Butler Lampson, in his lecture Hints and Principles for Computer System Design [1], has the following anecdote:
I remember hearing from the chief program officer for the software of
the new joint fighter the F-35, in the US, five or so years ago. He said
"I'm the chief software program officer, and I'm absolutely certain
that the approved requirements for the software for this plane cannot
be met, and there's nothing I can do about it because there are so many
forces being brought to bear on these requirements." (45:45 - 46:18)
The Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) system determined essential to keep F-35 flying and maintained is now scrapped and they start from beginning.
"ODIN will be based in the cloud and designed to deliver data in near real time on aircraft and system performance under heightened cyber security provisions, Lord said."
Independently of that "cloud based" ODIN as a replacement of ALIS ("Autonomic Logistics Information System"), the mentioned ALIS doesn't seem to me as what Lampson's source worried about.
I do not want to hear the phrase "cloud computing" anywhere near a fighter jet, unless they're talking and the plane (a computer) flying through clouds.
Thanks! It would be interesting to know whether purchasing countries will get sole authority in flight package definition in contrast to the ALIS where it had to be signed off in US for every sortie afaik.
IIRC it was reported like that by some outlets several months ago but the truth is more like US DoD personnel had to sign some keys to get interop with friendly fighters... Communications or some other kind of data sharing, I forget.
No, that was for loading IFF keys for Austrian fighters, a completely unrelated issue.
With F-35, the data packages necessary for operation in given theater are generated in one or two laboratories in USA, and so far there were no guarantees of anyone getting one of their own.
In addition, ALIS was dependant on Lockheed-maintained servers in USA by design, something that made it problematic even for US forces as the amounts of data that had to be transferred were too big for ship-based units - and you needed to sync at least once a month to ensure the aircraft is capable of flying.
“Another scenario theorised by analysts involves the US Government using the F-35’s enabling systems to “punish” a non-cooperative ally, potentially by withdrawing software upgrades or feeding information that would ground the entire fleet.“ https://defence.nridigital.com/global_defence_technology_mar...
While I understand the need (and the benefit) for selling arms abroad, having the ability to defang them if they try to use them against us seems very useful and seems like it could even expand the countries we're willing to sell to.
I think about this every time I hear about Iran flying F-14s
Kind of defeats the market for your product though. Assuming the US govt is going to stay non-rogue for the lifetime of the product you are buying to defend yourself against all threats, might be a tough call.
In fairness if the US went totally rogue their are few nations they couldn't wreck in short order outside of the ones with a credible ballistic missile program and nuclear warheads.
In that hypothetical no-one wins.
I'm sure there is an obscure plan for that somewhere in say the UK MoD filing cabinets.
I know the US war gamed invading Canada as both a training exercise and contingency plan.
Hopefully they've updated the obscure plan in the years since they gave away the entire carrier air fleet to the US marines, and ordered US F-35s to replace them.
Assuming competence in the halls of the MoD these days seems to be naive.
US doesn’t need to be involved directly for the blocking to become an option. Think about cases like India vs Pakistan vs China or Argentina vs UK or Marocco vs Algeria.
The F-35 project is a stealth Jobs program that pretends to be a stealth airplane program. Seen through this lens, things are actually going ok. It concentrates incompetence in the defense sector, where it can do less harm. (as long as we dont get a real war)
“We all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged free market capitalism for the poor.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
Benefits for the well off are ‘subsidies’ and ‘tax breaks‘, such as the fact corporate health insurance is not taxed, while benefits for the less well off are ‘handouts’.
I got into a debate with a republican over defense funding. I stated how the great bay-area recession of the early nighties was caused by scaling back of cold-war funding. Bases were closed and Lockheed Martin and others laid off alot of workers. They agreed it was terrible for the economy.
So I pointed out how they admit that Government funded make-work projects can have a positive effect on economies. So why not just switch from military spending to other tech spending? Why is it the military is the only government run make-work programs that R's support?
Yea or just ya know hire civil engineers to do basic maintenance on us infrastructure. Plenty of work to go around, there's no need to make up stuff to do.
why not just switch from military spending to other tech spending?
What sort of tech spending? I mean military spending paid for development of the internet, jet engines, satellite communications, radar, a million other real actual things that people use everyday. Modern day Silly Valley piggybacks on all this stuff and uses it to show us ads...
Because this way you can also reap the gains if you invest in these firms? If you keep the make-work in like 3 companies, then I, a human, can get the rewards of owning the stock by doing manual work.
That classic example is poor. The idea is that congress is forcing the military to buy things that the military doesn't want. We need to question that.
The military follows orders. The president is commander in chief. If the president doesn't want to buy something, then the military doesn't want to buy something.
Given that the date was 2014, saying "the military doesn't want" was exactly equivalent to saying "Obama doesn't want".
Fully retired members of the military, not seeking to gain something like a DoD or cabinet-level position, might be able to speak more freely to congress.
I mean we need to question "military doesn't want", not that we need to question "forcing the military to buy".
We may have a situation where the military really wants the equipment, but isn't permitted to admit it. They follow orders. The orders, coming down from the president, are that the military is to claim that they don't want the equipment.
Example: the military really wanted the F-22, then we got a new president, and suddenly the military isn't interested in the F-22
The military isn't a borg collective, it is full of people trying to get their way, climb the ladder, make money, etc. Those motivations produce behavior counter to what the command structure 'wants'.
Well, apparently military spending has long been a method for directly financing companies and research that the federal government likes, such as the beginnings of computer technology.
War is a moral argument. Health and welfare of society is a moral argument.
As for "maximizing output", I'm failing to see big returns here. Afghanistan? Iraq? Vietnam? The only output that was maximized was cashflow to the military industrial complex.
I do believe in national security but the way we do it is not only inefficient, but manufactures more insecurity that feeds into the cycle.
My point was different: it's that some of the so-called military spending is in reality simply a way for the federal government to fund research it wants done, without any relation to actual (direct) military applications.
The sad reality is that it is easier for people to accept a massive military budget than to accept a large National Endowment for the Sciences, or to accept direct government grants for a strategy of technical development (that would be 'government interfering in the market'). Of course, this reality was created through a lot of fear-mongering propaganda, and through a lot of anti-"socialist" propaganda.
Sure, and we're discussing it via a consequence of such a case (arpanet). But because the military by default has zero accountability, any funds that go there should be strongly vetted.
That's an interesting take. And maybe we don't disagree and it's just wording, but I think it's more of a "program to funnel money into the military complex in as many politician's states as could get involved"
If you want a jobs program, fix bridges and roads. If you want a "stealth" jobs program, declare it a national security threat and use the military budget too.
Maintenance programs don't grab headlines like the initial program to build does. Unless it's an extremely large package like what Trump proposed (what happened to that one?), it's just not sexy enough to get ink
My hypothesis is that since everyone plus dog in the US is an elected official that is perpetually campaigning, they're incentivized to focus on big splashy headlines.
That and the press loves to pulverize people over spending money to avoid disasters, but celebrates those that help when disaster strikes, even if it was entirely preventable.
Oh, and "Infrastructure Week" has been going on for about three years now.
I don't think DoD projects ever get positive press, when the products work people are apathetic and when they break they are criticized as boondoggles - infrastructure actually tends to get relatively positive press.
I think the problem here isn't in public opinion - it's strictly a matter of corruption at the political level.
Repairing bridges and roads doesn't attract weapon systems developers away from other nations. We gotta keep these guys busy so they don't go work for Russia or China
That employs and affects millions (directly and indirectly) of people across multiples countries in high deficit areas. Which is the ultimate goal of the project. A plane that may work is merely the bonus of the R&D spend.
Countries that don't do regional-deficit spending in this manner (that seems economically inefficient) end up having severe problems, particularly after the GFC. Much of Europe is easily in this bucket. The F35 is part of the reason the US isn't in as much hell economically speaking as Europe is.
You seem to imply that the program is distributing resources more equitably or fairly (according to some definition) than their initial distribution. Can you explain that? The money is taken from tax-payers, and most of the jobs created in the US are presumably tax-payers. But we also know that the companies with these defense contracts are making profit, which means it's not purely money being distributed to workers. There are presumably executives and investors making huge amounts of money from tax-payers.
If the money is just being taken from tax-payers and then distributed to a much smaller group of tax-payers, including some of it making a very small number of people very rich, I would need to see a lot of evidence to convince me that it's beneficial to society in the way that the term "jobs program" makes it sound.
Or, to be more efficient, we could funnel the money going towards the F-35 to productive uses that would employ as many people and actually create value. Saying the F-35 is good because it creates jobs is an example of the Broken Window fallacy; [1] we’re expending economic effort for no purpose, much like you can’t create economic growth by going around breaking windows so the glazier industry can have a boom. As I said in another comment, we might as well had spent the $1.5 trillion to build a fleet of metal platypuses that we keep in large hangars around the world. The existence of an F-35 has no practical use to the U.S. economy other than as a money sink.
If you would like to use broken windows as an example the parable doesn't apply exactly. For it to apply the same way it would mean both providing a job (by giving funds to do so) to fix the broken window/damaged buildings as well as having a need to fix the damage, versus simply having a natural distaster/broken window and hoping that works as economic stimulation.
The broken window fallacy/parable has no notion of outside money being inserted into the system and is a poor characterization of the F35 program/deficit fiscal spending.
That is the critical difference. Also these forms of spending are already empirically proven as being net beneficial due to a financial multiplier/accelerator.
So if I’m understanding your argument correctly, you consider the F-35 to effectively be a wealth redistribution program. Taxes are gathered from taxpayers nationwide, and some of that money is funneled into the communities where the F-35 is designed and built. I’m 100% down with wealth redistribution as a way to reduce income inequality, but I think we could be way more efficient in the redistribution; we could employ these people and use this money to create actually useful things, like say construct affordable housing or construct anything other than a $1.5 trillion lemon. That was why I mentioned the parable; the idea is that value isn’t added when you introduce an artificial, costly phenomenon into an economy (i.e. a storm that creates demand for repairs or a worthless fighter jet that creates demand for defense workers). But if you instead use that money to build productive things, then you can get the redistribution and actually make something that someone wants. Thus, it is impossible for the F-35 to be as efficient at wealth distribution as say an equivalent costing program to create working civilian aircraft that could actually be used.
The most efficient way of redistribution would be to use the money spent on the F-35 to directly fund social programs and jobs programs for the poor in these economically disadvantaged communities; this would redistribute all of the money to people who actually need it and will spend it, rather than send huge chunks of it into defense executives/shareholders’ pockets in the currently lossy transactions used in defense contracting.
Having recently been in Ireland, France and Germany talking to financial industry peers, vetting a bunch of startups and meeting with regulators, how exactly did I miss out on this hellscape you're talking about?
I don't disagree that do-nothing projects can be valuable to society - but defense contractors are an extremely inefficient way to inject money into the economy. Most of that money ends up going into the pockets of people who could find quite decent jobs elsewhere.
Redirecting that money to small business grants would provide a much bigger boost to general societal well being.
Some of it is less about injecting money than it is about maintaining capacity and capability. It's not always about jobs in general, but sometimes about specific jobs.
The US defense-industrial complex may not always have a high need for people who can design stealth fighters, but it definitely prefers to keep a few around in case it does suddenly need them.
Small business grants may not be a good way of meeting the same need.
I mean, maybe? That this program isn't working may not be the same as the US no longer having the capability. It's possible that the F-35 isn't really expected to produce a functional stealth fighter, all rhetoric aside.
That seems to stretch the argument pretty far - maybe if we just want to keep vaguely military folk in the country then we could employ them building military grade roads to replace the aging infrastructure. If the project they're actually working on isn't supposed to bear any real fruit then maybe just redirect them to something that isn't a complete waste of resources.
Also, I disagree, I don't think anyone in that realm of government would knowingly sink that much money into a project they intended to fail - they might be overly optimistic about the success, they might be trying to funnel money into their retirement but it takes clout to secure a budget like that and people had to work hard to secure it initially and keep it going - so a failure is probably going to fall under one of these categories - un-achievable, poorly managed, or wholly corrupt.
I suspect there is some truth to this. But I wonder how much of that effort could be directed to more useful infrastructure projects and still maintain skills.
The other issue is that some fraction of defense spending seemingly can be viewed as funneling public money into a get-your-friends-rich scheme. I don't think you can find much net upside to that aspect.
Stealth airplanes are extremely complex engineering projects that stretch across many fields. Maintaining any individual skill set is easy, but they're all highly specialized and require the industry to be maintained or else the combination of cross disciplinary skills, including project management, disappears.
Think back to Boeing's problems with the Dreamliner, where Boeing tried a new model of splitting out the design to a bunch of subcontractors and ended up with tons of problems with the integration ranging from missed design milestones due to problems with the composites to miscommunications leading to battery problems in production and so on. Those are a small taste of what happens when the engineering-management hierarchy is broken up and fractured across organizations. It becomes a lot worse when they are fractured across time.
The US famously lost it's top launch capabilities with the Saturn V and we didn't have a domestic replacement until the Falcon Heavy in 2018! By their very nature, maintaining the capabilities needed for weapons of war that can be deployed anywhere in the world is even more expensive if you want to have any sort of certainty that they'll work when the shots are fired instead of once a few years when you want to launch a satellite.
I'm saying that the resources cannot be redirect towards "more useful infrastructure projects and still maintain skills". The cross disciplinary skills in military aviation are unique.
Whether or not the cost of the F35 program is an efficient way to maintain those skills is a different issue altogether that gets at the fundamental structure of our government and how money impacts politics. That's a much more difficult discussion than "can we reasonably defend ourselves in the future."
sure, but it’s the more interesting discussion to have, and it’s what I was pointing out. Plausibly the majority of the resources spent on this program could in fact have gone to more useful programs without affecting baseline capability. Plausibly the could not ... but it’s not clear anyone who should be asking that question, is.
Circulating money doesn’t create economic value. We might as well had spent $1.5 trillion (the cost so far to develop the F-35) to make a fleet of large metal platypuses which we keep in hangars and occasionally launch into the air.
Circulating money does create economic value in far multiples of the initial amount. It's well established military spending has an impact on GDP far more than the amount itself.
Funds are never 'spent' as such, the money always circulates around even if you do buy metal platypuses - someone is going to get a salary and spend it somewhere or invest in their future by buying things that improve their productivity.
But a large portion of the money ends up in the F-35 itself, which is useless. Think of all the energy, all the time and brainpower used to build the platypus. Think of all the money and materials used to create something that no one wants, which could instead be used to create things that people want while still providing jobs/income. The point of an economy is to enable exchanges so that people produce things that other people need. That is the benefit of an economy; money is a medium for trading things of value for other things of value.
In this case, the trade is one-way; the F-35 is effectively a black hole. The transaction to defense workers is immensely lossy. Ultimately, the program is funded by taxpayers whose money went into building a $1.5 trillion boondoggle instead of any number of useful purposes. The unseen harm of using the public’s funds in this way far outweighs the benefits the defense industry brings. It’s the same as taking five dollars from everyone, paying people three dollars to throw two of every five dollars into a campfire, and calling it economic growth. Sure, some people get paid, but the net gain is negative. The two dollars isn’t used to create things that other people want; it is locked inside a metal platypus.
> But a large portion of the money ends up in the F-35 itself,
How does it 'end up' there? - A human being is paid in the end. This is the notion I don't believe you're accurately looking at.
Say you were to pay the cashier $100 for your groceries, s/he wouldn't end up with the money either it would go to suppliers and seep back into the economy. Money is a bit like energy to a degree it can't be destroyed it ultimately ends up being spent again and again. Unless of course it goes into a bank account that is locked and never spent - for which inflation will tax it and even that would leak back.
The F35 is deliberately built in very high deficit areas to have the largest multiplier effect- this results in extremely good stimulus spending. Just to throw some numbers out there money spent this way (even if the end product is useless) ends up increasing GDP 30-60% more than the original spend. E.g $100 spent => $130-160m. It depends on the unemployment rate in the area but it can be as high as 3x. There is hardly a government program that can be as effective unless its building infrastructure, where it can stretch to as high as 7 (read Japan roads to nowhere)
The F35 is certaintly not a black hole. Almost certainly if you look at it in the way we buy things and consume them - then yes it is, almost 100%, but in terms of the economic effects its a very helpful project. If France had for example done this type of spending it would not be sitting in economic contraction territory at the moment - wheras the US hardly sees contraction because of this type of deficit spending.
> Circulating money does create economic value in far multiples of the initial amount.
Again, that assumes the "initial amount" came from dead or poorly invested money. I have seen no rationalization or evidence that this is the case.
Consider that 37% of Federal Income Tax revenue comes from the 1%. The 1% are the most effective investors, because that's how they became the 1%. Government spending would have to be incredibly good to outdo the best investors.
This implies that the money extracted from the economy is dead money or poorly invested. I've seen no rationale nor evidence for why that might be true.
In these times of low unemployment, a dearth of applicants may push Lockheed to literally burning money. Could this provide more economic benefit until spring when heating costs drop?
>The F35 is part of the reason the US isn't in as much hell economically speaking as Europe is.
Funny, I've never seen a trailer park in Europe. And oddly, the infrastructure is typically way better too. Bizzarely, fewer people seem to die of preventable disease as well.
Clearly Europe is doing something terribly wrong, and needs to adopt the American model.
> The total cost of the F-35 program is expected to be $1.5 trillion over its 55-year lifespan
As of 2018, the estimated program cost was ~1.5T, or 1500 billion dollars.
"""The F-35 currently costs between $94 million (F-35A) and $122 million (F-35B) for low-rate initial production run 10, though sustainment cost projections are as big a concern as production costs for a program that is expected to cost $1.5 trillion over its 55-year lifespan."""
And people have the gall to say we can’t afford universal healthcare.
“Oh, but now that money is lost, and now we actually can’t afford to spend money on our own citizens,” say the next couple generations of warhawks as we spend $2.7 trillion on a drone army made of caviar.
"Through FY2017, the F-35 program has received a total of roughly $122.6 billion of funding in then-year dollars, including roughly $54.7 billion in research and development, about $65.7 billion in procurement, and approximately $2.7 billion in military construction."
I worked on a large DoD contract where there was a core of about 12-20 people doing the majority of the work and about 140 additional people just... having a job.
The legal requirements to collecting money on defense contracts pretty much always does this.
I know someone personally who's company was hired as a subcontractor to one of the majors on the F-35 project. He was put in a room to do nothing. They forgot he was in a meeting once and he overheard them saying that they were just hiring the subcontractors to get the government schedule people off of their backs, they were not there to actually do anything.
So happy my tax dollars are going towards this rather than feeding the hungry or providing shelter to homeless kids.
Part of the problem is you; not a personal attack, just an explanation: if you would be more concerned about your tax dollars staying in your pocket, you would be much more careful with all the government spending and putting much more pressure on doing the right thing. If your position is "the government take my tax money, at least I wish they spent it on something good" then you are less involved, it's no longer your money and you care less.
This is an odd statement. How do you know what my level of concern is with my tax money staying in my pocket. No matter the level of concern, I still have to pay taxes and the amount does not change based on my level of concern.
"you would be much more careful with all the government spending and putting much more pressure on doing the right thing"? what exactly can I do to be more careful about government spending besides voting for my preferred candidate?
Are you fully in control of everywhere your tax dollars are spent? Do you protest every dollar that is spent on a program you don't agree with?
All in all an odd statement but best of luck to you and I wish you well.
In my opinion: "feeding the hungry or providing shelter to homeless kids" != "dubious rubbish". "Hiring engineers to sit in a room to placate government officials" == "dubious rubbish". Each to their own though.
Only the second part; not only socialists spend people's money on all kinds of rubbish, every government does. People should keep governments accountable for every dollar they take from you, whatever is spent on.
Again, you stated I was the problem. What do you do personally that renders you not the problem? How are you personally and key here; effectively, holding the government accountable "for every dollar they take from you"?
As far as the socialist charge from the poster above you, I am not against taxes, I just believe they should be used to create a society where the least among us are provided for instead of endlessly feeding the military.
unfortunately in this country (USA) people who want the government to feed the hungry, provide health care and ensure a clean environment are called socialists while those that want the government to spend trillions on the military and the fossil fuel industry are called conservatives.
Fortunately I don't live there and I am neither of these 2 categories.
Hint: read "you" as the generic taxpayer. As I said, it is not an attack to a person, but a comment on taxpayer mentality that tax have to be paid, so the only thing to be cared of is what the tax money is spent on: not true, this is what I am trying to say. It is a false dilemma.
Defense companies sell butts in chairs. They know the game and play it well. I remember working on defense and the PM was pushing me to reduce hours. I was costing the project over $500/hr. The IC who was working with me could work all he wanted though, due to the way his costs were billed.
Working at that place, I heard stories from other defense veterans detailing massive, unending incompetence and graft.
If there's one thing I've learned over my time as an engineer, it's that there's far fewer people actually doing anything than you expect. I've worked with engineers building 5G infrastructure, the people who are actually doing the work probably account for a few dozen, but add the managers, sales, marketing, business development, and bloody project manager and you're up to hundreds immediately. It's always a nice surprise when you end up in a meeting and someone utters a shibboleth and ting this guy must actually do the work!
The F-117. Great story, was finished in budget and ahead of time. But then it was a black program without any political oversight. Basically a couple of brilliant engineers closed into a room with the sole task to built a stealth plane.
EDIT: They used components from the F-16 and F-15 programs. Being a black program, this was hidden in spare parts needs for these other planes. I have congress report lying around somewhere which complains about excess spare needs for the F-16 from that period. So, maybe some of the F-117 costs are driving costs of other programs.
The F-117 had very limited requirements compared to the F-35. What's killing the F-35 is the extreme complexity of the program.
The requirements for the F-117 were basically that it had to be stealthy, and had to be able to carry a minimal payload a reasonable range. There was no radar, no vertical takeoff, no carrier landings, no air-to-air, no sensor fusion, no datalinks, no cooperative engagement, etc etc etc.
It's poorly understood how the combination of high performance requirements, complexity, and flexibility mix. Optimizing a system for performance generally requires cutting across domains. Subsystems need to be designed jointly to wring out performance. This means there are many dependencies between the subsystems, so if one thing changes on one subsystem, it may affect a number of other subsystems. If you then add flexibility to the mix -- you want a modular system like the F-35, all of this optimization work has to be done on every combination of parts. Now combine this with a complex set of mission requirements -- every change has to be optimized for multiple missions and multiple aircraft variants. Due to the optimized and complex nature of the aircraft, each change will also affect many subsystems.
Because the system is so complex, no person or even a small group of people can have the entire system in their head, so it's hard to know exactly what will be affected with a subsystem change. Subsystems affected by a change will furthermore not even be built by the same company. This all means that each change has to go through very slow formal processes to make sure it keeps working.
All of this is to say that layering on all of these categories of requirements has an exponential effect. If the F-35 didn't have to be high performance, or if it didn't have three variants, or if it didn't have to perform multiple missions, the project would have been much easier.
Yes, it should have been multiple aircraft, or the scope should have been reduced. It's hard enough to make an aircraft that's good on an aircraft carrier and on land. Adding the vertical landing (B model) version compromised the whole program.
VTOL is a very specialized capability, and there's never been another airplane that has VTOL as an optional feature. You have to design the plane and its engine around this capability, and you compromise on many other things to get it. The A and C models then have to live with many of these design compromises. Even the basic shape of the aircraft, with such a wide front fuselage reduces the performance of the F-35, even though on the A and C models there's no need to be so wide since there's no lift fan.
Meanwhile, it's not even clear that the Marines need a VTOL airplane. The B model has the ability to operate off Navy helicopter carriers, which gives them significantly more punch, but there's basically no real scenario where a helicopter carrier would need it. In a real war, there will always be full deck carriers anywhere a helicopter carrier is. In theory the helicopter carriers would offer additional capacity, but carrier air wings have been scaled back, and full deck carriers only go to sea with 60-65 aircraft even though they have the capacity for 90. If the Marines wanted more of their own air assets they could have just bought C models and operated them off the big carriers like they already do with the F-18.
The B model is also significantly lower performance. It has to takeoff at lower weights, and it has the huge extra weight of the lift fan. This means it has a much shorter range and carries less weapons. If they had simply bought C models and put them on the big carriers, the overall capability would be greater.
Maybe someone more knowledgable about the history can chime in, but the first thought that entered my mind when you were discussing full deck carriers is that the F-35 was designed from the very beginning for international sales. Only a few nations have full deck carriers, while many more have helicopter carriers. It's not surprising then that there are 2 allies with F-35Bs, 3 allies with plans for the F-35B, and none for the F-35C: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...
Yes, that's true, but look at the F-35 orders. There are 563 orders for the B model out of 3200 total. The foreign customers are the UK with 138, to operate on their Queen Elizabeth carriers, 30 for Italy to operate on their small carriers, and 42 to Japan for the same.
In 2010, the UK decided to make the QE carriers ski-jump and operate the B model for cost reasons, however they considered making them CATOBAR and operate the C model. If the B model had not existed, they would have simply spent another couple of billion dollars to make them CATOBAR.
It's probably not practical from a budget and political standpoint for Japan and Italy to make CATOBAR carriers, but does it really make sense to compromise a 3200 aircraft program that's the backbone of the USAF and USN's fleet so that Italy and Japan can buy 72 aircraft? Italy and Japan could just buy tanker aircraft for long range power projection.
Your comments make up the most competent and comprehensive analysis I've seen on the F35 program; way more thorough than those presented in Congress or by the various involved aerospace companies. Are you involved in the project in any way?
I'm just an interested observer, but my observations are hardly unique. The same points have been made in many forums including congressional hearings.
Much of what I've seen in congressional hearings is so watered down and blame-shifted it is difficult to assemble into a coherent story. You did a great job of the spark notes version
And congress went along with it (or encouraged it) because theoretically it would be cheaper...
(And the Marines liked it because no one was going to spend the money to build a stealthy V/STOL strike fighter for them unless it was part of someone else's development budget)
(And the Navy IIRC just wanted their fucking A-12 [0] already)
The old "sports car/dump truck" problem: you can make a good sports car, you can make a good dump truck, but what you can't make is a good sports car that is also a good dump truck.
Things are more and more complicated (interacting, and also wide, dense, fast-moving...), and therefore unpredictability grows.
This is true for nearly everythoing, and war reflects it, as up to the Industrial Revolution things (strategy, tactics, weaponry...) evolved gradually. Nowadays nobody knows anymore how all this really works, therefore there is less and less way to predict (how/what/why/when/...) sufficiently accurately in order to prepare/act adequately (for example to equip soldiers).
Hence the need for "something which can cope with any situation".
Fun fact: this 'something' has to be complicated, adding up complication to the complicated global state of affairs, nurturing the very cause of the underlying challenge.
You can almost though. Make it out of titanium, give it gas turbine engines with an electric drive, put the thing on hydraulics so it can get lower to the ground, add electronic stability control to get artificial sports car feel, and some rocket thrusters on the top to keep it from tipping over in tight turns. Maybe you could make the tires out of some metamaterial so it can have slick tires for racing and deep treads for the construction site.
All of that is to say it can be done, but you're going to pay, and it might not be delivered on time.
>The F-117 had very limited requirements compared to the F-35. What's killing the F-35 is the extreme complexity of the program.
This. The only thing the F35 doesn't do it blow the pilot and hand him a beer. Since nobody is willing to settle for a plane that can do everything and sucks at it (and rightfully so) it's turned into this massive project where there's a billion dollars in man hours spent arguing over each little nut and bolt in order to find the compromises needed to create something that satisfies all the stake holders well enough to get sign off.
I think a lot of this is driven by the fact that we have no real enemy at present. It's much easier to say "no we need a system that can do X and Y and we need it now, Z can wait" when you're worried about the USSR having the jump on you. There is no such pressure for competency at present.
That's pretty much my take too. The F-35 had to be able to do absolutely everything, and that generally means it's not going to any of those particularly well.
For a small airforce, a jack-of-all-trades fighter makes a lot of sense (hence the popularity of the F-16 among small airforces), but for the US, it makes no sense to abandon all specialised fighters in favour of a single compromise.
> Basically a couple of brilliant engineers closed into a room with the sole task to built a stealth plane.
I think being able to focus was a big part of it. The F-35 (and F-32) is a 'kitchen sink' of a plane: multi-purpose sounds great in theory, but rarely works out in practice. Especially if you try shoehorning VTOL into the picture.
If they had tried focusing on the F-35A and C variants, perhaps things should be less complicated.
>I think being able to focus was a big part of it. The F-35 (and F-32) is a 'kitchen sink' of a plane: multi-purpose sounds great in theory, but rarely works out in practice. Especially if you try shoehorning VTOL into the picture.
if you look into the history - F-35 started as VTOL, ie. Yak-141, as Lockheed didn't have any VTOL and needed a response to Boeing/Harrier - onto which the "kitchen sink" of everything else was shoehorned/bolted-on. The Yak-141 was never intended and never imagined to be a good fighter plane or a good attack plane, etc., its primary and the only raison d'etre was VTOL as USSR/Russia just hasn't been capable of having real aircraft carriers.
That's the one, sold through Amazon. But I guess you should be able to get it as a pdf somewhere as well:
F-16 Integrated Logistics Support: Still Time to Consider Economical Alternatives: LCD-80-89
My dad was convinced this was how they paid for UFOs. I really hope that's true, but I find it nearly impossible to believe our government would be competent enough to maintain secrecy.
Well at very least these USAF/USN Stealth jet programs are at least competent at secrecy. From an Occam's Razor perspective, it's almost certainly that UFOs are either strange optical aberrations in peoples camera lenses or experimental military aircraft, so in part I think I agree with your dad. Camera weirdness being more common than billion dollar black programs, and those being more common than apparent life in the universe.
My father worked in connection to some of these programs many years ago (long since retired), and his favorite quip was to suggest that a closer inspection of "real" UFOs would reveal a USAF roundel painted on the side. So, naturally, I'm inclined to believe that if any such thing were ever spotted, it would be the result of one of these programs.
Basically the navy pretended to update the Hornet (F-18A, F-18B, F-18C) but actually built a completely new plane. Clearly it isn't the same, because the airframe is dramatically larger. There is a tiny bit of stealth (nothing fancy) but otherwise it looks like the Hornet... except way larger.
It was designed very quickly and cheaply. That was the requirement, and it was met. The whole project was sort of an open secret, pretending to be a revision of the Hornet while actually being an entirely new aircraft. This seems to have evaded lots of bureaucracy.
This reminds me of how my city managed to secure money for a world class concert hall by claiming it was just a multipurpose hall that _could_ possibly be used for concerts.
France's Rafale program is usually considered to have been very competently managed. Of course it's quite a bit older than the F-35, as the program started in the early 80s. But it has been mostly on time [1], on budget and on spec. This is despite sharing some of the complexity of the F-35 in that it replaced most previous aircraft types in use in the French air force (a true multi-role aircraft), and even has a carrier capable version (CATOBAR, not VTOL). It's basically equivalent to making the F-35A and F-35C, without the F-35B.
Of course, having only one nation in the program helped a lot keeping the specifications consistent over time. I strongly doubt the NGF currently being developed with Germany and Spain is going to be that smooth...
[1] delays were incurred by the end of the Cold war: the so-called peace dividends, resulting in military budget restrictions.
It definitely is a competently managed program, as were the mirage programs.
However if you look at the a400m or eurofighter programs, you see delays and budget overruns. The issue lies in the spec creep by the funding parties of these programs. For example the french took deliveries of the first a400m because they needed the plane, but it could not drop parachutists in the first version !
Also note that the makers of these three products are completely different. The Rafale was helmed by Dassault, the A400M by former CASA (Construcciones Aeronáuticas SA in Spain, now part of Airbus) and the Typhoon by what I believe is a former part of British Aerospace (now also part of Airbus).
Airbus really is a collection of companies, so it can be hard to figure out exactly which part does what. I hope Dassault remains the project manager on the NGF, although in the end spec creep really is the biggest program killer...
I believe no such thing exists in the western world. Russian fighter jet program costs appear to be orders of magnitude smaller though, at least on paper.
The Su-57 has a supposed ~$35-$45 million unit cost (versus closer to $78m for eg the recent F35A planes [1]). If you adjust that to the US economic output per capita figures, you're looking at up to a quarter of a billion dollars per plane equivalent for the Su-57. A crushing sum, in other words, for the Russians and their economic capabilities.
However, the Russians sold Su-35s to China at a cost of $83 million a few years ago. So the quoted Su-57 numbers certainly appear fraudulent. The real unit cost is probably twice the claims. There is minimal transparency in such things as it pertains to Russia.
So far it appears they can't afford or deliver their supposedly cost effecient plane:
It's very hard to compare sales figures with fly-away costs as they measure completely different things. Sales figures usually include many extras like weapons, simulators, training, support, spare parts, spare engines, integration with other (usually local) weapons, and other custom developments that can massively raise the bill. Conversely fly-away costs tend to exclude everything to look as small as possible: things like radars, helmet mounted displays, sometimes even engines are left aside.
There is nothing in the F35 program preventing universal free education: free education does not cost anything (it is free), so the money spent on the program is not impacting it. /s
I'm writing a post on software estimation, how it's difficult to estimate things correctly. One of the arguments that I want to make is that estimating poorly is not restricted to the software industry (obvious in retrospect). Military and public infrastructure projects are an excellent source of poorly estimated projects.
I've been collecting data about F35 specfically, 'cause it's so recent and the cost overruns are just mind boggling.
Anyway, here's an article from last year [0] that discusses how project management for the F35 prorgram reclassifies "blockers" and "criticals" into "major" and "medium" (severity levels of the issue). Especially like how the IFF transponder fails to send out a distress call if a pilot ejects, or how the arresting hook (for carrier landings) bends the airframe.
Just be careful what generalizations you draw. I've been in enough proposal development meetings to know that the estimates that make it to the client/government entity aren't always the actual estimate. In many cases, one or more persons provided a pretty good estimate and it got shot down immediately because if the proposal included it, it would be rejected. Basically, if there's a good chance the client will eat the cost overruns (as governments usually do for military/space/infrastructure projects), there's a big incentive to deliberately underestimate even when you know the actual number will be significantly higher.
I was about to say, estimates better be aligned to the sales team expectations or they'll be changed so that they do align. It's only after the project is sold do you get a chance to look at the reality of the situation.
Well there is no indication about the severity of these ~800 bugs, but ~800 non-severe bugs in a system this complex is actually pretty good in my opinion.
>but ~800 non-severe bugs in a system this complex is actually pretty good in my opinion.
"The fly-by-wire flight software for the Saab Gripen (a lightweight fighter) went a step further. It disallowed both subroutine calls and backward branches, except for the one at the bottom of the main loop. Control flow went forward only. Sometimes one piece of code had to leave a note for a later piece telling it what to do, but this worked out well for testing: all data was allocated statically, and monitoring those variables gave a clear picture of most everything the software was doing. The software did only the bare essentials, and of course, they were serious about thorough ground testing.
No bug has ever been found in the “released for flight” versions of that code.
Either, the Saab "released for flight" claim only applies to fully operational flights, in which case the F-35 is still in development and we haven't seen the "released for flight" version of its software, or test-flight crashes leading to changes in flight software are very strong evidence that the claim is incorrect.
I've worked in a closely related field. The fly-by-wire software is comparatively very small, compared to all software in a modern fighter jet like the F35. Just from the top of my head, you've got, Flight controls, Radar, Comms, NAV, Ident, Electronic warfare, Sensor fusion, Weapons management, mission recording, cockpit avionics, helmet mgmet, etc.
Why no subroutines? Isn't any function call a subroutine?
In any event, I'd love to take a look at that source code. I try my best to keep forward-only control flow, at least at the conceptual level (I.e., I don't eschew loops, but I try to keep data flowing from A to B to C to D without having it go back and check a preceding component for what to do in a given case).
Interesting. That’s a different world from the business, or development tool, projects I have ever worked on.
Never worked on any real time stuff. Looks like they are very big on using a flat finite state machine model. At least at Saab. I’m guessing they didn’t use C++, either, but who knows.
Yes, but the flight control software is just a tiny part of all of the software in the F-35. You have radars, datalinks, targeting, navigation, optical, sensor fusion, maintenance, weapons, propulsion, and cockpit displays, among others.
I believe the vast majority (if not all) of the code is in C++. They stopped using Ada because it was too hard to find programmers that already knew it
One of the arguments that I want to make is that estimating poorly is not restricted to the software industry (obvious in retrospect).
Thank you. We have a weird obsession in software with ascribing characteristic deficiencies and unique blind spots to ourselves, and treating ourselves as children next to the real "grown-ups" in other fields. (I think we're overcompensating for the "arrogant nerd" stereotype.) In any profession they are aware of their stereotypical tendencies (their déformation professionnelle) and joke about it but don't get obsessed with their own inferiority or paralyzed by stereotype threat.
We don't even use it in a way that helps us find the best knowledge from other fields to apply to our own. We start with our own deficiencies, project some idealized version of another field to serve as the opposite, and then try to learn from our imagined idea of how that field works. Early in my career, this took the form of thinking that building architecture and construction did not suffer from the planning and execution difficulties that software did.
For example, in Austin the ownership group of the new soccer team is constructing a stadium that is planned to be ready for the start of the 2021 season. When I was a wee software developer in the early 2000s, I was taught that unlike our immature industry rife with childishness and careless arrogance, people who design and build physical structures are careful, methodical, mature, and too aware of the responsibility riding on their shoulders to make mistakes in design and planning. A stadium isn't some silly computer thing; it's part of a multi-billion dollar professional sports league with complicated travel logistics, bound by the obligation of tens of millions in presold season tickets! This responsibility is entrusted to serious people in a mature industry, and everything is planned out meticulously via responsible processes to avoid delays.
Seriously. This is how people in software, at least the ones I was exposed to, talked about how to improve the profession. The question was not, what can we learn from other fields that struggle with complicated design and schedule and budget problems, but what is personally wrong with people in software that we have not mastered this process that people in other fields OBVIOUSLY have.
But of course when talking to the season ticket sales rep, when we asked about the possibility of the stadium not being ready when the season starts, he said great question, construction delays happen, it has happened to other MLS teams in the past, and the league will rearrange the schedule so that the team plays nothing but road games for the first several months of the year and has their home games later. This has already been figured out, because the "mature" design and construction industry that meets its schedules through the magical power of seriousness only existed in the imagination of circa-2000 software process consultants.
Thanks for your thoughts. One of the reasons I'm working on this is that I always felt like a failure when didn't deliver on a date that we agreed upon.
I want to prove that it's not restricted to our industry, and understand how we can improve the process.
The project was doomed to this fate from the moment the requirements document was handed down, much like the Space Shuttle's last minute redesign. The F35 is 3 different planes crammed into one airframe.
The cost of developing 3 aircrafts is less than linear with the cost of developing one (there are some commonalities). The cost of developing one aircraft that meets the requirements of all, that can be astronomical, assuming a solution to that problem exists. Let's say you want a motorcycle-truck-helicopter that rides on rough terrain like a cross bike, carries 40 tons of goods like a truck and flies. Good luck with that :D
Designing a plane that can be used by the Air Force and Navy can be done; adding the vertical flight to it, you break it: it makes it fat (aerodynamic), heavy and all this for a use case that is rare and useless to the other branches. For example, an F18 can be used by USAF and Navy, a modified F16 can be adapted to carrier operation with a reasonable cost and still you have good planes. Take one of these and put the VTOL in it: there is no high-performance VTOL plane ever built, so what are we dreaming about?
I don't have raw numbers, but last I checked the cost estimates of maintaining these aircraft over the long term is still projected to be cheaper than the alternative.
Some of the aircraft flown by the USAF and the US Navy have higher annual operational costs than the sticker price of those same aircraft. The F-35 is an attempt to avoid repeating the same mistakes, but obviously, easier said than done.
last I checked the cost estimates of maintaining these aircraft over the long term is still projected to be cheaper than the alternative
I think that if nothing else is learned from this program, it's that 'cost estimates' regarding it fit someplace between 'meaningless' and 'fraudulent'.
Wondering if they could instead have saved money by going the Formula 1 route. There you have a bunch of teams which develop very different cars, but certain parts are standardized and made by one common supplier.
Then again, I know nothing about designing war planes so.
The two main candidates are the F-35 and the F-18 Super Hornet (the Saab Gripen is unlikely).
There was much drama with this because the previous government announced a sole source contract. Then there was confusions as to how much it was actually going to cost. The original plans got cancelled, and now we have an RFP.
Of course the F-35 is a so-called fifth generation fighter, and there's already sketches about six generation stuff:
Related movie recommendation: The Pentagon Wars (1998). The one where "Toby" from "West Wing" (Richard Schiff) is put in charge of product managing the Bradley Fighting Vehicle that eventually tries to address every single need from every part of the army.
Being in the process of reading The Machine That Changed the World (a book about the development of lean production in Japan in response to the shortcomings of mass production in the United States), I can't help but see the parallel between Toyota's ability to quickly adapt to the changing demands of different export markets with an industrial process that creates variations on a theme in direct response to the demands of the customer. Contrast this with Ford's approach of throwing all resources into the same identical product, depending on the sheer scale of the production to absorb the inevitable defects in quality and supply-chain timing.
While the A-10 is not comparable with the F-35 playground, it was a plane that saved the budget and fit well into the military. The service made, the capabilities and the cost was really good. Same with the F-15. I think the F-35 is the result of hubris.
The A10 is only viewed as successful today because its very old.
Back in initial production in the Carter years they discovered awful metal fatigue problems in the wings. In the early Reagan years they bolted on braces to toughen up the joint. Still kept failing. Around the turn of the century barely before the GWOT the air force realized the wings were failing so fast they'd run out of replacement wings around 2010, so right after the GWOT started (which is getting to be one human generation ago...) they rushed a contract thru to slap repairs on the existing wings and then replace entirely with new wings. As of late 2010s the wing replacement project (about $2B) and the air force desire to get rid of the A10 were dueling with each other, kinda crazy. AFAIK that battle continues today. With new wings we'll be flying those things into mid century.
There's never been an engineering project that hasn't had teething problems.
Currently, the F35 does not have its wings falling off, the gun mounts merely need beefing up. Thats better than the A10 track record. If thats the worst problem the F35 has, that's pretty good!
There's also a lot of irony in that the A10 has been under seemingly continuous avionics upgrades for its entire life; you could probably build a F-35 with 1970s avionics for an 1970s price.. so unfair to compare a price tag for a 1970s plane that's been infinitely upgraded since, with a 2020s plane and its 2020s price tag. Also the leadership of the air force has been trying to get rid of the A10 for some decades now. Some doctrine insists close air support should be an army helo job, not an air force strategic bomber job.
The problem with the A10 is if you don't expect soviet tanks to pour across Germany there's no point in a giant flying gun. And if you need air launched anti-armor, the army does a better job with human on board helos and the air force does a better job with drone launched missiles. It just doesn't seem to have a point anymore. It can be made to work, and has worked, but the alternatives are a better match. The troops can and have been supported with a A10, but they'd be better and more quickly supported with multiple apache helos or a swarm of existing drone platforms for the same cost and effort.
> The A10 is only viewed as successful today because its very old.
It's more than that. The amount of service, casualties dealt that any other aircraft I would dare to say. At the Gulf War in 1991, teh A-10 destroyed more than 900 Iraqi tanks, 2,000 other military vehicles and 1,200 artillery pieces. The A-10 has more casualties than the F-16 with more than 4k built againts just a 700 production of A-10. I think it's remarkable, just as comparison. All aircrafts had problems and were upgraded. All of them. Some of them with bigger problems others minor. The problems in the A-10 came after 8000 hours of service.
The other thing to note when comparing the A-10 to F-16 is that the A-10 is a close-air support jet - when in combat it is flying slower and lower to the ground and therefore a much easier target than an F-16 dropping bombs from a higher altitude.
I think I completely agree. Most A10 doctrine is typically to establish air superiority first, and then use A10 for ground support missions [1]. The F-35 is supposed to employ stealth to do more penetrating missions when you cannot assume air superiority. This is more important with adversarial nations getting more and more sophisticated with their anti-air programs, like with Iran purchasing S300 systems from Russia. These modern system have very powerful radar, and pose a large threat to operating aircraft in the vicinity. Navigating a wartime arena dotted with radar without modern stealth technology creates a lot of challenges for our air force.
In a similar vein, the gun on the F-35 seems more of an afterthought. I think the capacity is super limited even compared to F/A-18s. But it's again supposed to be dropping GBUs- not strafing targets. And besides, modern air doctrine for air to air combat is going to be at the extend of sensor range. I wouldn't be surprised if the sixth gen fighters ditch cannons in lieu of more fuel/more misses/better radar evasion profile.
For a high-speed modern aircraft like the F-35, the gun is primarily for signalling intent to a non-responsive aircraft. The gun is fired so that the tracer shells pass within view of the non-responsive aircraft. Preferably it is noisy enough to be heard.
The non-responsive aircraft is expected to wise up, realizing the situation, and then land or leave the territory.
> The problem with the A10 is if you don't expect soviet tanks to pour across Germany there's no point in a giant flying gun.
You should check out some videos on YouTube of the A-10 in action in Afghanistan and Iraq - particularly the ones from soldiers on the ground. It’s a devastating and effective weapon. The only thing that delivers comparable capabilities is the helicopters (and maybe the AC-130), but none of them have a gun like the A-10.
I’m not military, but know plenty of people who are (and I’ve read a lot about this). My understanding is that ground forces love the A-10 for what it can do for them. They can communicate with it and give the pilots precise instructions about where to deliver the rounds. Drones can’t do that.
Ground troops do love the A-10 but there's plenty of reasons the brass has decided to retire it.
The A-10 was specifically made for CAS against Soviet armor. It's essentially a 30mm cannon with wings. The nature of warfare has made that role much less feasible, though; armor is more effective, anti-aircraft weapons are more deadly, and detection methods are more accurate. There isn't a lot of room for big, slow, low-flying planes like the A-10 in modern warfare.
Nowadays it obviously isn't used against mass formations of Soviet armor. Drones are capable of delivering the same kind of support that the A-10 is used for, just not necessarily the drones the US military uses today.
The thing is it was ineffective against Soviet Armor within a few short years it reached active service. It's 30mm was of little to no effectiveness against T-72's. It would instead have to use it's Maverick missiles against tanks. But at that point why not use something which can carry more Maverick's instead of a flying 30mm?
> They can communicate with it and give the pilots precise instructions about where to deliver the rounds. Drones can’t do that.
That isn’t true. We can target with laser precision from the ground, using a drone as the weapons platform. The A-10 was great at making a big mess (like an artillery barrage, but calling in drones can unleash hellfires with the accuracy of hitting a Honda Civic.) Drones can also stay on station for 12+ hours and you don’t have to wait for them to show up.
All the drones I’ve seen have relatively limited weapons capacity. Nothing close to the A-10. I do agree this is probably the future, but we’re not there yet.
It's interesting you categorize both A-10 and F-15 in the good bucket because the same group of people responsible for the A-10 (F-16 and F/A-18) were very against the F-15. The F-16 and F/A-18 were actually spun up in opposition to the F-15 by the "Fighter Mafia". That group of people favored cheap, numerous planes that did one job really well, hence the F-16 and A-10. Both of those are undoubted successes but at the same time most people would consider the F-15 a success too. I wonder if F-35 would ultimately prove to be a success the same way the F-15 did.
Worth noting that the F-16 is not what the Fighter Mafia wanted at all; they preferred a daytime only fighter that carried only a couple of missiles, while it's evolved to carry much heavier ordnance and much more advanced sensors. However, the simplicity of the design concept did result in a much easier path to service. The initial design was an MVP that was followed on by successive upgrades, whereas the F-35 is more of a program designed to come into being all at once.
Indeed, the F-16 was success, as well the F-18. F-15 was too a success, at its way. Another good example but now well retired was F-14. But the entire generation of planes of that era was really good. F-35 was beaten in dogfight by a F-16 in excercises. I don't think it's a good plane because it's heavy and want to do everything planes aren't good design either.
Are you sure that the F16 was a success? After all, it was decried as a horrible plan early in its program and service just like the F-35[1]. Also, that F-35 that lost to an F-16 was software limited undergoing testing for the explicit purpose of testing its limits. The plane has had those limits raised since and it has done very well.
>The F-35 was not built for dogfighting. It is supposed to sense and launch long before the opponents are even in visual range.
The very same hubris caused trouble in Vietnam, which were fixed with rapid re-introduction of guns to fighters, and dogfighting to fighter schools. Sad to see this lesson having been lost.
I'll go on a limb and claim for publicity and political fallout reasons there will never be enough BVR RoE airspace to make BVR relevant to aircraft design.
There's a difference between the classic definition of BVR meaning slinging a missile at a blip no one has seen 30 miles away, vs the F-35 concept which is to have excellent sensor suite leading to the pilot having excellent situational awareness so the pilot can shoot down the other plane before the other plane knows they're present, etc.
Its tricky to get into visual range to visually identify the target as a mig-21 and not a 767 full of civilians without at least some dogfighting performance.
The F-35 it's multirole. single-engine, all-weather, stealth multirole combat aircraft, designed for ground-attack and air-superiority missions. So it has to deal with all kinds of dangers. It's I-want-to-do-it-all aircraft that will not outperform anyone who specializes, unless the technical advantadge is on, ie. killing by range without being seen. But F-35 could kill lesser aircrafts, maybe 3 or early 4th generations but cannot outmatch other fighters with same technology. F-22 is way better for that.
3rd gens? Really? Don't you think it's a bit unbecoming to exaggerate so much considering it has achieved 15:1 kill ratios? It's IRST capability even actually gives it the capability to spot F-22's first. Furthermore, the F-16 was do-it-all aircraft. And it did it damn well. The F-35 is even better.
New generations fighters have the same range detection. And "stealth technology" is still on claim, in fact russian radars detected many planes with ease. An F-117 was shot down too. I will not rely on that, since all the 4th gen airplanes and 5th have same capabilities.
RCS reduction specifically targets X and S band radars because those are the ones which are precise enough used for firing solutions. You need those bands in order to either direct a missile onto a target or have a active seeking missile find it's target. What you're talking about is L band radar, which has existed since the 40's. But it's use is as a early warning system. The problem is that the resolution of it is orders of magnitude worse. For it to be actually useful today you need to build a massive radar which is very power hungry. That's a perfect target for a first hour cruise missile strike.
And that's not even getting to the part that the only reason why L band can even detect F35's and F22's is because that they have features like vertical stabilizers which are too small relative to the wavelength. B2's and B21's do not have this issue.
Finally the idea that one F-117 shot down somehow invalidates that fact that the F-117's stealthiness provided it protection with 99% effectiveness is absurd. The reason why it was shot down was because of USAF's arrogance in flying identical flight paths day on day and a SAM operator realizing this and succeeding in targeting it the moment it opened it's bomb bays, when it's stealth was degraded.
From those more in the know I've heard they are constantly having to fight to retire the A-10 which is a program mostly kept alive for solider morale and civilian fan reasons.
The rumors are that the leadership in the Marines would much rather have more single engine turboprop aircraft like the T-6 or A29 for Close Air Support missions, aircraft which cost at least 10x less to run.
John McCain wouldn't let the Airforce retire the A-10 because most of the A-10s were based in Arizona, and he was afraid of the job losses from having airbases close (aka the dreaded BRAC).
The F-35 is doing excellently at it's actual engineered purpose, which is to extract the maximum amount of money from the DoD and into the hands of contractors while at the same time being completely unassailable politically. Better than digging ditches and filling them back in, I suppose.
This is the problem with pouring all of the requirements into one bucket. A single plane that does air superiority (F-15), stealth (F-117), naval air superiority (F-18), ground attack (A-10), vertical/short take off (Harrier), etc - it's just not going to work.
What the US really needs are a small number of stealth fighters (F-22), a larger number of air superiority fighters (F-15 silent eagles), a whole bunch of light attack aircraft (A-29s), and something to replace the A-10.
Sure, an A-29 is a prop plane that stands no chance against an F-15, but it is phenomenally cheap to operate, and fits a very large number of mission needs that the high performance jets are too expensive for.
Yes; by comparison, Vulcan rounds are extremely cheap versus guided rockets (tens a dollars per round versus hundred thousand dollars plus per missile), so if you have a low threat engagement like a sniper in a house in Afghanistan it is very effective to shoot 50 cannon rounds at it. Same for a small truck convoy, a plane can get on the target faster than an attack helicopter just because it is 3 times faster at low altitudes.
It is not meant to replace an Apache or Cobra helicopter, but to occasionally take out ground targets.
The time is not the important factor, the number of shells on target is. These guns have very high rates of fire, dozens of shells per second. A plane can empty the entire cannon load in 5-6 seconds.
I'm no expert(casual aviation nerd) but I'm under the impression that the gun exists mostly for completeness and isn't expected to be used regularly. The F35 is meant to conduct air support a10 style, but will use missiles instead of bullets, since it can't really carry a huge cannon like the a10.
Since air support "A10 style" these days means "dropping smart weapons from high altitude", the F35 will be doing it the same way. Doing anything at low-level is expected to lead to the aircraft getting hit by a MANPAD.
FACS (the guys on the ground to direct the aircraft fire), as far as I have read, say that it is quicker to get a slow mover like an A-10 or helo updated on the situation, familiar with the layout of the terrain, and make sure they know where the good guys and the bad guys are before they let the fly-boys start firing / dropping.
One of the things that is supposed to make the F-35 as capable as an A-10 in CAS/COIN (counter-insurgency, despite the wildly different approach, is it's "Sensor Fusion" system. Basically it gives the pilot so much information that it offsets the "fast-mover" disadvantages (and then some). Whether it lives up to the claim is no something I can comment on.
Of course, when it comes to recent wars, everything the US military uses is massive overkill and massively expensive (apart from drones, maybe).
There is a popular view held that the Airforce brass doesn't like CAS/COIN (They all about killing MiGs) and that prop planes aren't sexy enough which is why this program has been taking so long.
It has nothing to do with sex appeal. A prop plane used for CAS/COIN will siphon funds away from the F-35. That's fine, as long as you don't need to engage in combat with a near peer competitor like China/Russia etc. Planes like the Tucano (and the A-10) will NOT survive against a modern AD. Nor will Apache etc; witness the performance of the Apache when used in 2003. When assaulting the Republican Guard positions at Karbala (with rudimentary AD), the Apaches suffered an incredible amount of casualties:
"Of the 29 returning Apaches, all but one suffered serious damage. On average, each Apache had 15-20 bullet holes. One Apache took 29 hits. Sixteen main rotor blades, six tail blades, six engines, and five drive shafts were damaged beyond repair. In one squadron only a single helicopter was fit to fly. It took a month until the 11th Regiment was ready to fight again. The casualties sustained by the Apaches induced a change of tactics by placing significant restrictions on their use.[11] Attack helicopters would henceforth be used to reveal the location of enemy troops, allowing them to be destroyed by artillery and air strikes.[3]"
The A-10 was designed for a hot war in Europe and would have been nothing more than a “speed bump” for a Soviet invasion in the Fulda Gap, let alone a modern peer.
The problem is really casualty aversion - we lost 10’s of thousands of airmen in WW2 and that’s not sexy. The fighter mafias in the USAF and USN are real things, driving the specification of unrealistic capabilities in fiscally constrained universes.
Fiscally affordable wars are going to require less bling and a higher tolerance for losses.
Extending your thought we should expect F-35 shortcomings to lead to tactical limitations due to operational risks leaders will be unwilling to take when facing a real peer.
Yes, we've imposed tactical (and strategic) limitations due to operational risks in our current wars/engagements. The B-2 for example, will never fire a shot in anger since there are so few airframes. It'll be retired in short order after the deployment of the B-21.
Same with the F-22. Other than a token deployment to the Mideast with a sortie or two in Syria, they won't see combat unless we get in a hot war with a peer. And until recently, they lacked the required capabilities to attack ground targets. No need to risk them for bomb truck missions.
My real worry is that our risk aversion will cause a conventional war to go nuclear in short order, when a more robust conventional military would be able to prevent that. Imagine if we lost a CVN to the Chinese? 5000+ sailors and airmen dead.
> Planes like the Tucano (and the A-10) will NOT survive against a modern AD.
That wasn't in their design briefs.
They're for low- (and maybe medium-) risk areas; they're not for Day 0 (or perhaps even 1) operations.
But "victory" is often achieved after a bit of a slog over hill and dale, and high-end gear may not be need for for all of it. Yes, the tip of the spear may need pricey kit, but the baseball bat of suppression may be able to do with a bit less.
As long as your wars are expeditionary in nature you're fine with a low end force. But in a peer conflict, these are useless. And they siphon away pilots (something the USAF is short of), while simultaneously making it easier to get into an expeditionary fight.
> There is a popular view held that the Airforce brass doesn't like CAS/COIN (They all about killing MiGs) and that prop planes aren't sexy enough which is why this program has been taking so long.
This may be getting in "jurisdiction" issues, but if the USAF doesn't really want to do CAS/COIN, why can't the Army do it?
The USAF keeps think clear at >3,500 feet (1000m), and Army CAS planes mops things up for the folks on the ground. If extra muscle is needed USAF ordinance can be dropped or an AC-130 be requested.
You've just complicated your logistics and added a whole bunch of personnel requirements for the Army to have any significant amount of planes for use in combat. Not to mention, the Army has helicopters to perform this exact same function already.
Well for one, the Army would have to start worrying about bases with full landing strips, pilot training, the bureaucracy and command structure that would be required to run the squadrons. They would need mechanics that know how to repair them, people that know how to arm and refuel them.
You end up doing a good amount of work just to try and protect a very expensive plane from Air Force politics. Ideally, the Air Force would just settle on an inexpensive prop plane that could perform the same missions as the A-10 at much less of the cost.
I'm not knowledgeable on how effective a helicopter is for CAS.
The A-10 is quite MANPAD resistant. Look carefully at the engines and tail, and remember how nearly every MANPAD operates.
Almost every MANPAD uses an IR seeker, not radar. The A-10 engines are mostly hidden from the ground, inside a wrap-around tail. There are few angles from which the exhaust can be seen. It is in fact a very simple form of stealth. The aircraft turns of course, changing the view and causing simple heat seekers to loose the aircraft. Of course, the aircraft also carries flares and other decoys, and it can be accompanied by a Growler.
If the A-10 does get hit, it will probably be fine. It has quadruple-redundant controls. It can fly with the loss of an engine, half the tail, and 2/3 of one wing. MANPAD explosive charges are small. The A-10 engines are spaced apart from each other, making it unlikely that a hit on one engine could disable the other. Experience shows that the aircraft is tough: they often return to base after getting hit by a missile even larger than a MANPAD, such as truck-mounted Russian equipment.
The A-10 might be MANPAD resistant to the SA-7 (Grail class and variants), but it wasn't designed to survive anything newer. Yes it has redundant control mechanisms/engines, titanium bathtub and tails. But it's still easy to target with IR, not to mention radar.
And against a modern AD system, it'll be toast. Whether it's a Tunguska or worse, it can't survive on the modern battlefield until these systems are attritted via SEAD.
They survive pretty well. Don't expect perfection. It's war. Check out the loss rates for WWII bombers over Europe, but we sent them anyway and they worked fine.
The A-10 of course is capable of SEAD. It carries the equipment. However...
There is no requirement that the A-10 go alone. It can be accompanied by the EA-18G or F-22.
If it mattered, we could have the A-10 carry the AN/ALE-50 towed decoy system. The threat isn't serious enough to bother, but we could.
I'm sure the crews in the 8th AF who attacked Schweinfurt in WW2 would disagree. Until the P-51 and P-47 were able to escort the B-17s start to finish, the attrition rate was terrible. Daylight bombing was completely unproductive; the only good thing was that the escorting fighters eventually degraded the Luftwaffe.
The A-10 is not tasked with SEAD. The only weapons it could use in that role would be Mavericks, CBU, dumb bombs, and the GAU. It carries the ALQ-131 pod, but that's only for self-defense (jamming). Also, the operational envelope for ALE50 is too high to be useful for the A-10, unless it's going to just be used as a bomb truck at medium altitude. Plus it only has two "buddies" so it's of limited use.
If you can get your hands on some of the literature regarding it's intended deployment in Europe if the GSFG rolled through Fulda, you'd be horrified at it. Both it and the Apache would have attrition rates that would never fly with today's voters.
And it's not that the threat isn't "serious enough to bother", but that it wouldn't be cost effective to increase the A-10s survivability. If the conflict gets too hot, the USAF simply won't deploy the A-10.
Sure, the attrition rate was terrible, but we sent them anyway. That is war. Under the right conditions, today's voters will tolerate the same. Human brains haven't changed that much. We don't tolerate the losses when playing around in Vietnam or Iraq, but another Pearl Harbor will put us right back in the mood.
Until such a conflict, our enemies have weak air defense.
So either way, the A-10 works. Either we are in the mood for serious war with serious losses, or we're fighting an enemy that can't put up much of a fight.
Sent them anyway as the brass's belief in the Norden bomb sight was far in excess of its ability. Tests had been in perfect steady level flight, in perfect visibility in the desert. Daylight raids had horrific losses, yet were repeatedly shown that in practice accuracy was no better.
Night raids would have cut losses markedly and achieved no worse accuracy.
> another Pearl Harbor will put us right back in the mood...
Yeah, well, they kind of said that with the WTC attack, and I guess it's carried us through on a multi trillion dollar war against a bunch of countries that never attacked us, and a growing surveillance hellscape. Pretty sure most people are sick of it. I know I am!
Another attack on US territory; well, if they took out certain areas of the government, I'm about at the point where I would welcome them as liberators.
And the purpose of that gun is no longer valid as it won't take out modern tanks. Also if you are fighting modern tanks you would get shot down by MANPADS.
There is a reason why CIA never seemed to give away anti-aircraft weapons while they throw anti-tank weapons at Syrian rebels. Despite manpads would be so valuable against the old Syrian air force.
With current ammunition the gun will not quickly and reliably take out modern tanks.
Guided ammunition has been done for 12.7 mm ammunition. The A-10 carries 30 mm ammunition, so it would be no problem to supply it with guided ammunition.
Mission kill can be achieved by splitting a tread, pitting the surfaces of the sensor lenses, or ripping off an antenna.
Even the most modern armor will fail when repeatedly hit.
MANPADS are not a serious threat. That is just FUD.
FUD? Tell that to the VVS squadrons flying SU-25s in Afghanistan. These were extremely robust aircraft similar in many ways to the A-10. Facing the Stinger, they had high casualties, forcing them to bomb from higher altitudes and use PGMs instead of strafing and dumb bomb attacks. This was 36 years ago. MANPADs have gotten better in this period.
One was taken down by 12.7 mm ammunition. Clearly the Su-25 was not an extremely robust aircraft. It even has turbojets (hotter exhaust than turbofans) that are completely visible from the ground. A bit of armor around the pilot doesn't make an aircraft equivalent to an A-10.
USAF has many options when it's about gunning all terrain options:
C130, yeah, that plane can literally wipe an entire convoy of cars, tanks, and landforces with thousands of heavy rounds, same as the A-10.
Apache helicopters and A-10.
And the list goes one.
I don't think it's wise to use fighters to attack land targets, more than blowing bridges or targeting tanks with missiles. The amount of rounds and the guns used in these fighters aren't suitable in my opinion. Yes, you can fight with it but that doesn't mean it's practical.
A AC-130 cannot carry "thousands of heavy rounds", it is a plane not a battleship; it has a couple of dozen 105mm "heavy rounds" and a few hundred 25 or 30 mm projectiles. In the modern world, automatic cannon rounds are not classified as heavy.
An AC-130 Spectre, for example, carries 8 cannons: 4x GAU-2B/A (Army M134) 7.62mm "minigun" to tear apart any lightweight vehicles, soldiers, helicopters and more. Another 4x M61 20-27mm caliber dealing 6000 rounds per minute. Let me know where is your definition of "heavy calibers" and quantities.
It carries over a thousand rounds which is 5x-10x what most planes carry; Plenty to mission kill a lot more more than a few ground targets (granted that depends on what is being targeted, but they are not going up against many T-70s at the moment.)
Maybe we have different defnitions on "not much ammo" ?
The gun is extremely precise, so precise that is useless: if you miss the first shell, all will be misses. They intentionally made it disperse the projectile to cover an area, not 1 square meter.
For current third-world proxy war purposes its not very useful; but in a real war its an expected possibility that missile & countermeasure tech accelerates such that an F-35's current missile armament's range may shrink to dogfight range, at which point you need a cannon.
Of course a ground-attack plane shouldn't be dog-fighting in the first place but you gotta have that multi-role capability
Yes. In the sense that current gen figters are often called upon to strafe ground targets, in the absence of air targets. Even in less asymmetrical warfare, its very common for there to be not very many ground targets for periods of time, and then a whole bunch all at once. This means that while we can have dedicated ground attack planes to take up the baseline loads, it's useful to have fighters able to take up the slack on any variable load spikes, even if they aren't quite as good at it, they can be used for other things when demand isn't quite so high.
Not really. The F-35 might replace the A-10 in the CAS role but it will not be achieving it in the same manner.
Whereas an A-10 may roll in for a gun-run at low altitude the F-35 will be dropping precision SDBs (Small Diameter Bombs) from high altitude instead.
I would be astounded if the F-35's gun gets anywhere within spitting distance of "regular" usage, especially since getting into gun range puts your exceedingly expensive plane into range of MANPADs.
I agreee that it is a requirement of the design but I have serious doubts it will ever be actually used that way.
I remember hearing from the chief program officer for the software of the new joint fighter the F-35, in the US, five or so years ago. He said "I'm the chief software program officer, and I'm absolutely certain that the approved requirements for the software for this plane cannot be met, and there's nothing I can do about it because there are so many forces being brought to bear on these requirements." (45:45 - 46:18)
[1] https://www.heidelberg-laureate-forum.org/video/lecture-hint... (27 August 2015)