The Pentagon's $399 Billion Plane to Nowhere | Hacker News Reader

The Pentagon's $399 Billion Plane to Nowhere

foreignpolicy.com

103 pointsmcalmels72 comments

It would appear this nation's military is a fat, bloated welfare recipient, feeling entitled and too powerful for anyone to do anything about it, impoverishing the nation.

We all know it has many brilliant and capable individuals and teams in it who can do great work, but the system is anything but.

The money ultimately goes to people, meaning we are paying people to do unproductive work, though I'm sure plenty of it goes to executives extracting rents without working productively. Weapons are not the only way to make a nation secure. Collaborative relations with other countries and less disparity of wealth help too. Imagine the security that money could create if used to help others instead of threaten them, or invested into entrepreneurship or helping keep the government accountable.

History shows what happens to cultures where the people can't rein in its powerful who look for more power. I hope we figure out how to.

All the money we spend on the fighting the wars, yet we can't over spend on treating the veterans. It's really pathetic.

Veterans, yes. But how about all the people who lost their jobs in the US over the last 20 years because of the obvious incompetence of the government to budget in any way that makes sense.

Priorities. If you have a ton of starving and jobless people in your country, you do not spend a quarter of a TRILLION dollars on killing more people. I'm sorry, you just don't.

Getting people to work means more people paid, more jobs. How does a large govt project reduce available jobs? Not following.

It doesn't. The point is not that it reduces available jobs, but that nearly half a trillion dollars could have been spent more directly on any number of options which A) don't involve blowing up people in foreign countries; and B) produce a substantially better quality of life in this country. Basic income, healthcare, even jobs just standing around that paid a living wage.

It boggles the mind.

By reducing consumer spending and investment through the taxation necessary for funding said project?

Actually government jobs programs kind of directly affect joblessness and hunger. The question is whether this is the right kind of jobs program. Fixing infrastructure would create more jobs with a greater multiplier (construction workers are lower paid and spend more of their income) and produce lasting value.

Edit: weird typo.

You are exactly right.

These huge military projects (which for the most part are utterly unnecessary) are nothing more than jobs programs cloaked as national security. There is certainly a huge element of rent extraction by defense contractor executives, as well as small business owners who utilize specialized direct award "set asides" designed for minorities, women, service disabled veterans (the vast majority of these are people who were never in combat, and have minor injuries at best such as back-pain), etc. Of course, the large defense contractors simply sub-contract to these small businesses and then do all the work, while the 3 people who constitute the small business pocket money for doing nothing other than existing.

But beyond the rent-extraction, you have a nation with a hugely oversized, overstaffed military. We take people, the vast majority of whom have an average high school record and zero college experience, and then put them into an immensely bloated, 1950's era organization. A small percentage of them will learn how to perform combat operations. The majority of them will learn to perform the logistics functions (supply, maintenance, repair, administration) that are the backbone of any military.

While some of these skills learned (electronics, software, etc) are in demand in the private sector, the vast, vast majority are not. In fact, a huge percentage of the administrative functions in the military have long been automated in the private sector. It is a truly overstaffed, bloated beyond belief organization.

So where do you go when you get out of active duty? If you are like many folks, you are truly fed up with being in a large government institution, and you want nothing more to do with the military. You go to school, aggressively learn some trade/skill that is in demand in the private sector, and you leave it.

The majority of people I've encountered don't do this. Instead, they take the only jobs they are qualified for: "quals" (somebody with military experience in some obscure area of logistics for an organization that is required on paper for a contractor to have employed upon award of a contract) for a defense contractor, or a civil service civilian job in the Department of Defense or other segments of the Federal gov't.

Both are, to some degree, do nothing jobs. A "Qual" might provide lots of advice to a defense contractor they are employed by, but typically they are just there because the contract demands that they are. They are mostly figure-heads. The joke in the industry is that many are hired and hang out in darkened offices playing video games, separated from the software developers and managers who were never in the military.

The civil service jobs in the Federal gov't are like working in any large bureaucracy. Mediocrity isn't just tolerated, but is the norm. People come in at 9 and leave at 3. If you care about your job, you work hard and end up carrying the weight of several of your coworkers who do nothing but watch the clock. Promotions are based on paper qualifications and certifications, are decided by people who have never met you, and are frequently awarded to people who dedicated their time to gaming the paper system instead of performing their job function.

What I am saying sounds anecdotal, but organizational experts who have studied failures at places such as the V.A. have all summed these findings up in a scientific way.

In Arlington, VA, there is a neighborhood called Crystal City. In Crystal City, there is a large, brand-new environmentally sustainable building which houses a huge number of EPA employees. The EPA has a valuable, important mission. For someone like me, it is beyond depressing seeing the employees milling about on 2 hour lunch breaks. The vast majority of them drive to work, despite the building being walking distance from a subway station. There is a mass exodus at 3PM as they all leave for suburbia.

Just like the rest of the Federal gov't, the EPA and the DOD are nothing more than giant employment programs. The difference is that the EPA gets its budget hammered by one political party that hates it, while the DOD is universally praised and worshipped by people who don't understand that the percentage of members who will ever see combat is in the single digits.

Bingo. Although I am one to generally scoff at jobs programs, if it's going to be done, this is how you do it. VERY expensive jobs programs such as the F-35 shuffle large amounts of cash around, and make it appear that the economy overall is healthy and growing, which it is, but it all relies on program success. The F-35 is a long way from being successful. It's not impossible, but it becomes more unlikely with each problem. That being said, the F-35 program was most likely never meant to be a jobs program. It just turned out that way as funding ballooned (probably after some very successful lobbying).

If only it was a quarter trillion.

More like a quarter trillion per year.

Yes it really is shameful how bad the VA is. I wish someone would pass a law that would prohibit deploying troops to anymore deployments until we fix the VA.

Problem is, any politician who mentions a decrease in military spending is demonized by the right and "left".

Did those $400BN go to the military? Or to the private contractors that designed and built the plane?

>> It would appear this nation's military is a fat, bloated welfare recipient

This can also be said in regards to a large populace of Democratic voters.

Sure, if you consider 4% large [1]. Or maybe you're thinking of the 15% too poor to feed themselves. Which is about the same thing as building a $400B plane.

[1] http://www.statisticbrain.com/welfare-statistics/

I'm a realist, so I understand and accept that the Pentagon's main goal is keep its budget healthy. What I don't understand is why can't we do that in a way that gets us good airplanes?

I'm a wary optimist. Trust, but verify. Hope, but plan for the worst. I don't understand enough to know whether we're living in a Pax Americana or a Pax McDonalds. I hope it's the spread of globalization and liberal democracy, but I'm willing to spend the money just in case it's actually the shadow of the American military machine that keeps our relative peace. If my fears are justified, however, it's our military machine, not our military budget that keeps nation-states polite.

I can be a ruthless critic. I'll buy spin (multi-role is cheaper) only as long as I don't think much about it. But, now I'm thinking about it. It's obvious that an F-35 is a joke. 2500 of them is less funny, but still not nearly as awe-inspiring as it could be.

But, I'm apparently naive. I don't understand why some ambitious politician can't take this opportunity to really do something of note. Why can't somebody take this political machine we've built, with contractors lined up in many states, and repurpose it to produce useful, best-of-breed airplanes? I would buy the spin that it's cheaper and easier to design four different planes each tasked do one job extremely well than it is to design one single plane to fill those four roles simultaneously. There is such a thing as the opposite of synergy. Somebody could coin a phrase here, sell the public something huge, and come out looking like a hero for making good on the money we're inevitably going to spend. Let the Pentagon have their budget. Let the politicians have their jobs. And let me have a military with the best equipment in the world.

> "An upfront question with any program now is: How many congressional districts is it in?" said Thomas Christie, a former senior Pentagon acquisitions official.

The military-industrial complex runs deep...and it goes to show how little we can rely on politicians to confront it. If you were a Representative from the few regions that still has an industrial base, it would be easy to justify just another "Yes" vote, for something that brings 50-500 well-paying jobs and is ostensibly there to "help America"...and hard to justify why you were one of the few to say "No" when ultimately, your share of the pork is small. But spread that attitude across dozens of representatives...and then you have a pork train that's too hard to stop, even if it is subpar in meeting its objectives. Maybe most projects are like this, it's just that this one kept going for a few hundred billion too far.

Most military projects, at least. Witness the nightmare of the armed forces' camo wars [0].

[0]: http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21600700-expense...

The problem with this type of spending, whether or not it does create jobs, is that it is inherently wasteful. If it were a good plane, and not a political show pony, I'd let it off the hook. But billions are being poured into this fancy paperweight, when that money could more readily benefit programs like NASA (I am a fan of private space enterprise, but if we are going to go nuts with the political budget, might as well be on things that are useful). This type of spending creates a false economy that is not a meritocracy but (for lack of better words) a porkocracy.

I don't know if these programs necessarily need to be inherently wasteful. We need a military to wage war, the military needs planes, it needs to renew its fleet, and then projects need to get started to design these planes.

Now, this project seems like a disaster. But it appears to be run under the old rules of Pentagon procurement (cost plus) instead of performance based budgets.

Let's just consider this $trillion just another boost to the economy, this time not through the banking industry, but through the military. We need a military, and sometimes the redistribution of wealth needs to reach them too if we want to keep them around for when we need them to build space ships, bombs and other necessary war products.

It's true, but the same people voting yes "because jobs" vote no on infrastructure repair and improvement projects - desperately needed work that would also create jobs and have a huge, noticeable positive impact on the general citizenry.

Govn't spending to create jobs is always welfare, no matter where we put the money. Why not put it somewhere that will create the same number of jobs, and have something other than a flaming war plane to show for it?

New defense projects are sexy; bringing this type of work to a district makes politicians seem "innovative", and it's the type of thing that plays well in a campaign speech. Maintaining and expanding infrastructure isn't sexy. It won't keep politicians elected.

Defense job creation is appealing because it's an easy way to use federal money for local benefit. If you want to fix bridges or something, you have to deal with people saying it's your state's or city's responsibility, but everyone agrees that defense is the feds' job.

This sort of boondoggle happens in all corners of our society though. I mean... you like NASA... so I'll use them as an example.

The Challenger blew up because of O-Ring failures. Devices that were needed to seal the different cylindrical sections of an SRB together. Why not simply make the SRB from one big cylinder ? Because it wouldn't fit on a semi truck for shipment to KSC. Why do we need to ship these cylinders, can't we just build them right next to the pad ? Because we needed the jobs in the state they were manufactured in. Sound familiar ?

This really is just how things work. It shouldn't be. And this project gets all the attention because of the spectacular nature of the failure... but it really does happen everywhere. It is the kind of public spending folly to be expected from a democratic republic where each region has its own representatives.

You will find many companies that work in dangerous industries, public or private, have had their share of disasters due to institutional problems.

If you want the result of private companies' work, see: coal mining, oil drilling.

It's not about public versus private. It's about the will to hold ourselves to higher standards.

Nearly upend the global economy with derivatives - no consequences, because the economy is too fragile, because our derivatives imploded. Invade a relatively stable nation on the basis of known lies - no consequences. Compared to that, what does washing a mountain of coal ash into a river amount to? Or betting that Indian Point can survive an earthquake?

And so on down the line. Yesterday there was an article posted about how easy it is to get through university and not learn anything. Because, so far, it is possible to maintain a good reputation for academics and let that slide for the sake of revenue.

This is how you become something less than a first-world country, and how you get surprised by the demotion: Having undermined standards, you can't even measure how far we've slid.

Pierre Sprey (F-16's designer) on the F-35 "The F-35 was born of an exceptionally dumb piece of airforce PR spin" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxDSiwqM2nw

Good interview. Problems he's mentioning is basically true for any complex engineering problem: - stakeholders with different agendas building a common product does not work well - one size does not fit all

Same is true for software, etc.

Also known as "design by committee".

He's right about so many things. Especially what is the F-35 good at: "spending money". The whole idea of multi service multi mission fighters is laughable, like saying you only need one programming language to write everything imaginable. Having worked on the F-16 I still think it's an amazing plane with a great track record of doing exactly what it was designed to do.

A lot of what's made the F-35 such a disaster is the Marines' obsession with VTOL/STOVL capability. That requirement and the desire for commonality between the A/B/C models meant that all F-35s had to be designed around a fuselage wide enough to accommodate the lifting fan of the F-35B. That had a direct impact on the reduced maneuverability of the aircraft, pilot visibility, etc.

War is Boring over at Medium has a lot of great coverage of the F-35 program and all the huge missteps and disasters along the way.

https://medium.com/war-is-boring

(When I've recommended them before, I've had someone point out that their coverage is quite biased against the F-35. This is true. That bias does not mean, however, that they're wrong).

...

$399 billion could virtually end hunger in America.

...

Or, you know, we could kill more innocent people halfway across the world. Yeah, let's do that.

America!!!

Oh, that money doesn't include any killing, it's just for designing and building this single tool for it. Actual war fighting is rather more expensive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War

This isn't Reddit. I don't come to HK to read memes or "jokes." Please contribute something more substantive.

You could have made your point about hunger and priorities without it turning into an "America!!!" gag. Then maybe someone else would have replied and the conversation would have moved forward.

Meh. We need a bucket of cold water poured on us. How much of our highly touted "manufacturing renaissance" was in this boondoggle? It's a situation that deserves ridicule.

I'm not going to apologize for my use of a little bit of internet-flavoured comedy to make light of an otherwise absolutely horrifying situation.

As a dual US/CDN citizen myself, I really have to look at this and say 'Whoa. A country that I have pledged my allegiance to is, even as I type this, actively choosing to spend money on killing people outside of their country as well as it's own citizens, instead of helping the people inside of it's own country that are unfortunate bi-products of it's government and banking system's poor decision making over the last century.'

I work in theatre as well as software development, and in theatre we have two faces, a laughing face and a crying face. Because everything is a tragedy or a comedy, depending on how you look at it. I'm just choosing to use the smiley face. :O)

Previous F-35 stories on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7989659

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7906501

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7111843

$399B is enough to have funded NASA from 1980-2012.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Annual_budget.2C...

To be fair, almost a half of that NASA budget was used to pay for the Space Shuttle, that was a plane with many technical problems that use suppliers from almost the 50 states to gain political support in the congress.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program#Budget

Untrue according to your own source. It was $513b from 1980-12, and that's in 2007 inflation adjusted USD. If you used 2014 adjusted USD for both NASA would have come out worse.

We're just lucky that this sort of boondoggle only happens in the military. Imagine how much trouble we'd be in if the rest of our government were engaged in this kind of corruption and/or ineptitude!

I see what you did there. ;-)

It happens in most institutions of size where the goal is to control as many people as possible and the incentive is to create even more layers because then you've got "more people underneath you".

GM had/has an amazing number of levels of mismanagement.

Go after multiple solutions. Sure, cut spending, eliminate bureaucracy, but improve the process of improvement as well: Figure out how to make government changes on a smaller and more agile level. Figure out how to make flatten the legal landscape and make it more accessible.

I recently called my senators and congressman about this issue. None of the staffers were able to provide me with their public opinions on the project. Two mentioned that they haven't received any calls on the matter. If you care about this issue, and are a US citizen, call (http://www.contactingthecongress.org/) your elected officials.

This is by design. Lockheed first learned how to game congress with the B1B (another useless plane).

Here's the recipe:

Talk to the military, see what's giving them a hard-on these days. Get them to start coming up with a project to put on contract.

Military issues Request for Information/Request for Proposal based on requirements you told them to use

Contact any and all congressman. Let them know that you intend to make widget X for Aircraft Z in their respective District. Ensure that virtually every congressional district in the country contains a business that is making at least one or two parts for the aircraft.

A new general comes in who is honest, realizes the weapons system is useless, wants to can it. Congress says no, we need it. Who wants to be the guy who threw away jobs in his district?

Critical general leaves, is replaced by politically minded General who wants to be in charge of a "successful" program, drinks the kook-aid and pretends its not a giant boondoggle.

Profit.

>Lockheed first learned how to game congress with the B1B (another useless plane).

Well, except that the B1B was manufactured by Rockwell who have since been absorbed by Boeing.

ah, I stand corrected. What I should've said was the defense contracting industry learned how to game congress.

Seems like I remember (back in 2005-6) taht the JSF/F-35 was well within budget and on time BEFORE the F-22 was cancelled because of the explosion in costs that now confronts the F-35. Can anyone corroborate that or am I totally off? It really seems that once the F-22 was cancelled the F-35 became the new 'cash cow' so to speak.

The irony of the F22 being cancelled in favor of the F35 is pretty rich.

Do they say $399 Billion because it looks cheaper than $400 Billion? ;-)

They're worried that if they charged $400bil and the government paid with a 400 billion dollar bill, someone could just pocket it. This way, they'd have to make change for $1 billion from the till.

I think it's so the people will say "Oh well, at least it's not $400 million.", and go on with their day. But, it could be your theory too, or may both! :-)

FWIW defense spending during the WWII and the Cold War did wonders to spur technical innovation. Silicon Valley in fact was a product of WWII defense activities (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley).

While I don't necessarily agree with the end product and how it will be used, I say defense spending like this is ultimately good for the tech sector. It's funding innovation that wouldn't otherwise get funded and creates lots of attractive jobs in technology that will hopefully bring more people to the field.

We may not have even had the microwave oven today if it wasn't for defense spending on radar technology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_oven#Discovery).

War, the military industrial complex, and homeland security are our biggest money black holes our tax dollars go into and not things like food stamps. People need to start to get clued in...

I would like to make sure Lockheed Martin gets mentioned as the incompetent manufacturer in this debacle.

I believe you are wrong about that. While defense spending is big, it's not the highest. Health and Human Services and Social Security are both significantly higher portions of the budget. Unless there's a bunch of "off the books" spending?

You can easily see here in this extremely user-friendly document http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2... :-p

Well, the wars were off the books until Obama put them on but they are "over" now so that is money mostly already spent (like 1 trillion).

When I say black hole I mean money that is wasted. Health and Human Services and Social Security are things that benefit us while wars, our military, and homeland security not so much. Social Security for example is an entitlement that everyone pays into that has always run a surplus so it's paid for... Politicians raiding the fund is a different story.

Our bad foreign policy decisions of the last century are bleeding us dry. Wake up people! Ready for round three in Iraq?

Food stamps =! social security. Also SS isn't an entitlement, I fucking paid into it, i should get something back.

No one said food stamps = social security but they both are social programs that benefit people.

Social Security is in fact an entitlement as in workers are "entitled" to their benefits by paying into the system. Republicans later smeared the word entitlement because it now also refers to welfare programs (entitled by law) so people get confused.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entitlement

Yes but comparing to the military is unfair. These are two very different types of programs. Of course SS costs more, we're all paying massive amounts into it for our retirement.

Military on the other hand is spending congress controls and whether its 1 dollar or 1 trillion is by their whim. No one is explicitly paying into it. In these kinds of military vs "welfare" spending, removing SS from it makes perfect sense. It pays for itself, and then some (when congress isnt stealing from it). Military is all debts and spent money. Its doesn't pay for itself. It buys 1 trillion dollar jet programs that are the laughingstock of the world as our corruption and incompetence are clear to see.

I think you are confusing me with wuliwong...

After reading the Wikipedia page on this plane, you'd have to be crazy to buy it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning_...

Note: it's a long article

It seems to be expensive, but what would have been the alternative to JSF or to the F-35?

The trillion dollar budget was postulated by some already long beforehand. Bill Sweetman wrote that into his book ten years ago already: http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Fighter-Lockheed-Martin-Strik... Unfortunately, with this being what it is, nobody believes the companies' presented combat aircraft prices. Just a while ago, the French Dassault Rafale doubled in price, some time after winning a huge fighter order competition in India, and it's a plane that's been operational already for fourteen years!: http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-dna-exclusive-100-price...

Maybe two or three different aircraft could have been developed, and it would have been faster and cheaper in total - since each design could have been more straightforward, more specialized for its mission. Who knows? This is far from obvious to me. Pierre Sprey advocated this line. But even his favorite optimized light weight fighters were adapted to multiple roles and replaced many more specialized aircraft.

Another alternative would have been to develop nothing really new, just keep operating old airframes, maybe manufacture some minor updates (F-15, F-16 and Super Hornet are being manufactured). They don't have stealth, though some versions have some minor stealthiness. Russia and China are developing at least reasonably stealthy aircraft (PAK-FA, J-20, J-31). The F-22 is not manufactured but AFAIK the tooling is preserved. But it's a more specialized aircraft anyway. I think doing nothing would not have been a politically possible path.

Everybody complains but there aren't that many better directions. Some countries could at least buy European or Russian generation 4.5 fighters if they want to avoid JSF, but that's mostly it.

The problem isn't just that the F-35 is multirole but is trying to cater to the various quirks of multiple services. I mentioned it upthread, but an example of this is the very shape of the aircraft was determined in large part due to the Marines' vertical take off requirement. This necessitated a huge lifting fan in the fuselage, which had major ramifications on the maneuverability of the aircraft and the pilot's visibility out of the cockpit. Then there are all the modifications made to the C variant to accommodate carrier landings for the Navy.

The end result is that you have an airframe that was meant to save money by being common between all three services which has ended up with a parts commonality of only 25-30%[1] and whose performance has suffered because of the requisite compromises made to chase that goal.

I think one of the other big things that gets lost in these conversations is that the F-35 was meant to be cheap and widely fielded. The problem is that the program's bloating to the point that they're getting too expensive to field in numbers that would replace the existing force.

The response is usually that the high tech gadgetry in these planes will save the day. That's problematic. This is going back to the F-22, but RAND ran a widely-circulated simulated conflict in the Straight of Taiwan a few years back[2]. The result was that the F-22s held their own... until they ran out of missiles and were overwhelmed by the sheer number of opposition planes that were being thrown at them.

So, basically, my answer to your question would be forget the super planes and focus on cheaper, more, and good enough. Accept that fighter, bomb truck, and stealth is a pick two proposition. Design something light, cheap, and modernized to fill the multirole capability of the F-16 today; it's very difficult to replace a $40M jet in the same kind of numbers with a $150M one. Supplement the F-22 with new production F-15SEs. Look into things like the Textron AirLand Scorpion to fill the permissive environment CAS role that the A-10C fills today.

KISS.

[1] http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/lightning-rod-f-35-fight...

[2] http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2009/RA...

I don't dispute your points: it is very expensive and there are problems.

So, at the risk of oversimplifying, your preferred approach would be to stop the F-35 program (or programs) and start a few new different aircraft programs, and trying to depend on existing or mild developments as well?

It would not be cheap either, and it would take time.

Obama runs the Whitehouse and has for 6 years, so is he responsible? It didn't take him long after signing on to fire the NASA administrator.

Obama is definitely partly responsible.

This isn't a party political issue anyway, both the Democrats AND Republicans support this program and have for quite a while. As the article says contractors exist in 45 states, so that's 45 senators who have a vested interest in its future.

This 10,000 pound gorilla has been around for quite a few years before Obama and while it would have been political suicide to try and kill it, it would be interesting to see if Obama could have killed it (since he is in command of the military, but congress actually makes a lot of the acquisition decisions).

I'm sure Obama could have ordered the US military to not buy the F-35 anymore but then what? The contracts still exist and the military's budget is based around those purchases (i.e. the money likely cannot be used for alternatives without approval).

You mean 90 senators (out of 100)

oh yeah, all military spending is just soooo stupid ... say people writing comments on something originally funded by the very same military-industrial complex, living in an area largely funded through said complex after ww2.

but we like drones and robots, right? boston dynamics, the darpa challenge, ... oh what a WASTE.

and the technology invented and developed for this plane will appear nowhere else, ever. that's how tech innovation works, all dead ends.

I would not be surprised if this cash cow gets cancelled after this recent grounding. This scheme is hardly going unnoticed.

Eh. You get what you vote for.

Did anyone else get overloaded by the foreignpolicy.com design? Yikes!

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