m not aware that anyone has the platform to stop them.
Who says it has a fragile supply chain anyway? It certainly has a complex one, but then so do things like nuclear weapons and nobody is clamouring to abandon them on that basis. Protecting that chain and the logistics around it is a staple of military operations. It’s not like someone is going to surprise them by going after supply chains.
If the US is unbeatable militarily then you, as a poorer advesary, don't try to match it, you use one of the other avenues like causing political de-stabilisation for example, interfere with elections maybe.
Therefore is the military persuing "perfect" at high expense instead of "good enough" at a lower expense which would still be good enough to fulfil its requirements.
At the very least, N drones can't be destroyed at once (unless stored really carelessly) and can be individually specialized in a way that provides wider spectrum of capabilities.
A massive bonus: pilotless aircraft can perform manoeuvres unsurvivable for humans, and the ability to maneuver was always a strong point in the air.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incid...
It’s obviously possible to imagine a scenario where you have a massive number of drones, the question would be whether you could channel that into tactics that would give you an advantage. Numeric superiority is sometimes useful, and sometimes a liability.
The F-35 currently has a massive advantage over cutting edge drones - a MK I brain in control of the airframe that cannot be jammed. Its electronic warfare capabilities could create havoc for the drone swarm and deny the enemy remote sensing etc.
Until there’s actual conflict though, it’s pretty much like asking whether Mike Tyson or Bruce Lee would win in a fight :)
It doesn't have to be theoretical at all. The air force can just easily have mock battles v drones to evaluate performance if they wanted to.
The speed of autonomous avaition navigation development is far exceeding the speed of innovation in traditional nth generation fighter planes. Inherently the human will always be slower. The drone will have higher manuverbilty has high g will not be a factor. Imprvoing the algorithms to match or improve human response will happen sooner or later (it is not hard AGI category of problem). The drones are cheaper and easier to manufacture then fighter planes or pilots trained for this kind of high end aircraft.
AFAIK the electronic warfare capabilities of f35 are not designed towards drones. Even then performance against cluster of drones is different matter altogether.
The whole article is about the history of the program, why it costs so much and what the options are going forward. If you squint you can make it seem like failure but the article does not make that claim.
It does actually. Here are a couple of excerpts from the article that explicitly refer to it as a failure:
> Brown’s comments are a tacit admission that the F-35 has failed.
> ...
> But the Air Force and Lockheed baked failure into the F-35’s very concept.
[0] https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a34030586...
So, it's reasonable to say that NGAD may not be possible if it weren't for the F-35. I'd argue this is less about the F-35's shortcomings and more about the fact that we're seeing a dramatic change in air war-machine design, development, and theory.
In defense news below, you can see them speak (in meta) about how the NGAD Prototype was built. Some of those things were pioneered on the F-35.
https://www.defensenews.com/breaking-news/2020/09/15/the-us-...
"Failed" things nearly always embody good and great ideas that go on to be used in successful things. For example, the Newton was clearly a failure, and yet there are echos of it all over today's phones and tablets.
Can you expound on this? Why is distributed computing neeeded - is it simply such that "if hit in this location, there are backups that can handle the load?"
For autonomous, what relief does this bring to the pilot? Targeting? Nav? Trim?
Could that be addressed by old software trick of modularising components - software and hardware-alike - and rely on some extensive semi-open protocols to connect these? I think car manufacturers have faced that at some time in the past, even inside single manufacturer (not sure if they have solved it completely). Sounds like they need Ada-like project, but for hardware side.
>>> I can't comment from the perspective of the F16 specifically, but from experience working on upgrade efforts of military and IC ground processing systems, the challenge is the legacy systems are very tightly coupled to the hardware. They make strong assumptions about register size and number, bus bandwidth, filesystem block size, all kinds of things...
>> Worked around F16's and F22's when I was in and can attest that this is the source of the issue for upgrades. Everything in the software is so tightly coupled to the hardware that updating the F16's would be a monumental effort.
> Could that be addressed by old software trick of modularising components - software and hardware-alike - and rely on some extensive semi-open protocols to connect these?
I think the military has already done that to a degree, see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIL-STD-1553 (serial data bus)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIL-STD-1750A (16-bit ISA)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_16 (tactical radio communication)
It sounds like there are two issues: 1) protocols and standards themselves can become obsolete, so it's like updating Apple II DOS to read a ZFS array (or a modern Mac to work with 5 1/4 floppy drives).
But that wouldn't likely make it any easier to update the software. Say the military makes the PowerPC ISA (e.g. RAD750 processor) and IEEE_1394 bus the new standards. If you have to port a program written to run on a MIL-STD-1750A processor with a MIL-STD-1553 data bus, you're dealing with an entirely different ISA, new drivers, and probably a lot of behavioral differences between the old and new bus behaviors.
And given this is aerospace, some options for dealing with those differences (e.g. emulators) may be totally off the table (for instance, I think I read somewhere that coding standards for one of the recent US fighters forbids dynamic memory allocation).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD750
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1394#Military_and_aerospa...
Here's an example where they went down the "standardise things" route: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/how-t...
How well did that work? Well: "The Marine Corps, tired of waiting for new equipment, built its own battlefield network system for the war in Iraq, called CONDOR—based on off-the-shelf satellite phone and encrypted WiFi technology."
I know of companies (I can't talk about which) that spent a few billion dollars trying to replace old hardware, only to abandon the track taken and have to start over. All the while the stores of the obsolete and no longer made CPU are getting smaller and smaller. All this for a controller that marketing doesn't see any reason to add more features so they can't even justify some off the cost as new features.
A device that's faster and slicker than everything else. That has a version that can fly vertically.
If you're in the sf bay area, go take a tour of the SS Jeremiah O'Brien when things reopen. It's a WWII Liberty Ship freighter. They built well over 2000 of these things, fast, and cheap, to haul military stuff from continent to continent. They had to be fast to build: many were needed. They had to be reasonably cheap: the enemy sank many of them.
And, look at the design of this here Hacker News web app. Functional. High capacity. Simple.
Why can't US weapons factories build stuff like liberty ships and simple web sites, that work and are serviceable?
Too many committees? Too many senators? Unwillingness to tell some branch of the service (the Marines) to use helicopters? Another branch (the Navy's aircraft-carrier service) to use purpose-built planes?
I wonder if engineering and business schools should reintroduce this thing I was taught in college. "Any clod can build something heavy for a dollar. It takes skill and dedication to build something light for a quarter."
Grumble.
Now, I understand that is oversimplifying things, bending the truth a little, and omitting crucial details... but it's not that wrong.
I get how the F-35 has raised the cost of air war for the NATO countries which have bought into the F-35 program.
But how has the F-35 program raised the cost of air war for other countries?
Edit: None of you, including me, have enough understanding of this topic to even begin to discuss it in a serious manner. Have you ever heard some technically illiterate family members debate Apple vs Microsoft vs Dell computers? That's what you all sound like right now.
-- Dick Jones, Robocop.
At the implementation level, we tend to underestimate the cost of making a system extensible and "future-proof", and underestimate the value of implementing a narrowly focused system from scratch.
At the specification level, product managers too often are willing to add every feature that big customers request.
I lived and worked very close to Eglin Air Force base where all the initial F35's went. Many Air Force people thought the primary design decisions were to spend money and little else.
Is the F-35 a good example of what we want our next aircraft to be? It seems to me that we now have a whole development infrastructure set up to build expensive, buggy aircraft. That "development capability" that we've retained isn't a good one.
Won't happen, but it seems like they should just buy fighters from allies where the F-35 isn't a good fit.
We don't need an F-35 or another 2 Trillion dollar procurement process to sink literally anything China wants to put in the water.
If there is no specific credible enemy to fight, there are no strict reguirements that MUST be met, so one makes the plane do everething, because you dont really know what you need.
Investing money in drones over fighter jets seems like the cost effective move here. Flying the jet yourself is definitely cooler than doing it by remote control, but I don’t think it will make much sense in warfare in 20 years time. We have to skate to where the puck is going.
I think something US should take out of this is consider what Russia do with their monkey model strategy. Basically with something like tank/jet they do 2 models, one with all the bells and whistles and the other is a simple version.
This has 2 main uses;
1) Export market so they can sell simpler/cheaper and not share all tech. America does this somewhat but more on the tech protection side I believe.
2) Manufacturing output potential, so in a war countries win in the either the first strike or attrition. If you hit the attrition stage you want simplified options so factories can output faster vs the multiples the premium version take in time and resource.
If they had this, it might have given a low cost daily driver option while not forgoing the top end capability.
The other thing I thing Russia does I feel countries like mine (Australia) and other western nations should do more of is work out how to expand military into absorbing civilians. This way you can scale down the size generally whilst having solid plans on how to scale up quickly beyond the usual reserves. I've raised this before but people say military tech is too advanced. But I feel humans are smart and adaptable, I've little doubt if they look into this they would realise maybe women in their 60's (example/guess as far from normal military recruits) might make great radio operators with minimal training or drive supply lorries. Having this knowledge would give a huge force multiplier to armies if they want to scale fast and ideally help reduce the need for as large standing forces.
You mean like they did with the F15 and the F16?
It's not even a cost-benefit thing, because the benefit is there... But you don't want that cost on every plane.
Tim Krieder said it best: "we have radar-invisible planes and our enemies don't have radar".
For the Al Qaedas and Isises of the world that the US seems to fight so much, the F-35 is absurdly overspecced.
If that was the goal, then the moment the price tag on the F-35 was set, failure was admitted.
According to this: https://www.investors.com/research/f35-fighter/
the price of an F-35 is about 80 Million USD.
An F-16 goes for 30 Million USD: https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/08/24/lockheed-martin-sc...
Although it seems you can buy it used for 8.5 Million USD?? : https://www.planeandpilotmag.com/news/the-latest/2020/07/24/...
The first number in the article is Taiwan purchases 66 F-16 for 8 billions, which gives it 121 mln price tag.
The desire for commonality between the A/B/C variants (notionally to reduce cost) is the big driver, but the B (STOVL) variant probably has the most difficult individual requirements.
Unless the Forbes author has inside information, the airforcemag article in no shape or fashion says the F35 is a failure. The airforcemag article quoted Gen Brown saying the combat commanders are using the F35 too much. And wearing out the available ENGINES. With a limited budget and the mission he he has to fulfill he wants a cheaper alternative that he can sends into low threat theaters. And preserve the F35 if and when the US must fight near peer enemies. Eg Russia and China.
Not entirely but like 15% of the force
My opinion here is the Air Force recognizes the cost overruns from the program mean they need to make sure the USA's "near peer rivals" (their words) are lulled into a false sense of security, As they won't be able to spend this money again for a good 20 years. China is 12-15 years behind, Russia maybe 3-5.
An incredible amount of risk was undertaken in the project. Hopefully the lessons learned make future development much cheaper, as nothing like the aircraft has ever taken to the skies.
You may end up with something that can not fly far, can not fly high, can not carry a big payload, can not dog-fight, has an insane maintenance requirement and may, or may not be invisible. No plane can be invisible by definition. It may or may not be invisible on specific radars. The F-35 was not build to fight Iraq or Iran. I was build to fight China or Russia. This makes it a big bet.
As far as I know "Superiority" is required reading in MIT Engineering programs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superiority_(short_story)
A lot of people are mentioning Skunkworks planes like SR-71 and U-2. I don’t think that’s a fair comparison. Skunkworks basically built highly specialized prototypes that performed well within their intended use but were super expensive to maintain and couldn’t be deployed on a larger scale. I would compare them more to an F1 team that can build great cars quickly but need 20 people just to get them ready for a lap.
Building impressive prototypes is way easier than building something on large scale in an efficient way.
Again, I don’t know much about the F-35 but Skunkworks is not the model.
2) Stealth is now table stakes for fighting a peer or near peer opponent. Modern A2AD systems are extremely difficult for non-stealth fighters and bombers to counter. Sure, you can soften them up with Tomahawks, but even those are starting to be less effective. (which is why the US has been developing JAASM and LRASM).
3) While stealth does add costs, especially in maintenance routines, compared to software and systems costs, it's not as significant. And stealth generally doesn't affect performance; the F-35 is an excellent aircraft in terms of range and maneuverability, as is the F-22, the Chinese J-20 and FC-31.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Johnson_(engineer)#Kelly...
It was a trillion dollar stimulus package (or welfare) directed at the good old military industrial complex, plus it helps placate the chicken hawks in Congress who wanted pork for their district. Like most weapon systems developed in peacetime with unclear use cases, it’s kind of just an expensive tech demo.
Why say including the engine? Do they sell them without the engine?
The F35 is supposed to have amazing networked situational awareness (idk the military terms) which seems like a great platform to control a fleet of slave drones?
Kind of like an aircraft carrier, surrounded by a lot of support.
Like, this is the fundamental reason why ground-based missiles don't rule the skies. Aircraft can go high enough and travel fast enough that any intercept solution has you firing well before they've committed to flying into the effective range of the missile.
It sounds like they are looking for air-to-air replacement?
Not caring bombs saves a lot of weight and size.
Hell maybe even just do what terrorists have learned and make cheap kamikaze drones which are really fast and simply blow up.
Any new aircraft they develop to be cheaper will suffer the same scope and budget creep that the F-35 did.
We won't send pilots out in planes that are known to have low survivability, so when the new aircraft is insufficiently stealthy/fast/survivable, more money will be spent to make it even worse than the F-35.
The Gripen is a fine aircraft, but introducing a foreign made aircraft into the USAF doesn't happen very often. I can only think of two examples, the Canberra bomber (B-57) and the Dauphin helicopter the Coast Guard bought in the 1980's.
Plus new-build F-16s would be better at most roles than the Gripen.
His and the rest of the fighter mafia's extreme views are not popular within the defense community.
The main design driver shaping the F-16 was Boyd's energy–maneuverability theory. A major criticism of Sprey is that the F-15, which was crap according to Boyd's math is undefeated in combat. This is true but it also hasn't gone up against the best opposition in the world either. Boyd, Sprey, and the rest of the Fighter Mafia have been hated for decades in the Pentagon but history is showing that their predictions are accurate. One thing which is too classified to know at the moment is whether advances in missile technology have finally gotten to the point where electronics and firing first matter more than the ACM abilities of the pilot and the airframe to which they are strapped.
Either way, dismissing Spray as a luddite is an incorrect statement.
We're talking about nation-state on nation-state hacking here. The kind of investment you're talking about would have to be absolutely massive, and even then it still might not do the job.
And even if that kind of investment in cyber-warfare/security capabilities is undertaken, the military isn't going to stop "dumping the money in machines designed to carry meat-bags" until after it's very clear the investment was successful. It's not realistic for a first rate to take the kind of risk you're talking about if it wants to remain first rate.
And if that's a realized threat, the planes can be disconnected and still function at a reduced capacity. That's not true for drones.
It's like GPS. It's a really nice technology, but warplanes and weapons also have IMUs, so they'll still be effective if GPS has been jammed/knocked out.
Most horses were used for logistics if I recall.
What exactly is a "low-end fight" when it comes to the USAF?
Seems to me like the real problem is the F-35 was built to be a do-it-all plane when it would make far more sense to have a more varied fleet of more cost-effective, purpose-built aircraft.
Purpose built aircraft are indeed better, and flexible cheap and reliable aircraft like Tucanos are the ideal solution for many scenarios.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_Attack/Armed_Reconnaissa...
The Tucano several other comments have mentioned was a strong contender. The Scorpion also looked pretty great, and went from concept to first flight in just over two years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textron_AirLand_Scorpion
I don't know why it was disqualified.
So we end up with a lot of politics where people say "I'm right, because [insert some factor that may or may not be relevant]", and then argue about who is right.
Conflict never stops, it just becomes indiscernable from diplomacy.
I wonder, in light of a shifting geopolitical situation, if the next generation of fighter might be a stab at something the west can build completely independently on it's own materials?
So, Israel flies lots of pilot hours and seems to think that the plane is a good deal.
The F-35 failed in its original goal of being lightweight, but is perhaps fine in the new goal of being a modern fancy fighter that dominate the sky. In which case, it has pivoted to become a success.
To extend their analogy, if you live near the Autobahn you would use your Ferrari daily?
Plus I don't think being "lightweight" was a goal of the JSF (or its predecessor JAST) program. Being more affordable than the F-22? Definitely.
There are 331 million Americans.
= every American paid around $1000 for this failure.
These funds could have gone into schools, roads, social programmes, ... Instead they served to enrich the small crowd owning the defense industry, with little to show for it all.
This approach is very typical of the UK MoD as well. Buy fewer than planned of an item to "save money" without understanding that the R&D cost is the same and will be spread over however many of them you buy. Then fatigue them to death because they are too few to meet the commitment, driving up maintenance costs and bringing forwards the date at which they will need to be replaced. Rinse and repeat.
The UK looks to be cutting its order from 138 to 48 F35s, but who knows what will be in next month's defence review...
Its just sad how the B52 was abused by the CIA in LAOS.
The A-10 is just a robust vehicle, hence the namesake Wharthog
Yet the single-role F-16 was morphed into a bomb truck and was considered successful by block 70 or whatever in the late eighties. Hillaker said "if I had realized at the time that the airplane would have been used as a multimission, primarily an air-to-surface airplane as it is used now, I would have designed it differently".
So as a square in a round hole, it was made to work but it wasn't brilliant foresight or (early) development.
As an actual fighter-plane, it is fine.
In other industries, you would look for ways to cost-down the product. We often keep the same basic structure or components, but figure out less expensive ways to accomplish the same goals. Often, the revised product can be more durable and reliable too.
It is a shame that the incentives in weapons system development / purchase don't seem to help with this at all. It seems all the incentive is to make the product more and more expensive, and requiring more service.
He ran the "Fighter Mafia" which was responsible for the F-15 and F-16 aircraft.
https://www.amazon.com/Boyd-Fighter-Pilot-Who-Changed/dp/031...
It's sad that the F-35 is in this state. The whole "sensor fusion" (no doubt, overhyped) sounded interesting. I am curious as to how well implemented the same system is on the SAAB Gripens.
It's more difficult to upgrade the F-16 systems than to design a whole new aircraft? I mean, maybe there are other reasons to design a new aircraft, but this doesn't sound like the whole story.
(Currently on the short list are: F/A-18 EF Super Hornet, F-35A Lightning II, Dassault Rafale, Eurofighter Typhoon and JAS 39E/F Gripen.)
I'm sure Lockheed will give us a great deal on it though...
Plus because the length of development is longer than pharma's, nobody involved in kicking off the project will be around to deal with the deployment problems.
Make hay while the sun shines.
I'm sorry I was too pithy. To answer your second question first:
Old aircraft are not inherently bad. The most famous case is the B-52, already in its sixties and when the current round of refurbishment completes (if it hasn't already) should continue fighting with airframes over a century old. The A-10 Thunderbolt (Warthog) is still in service despite many attempts to kill it as there is no replacement.
(Old aircraft aren't inherently good either; even the Harrier, despite being heavily used and not really having a replacement, eventually became too expensive to maintain)
The F-16 was brought up specifically in the article; the claim was that it is too difficult to upgrade its electronics, not that the airframe or engine were obsolete. Indeed the specific use case a new plane is being considered for is the kind of thing where an older, airworthy craft would be better (the station wagon vs Ferrari example from the article).
So for your first question, money: yes I am explicitly suggesting that. Without getting into the politics of consolidation in the US arms industry, since the B-1, weapons production has been structured in part as a jobs program (The B-1 was the first weapons system to explicitly have had its supply chain structured to have parts made in 100% of all congressional districts) while the purchasing procedures are so complex that they require ex military on the private sector side just to make them viable. That revolving door is not subject to any lobbying rules and is, TBH the only real retirement plan for senior officers below three star rank. And of course spending money on arms is always popular with the voters, as part of the "support the troops" slogan, even though the actual troopers, humans, get low pay, mixed-quality post-service health care (some amazingly excellent, other terrible) and are not protected against the depredations any number of predatory corporations while in the service. Oh, but that shiny gear shows off as well in the USA as it does in norks.
To be more charitable, generals and admirals also always want to push for the new and shiny because that's how they demonstrate status, in war and especially in peacetime. This is a social factor in all groups, this is merely how it manifests in military hierarchies world wide. Doesn't mean it's an effective use of funds nor that it necessarily improves warfighting (much less prevents it).
(EDIT) Accidentally hit 'comment' before finishing.
On the other side, we have the entire Apollo program that cost $156 billion (2018)[²], was stopped because too expensive. And we never have been able to go on the Moon since because "cost".
Decisions that lead to the usage of public money by governments is definitively a mystery.
I wish the Lobbyists of the Army/Lockheed Martin/Military complex could do a bit of training for NASA and the research sector. Something tell me humankind could benefit a lot from it.
[¹]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...
China is not going to send fighters over to Bomb the us mainland, this thing is totally unnecessary.
https://berniesanders.com/issues/how-does-bernie-pay-his-maj...
Maybe the money printer can go brrrr a little bit faster.
"Taking into account both the costs of coverage expansion and the savings that would be achieved through the Medicare for All Act, we calculate that a single-payer, universal health-care system is likely to lead to a 13% savings in national health-care expenditure, equivalent to more than US$450 billion annually (based on the value of the US$ in 2017). The entire system could be funded with less financial outlay than is incurred by employers and households paying for health-care premiums combined with existing government allocations. This shift to single-payer health care would provide the greatest relief to lower-income households. Furthermore, we estimate that ensuring health-care access for all Americans would save more than 68 000 lives and 1·73 million life-years every year compared with the status quo."
it also assumes government run systems will be as or better efficient than private system, we have 100's of years of history (including this very story) the proves that to be a fallacy
https://www.vox.com/2014/12/22/7427117/single-payer-vermont-...
What people don't seem to understand is that you can't just vacuum money out of a giant industry. The money we spend in health care doesn't go into an incinerator. There are approximately 16.5 million people working in the health care industry. This study assumes we'll save 13%, a wildly optimistic figure, but we'll go with it.
Pick the 2.15 million people to fire.
Yes, and this would decrease, significantly if the us healthcare system were more proactive and more people had good insurance. Not to mention that much of this is what is already spent, so clearly we can afford it. If taxes increased by exactly what your premiums were before, it's revenue neutral.
"Medicine" is grossly overpriced.
our entire model is FUCKED.
Source: designed and built and commissioned several hospitals and an entire family of doctors. Fuck the US health care system and fuck the military-industrial-spyware-congressional-graft system. I was the tech designer for SF General (before Zuck stuck his name on it) (I designed the entire nurse call system there, among many other things)
My brother was the head of the VA for Alaska, commander of the 10th medical wing USAF, personal flight surgeon to the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the pentagon.
Grandmother was a surgical nurse for decades in Silicon Valley.
Top cardiologist in California (and mayor of Saratoga)
Aunt is top NICU nurse at El Camino Hospital (which I was TPM on building...
Among other many accolades that my family has; we all agree - Healthcare is GROSSLY overpriced and BS.
FFS I had to go to the hospital recently and they charged me $4,000 for the ride to the hospital and $12,000 for giving me vitamins and holding me over night.
FUCK the medical industry pricing.
Each medical group can also have their own economic models which are optimized for different things. One local group actually has reasonably priced specialty visits, but their outpatient services are crazy expensive ($1000 in-network for a NCS/EMG), and that's how they've structured things. Another semi-public group (University of California based) charges significantly more for visits, but significantly less for outpatient procedures ($1000 for an in-network 3.0T MRI).
How in the world to other countries pay for Healthcare?
The USA has tax revenue per capita very similar to New Zealand, the UK, Italy and Canada - all of which have good Healthcare for all. [1]
The USA has more than double the tax revenue per capita than South Korea, which also has good healthcare.
It's not about the cost, it's about how the USA is choosing to spend it's tax dollars.
I live in Canada, and waited more than a year for a specialist. It took me 2 years to find a family doctor with decent reviews who was accepting patients . I needed an MRI once and the wait was measured in months. I waited four months for just a cortisone shot, before the pandemic.
I'm not claiming one system is better than another. Certainly if you're wealthy and have good benefits in the US, the standard of care is much much higher.
On the flipside, if you need cancer care in Canada you're probably not going to need to declare bankruptcy.
I'll need a citation for that.
When a country has 29 million people without health insurance [1], and medical bills are the number one cause of bankruptcy, I think it's safe to say the average standard of care is way, way lower than Canada, Australia, Germany, etc. where literally every person gets care.
[1] https://www.kff.org/uninsured/issue-brief/key-facts-about-th...
Yes, there are a lot of people without coverage in the USA, and there are a lot of people in deep medical debt.
However, when it comes to the actual quality of the healthcare facilities, the USA does have some of the best in the world (CHOP, UPenn, Mayo Clinic, etc.). The fact that it's extremely expensive/overpriced is a different issue.
If you’re poor and in a blue state you get free healthcare comparable to the rest of the developed world. But go over the 30k/year threshold and you’re getting a high-deductible plan and a random number generator for a hospital billing department. Then once you get a job at FAANG and you get great healthcare.
Your reply is anecdotal with a sample size of one.
You need to look at how healthcare works for everyone in a society. It's not OK when the mega rich have it great, the middle class OK and literally 30 million people have nothing.
My reply is a sample size of one because I actively don't speak for other people, on purpose. That isn't a flaw in my argument, that's intentional. If there was one delay in a health procedure it wouldn't be of note. But there are lots of delays, and my doctor needs 2-3 months notice for an appointment, and only wants to discuss one thing per appointment so he can maintain the # of appointments he needs to do throughout a day by not making any one to long, and get paid again for another consult, and he's a good doctor (for real).
But again, you have to actively ignore the last 3 sentences of the post you replied to, for this to be a reasonable and in good faith response to what I wrote. I have no interest in engaging with people who don't read what I write, while telling me what I have to think.
I'm pretty sure no one is going to do that and yes we way overspend on the MIC but really sending militaries over to other countries was the status quo for almost as long as countries have existed.
There is no real reason to expect that will not happen again just because we are going on 80 years since anyone made a serious effort to do it. You could also argue that it has been 80 years because it was made so expensive to wage war that money/resources is no longer a reason to do it. There just isn't an ROI.
No one outside of the US or its allies even has a blue-water Navy. China has ONE carrier and it's a pile of shit compared to what we have. We have 11 super carriers, add in the smaller ones and we have another 40 or so. That's not even counting the rest of NATO.
Let's not even get into to the backwater that is the PRC's air force.
Yeah they have 1.3 billion people. Big deal. How exactly do they get them over here?
Nuclear war, now that's a different story but having another cool bleeding-edge fighter jet isn't going to stop a full scale nuclear conflict. China and Russia have enough nukes they all might not make it to the continental US but it's enough to destroy us. We can certainly do the same. The basic game theory of MAD hasn't changed much in the past few decades.
What I am saying is that if they do we have a backup of about 40-50 more. And that's not even counting Nato.
Or the fact that hundreds of other ships and subs led by Navy folks that are far better trained and with better equipment than anything China or Russia could ever hope to compete with in the next 15-20 years at best.
My point isn't that China can't give us a bloody nose or two, it's just that they are so far behind the NATO force's militaries that we don't need to waste another few trillion on the latest greatest tech.
I think that before a brand new manned fighter design leaves the assembly line and takes its first flight, unmanned drones will rule the air.
It has been clear that it wasn't going to be a useful platform for USAF for years.
There's plenty to criticize about the F-35, particularly about the procurement strategy and development cycle. But we are starting to see real results. The F-35 has performed very well in exercises like Red Flag. And I don't think you can understate the importance of the F-35B. Yes, it has markedly worse availability rates and maintenance issues than the other variants, but that's pretty common for STOVL aircraft, like the Harrier it is replacing. And not only is the F-35B the only stealth STOVL, it's also the first production STOVL aircraft capable of supersonic speed.
I also think it's weird to imply the reason the F-35 has failed (and I don't belive it has) because it's been made in three different variants. That really isn't the reason for all of these delays. There are several examples of aircraft being able to work in multiple roles, like the F-4 and the French Rafale. The fundamental issue is in avionics and logistics. All of these sensors and systems are very complex and difficult to integrate together. Any aircraft with a modern, full-featured AESA radar and IRST sensors sees a protracted development time.
In terms of purchasing new, lower-end aircraft, I do think that's a good idea. Depending on where you want that to fit in in terms of doctrine, you've got a couple of options. The USAF is already starting to purchase some F-15EX planes. It's got decent range, good performance in air-to-air and air-to-ground engagements, and it's based on a mature platform which should reduce costs and improve availability. But it's a fairly big beast, and operational costs will still be higher than legacy F-16s. The other option is to go with a genuine light fighter like the JAS-39 Gripen. Cheaper, much lower operational costs, and capable of operating from short, rudimentary runways, but shorter range and less payload capacity. I also think there's space for a "featherweight" plane, like the A-29. When we're engaging Taliban targets that don't have anti-aircraft defenses beyond small arms fire, a simple turboprop will get the job done efficiently and cheaply, and that frees up jets to be used in other theaters.
The Australians and Boeing have a fighter companion drone in the air already now. I didn#t follow that to closely, so. I also think that the manned component of FCAS, the fighter, might be ready earlier. And that fighter is everyting the French want from the program.
I presume the French just want to save their aerospace industry. Before Corona Airbus was looking really screwed, with 777/787 being much more efficient than the A380, but with 737 MAX fiasco and limited intercontinental flights the A320neo is looking good. But I digress.
Today's drones are sitting ducks and they've just started to outfit them with air to air missiles.
48 x 90 = 4320 mil.$
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2365060/microsoft-caught-ast...
Or perhaps it was astroturfing of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America?
https://www.minnpost.com/second-opinion/2016/02/new-patient-...
Or perhaps the energy industry?
https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/energy-utility...
But certainly its an unhinged conspiracy that government and the military would push their own narratives via astroturfing. Everyone knows they have far too much respect for how they spend our taxpayer dollars and they have far too much integrity to be so devious. Certainly all of the stalwart defenders of the F-35 that pop up on every internet forum and message board to sing the praises of that boondoggle must be sincere.
I don't know the sales figures, but it may have been a success using those metrics.
F-15 -> F-22 + some F-35 F-16 -> F-35 F-18 -> F-35 carrier version AV-8B -> F-35 STOVL
It is unfortunately compromised in weight by needing to do the carrier role. But on the flip side, the extra strength in the fuselage means they could last a long time.