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Comment by credit_guy | Hacker News Reader

> a plane that took [...] a trillion dollars to develop

It didn't take a trillion dollar to develop. The trillion dollar figure includes acquisition costs (going to 2070) as well as operations and maintenance over the same period.

By the way, the F-35 isn't any more expensive than other aircraft. For example for the latest budget proposal (2022), the DoD plans to acquire 85 F-35s [1] for a total price of $85 BN, or about $150 MM per plane. At the same time, it plans to acquire 14 tanker aircraft KC-46 for a unit price of about $180 MM, and 9 cargo helicopters CH-53K for a unit price of $190 MM. Yes, you read that right, those are helicopters, they are not attack, but cargo helicopters, and cost almost $200 MM apiece.

[1] https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/263871...

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For anyone else confused, it's 85 F-35s for $12B, not $85B

It's also worth noting that these other aircraft are widely criticized as being excessively expensive as well, mostly because of the exact same issues with the acquisition process. For example the CH-53K is supposed to cost half of that, but because only 9 are being purchased this year the fixed costs aren't as amortized as predicted. And that's really the crux of it: the F35 acquisition was always going to be an 11 figure program, but the leading digit could have been a 1 instead of a 4, the price tag is the right order of magnitude, but there were still hundreds of billions of dollars wasted due to mismanagement.

You can say wasted due to mismanagement and not be wrong but also designing, building, and maintaining warplanes are among the most complex tasks humans have ever done, and I’ve been on plenty of teams that could barely manage a CRUD webapp so it’s not like being efficiently organized is easy and everywhere.

It should be impressive that such a thing is possible at all.

And, to be honest, it’s partially a jobs program to keep engineers employed and experienced in case there is a real need for immediate defense work.

Is it really that complex? The best software engineers go to FAANG, not defense companies.

Aircraft engineering isn't all software though. There's a significantly non-trivial part that is hardware design (arguably the bulk of it), with incredibly tight tolerances, and often unique alloys. All of which can make or break a design.

Even just a single component, like the engine, is a massive engineering undertaking. If the company developing the powerplant under-delivers the entire program can be a bust.

What do you base this assertion on?

Prices?

And what does that say about society? If all of the companies in FAANG were to suddenly disappear, I think society would be better for it*.

Sure, people "depend" on FB for comms etc blah blah, but the world functioned fine before them if not maybe slightly less convenient. Netflix, come on. It's just entertainment. Nothing more. Google? Maybe search could be built to work again. Amazon? Maybe people actually buy local again. Apple? So we don't have luxury devices that cost more than some people make in a year.

*Obviously excluding the sudden loss of jobs. It's just a thought exercise.

It says that we haven’t seriously needed to actually defend ourselves in an extremely long time.

I don't think that's true. It's more like we value people to spam other people with ads and other trivial minutia more than other things.

when was the last time there was a credible threat against the United States that the defense industry was helpful in neutralizing?

Perhaps the reason for that is just having that defense industry.

Sounds like they don't need any help from FAANG engineers then.

Imagine if all of the FAANG engineers took their resources to make the place a better world <snark>. All of that energy on delivering the better ad could be so much better spent on <insert cause of choice here> instead of delivering ads and building the better big brother.

https://earthshotprize.org/

Sure, I agree. I just think defense is a weird thing to pick. Our governments need a lot of help with tech, I think the DoD actually needs less help than most other parts.

These companies exist because the market demands they do. If they disappear something else would fill the gap, swiftly. “Just” entertainment? That seems to me to be a better investment of effort than creation of war machines without a cause.

You have been sorely misled

Even if it was true that software engineers that don't work for FAANGs can't develop something complex (I doubt that's true, I'm sure there's plenty of skilled software engineers working at Lockheed Martin), FAANGs don't employ a lot of aerodynamicists, flight dynamicists, weapons engineers, material scientists, experts in radar technology etc. though, which is just a selection of the kind of specialists you need to develop a fighter jet.

When the JSF program started, the only FAANG that existed yet was Apple.

Only a small proportion of the program involves software, and at that they were, for example, designing VR/AR helmets as a feature. What people are talking about being an entire industry was tacked on as a minor feature.

Imagine designing hardware where your single product is developed as computer tech advanced from 1993 to 2006 (program inception to first production flight, more or less)

There was an estimate that the program employed a quarter of a million people, because of how spread out contracts like this are it's hard to really come up with a comparison.

JSF is on a similar level of complexity of the entirety of Google, and has been in development about five years longer.

>the only FAANG that existed yet was Apple.

Which back then was seriously on the ropes, with SJ coming back to turn it around. Nobody would have listed Apple as an industry leading company. How times change.

Unfortunately, some of the smartest mathematicians and engineers that I know work for the 'defense' (should be named 'department of war' or 'offense') departments. They believe - which you of course may or may not agree with - that they are doing something for their country, and that the lack of pay is proof of their sacrifice.

> designing, building, and maintaining warplanes are among the most complex tasks humans have ever done

Most people who do complex, difficult jobs estimate for the complexity and difficulty. This project is both years behind schedule and at roughly twice its initial budget. There are also regularly reports of serious flaws in its day-to-day operation.

I believe it's fair to say both that the project is difficult and that this particular effort appears to have delivered a lower-quality product at higher costs and timelines than most of its peers.

> it’s partially a jobs program to keep engineers employed and experienced in case there is a real need for immediate defense work.

This is always true and they usually have better results.

I believe it's fair to say both that the project is difficult and that this particular effort appears to have delivered a lower-quality product at higher costs and timelines than most of its peers.

What are the peers of the F-35?

There are none, obviously.

In most ways it’s a cheaper less capable version of the F-22 except it’s not significantly cheaper. The VTOL version of the F-35 has few direct competitors but then again it’s making serious sacrifices for VTOL capacity.

My understanding was that the F22 is more for a forward stealth air platform that is also intense at air to air. The F35 in “beast mode” is a gun truck in military jargon and isn’t really all that stealth at all. The F22 and F35 are meant for quite different missions and they’re best paired together.

https://www.lockheedmartin.com/f35/news-and-features/raaf-fl...

The issue is the US military has more than just 2 aircraft. Sure, if it’s going to give up on being stealthy the F-35 can be a relatively slow gun rack with a pile of air to air missiles. Except giving up stealth and it’s lost most advantages over older and vastly cheaper aircraft.

Air to ground benefits from the extra carrying capacity but if you have air superiority then drones etc are again vastly more effective for the price. Sure, it’s got nice avionics right now, but that stuff gets replaced long before the aircraft gets retired.

That said we didn’t actually built that many F-22’s so we really needed something to pick up the slack.

The Shenyang FC-31 Gyrfalcon is maybe sort of a peer of the F-35A/C. The Sukhoi Su-75 Checkmate might eventually be developed into a peer of the F-35A, but for now it's still a paper airplane. There is no peer of the F-35B.

You could say the same for a toy car that I made when I was 5 out of play dough.

That car has no peer.

A more relevant question to ask is... in head on air to air combat, is there a plane that can match it or beat it?

Yeah, but they're not blowing money on the hard, complex parts, most of the cost overruns have been due to poorly thought out "cost saving" measures, for example producing the factory tooling before the plane if finished being designed, only to have to go back and redo all of the work when the design changes. Indeed the impetus for the project was to reduce costs by moving everything to a single airframe, based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the cost of aircraft development. At the same time many decisions were made based on maintaining political support instead of efficiency, which was always going to increase cost. Yeah, this isn't the the first time a project was poorly managed, and it won't be the last, but this is not an example of competent people giving it their best shot.

The claim that something is a jobs program is often used to justify not caring about waste, but that doesn't really make any sense. If your goal is to maintain a large pool of skilled individuals, it makes sense to do lots of highly efficient projects. When you do things efficiently, you can provide jobs to more engineers, and support a wider range of projects to maintain a more diverse skillset, plus you get more useful products out of the program.

You know what is impressive? Getting the CSS of any non-trivial app right. /s

More on a serious note, for the cost of one of these aircrafts, you can get more than 1/10th of their weight in gold. Either gold or the aircrafts are way too expensive, I think it is the latter. I wonder, what the Chengdu J-20 costs...

Imagine if this level of corporate welfare went towards social care, the environment or education. What a racket.

I think they are like supercars. They cost a lot but that’s because two things: low volume and custom parts or components and special requirements.

Imagine how easy life would be if we didn’t pay over the odds for either.

Oh god let's please not add any for-profit subsidies to a broken pharma and healthcare system. It's a plague. I hope the drug price negotiation becomes law and actually saves as much as CBO score projects. I am less hopeful we'll ever be able to get a better healthcare system in the US

I'm 100% for clean energy though. But probably not going to happen; Manchin said specifically he doesn't want to subsidize 'what the companies are already doing.' Yet he's good with a bunch of coal and coal employee subsidies...

In a lot of circumstances I'd probably agree with his position but this is a crisis. It's like saying we shouldn't have invested in helping develop Covid vaccines because PHARMA is already doing it on their own.

There is a greater survival and health risk to think of. If money can help we should spend it.

In the US, defense spending is ~700 billion, whereas the level of social care spending is about ~3000 billion.

Given the relative effectiveness of US healthcare and education, vs the US military, I’d sooner call US social spending a racket.

That includes Social Security, which is wildly successful.

> That includes Social Security, which is wildly successful.

Wildly successful at giving away other people's money, but not wildly successful at sustaining itself without congress intervention every few years, to the point where the fund would collapse and cease to exist without intervention (ie. capital injection, ie. printing money).

I don't count that as "wildly successful" by any means.

Do you think it would be better if our senior citizens, past working age, were just living on the street in poverty?

That's quite an unfair argument... it's not binary, either living on the streets or getting social security.

Personally, I don't think the government should be involved in your financial life at all, especially retirement. IRA's should be available to anyone, and maybe even required. The difference is you are in charge of your retirement, not politicians and their political objectives at the moment you just so happen to retire. Why would you want to trust the government with your financial future?

But, that's not to say some system run by the government can't work... it just says social security as was implemented doesn't work. We know it doesn't work because it requires printing money or raising the burden on today's youth unfairly. It doesn't work because the amount of money you put into the system doesn't equal what you will get out, and it doesn't grow with the markets or inflation. Few people can actually retire on social security because it pays so very little.

Any way you slice it... it's really, really tough to objectively call social security "wildly successful", which was the original contested assertion.

> you are in charge of your retirement, not politicians and their political objectives at the moment you just so happen to retire

How has the latter happened for Social Security? It's pretty much delivered as advertised. Would you trust everyone's fate to Wall Street?

> IRA's

Not everyone is equipped to handle investment, especially elderly people who are easily confused. And it creates reinforcing problems: If the economy is bad and Wall Street has a bad year, people need the money more but have less of it.

> it requires printing money or raising the burden on today's youth unfairly

How has Social Security required that? Why should today's youth have less burden their their predecessors, who paid for a many long-term investments that other generations benefited from?

I'm not sure that's unfair.

With the state of wealth inequality in the states, the number of people living paycheck-to-paycheck, ever increasing attacks against the finances of the elderly in the form of scams and schemes, and our culture's dislike of multigenerational housing it seems like a choice between a government wellfare system like social security or tens of thousands to millions of impoverished, homeless elderly folks.

Libertarian ideals like "the government shouldn't be involved in your finances" seem fine in a perfect world, but reality is certainly not ideal.

Counterpoints? I'd also like to hear your thoughts on an alternative that takes care of those less fortunate? Thanks for your time! :)

> We know it doesn't work because it requires printing money or raising the burden on today's youth unfairly.

Debt financing is how we got out of the great depression and just about every major economic crisis since. Where would the markets be without government intervention in 2008? Where would the markets be now without QE? If "printing money" and "raising the burden on today's youth unfairly" are systematic failures, then it seems that American capitalism has been a sham for a long time.

I agree it has generally been a sham for a long time. If we actually believed strongly in free markets we would have let the various financial institutions die in 2008. I personally believe smaller regional players would have stepped in and we may have had a stronger recovery after a worse initial depression as those players fill the gap.

Let's also see the real consequences of the rapidly increasing inflation too in the coming years from the last couple stimulus bills. I wouldn't be too quick to look at QE as a panacea.

Seems like we've been treating symptoms instead of addressing various root causes for a long long time.

You get back your own money, effectively. The money isn't 'given away', but invested in the survival, health and well-being of elderly people.

For regular SS, it's like an annuity. For the disability portion, it's closer to insurance or welfare

Has congress actually added any money to the Social Security Trust funds, except in cases where they were first taking revenue away (ex. payroll tax breaks)?

I thought the issue of potential congress intervention was future funding, for full benefits, not current and past funding.

1937 to 2009 historical receipts/expenditures/balance: https://www.ssa.gov/history/tftable.html

1957 to 2020 reserves/income/costs: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4a3.html

Seems overall to have funded itself well?

Yeah, the fund is expected to run out in 2034 now. And then we'll see what happens.

https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/TR/2021/tr2021.pdf

Isn't the US military just another social security scheme? Except the main recipients are arms companies instead of the poor. Although the US military recruitment tactics of focussing on poor communities could also be seen as a social security scheme.

All of this is a contortion of the concept of social security, and you should lead with the redefinition.

You could say the same thing about the military. It's been 76 years since 1945, and the US is still on top.

A bunch of Afghani people would beg to differ.

They'd be wrong. The US suffered a political defeat, not a military one. The US could flatten Afghanistan at any time.

Flattening a country isn't a victory. It's the act of a toddler not getting its way and then upsetting the gameboard so nobody gets to play.

I suggest you re-think your definition of victory.

Is Afghanistan on top of the world now? Did I miss that?

And far more Vietnamese, Koreans, and Iraqis.

Fair point, I just went with the most recent example.

I wasn't arguing, just augmenting. Your point was essential.

On top of spending, yes.

https://www.pgpf.org/blog/2021/07/the-united-states-spends-m...

The true national security budget is around 1.25 trillion. For example nuclear weapons are not in the defense budget but in the Department of Energy budget.

https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2019/05/making-sense-of-the-1-...

It does in other countries!

Now add the expected maintenance costs over the life of the aircraft.

- How many hours of flight can the F-35 do before it needs to be hangered?

- How long does it take in the hanger?

- Can the F-35 even go supersonic without ripping off its anti-radar coat (thus becoming more visible as soon as it decelerates?)

- given the cramped space, how capable are aircraft carriers at F-35 repair? How many can they do at a time? What is the duty cycle of the F-35 on a carrier?

- Is the plane even finished the design phase?

The US should have bought 500 F-22 and given the Navy its own carte blanc design skipping the F-35 altogether.

> The US should have bought 500 F-22 and given the Navy its own carte blanc design skipping the F-35 altogether.

Why? The F-22 is an air superiority fighter. The F-35 is a multi-role fighter. They're built for different purposes. It's crucial to understand the difference.

That's the issue, trying to make one airframe fill three drastically different roles and hence failing at all of them. Every time the F-35 turns in a miserable performance report its mission profile is changed to make it look like less of an embarrassment.

In Hearts of Iron, you play as a country during WW2.

As Germany, you face threats from Britain (ships, fighters and bombers), France (mostly land forces) and Russia.

What do you build?

Air superiority fighters win dogfights (F22 today) but are only useful vs Britain.

Close Air Support (A10 today) beat tanks, but lose in the air.

Multirole fighters (F35 today) work in all three theaters, but not as well as the specialists.

Given that the next war might be vs Russia (Crimea situation), Taiwan / China (Naval), or maybe even terrorists in Africa or Middle East, multirole is the obvious airplane to build today.

-----

So Air Force wants a multirole fighter that can take off from airstrips / airports.

Marines want a multirole fighter that can take off of Wasp Amphibious Assault Ships (ramp launch)

Navy wants a multirole fighter that can take off of their Aircraft Carriers (catapult launch).

This gives F35A, F35B, and F35C variants. But since they all wanted a multirole fighter, it makes sense to try to make the three variants as similar as possible. You want to standardize the gun, standardize the bullets, standardize the fuel, standardize the software.

The F-35 wasn't intended to do everything. There are certainly those who have tried to make it do everything but that wasn't the intent of the program.

For example it was never meant to be an air superiority fighter. While it does have a great radar, missiles and even a gun on the air force version it was never meant to fill the role of an F-15 or F-22. The air force wants to replace the F-16 with the F-35.

The new Digital Century program shows the AF hasn't forgotten about the importance of dedicated platforms. However given the cost and development times of modern aircraft it takes a new approach to make them practical.

The navy has also been clear about the role of the F-35. It wont ever be used as an F-14 replacement. They are actually working on that separately.

As for other customers, different militaries have different missions and needs. It is true the F-35 is capable of filling most roles if needed. Some nations may rely on it as their air defense backbone. That's a secondary capability but when you only have the budget for one fighter and this is the only 5th gen on the open market then its defacto the best option.

> The F-35 wasn't intended to do everything.

Yes it was... and Congress decided to tell the military what it needed instead of the other way around - hence the "jack of all trades, master of none" that is the F-35.

The F-16 is considered an air superiority fighter[1], although it is used in multi-role missions as well.

It's fly-away cost in 1998 was around $18.8MM[1], which is about $31.9MM today... or less than half the cost of each F-35.

Congress forced the idea of the F-35 onto the military as a low cost modern do-it-all aircraft. Then the Marines drove a huge part of the F-35 development, which ended up requiring VTOL/STOL capabilities etc, things no other branch wanted or needed and where subsequently ripped out of their variants anyway.

The final result are three different airframes that look similar, but don't share many parts, and don't outmatch the incumbent plane in each category (A-10 for CAS, AV-8B for VTOL/CAS, F-16/F-15/F-18/F-22 for AS and multirole, and probably a few others I'm leaving out).

So... why continue with the F-35? Sunk cost fallacy, mostly. It would be far better to take the lessons learned from this bleeding-edge program and apply them to new, purpose-built aircraft that each branch actually wants and needs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Dynamics_F-16_Fighting...

The air force wants to replace the F-16 with the F-35.

Shame that in exercises the F-35 loses visual-range fights with the F-16 even when the F-16 is carrying external fuel tanks.

The issue is that it's almost universally worse than all the specialty aircraft it replaces at that specialty job. It's worse at fighting insurgents than the A-10. It's worse at dogfighting than the F-16. It's worse at air superiority than the F-18.

https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/us-admits-f-35-failed-to-r...

> That's the issue, trying to make one airframe fill three drastically different roles and hence failing at all of them.

Really, you can thank the the F-4 Phantom II, F-16 and both versions of the F-18 (the A and C, which is a much larger aircraft) for this. All of these planes excelled as both fighter and attack aircraft, and showed it was possible to do both missions well enough.

The F/A-18 E is the Super Hornet, the A and C are the same airframe.

You are correct.

"Multirole" is just Pentagon speak for "smaller, cheaper, and limited, but still stealthy".

No, it doesn’t mean that at all. It’s differences can range from types of munitions to avionics. The fact you said a multirole fighter is more limited shows you really don’t know the differences. A multirole is actually more capable. A multirole like F-35 can do air superiority but it won’t outperform an aircraft designed specifically for air superiority like the F-22. The F-22 does not do air-to-ground strikes. The F-35 can.

The multirole fighter is not a new concept.

The F-22 has done air-to-ground strikes, its problem is just being too expensive.

Being capable of doesn't make it the primary role. Yes the F-22 can drop a few bombs... but that's the problem.. a few. It doesn't have the load capabilities or external pylons (without compromising it's stealth entirely) to carry significant munitions or preferred role-specific munitions to be really effective in CAS or ground attack. Nor is it's cannon a comparable replacement for the GAU-8.

All carrier aircraft are typically brought into the hangar for several hours of maintenance after every flight. But if necessary the F-35B can be immediately refueled and rearmed on the flight deck and sent right out again in a matter of minutes.

Maintainers on a carrier can do fairly complex repairs, including engine replacement. If they need more working space in the hangar then other aircraft can be parked temporarily on the flight deck.

The F-35 is primarily a strike fighter so supersonic speed isn't that useful. The biggest problem with flying at supersonic speeds is it drastically increases fuel consumption, and the F-35B has a very limited fuel capacity. British carriers have no tankers.

As long as an aircraft is still in active production the design phase is never "finished". Updates will continue for decades. The F-15 design is about 50 years old and it's still not finished.

The F-22 production program was cancelled in 2011 because there was just no funding available. It wasn't possible to fight the wars in the Middle East, and procure more F-22s. Something had to give.

"- Can the F-35 even go supersonic without ripping off its anti-radar coat (thus becoming more visible as soon as it decelerates?)"

Yes. One of the major improvements over the F-22 is the way the stealth coating works. Its baked in to the skin of the aircraft. It does not flake off, it does not need to be constantly reapplied. The F-22 and all other prior stealth aircraft, F-117 and B-2 are hangar queens because of their fragile stealth coatings. This is not the case for F-35. Not only is a game changer but it was also a requirement to make a carrier based stealth fighter actually practical.

"- given the cramped space, how capable are aircraft carriers at F-35 repair? How many can they do at a time? What is the duty cycle of the F-35 on a carrier?"

Just as capable at servicing any other carrier based aircraft. The F-35 its actually smaller than the super hornet in every dimension so space shouldn't be a problem. Its much smaller than the F-14 was. And its biggest servicing issue wasn't its size but the complexity of its swing wing.

"- Is the plane even finished the design phase?"

Ok, now I'm starting to wonder if you actually have informed criticisms or if you are just an F-35 hater and only want to spread FUD.

> By the way, the F-35 isn't any more expensive than other aircraft.

Only because every time the development costs go up they agree to buy more planes so that they can keep the per-plane costs the same. The development costs are wildly disproportionate to other weapons programmes if you properly separate them.

> By the way, the F-35 isn't any more expensive than other aircraft.

It is more expensive. And the fact that all "modern" militaro-industriel projects goes over budget is just not an excuse to that.

The F-16 program (which the F-35 is supposed to replace) was around 10x less. Even inflation considered, this does not justify this fiasco.

Same goes for the F/A-18, the Su-35 or the Dassault rafale.

Even the damn entire Apollo program (inflation considered) was currently cheaper with an impact for the society of a complete different scale.

Maybe the question should be: Was the utility of this plane worth the cost ? And I can barely find any positive arguments to that. Specially when considering the conflicts USA has been in the last 20 years.

It's a work program, not an aeronautics program, and a very efficient way to take a large amount of tax payers money and make it end up in particular designated pockets.

> the F-35 isn't any more expensive than other aircraft. For example for the latest budget proposal (2022), the DoD plans to acquire 85 F-35s [1] for a total price of $85 BN, or about $150 MM per plane.

But isn't that in all probability the same kind of thing as large American IT companies do with their international subsidiaries, i.e. moving money around on paper to where it looks the best?

That is, Dell and Facebook and Apple and so on have their European headquarters in Ireland (where corporate taxes are the lowest, and on top of that they negotiate sweet deals to make it even lower), and pay the mother company "royalties" for "use of intellectual property" to siphon profits away to where they're hardly taxed at all. In a similar way, defense contractors make the sale price look like what they think gives the best chance to get the sale (including what the great unwashed public will "buy", so they don't put pressure on their politicians, and those in turn on the military, to reject it) -- but then add that money on to maintenance contracts or future development where it's less visible here and now.

Looking at just the stated "sale price" and thinking that that actually represents the "true cost" of a machine seems rather naïve to me.

Your comparisons ignore engine count. The KC-46 has two engines and the CH-53K has three engines. The F-35 has one.

If your single engine jet fails on a catapult launch, you've lost that plane, and the pilot has just a few seconds to punch out and save their own lives.

I have no idea what engine count should have to do with argument: my rowboat has two engines (if my partner is coming along), yet I'm willing to part with it for below $ 150 million. It's also safer than most military helicopters and fighter jets, although I won't vouch for its behaviour in carrier catapult launches.

I believe the real argument is something along the lines off "yeah, those planes are BIG compared to the F-35", plus something that accounts for the helicopter. Maybe its unit price doesn't benefit from a split-off development process before? Or its expected sales volume is even lower?

None of that matters if an expensive flying gun can't do what an inexpensive robot vacuum can do.

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