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spaceman_2020

If these are indeed secret government projects, you’d wonder why did taxpayers ever fund a trillion+ dollar F-35 program that keeps running into problems year after year.

Surely these black ops operations couldn’t have had a bigger budget than the F-35 (if they did, you’d ask how did they source the funds?). And if they didn’t, how were they able to get these experimental aircraft to fly better and faster than the trillion dollar F-35 jets - decades ago? And if they were, why are we not funding these hypersonic gravity defying jets instead of an evolutionary upgrade to 4th gen fighter planes.

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The F-35 ended up being a pretty impressive jet after all, but let's go with the old story that it way under-performed for the cost -- a possible explanation would be that most of that trillion+ budget actually went to secret projects like the hypersonic UFO stuff. (I don't actually believe this, but it is at least a self-consistent explanation under the assumption that the government is hyper-competent and has this sci-fi UFO technology).

Same was said about the B-2 stealth bomber program: its cost was so high that a popular conspiracy story was that much of the funds go to something really advanced and thus not even spoken of publicly.

I think the cost per fighter was something like $2B which to me seems absurd as once the initial research and test plane were created the other planes should be relatively cheap as they are making them off of well tested plans. So either major grift by the manufacturer or something else is getting that money. And the cost per plane keeps getting higher every year which doesn't make sense.

The government tends to include operation costs. The 2 billion per plane includes the cost to run the things over their lifespan. so the equation to get it is something like.

stealth_bomber_design + stealth_bomber_r_and_d + ( 21 * ( stealth_bomber_manufacturing + (stealth_bomber_operations_cost_per_year * years_of_operation ) )

I'd be surprised if some of that stealth_bomber_r_and_d didn't go into the f-22 and f-35. So really a full accounting would probably make it look a little cheaper, and give the R&D cost a chance to amortized across the more numerous fighters.

They only made 21 of them, which is probably hardly enough for marginal cost to even matter.

It’s also a case of not really a cost for the B2 (or F35, or F22). What you’re really paying for is “if we have a war, will we own the sky?”

The price is insane, but that's what you get when you ask for something that's a fighter, a bomber, a close-air support aircraft, a carrier-capable aircraft, a VTOL, and stealthed. The amazing thing is that the F-35 actually can do all that.

Whether combining all that functionality was a good idea is questionable. Because there aren't enough F-35s for a serious war, like Ukraine or Taiwan.

I can understand the misappropriation of funds to explain what was done but what I can't understand is the depth and number of layers required for the cover up. The amount of people starting at the maintenance, cleaning etc all the way through engineering, logistics, support to maintain such a cover up just seems impossible to me.

On September 10th 2001 Donald Rumsfeld testified to Congress that the department of defense had misplaced 1 trillion dollars. Somehow the public reaction didn't last for a full 24 hour news cycle.

> Somehow the public reaction didn't last for a full 24 hour news cycle.

That "somehow" is doing a lot of work.

Really?! The day before? I’m not a conspiracy theorist but…

Alright, I'm no MAD game theory expert so I'll probably get ripped apart, but I'll appreciate the discussion.

I've wondered if there's any MAD incentive to keep some major groundbreaking technology under complete wraps (beyond TS - see recent headlines). If MAD is disrupted by groundbreaking tech, and if this technology would significantly boost strike capabilities and possibly render nuclear weapons useless, then the rival nations would be forced to exercise a nuclear strike preemptively to ensure their security to prevent a war they would inevitably lose.

So that's one theory that I've kicked around in my head as to why we might have such tech but keep it such a tight secret. It certainly could be complete fantasy or misunderstanding of MAD. Please tell me why I'm wrong so I can bury this line of thought!

> If MAD is disrupted by groundbreaking tech, and if this technology would significantly boost strike capabilities and possibly render nuclear weapons useless, then the rival nations would be forced to exercise a nuclear strike preemptively to ensure their security to prevent a war they would inevitably lose.

As of now, a nuclear war would result in two losers anyway, that's the whole point of MAD. Doing a preemptive strike would just create a massive problem where there might never be one. The only reason to attack would be if you already plan on kamikaze-by-nuke.

"Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world?"

But what if it is not a Doomsday machine. What if it is something that can give you first strike capability while also destroying any enemy attempt at retaliation. In that case, it might make sense to keep it close to the vest, lest you destabilize MAD.

Or what if it’s a kite, or a piece of trash blowing in the wind, or a paper airplane, or…

One group of aliens uses a craft the exact shape of a trashcan lid. They said this is no accident, it looks precisely the way it should look. There are pictures of it but I wont bother :)

Tbh I think US conventional weaponry is pretty close to cancelling MAD anyway.

US weapons actually work.

And they actually seem to have enough of them. Russia seems to have three prototypes and zero inventory.

> trillion+ dollar F-35 program

<tin-foil>It makes perfect sense that the trillion+ didn't actually go to the F-35 and was instead used for secret projects, and the F-35 was a token effort to look legit.</tin-foil>

Pretty sure in the Cold War and so forth there were all sorts of paper tiger projects that were just for show, either to the public or for Soviet espionage.

It's been suspected that these money hole defense projects like the F-35 are siphoning off the money for these alleged skunk works secret projects and that's really where the money is going. That or just plain old corruption.

With a fully parallel secret tech tree, you could in theory mine raw material, process them, and manufacture anything without money. You could have a closed system where resource allocation is done differently.

> why did taxpayers ever fund a trillion+ dollar F-35 program that keeps running into problems year after year.

These problems and that budget are the feature they have been seeking.

It’s not clean, limitless energy.

The budgets were not actually going to the F-35 or the mythical $50 hammers etc. They were going to projects that work.

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