The saddest thing about all of this IMO is they have been working on this for 14 years, and how much money was spent/wasted? Now, read about Skunkworks - they were able to build the SR71 (without supercomputers) in less than half that time and for a fraction of the cost.
This isn't just planes, this seems to be everything nowadays. Fission was discovered in 1938/1939 and we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. No chance we could do something like that in this toxic environment of today.
I know Peter Thiel is not popular here, but his conversations about technological progress seem to be spot on: we just cant build cool shit anymore. I really did want a flying car, and all I have is 140 characters and promises of AI that never come true.
Maybe, you could say there are some exceptions like CRISPR, but that is TBD.
While the US does have a problem with building civil engineering projects today, that dynamic isn't really what happened with the F-35.
The root of the F-35 program's problems is a cost plus style contract that gave Lockheed every incentive to overrun on cost and time table. Ash Carter fixed that by telling Lockheed if they didn't agree to his new contract he'd kill the entire thing. And oh hey what a surprise suddenly the marginal cost of a new F-35 started hitting the target numbers.
The aircraft itself is apparently excellent at what it does, but that doesn't erase just how much grift was involved in this program for decades.
The other big thing driving the Air Force to heavily restructure it's approach is they know they just can't have these decades long development programs. They want to be able to iterate much faster. It's all still classified, but apparently the first few attempts at this more agile approach are in fact actually working, like with the NGAD program.
>The root of the F-35 program's problems is a cost plus style contract that gave Lockheed every incentive to overrun
I’m fond of the saying “once you understand people’s incentives, you understand everything” as it applies to contracting.
I will add, however, that fixed price contracts have their own problems as it relates to cutting corners. E.g., it can put downward pressure on retaining talent and performing best practices because it incentivizes under-bidding and then cutting corners to make a profit. E.g., “you cobbled together some VBA in a spreadsheet once 20 years ago and will work for pennies? Congratulations, you’re our new head of software development!”
A lot of the problems can be attributed to poor contract/spec management and poor oversight. Part of the key is having good requirements and also the contractual teeth/intestinal fortitude to hold contractors feet to the fire
Firm, Fixed Price (ffp) contracts can be utilized with incentives after delivery based on metrics like tail availability, maintenance issues, flight hour cost, effectiveness, etc. Most big contracts are really a hybrid, though an existing contractor always tries for a cost plus. It's literally taught in PM classes.
I was NOT directly involved in F-35, so I can't speak to the exact amount of sleaze that occurred with the prime contractor.
I'd love to see a real competition! (new contractors, new ideas, new teams, new airframe ideas). And two engines, yeesh.
Anyways, cost plus is great at moving risk to the government. FFP is at the other end of the spectrum, moving all risk to the contractor.
[Unnecessary edit: I'm a fan of the textron scorpion-as a light attack fighter we could modify]
I think the issue is if you are going to order a million toilets, then moving all the risk to the contractor is fine. If you are asking for innovation and R&D, then the contractor already has a ton of risk. Add in requirements to make a fighter suitable for all branches of the military, and the risk is gigantic. In that environment, you need to remove risk from the contractor.
This is why R&D projects can't be treated in the same way as delivery of well understood tech that simply needs to be mass produced well and efficiently.
They also cap profits based on the original bid size. So you bid 20 million for the F35 program you get 1.5 million profit. When you overrun the 20 million to 30 million you still only get 1.5 million "profit". Typically you also have to go ask for that 10 million in piecemeal as well. I need 500k to do this and 500k to do that and the program office approves or disapproves.
Of course, the contractors probably skim a little bit off the top of the 20 million back to themselves. They might for example bill for machine team on the CNC or charge $200/hr per an employee and only pay $60 (note that they have expenses for training, downtime, office space, equipment and management which that 200/hour needs to account for so the employee isn't getting screwed that badly.
Less moral contractors might build projects which intentionally fail but meet the specifications so that the gov't needs to execute a change order at which point they would get additional fee as part of the change order, however with the DOD you can get your company put on a blacklist which will mean you cannot win any more DOD contracts. But I have heard of a California construction company doing that repeatedly over the course of 30 years successfully. In the dod world, most companies try to propose improvements to the original contract. Typically they will have yearly goals associated with submitting and winning change orders as its an easier source of revenue than bidding and winning new contracts which typically have a 30% win rate.
>FFP is at the other end of the spectrum, moving all risk to the contractor.
I agree with your overall opinion but I do think the govt has a lot of residual risk in cost-plus. When a contractor is incentivized to cut corners, the mitigation is govt oversight. Meaning the contractor can keep cutting corners until caught. Since the govt ultimately owns these systems they can be left holding the bag (particularly when requirement specs are weak)
This is quite similar to one of my favorite saying that comes from my background in psychology: "When the mouse presses the lever, don't blame the mouse."
I ran across an interesting one earlier, understanding Maslow's Needs by negative example: We usually say that, when someone has food and shelter and safety, when they have friends and feel a sense of belonging, they can pursue higher stuff. And we know at some level that if someone is starving, they will do anything to find food -- civilized behavior goes out the window in that mode. But we forget that if someone has no friends and doesn't feel a sense of belonging, they will also stop at nothing to rectify THAT.
Aye, the most common I've seen being 2-factor hygiene approach to HR & Retention.
"Hygiene" for the record has nothing to do with deodorant, at least not per se, but instead the willingness to remove negative traits. However, just because you remove negative traits doesn't mean you have any positives. Just cuz you took a shower this morning, wear clean clothes, and trim your fingernails doesn't mean you're not an asshole, and that we should friends with you.
Same deal with jobs, cultures, etc. The work may be risky and dangerous, but if there are enough positives to outweigh those negatives, people might stick around. But even if you strip out the negatives, people will eventually float away from jobs that aren't fulfilling or that don't offer any positives.
There’s a distinction to be made between excusing bad behavior, but rather they explaining it. The article seems focused on the former, I’m more interested in the latter.
There are intrinsic and extrinsic incentives. I think the important part not touched upon is that for those actors extrinsically motivated (e.g., status, money, etc.) the system incentive will influence behavior much more than those more affected by intrinsic motivations.
The article is right that extrinsic motivations don’t excuse immoral behavior but when morals are lacking external controls are still needed. Developing the right extrinsic incentives provides guardrails for those who tend to lack intrinsic motivation that align. The article seems to think the solution is to “just act morally” which works at the individual level but that’s not really a policy at a system level (especially once we acknowledge everyone doesn’t share the same goals/motivations/morals)
I don't really see it as "the other side". Identifying root cause of behavior is critical to modifying it. The "don't blame the mouse" saying is simplified; scientists (as in this article) live in a more complex world. Just because we can understand what led to a set of behavior for scientists, or others, doesn't mean they have no accountability for their actions, but it usually does mean there is a systemic problem that requires a systemic solution, otherwise we'll only ever be treating the symptoms.
That's not a problem with fixed price contracts so much as selecting the lowest bidder. An agency which is allowed to pick the more expensive contract that is justifiably better usually won't succumb to these problems.
And those of us that spend govt money generally do this, it's totally fine to not pick the cheapest, you just have to have a sound reason to do so.
I.e. if you aren't willing to stand up in court and talk about why Tootie is better than Tito, despite Tito being 10% cheaper, you better be selecting Tito or looking for another job.
Thanks for offering your experience. That matches with my own as well, albeit from the other side. I worked for a large government contractor on our bid, and we knew we weren't going to have the cheapest option but rather banked on the value-add. And most of the time it worked.
The government doesn't have to select the lowest bidder, that is a misconception. If they think the bid is too low, they can "risk up" the cost, adding in the cost of the additional risk not accounted for. The FAR specifies that they select for best value.
I know! I used to be a government contractor. I was rather pointing out that the failure mode in question only arises when budget is the deciding issue between proposals. A proper procurement process decides based on delivered value, however.
“Best value” can be very hard to get approved when lower bids exist. Circling back to the incentive theme, I have a feeling contracting officers are graded, in part, by how much they “save”. (In quotes because you can often pay much more in the long run by selecting the lowest bidder).
I’ve found people are very risk adverse in this regard and would prefer to select the lowest bid instead of potentially defending their decision during a protest.
I think it all depends on your local purchasing department(every govt agency/department gets their own, pretty much). Our department's attitude can be summed up(by me) as:
select the best solution to meet your needs, mostly irregardless of cost, but be sure you can articulate why you are buying from A.
I.e. You can pick whatever vendor you want, provided you are happy to stand up, under oath, in court and talk about WHY you selected vendor A over vendors B, C and D.
So far so I have no experience in court defending our choices.
Incentives seem to have huge explanatory value wherever you look, don’t they. I’d like to add a classic Warren Buffet quote into the mix: “Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.”
Does anyone have any views on what constitutes canonical reading on incentives? Some of the classic game theory works? Would love to hear opinions on this.
Incentives in my opinion leads to Goodhart's law [1].
In fact, I will go a step further - most incentives are chosen by well meaning people. There is neither malice nor incompetence going on. What happens is that every incentive can be perverted, and will be perverted over time. Over time, then that incentive, that was once chosen with good intentions, becomes perverse.
Incompetence may be too strong of a word but I think there can be a lack of thinking about second and third order effects when the “measure becomes the target”.
I am not trying to be a smart ass but how about this for an human incentive: Build us plane that fulfills these outlined objectives, that meets are budget requirements, or we will shop somewhere else.
I get what you’re saying but I wish it were that easy.
Take the requirements for example. If they aren’t airtight, you’ll get into a wordsmithing scenario where the contractor claims they met the requirement and it becomes a game where the team with the best lawyer wins. Write the requirements too explicitly and contractors will push back saying “tell us what you want, not how we’re supposed to do it.”
A somewhat silly example is if you specify you want unit testing on all safety critical code paths a contractor may claim they define running a compiler as “unit testing”. A contracting officer may not be technically savvy enough to push back and when the subject matter experts try to leave negative contract comments (that get reviewed when awarding future contracts) they get scrubbed because its not worth the fight in the eyes of the contracting officer.
Unfortunately, just saying “do good work” just doesn’t...work
And the parent's comment is any contracting work, really.
With DoD you have to add in various accountability steps, political footballs, public opinion, etc.
If you've spent time around the DC area you'd be shocked at the number of adverts for things like the F-22 that you see. One time I took the metro from NoVA to MD, with a stop off downtown, and counted at least 6. They're not just bringing lawyers and playing contractor games, they're aggressively marketing to everyone.
Having only been to the US a few times I'm floored by this. You mean to tell me that there are actual printed ads in public places for _fighter planes_? I can sort of understand the rationale in DC, but it just seems surreal to me.
Those kinds of purchases being swayed by subway ads... I really hope it's a joke.
WTOP, which is the All News/Traffic station is filled with ads from contractors during the Drive time. Of course, I last listened to them a year ago, but I suspect that hasn't changed. Listen to them anytime between 7am and 9am EST.
Sounds like the Air Force still needs the F-20 Tigershark
(killed by Ft. Worthless Jim Wright to protect the F-16 from competition) to bail out the F-35 Trillion Dollar Turkey.
The F-20 may have been the last time an aircraft company ever pitched an airplane developed on the company's money. Despite being highly praised by all who flew it (including Chuck Yeager), it's ugly demise at the hands of politics (it was less than half the price of the F-16) was an example to all to never do this again...
I believe one of the objectives of the F-35 was for the plane to be able to fulfill all kinds of different roles. That idea in itself seems pretty much impossible for me. Especially on a budget.
The problem with massive development efforts like this is that there aren't a lot of competitors. In this particular field, there are two, and not really even quite two exactly.
There would have to be organizational will to do so, and one pole of the American political system doesn't have it for a military plane program and the other actively hates the idea of nationalized industry.
Thank you for bringing a structural, informed approach to this. I'm getting a little tired of the tendency to handwave blame "cultural decline" rather than actual looking into the policies and details.
Aren't policy and details a product of culture? If a group of people, be it a team or nation, dont have have a solid culture then surely they cant achieve solid results. And indeed it would appear that gradually there is a decline in achieving great results from countries that have historically achieved such results. Dont get me wrong, the US is still doing great, but maybe when the rest of the world keeps raising red flags then criticism should be taken on board as not all is ill intentioned.
"Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence'
Thanks for the kind words. I'm just someone sitting in their armchair with a lot of curiosity, but I do try to work hard to understand the world in cause and effect structure, for topics like this.
Even more important to understand that we humans as a species are extraordinarily poor at understanding complex systems. Larger, older organizations will become complex over time, and complexity increases at higher than linear rates. This is why a lean, happy startup at 50 employees often becomes an unmanageable disaster at 200 employees.
Human societies have become incredibly more complex over time, and development of communication has contributed to it.
The point I am trying to make here is that this is not cultural decline, but rather a society that has grown incredibly more complex, while we humans have not learnt how to deal with it.
F-35 is far from excellent and it had many engineering problems like massive software problems, fire hazards, structural weakness, engine problems, heating, high noise, low range, etc.
It failed to replace existing fleet of fighters, like the F-16, and on ground support, like the A10. That is not excellence.
All of the engineering problems of the F-35 have been well known from the early days of the project, I know because I have studied closely ever since Norway decided to buy it. But the massive propaganda from the weapons industry has clouded this debate from the start.
F-35 is a huge fiasco on multiple levels - policy, contracting, diplomacy, engineering, warfare, etc
Reason why it is even bigger failure than the F-22 is that the US decided to sell the F-35 overseas. This exposed the project to more scrutiny and increased the stakes. Can’t be hidden away like the embarrassing F-22.
If US decide to build a new fighter aircraft I predict it will be a failure too.
The F-35 is a combined development and low rate production program. Whether that was wise is a discussion, but it’s unsurprising that the current plane isn’t perfect. It is a LOT more perfect than the first versions though! That accounts for most of your complaints, except for noise which is unavoidable with the most powerful single engine to date.
You also might want to consider its extremely good flight record. Until recently there hadn’t been a single crash.
The software issue isn’t great (I blame C++ to an extent) but it’s also improving. The plane is now certified for many different weapons systems.
With stealth as great of a game-changer as it is, the incremental cost of the F-35 isn’t much. Developing a new fighter that pretty well duplicates the F-35 except for stealthy materials probably isn’t worth the cost. The F-35A cost keeps dropping...
As to not replacing “existing fleet of fighters”, that sure isn’t what the pilots are saying. So far it’s been well over 10-1 kill ratios against Gen 4 airframes at all Red Flag type competitions.
The only thing embarrassing about the F-22 was the decision to terminate production at 187 aircraft. The F-22 was and is an excellent aircraft, perhaps a bit ahead of its time in terms of need, but to call it an embarrassment doesn't have much accuracy.
I love jets and the F-22 is both my favorite fighter and likely the best air superiority fighter in the world, so I get where you are coming from, but it is not an excellent aircraft for the current USAF mission when you look at it as a whole.
Not only is the procurement cost of an F-22 extremely high, operationally it has been plagued by issues that hare only partially elevated by a maintenance program that even by fighter jet standards is considered expensive and frequent. The stealth coating in particular is very finnicky and has to be worked up constantly. Approximately half of F-22 are non-op at any given time, even getting training time is extremely difficult.
The F-22 is like an exotic sportscar. Nobody denies that if it's in the air and functional, it's a great performer, but we would never make the bugatti veyron the standard patrol car for all police - not only would it be mindbogglingly expensive, durability and high maintenance would make it impractical, not to mention overkill in most situations. To make another car analogy, it would be like buying a Ford F350 for picking up your groceries once a week.
I look at the F-22 as an aircraft that was born too soon. The ATF program started in 1981, but nobody anticipated the fall of the Soviet Union. So it really never had a real need. Now its technology is outdated (in terms of electronics), and the stealth technology is expensive to maintain and support. It's still an incredible fighter, arguably the best in the world.
It's like some of the pocket battleships produced between WW1 and WW2. The technology was incredible, but expensive. And by the time war actually came, they were outdated. I think the F-22 will meet the same fate (and the B-2 as well). Silver bullets that were never really needed.
I also think many of your criticisms are due to the small amount actually produced. Spares were never produced in adequate volumes, and when a single accident reduces your aircraft inventory by almost 1% it makes you risk averse.
Essentially no battleships that weren't complete by the start of the war for whichever country actually saw combat in WWII. The vast majority of battleships that saw combat were from the interwar period, if not WWI.
Also pocket battleship mostly refers to the heavy cruisers that Germany built during their rearmament program.
I think you're first paragraph is incorrect. For example, the US entered WW2 in 11/7/41, and the BB-63 Missouri was commissioned in 6/44. Missouri saw combat at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. BB-62 (New Jersey) was commissioned in 6/43 and fought at Guam and Okinawa. BB-61 was commissioned 2/43 and fought in the Pacific after being transferred from the Atlantic.
For the UK, five King George class battleships were commissioned after the start of Britain's declaration of war in 9/39. They all saw combat.
France's Richelieu was commissioned in 4/40, and saw limited combat in Dakar.
Even Japan's Yamato class battleships were commissioned before Japan invaded China.
Perhaps you meant that no battleships that weren't laid down prior to the start of WW2 saw combat?
> apparently the first few attempts at this more agile approach are in fact actually working, like with the NGAD program.
For the clueless like me, NGAD doesn't stand for "Not Give A Damn", but for "Next-Generation Air Dominance"; or less pompously, a sixth-generation jet fighter.
Sec. Ash Carter [0] did some really good work at reforming the pentagon, especially acquisitions, both as Deputy SecDef and later returning as SecDef. He also served as Under Secretary for Acquisitions (AT&L)
Sec. David Norquist [1] was another Deputy SecDef who helped reign in DoD costs. He also served as Comptroller before DepSecDef. There was whispers that he did actually fire people for wasting DoD funds.
Chip Berke is an F22 and F35 test pilot, and the first F35 Squadron commander. He's probably the most qualified person on the planet to talk about fifth gen aircraft:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxK6O5--9Z0&t=203s
Admittedly my sample size is 1 so I'm not pretending my anecdata is conclusive, but you have to be wary of what people will say publicly about politically motivated projects.
EDIT: Although to be fair, I wrote that before looking at your links, I feel like that context is important (although I stand by my statement).
The F35 has been badly politicized, but it has also been the victim of an absolute shitload of criticism from people who want it to be something it was never intended to be and are unhappy that the F22 was cancelled early.
If it were just that Colonel Berke liked the plane, it would be one thing. He really explains it in detail in the video. I'll admit I wasn't quite sold on the the plane years ago, but once I saw this video it pretty thoroughly changed my mind.
I realize the video is a bit long, and I almost never post links to videos -- but this one is well worth the watch.
One of the stupidest criticisms of the F-35 was from J. Michael Gilmore[0] former DoD Director of Operational Test & Evaluation. OT&E has a role, and is intended to be critical in their evaluation, but his reports were typically out of date, and didn't seem to reflect the consensus of the pilots and others actually operating the jet.
What made his criticisms ironically stupid was he'd never even SEEN the jet up close, or spoken to an actual pilot, only reviewed documents and read memos, until the very end of his tenure as Director of OT&E. He was not retained when Gen. Mattis took over as SecDef.
I've heard nothing but praise for LtCol. Chip Berke. He is a great fighter pilot, although now retired from the USMC.
It also sounds like they made a lot of thoroughly unreasonable requests for a completely modular platform that could outperform everything in all branches of military at once.
It also sounds like they made a lot of thoroughly unreasonable requests for a completely modular platform that could outperform everything in all branches of military at once.
The concept of modularity is a sound one. Imagine this: You buy an F35 and it comes with 2 sets of wings. It has a empty bay just behind the pilot, and it also comes with a lift engine and a spare fuel tank, and a tailhook that can be easily slotted into place if you want it. A trained ground crew, in a couple of hours, can swap parts around and turn it into an A, B or C variant, and then into another one for its next mission.
The problem is that the materials needed to create such a F35 kit don't exist and won't for the foreseeable future. So what you end up with is 3 similar looking aircraft that happen to share the same name and have a vague resemblance but have surprisingly little in common, for triple the price.
The idea of having one aircraft be able to become any of the other variants isn't actually that great. Air Force planes don't operate from carriers, and Navy planes don't need to operate from very small fields.
The common bits are actually really useful to have in common. The radar is expensive to develop. The optical sensors are too. Engines are expensive, and the F135 engine is like 1/6 of the aircraft's cost.
Development is a bit more expensive, because you have 3 airframes with slightly different characteristics, but much of it the same between the three as far as systems that go inside.
It's definitely not 3x the price to develop the 3 different variants.
And they're buying new F-35s for cheaper than a new F-16.
The idea of having one aircraft be able to become any of the other variants isn't actually that great. Air Force planes don't operate from carriers, and Navy planes don't need to operate from very small fields.
I disagree, there have been cases where it could have been very useful. For example in the 1980s the RAF were operating the Harrier for the close support role (from austere forward airfields) and the RN were operating the Sea Harrier for air defence, but when the Falklands War kicked off, RAF aircraft were brought onto the carriers. The RAF were also operating the Tornado for long-range bombing and another variant of Tornado for air defence, plus the Jaguar. That's 4 different aircraft that could be merged into a "kit" F35 if it were possible to do so.
Yes, the UK had all of those 4 different aircraft. But the F-35 is primarily a US aircraft, designed primarily for US purposes, and only bought by other nations as fitting their purposes close enough. The F-35B fits UK RN FAA requirements close enough, so they're buying it. The UK RAF has requirements that are better met by the F-35A, so they're doing that.
The F-35B is explicitly the replacement for the Harrier (Sea or regular). The F-35A is designed for both interdiction/strike (it is a "strike fighter"), as well as being able to swing role[0] into air defense. The F-35C is explicitly only for USN requirements. No one else is going to be buying them, because the only allied country that operates CATOBAR aircraft is France, who likes their Rafales.
For all of the F135 being literally the most powerful low bypass turbofan in the world, it's still not enough power to be able to adequetely lift the F-35B without the B being lightened compared to the A. It's not just parts they left off, like the arresting hook, but different parts to shave weight. For example, the weapons bays are smaller. Tails are smaller. Airframe structure is lighter, which reduces durability, and also limits the maximum g-load (22% lower! than the A model). They also had to make the attachment of the wings more difficult compared to earlier plans, because the easier wing attachments weighed too much. The left shoulder of the aircraft are different, because the A model has a gun there that the others don't. These limitations are baked in, and unbaking them would make it too heavy to be able to perform the required role.
[0]: Swing role is more than just being able to do more than one role, but being able to do both of them during the same flight.
The only reason FAA ended up with F-35B is that they were too late with the idea of switching to F-35C, which meant that they couldn't rebuild their new carriers for CATOBAR on reasonable time/money budget.
Meanwhile F-35B exists pretty much only due to USMC to the point that I would be doubtful of any praise for the F-35 if it came from USMC crew. Then it got pushed as option for export, often seemingly presenting F-35B as being as capable as F-35A.
Meanwhile the ALIS without which F-35 is an expensive paperweight turned out to be a very expensive turd, that finally got renamed as ODIN after awarding the new contract to the same group that fscked up ALIS :/
Yeah, the RN screwed up their requirements such that the new UK carriers aren't actually going to be built for CATOBAR, even though they're supposed to be equipped for, but not with, the facilities to do so.
The F-35B is obviously not going to be capable in the same way as the A. However it's significantly more capable than the Harrier, which is the important part for everyone buying it. There is no other current STOVL carrier fighter jet available. And the reduced capabilities may largely not matter to those users, in exchange for the increased capabilities for being able to launch them off ships/very limited area land strips. I think the only nation that is going to not be launching them off ships is Singapore, which is very restricted in land area.
Yeah, the RN screwed up their requirements such that the new UK carriers aren't actually going to be built for CATOBAR, even though they're supposed to be equipped for, but not with, the facilities to do so.
You speak in the past tense but both are actually in the water now! One of them is working up for her first live deployment.
I personally don't believe that CATOBAR was ever an option on these ships, there are too many clues. One is that both cats and traps are enormous pieces of machinery that need to be integrated with the hull and dissipate enormous amounts of heat, they can't be pasted in afterwards, they have to be designed in from the start. The catapults require steam or electrical power for EMALS, the QE class can't do steam and can't generate that much power. Operating cats and traps needs lots of deck crew, there aren't enough people without growing the RN by a few thousand people all told. And finally keeping pilots current for arrested landings isn't feasible if you want the freedom to embark RAF crews at short notice, who have only used runways. Basically BAe said they could do it as a tickbox exercise in the planning stages, but when the government looked at doing it and switching to F35C, it would have cost as much as rebuilding them both from scratch.
You can see some openly available artifacts of earlier efforts at the more agile approach to highly complex cyberphysical systems with programs like DARPA's Adaptive Vehicle Make (RIP).
Though AVM was killed by sequestrations, the work continued in other programs — and of course there was a lot of learning taken from various unclassified programs to behind the green door, so to speak.
The next-gen bomber program (B-21) as far as I'm aware is also going well. Fast purchase of an a platform intentionally only incrementally more advanced than the current model.
Does it have a human pilot? Any combat aircraft project with a human on board should be stopped. It has no hope of long term parity of a drone controlled airplane without having to cart around meat bags with limited speed and turning power.
Human pilot optional. I would argue that physical humans are not the limiting factor in bomber performance, and the thought of a Kubernetes cluster autonomously flying around with nukes scares the fuck out of me. In addition to the philosophical implications there's also political reasons to go with a hybrid approach.
> the thought of a Kubernetes cluster autonomously flying around with nukes scares the fuck out of me
I get this, but I also wonder if the same kind of bugs or unintended behavior in a software system aren't just as likely in the protocols, procedures, and chains of command we build for humans to deploy that weaponry. You've got AI doomsday (a la "War Games") on one hand, and bureaucratic doomsday ("Doctor Strangelove") on the other.
That may be the case, but I think the "bugs" in humanity are biased towards not using nuclear weapons. I think that's a good thing.
For example it's very possible that a "Should I launch the nukes?" algorithm would've come up with a different answer than Stanislav Petrov did[1]. There's a similar story about US missileers disregarding a glitch in their own command and control system on Okinawa but the authenticity is suspect.
That's the lynchpin that guarantees Russia will retaliate, but it's Ripper's unchecked moments of control at SAC that set the whole ball rolling, and Slim Pickin's is cowboy-riding that bomb down to the ground whether Russia has an AI or not.
This meme needs to end. It's a damn bomber. The by far biggest problem is that a pilot needs to eat and go to the toilet multiple times during a 20 hour mission and he will be exhausted by the end of the mission.
Repeating the same old "lol quadrocopter go 2000g brrrrrt" meme just makes you look stupid.
I agree with this sentiment for fighter aircraft, but for a stealth bomber carrying thousands of pounds of ordinance, a few human passengers doesn't really matter.
(it's not like these bombers are built to sustain high G forces anyway)
> The root of the F-35 program's problems is a cost plus style contract that gave Lockheed every incentive to overrun on cost and time table. Ash Carter fixed that by telling Lockheed if they didn't agree to his new contract he'd kill the entire thing. And oh hey what a surprise suddenly the marginal cost of a new F-35 started hitting the target numbers.
A cost-plus contract is a contributor, but not the root of why the JSF program went astray.
The fundamental flaw of the F-35 is that they tried to make one air frame for 3 very different sets of requirements. By doing so they compromised all three variants yet failed to achieve the cost savings they thought they would get from that approach.
Equally as important is the fact that it was politically engineered to be almost uncancelable. The future of US and allied air power was staked on this one platform so all of the stakeholders had very high motivation to keep pushing on long after it wasn't prudent to do so.
Then there's the fact the DoD and Congress removed some of the normal procurement guard rails to try to shorten the timeline, but also made it more difficult to cancel. "Concurrent development" with the JSF meant that series production began before all testing and evaluation was done. This meant that when problems were found there were costly retrofits. It also means that the multitude of serious shortcomings were found after production had began, making it more difficult to justify stopping the program.
Then consider that production of parts for the F-35 is spread out across over 40 states (I wanna say it was 47). Then there's the part where the DoD allowed the contractor to write a significant portion of the requirements. It's no wonder things went sideways.
> The aircraft itself is apparently excellent at what it does, but that doesn't erase just how much grift was involved in this program for decades.
But that's the problem, it is not excellent at what it does. When you read the DOT&E reports about its mission capabilities there are numerous serious defects and limitations to what the aircraft can do. Granted, some of those issues are getting addressed, but the costs of the program makes it harder to justify.
Ultimately the whole reason for the F-35 to exist was that the high parts commonality and the very high production numbers would save big money on costs. It failed to do that.
I think this sort of self-perpetuating bureaucracy bloat has characterized most post-war weapons development in the Pentagon. The F-16 was an exception and success from what I understand, because of what another poster above refers to as spec management (I presume). i.e. it had a small group of proponents who had both extensive pilot experience and also the engineering/management chops to understand clearly what they wanted aeronautically, and were good at running a "rebel" program within the giant DoD bureaucracy to keep that project coherent and focused...until the very end when it did pick up a bit of bloat when it necessarily was exposed to other parts of the DoD.
I think in order to be successful, they probably have to implement some sort of "small teams" approach; I'd imagine a lot of tech developed for JSF/F-35 can be rapidly rolled into a 5th gen+ fighter without reinventing the wheel...but they'd need to firewall the project into small focused teams who really know what they'd want to build.
You misunderstand the purpose the F35- it is a jobs and pork program first and foremost, like SLS. It has the side benefit of keeping people trained to build this sort of thing, so SpaceX can hire them.
We can build cool shit, but our government and most companies don't optimize for that.
It's more than just a jobs program too. It's a reelection plan for senators/house members.
Look at what states and districts get these big DoD contracts and then look at what committees the congressmen/women are sitting on.
They approve plans that benefit them then direct the funds right into their districts so they can campaign on it.
I mean it's not the worst form of corruption but it's pretty shitty when you realize how our infrastructure and defense is designed around congressional districts instead of what is best for our country.
Grid infrastructure and rail lines jump to my mind often in these discussions.
I am reminded how we got existing rail line through much of the U.S. 19th century land acquisition for private parties who built that infrastructure is easy to spin as a travesty. In many cases it was blatant corruption. And the legacy lasts to this day. All of that land and infrastructure is still privately owned.
Fast forward to today. Is it right that the government should build infrastructure to compete with existing private businesses? Should they build and operate grocery stores? Automakers? ISPs? Textile factories?
There used to be some idea that the government should not compete with private industry. That idea is much murkier more recently.
But if you want to build public infrastructure to compete with the likes of Union Pacific, shouldn't you start by nationalizing the likes of Union Pacific?
See also USPS for more interesting examples of public vs private enterprise. Imagine that the USPS contracted local delivery and long-haul transfer. Imagine that a local mom and pop could bid on a local contract. Newspaper delivery bicycle contractors everywhere could double their money for little additional effort. Or FedEx/UPS/Amazon might really sharpen their pencils and win those contracts.
Re: USPS, I’m still waiting to hear the interesting part.
The USPS is legally obligated to deliver mail to every household, 6 days a week. The private carriers don’t come anywhere close to meeting that level of service. Most of the US is incredibly sparsely populated. There won’t be bicycle contractors lining up to deliver mail up the Adirondacks or across the Great Plains.
How would a network of private interests handing off parcels between each other under government regulation deliver better service than a single organization with the problem already solved thanks to 200 years of domain expertise?
This isn't an argument for privatization, but the proposal from the OP are not the same as full an open free market. You still have the USPS responsible for ensuring delivery to the long-tail routes. That just gets bid out (probably at a higher cost that delivery occurs for today). These are the kinds of bids companies like Halliburton take.
I'm not in favor of this approach, either we have a really free market (with some limited regulation for things like anti-fraud) or you have the government manage the service. These public-private partnerships just seem to be grift programs write large. Let's not push for more corporatism. If there is already a private market, then sure, have the government bid for private contracts within that market. Otherwise you have companies whose full-time roles is figure out how to squeeze more money out of government, and they lobby hard to do so, often with much success (at filching taxpayers)
The USPS does not deliver mail to every household. Nor do they deliver universally six days a week.
Where I live, USPS doesn't deliver to any household, but UPS and FedEx do.
But that is beside the point. Any party that contracted with the USPS would be obligated to meet the terms of the contract.
You might be surprised at who lines up to deliver mail up the Adirondacks. One of the virtues of a free market is the amazing ingenuity of entrepreneurs to meet market demand in the most efficient ways. The free market provides the motivation for such ingenuity whereas non-profit single-player monopolies often don't.
But still this misses my interest in this discussion. I think there is an optimum balance for publicly-owned infrastructure and privately-owned service providers. But that balance is not always obvious and usually not stable. I think there is great benefit in continuous discussion of the pros and cons to monitor and adjust how we leverage the strengths of both sides of the equation.
I like the idea of "build more rail lines." But it takes more that four words to make this happen. If you are just trying to replace the pork of military spending, then perhaps the details don't matter. Just trade one corruption for another. Let the power brokers beat each other up clamoring for the money.
But if you're making such radical changes to the redistribution of wealth, why not have some thoughtful discussion that people can reference for the next 100s of years. Who are the Lockes and Keynes of 2021? I know they exist. Let's bring them out in public discussion.
>Fast forward to today. Is it right that the government should build infrastructure to compete with existing private businesses? Should they build and operate grocery stores? Automakers? ISPs? Textile factories?
There is absolutely nothing wrong with building public infrastructure considering in many cases the infrastructure in question would form a natural monopoly. However, car manufacturers, grocers, textile factories have lots of competition. Those markets are very healthy.
American ISPs fail to provide good service even in wealthy locations. Google had to stop their gigabit fiber rollout. That's definitively a failing market where a baseline of service should be provided by governments. Private companies can always provide superior service and charge for it.
But all these companies need a government that does compete with them the moment they stop innovating and start rent seeking, it's really best for them.
I think this is really insightful. Misallocation of resources is what eventually brings down economies. There are lots of bright people around, but corruption can drain a lot of talent.
Perhaps the problem is that the government has too much of a role in allocating resources in our economy as it stands. Maybe the military-industrial complex had some cool things for the first couple decades of its existence, but as the decades went on, it became a rusty, slower version of its old self as bureaucratic creep and complacency set in. Now it seems hard to disrupt that, like what tends to happen in the non-monopolized private sector.
Lots of us would love to believe this, and yet what does the unrestrained private sector churn out? Ad networks, app addiction, gig economy, throwaway culture, urban sprawl, climate apathy... hardly a winner.
SpaceX is everyone's favourite private sector success story, but they're basically just a younger, leaner version of Lockheed— surviving off of NASA and doing what they're contracted to do.
I don't think the private sector is ever going to do ambitious things like build rail infrastructure all on its own, nor is the current PPP model necessarily the way either, but maybe there is some option out there to get things done which looks like the bakeoff that NASA held with CRS.
> SpaceX is everyone's favourite private sector success story, but they're basically just a younger, leaner version of Lockheed— surviving off of NASA
In 2020, SpaceX did 26 launches. Only six of those had NASA as a customer. The rest were a mix of US military, commercial customers, foreign governments (Argentina and South Korea), and Starlink. Even if you add up NASA and US military, that's still only nine out of 26 with the US government as the customer.
So while no doubt SpaceX does benefit from NASA's business, it is now only a minority.
Sure, and legacy launch providers do business with the private sector also, but none of them could have been bootstrapped without years of unprofitable R&D on the public's dime.
There is no VC who would have accepted a pre-SpaceX pitch for low cost launches, Starlink, or any of the rest of it. It would have been straight up "lol Iridium amirite, get out."
> There is no VC who would have accepted a pre-SpaceX pitch for low cost launches, Starlink, or any of the rest of it. It would have been straight up "lol Iridium amirite, get out."
SpaceX was funded by Elon Musk and later, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Peter Thiel's Founder's Fund. Starlink has been in part funded by a $1 billion investment from Google and Fidelity. And since then further funding rounds have been raised.
The DFJ and Founder's Fund investment was before SpaceX had any substantial NASA development contracts, let along their 2008 $1.6 billion launch contract.
Interesting, though I don't know if any of that really disproves my point. Musk's own money was a self-investment; he didn't need to pitch anyone for that. Jurvetson was involved with Tesla prior, and Thiel was obviously connected through PayPal.
Until the Dragon demo flights in 2012-2013, I think SpaceX would have been hard pressed to raise significant capital from anyone other than Elon's friends. I think the fact that so many private space companies have one or more wealthy benefactors bears this out (Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, Armadillo to a lesser extent).
There's a wide gulf between "only a few people with the right skills and personal connections can bootstrap a space company" and "none of them could have been bootstrapped without years of unprofitable R&D on the public's dime"
The missing bits is that they bootstrapped after a lot of heavy lifting was done on public dime, and then landed a crucial bunch of govt contracts way before first succesful draco launch, the same kind of contracts that the previous private contractors also take.
I'd love to come up with examples as I type this to you from an open source web browser on a smart phone that contains more functionality than $20K worth of equipment did with more processing power than what all of NASA had in the 70s and access to more information than President Reagan had in the 80s and a faster throughput than anyone had in the 90s all hosted on a self made website by a startup platform helped fund and inspire hundreds of successful companies as I wait for my sushi dinner to be delivered to my door and take a break from my telecommute to work to hack out this absent minded response to you, but I'm drawing a blank.
Another Musk inspired project is the hyperloop and of course the Boring tunnels for electric cars. These are novel transportation solutions that solve for the problem in a more creative way than simply "build more light rails". That's the type of stuff a government will never come up with. There needs to be a creative maestro with massive capital. Musks are rare in the world but they certainly can move in a more agile way when they do appear.
I would also argue, telecommuting has solved for some of the transportation problems alone. Think of how many less cars are on the road as a result of work from home.
The thing that's different between Boring/Hyperloop and SpaceX is that SpaceX's entire business case is built on the cost benefit of landing and reusing a rocket, an idea for which the napkin math was obvious and in the end turned out to be extremely feasible but which legacy providers had been unwilling to even try.
Boring/Hyperloop don't have an idea like this. Boring's pitch is using conventional TBMs but making it cheaper by digging a smaller-diameter tunnel than the other guy. Does that meet the requirements? New subway systems are also reducing tunnel diameter by using LRVs instead of heavy rail cars... is there an actual innovation here?
Hyperloop is full of practicality issues, and addresses none of the real problems that are barriers to high speed mass transit projects today— specifically the fights over rights of way and station locations. The fact that it was initially pitched in 2013 as a system for moving around private automobiles should tell you a lot about how much understanding there is of the first principles of transportation— it wasn't until years later that this was acknowledged and corrected [1]. It would be like someone proposing an airline where each plane carries 10 cars instead of 400 passengers ("so convenient, you just drive right on board!")— it doesn't matter how fast the trains are, 840 passengers per hour for a Hyperloop would be a complete nonstarter when a normal subway does 40k/hr.
Maybe Boring/Hyperloop will end up pivoting into something worthwhile, but at the moment there is good reason for skepticism.
> The thing that's different between Boring/Hyperloop and SpaceX is that SpaceX's entire business case is built on the cost benefit of landing and reusing a rocket, an idea for which the napkin math was obvious and in the end turned out to be extremely feasible but which legacy providers had been unwilling to even try.
The cost of reusing a rocket has not been proven to be cheaper than building a new rocket. Consider factors like the inability to reuse the entire rocket, the reduced payload. At best you can break even. Unless you somehow reuse the entire rocket and do 100 flights with the same rocket the savings are meager.
This isn't something new. The space shuttle suffered from the same issues. Building new shuttles was almost the same cost and less risky.
I think it's pretty obvious that the current gen F9s are way more reusable and with way less refurbishment than the Shuttle ever was, even with the disposable second stage. But yeah, there are limitations, which is part of why FH is effectively cancelled in favour of just flying those payloads on a disposable booster.
But now that the basic principle has been proven, really leaning into it is part of the point of Starship— a new clean sheet design that is built for full reusability from the get go.
He just took the 100 year old vac train concept and repackaged it. Back in his original pitch he constantly said and laughed how easy it is. Once the years went by he slowly backed off from every promise and ultimately reduced his involvement to 0.
> of course the Boring tunnels for electric cars.
He promised to make tunnel boring cheaper, yet his only tunnel costs exactly as much as every other tunnel. He constantly advertises 150mph travel when the tunnel isn't even long enough to reach that speed. Have you seen the tunnel? It's so tiny you can't even open your doors if you get stuck in there. If even a single car fire starts in that tunnel everyone in the tunnel will die.
Cars themselves are pretty wasteful in terms of space and the way they rearrange the urban landscape. The concept of the Boring tunnel actually sounds like someone in 1894 wanting better spaces for horse carriages, except even more wasteful in this case.
> SpaceX ... surviving off of NASA and doing what they're contracted to do
Really this is more similar to VC investment where NASA funded it so they could get a return (better launches), but the future is that a probably large percentage of launches will be for commercial purposes (~50% of 2022 launches are for Starlink).
The elephant in the room is that military budget has to keep going up ("support the troops", create jobs and satisfy lobbyists) but there is no good goal to work towards. Great things happened in the 1940s to 70s because there were clear enemies and clear steps to take to gain and keep superiority. Today the US has a military budget three times bigger than that of the next largest spender, and everything necessary to fulfill the current challenges already exists and is in operation. So you spend the rest to prepare for the future, but with no external pressure to do so fast or efficiently.
Boring! How am I supposed to get reelected and campaign contributions without cool dream pictures? Infrastructure is just something you say, Pork is what you do.
Fear of terrorists sells better than fear of ice storms.
Especially for the states (and representatives) that the ice storm is 100 year. Dams fail, and when they fail, they don't affect the people that didn't want to live near a dam.
I’ve often wondered if it’s a similar incentive misalignment with executives and politicians that helps ignore these low frequency events.
CEOs are graded quarter-to-quarter and politicians every 2-4 years. Low probability events (plane crashes, infrastructure failures, etc.) may not ever happen during their tenure, incentivizing them to defund preparing for them to favor other programs, understanding full well they’re bound to occur
Defence equipment isn’t useless. In the event of war it becomes essential. Spending has to continue on these programmes in peacetime to retain capability.
Communism had a great many failings, but they did allocate a lot of money to infrastructure and science.
But what real communism did isn't even relevant here, I'm pretty sure GP is talking about imaginary communism in the sense that anything that is good for the general population is somehow called communism in US politics.
In any economic system political aspects have a tendency to reduce the information available to consumers and producers. This is often done with laudable intent leading to terrible outcomes. In Soviet Communism the information feedback loop was so disconnected it resembled the theory of an AI "paperclip apocalypse"[1].
From 0:
The Soviet whalers, Berzin wrote, had been sent forth to kill whales for little reason other than to say they had killed them. They were motivated by an obligation to satisfy obscure line items in the five-year plans that drove the Soviet economy, which had been set with little regard for the Soviet Union’s actual demand for whale products.
Whaling, like every other industry in the Soviet Union, was governed by the dictates of the State Planning Committee of the Council of Ministers, a government organ tasked with meting out production targets. In the grand calculus of the country’s planned economy, whaling was considered a satellite of the fishing industry. This meant that the progress of the whaling fleets was measured by the same metric as the fishing fleets: gross product, principally the sheer mass of whales killed.
The real solution involves a hybrid system where the government supports a baseline of services. Mostly food, water, shelter, electricity, roads, etc. The private sector's responsibility is to provide superior service above and beyond what the government is doing.
Pure communists think that the government baseline should be enough for everyone, even if it means inferior service.
Pure capitalists think that superior service should be enough for everyone, even if it is unaffordable.
The obvious answer is to find the middle ground and reap the benefits of both.
I personally don't think that the F-35 is falling into that. A jobs program fighter jet doesn't really make sense since it is not a long term investment with a direct return. It's more of an insurance policy against an imaginary foe. Yes, you have jets but unless you use them to conquer land or defend yourself there is no direct return on investment.
>real solution involves a hybrid system where the government supports a baseline of services
As Inread that I think: basic services are too important to miss the feedback loop and become the equivalent of universal low grade government cheese. At the same time, maybe the poor quality of government provided baseline goods and services would incentivize people to attain better, which is an improvement over direct subsidies which act like high marginal taxes when they are reduced in response to income growth. Unfortunately a significant number of basic needs are commodities, such as cheese, and are subject to mismeasure and goal seeking instead of value seeking, similar to the Soviet whaling industry of the 1960s/70s.
The F-35: similar to SLS and Soviet whalers, political considerations are weighted higher than value ones. The F-35 also has the challenge of being developed at a transitional period, in the late morning of a period that will be marked by low observability, human optionality, and high speed and precision impact. The F-35s story isn’t over yet and like other troubled weapons systems there is a lower than likely chance it may blossom like the M-16. It has already passed the Sgt York stage and is in the a state where like the BFV it will find its place within doctrine and eventually battle, or not. I think it is too soon to tell.
Walls and bullets too, don't forget that. Communists were not shy to kill their own people looking to escape the "wonders" of their system.
Barbed wire on the borders, bullets shot without warning at swimmers trying to cross freezing rivers, then families held hostage and tortured to punish and warn escapees - oh Communism was such an awesome experience, I can only wish it from the bottom of my heart to all its apologists.
Some years back a socialist told me that the Berlin Wall was to keep westerners out of East Berlin. I told him that I'd visited the Wall in 1969, passed through it and had a tour of East Berlin, seen the Wall museum, been on the platforms overlooking the wall, had East German guards wave at me, etc.
In a sense it is both good and bad that the Wall has been erased, people forget what it was like. Nobody should forget.
Nice propaganda there, most post soviet countries still havent recovered. Hell i aint a communist but most of these countries did better under communism if only because the US wasnt there to leech off them
> had higher standards of living while they didn’t
That’s debatable. Might be true in 1910-1920, but by the end of the last century all communist states with planned economy have failed their economies, catastrophically so, with direct consequences on standards of living. China’s the only exception, were lucky to have smart enough people in power to pivot towards market economy, and execute it relatively well.
I presume the parent poster is referring to things like housing cost assistance (called Section 8 in the US), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), social security, Medicare/Medicaid government assisted health coverage programs, disability financial assistance programs and other socioeconomic-hardship assistance programs.
Not to mention funding schools, universities, or government research grants.
That's among the things that get called communism or socialism here in the US.
The entire point of a government is to provide services; including but not limited to transport infrastructure, contract dispute settlement (civil courts), protection of life and property (police, criminal justice system, sewers, firefighting, public health, etc.) and education. If all of that is socialism then I don't know a country that isn't socialist. Maybe Somalia in the 90s. Of course words can mean whatever we want, but that definition doesn't sound useful.
> The entire point of a government is to provide services
Of course. That doesn't mean the services it provides aren't socialism. For a country on balance to be socialist, more than have of its goods and services would need to be provided by the government.
> that definition doesn't sound useful.
It's exactly what socialism is:
"a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole."
The first definition when googling "definition of socialism". Government is the means by which the community effects socialism.
The interesting thing is that it seems to be an unfixable and systemic problem. You could have someone come in and try to clean it up but then they'd face the backlash of the entire system that has been built on and benefited from the corruption.
Exactly... this is in fact the overall problem with the US government. Start by fixing that, and then the smaller systems like military procurement that depend on corruption higher up will become fixable.
How can we create new incentives to discourage this behavior and to encourage infrastructure projects that provide jobs as well as create superlinear value?
The easiest answer is probably public financing of elections.
Because Members of Congress basically need to continuously raise money, there’s always an incentive to spread the wealth among congressional districts.
For the F35, I can think of one company in a rural area who fabricates some metal component for the project. Because of the way it is contracted, acceptance standards, etc they sell it for something like 50x it’s value of you were to order it, and whomever gets the part spends even more to receive it.
Planes are small and have lots of parts, so they suffer more from these issues. We’re still ok at building warships, because you can’t build a shipyard in some coal town in Kentucky.
Public financing would help as a component with corporate lobbyists but pork barrels wouldn't be affected. I use the term with a slight distinction - pork barrels are for parochial voter influnce while an "industrial complex" involves a company's interest in exchange for political benefits. The two may overlap if what helps the company also gets votes in itself. A stereotypical but perhaps unfair example of both (as I am uncertain of actual lobbying in the period) would be Detroit in its heyday - it would have a sizeable base of factory workers locally and large connected auto companies.
The problem of pork barrels is that it gets them votes directly by making things worse for everybody else in exchange for local benefits. Disproportionate representation is what enables it as a tactic or at least makes it more disastrous. Something which serves the interests of 30% of the population is closer to benefitting the whole than one for 3% of the population.
I would agree that it isn't magic. Keep in mind that one man's pork is another's bacon. Pork is part of the political process.
In the modern environment, material pork barrel spending is at the corporate/national level. Most congressional districts due to gerrymandering or demographics are very secure... the era of political machines handing out turkeys is gone.
If the craven corruption around defense contracting was only 80% as wasteful as it is today, you could give every member of congress a substantial slush fund to waste and still save money. Plus you would have working fighter jets that are able to compete with countries like Russia, that has a GDP equivalent to Texas but seems to be able to procure weapons.
We did: pork spending was mostly outlawed in 2011 (the F-35 dates from way before that). But as it turns out, the cure was almost as bad as the disease. Getting rid of pork has accelerated hyper-partisanship and dysfunctional gridlock, because without it there's no incentive to ever try to reach a deal with the other side instead of digging in on no-compromise radicalism to please your base.
Is there a longer discussion of this that you can link somewhere? I remember the phrase as a derogatory commonplace in adults' political discussion when I was a child, but the concept seems to have drifted out of the discourse since, and having now had my attention drawn to its absence I'd be interested to find out more about why.
There's definitely still pork. I mean, look at how many pet projects were included in Covid relief funding. Pork is the idea of stuffing an unrelated project to benefit your local district or state (and thus, the politician's reelection chances) into a bigger bill that is unrelated to that expense. Like the most famous one was the Alaskan "bridge to nowhere" that would have cost $400 million: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravina_Island_Bridge
That dates to 2005, so you are not really contradicting grandparent's point that this was mostly outlawed in 2011 (and that this has accelerated hyperpartisanship by removing an incentive for compromise).
Grandparent never pointed to what law they were talking about. They just made an offhanded, unverified remark. I also pointed out that a lot superfluous pork was included in Covid funding. "Pork" was never outlawed. It's not even a formally defined thing. If you think politicians can't figure out how to wiggle pet projects into huge multi trillion dollar spending bills then you really ought to tune into C-Span more often.
This is the outdated proposal that didn't pass. But the current proposal is double this. I've tried to tune out politics for a while but you can be sure that pork is in a $1.9 trillion spending bill as sure as the sun rises.
Plus one state's useful new spending is 49 states' pork, meaning that it's always easy to label anything as being evidence of government waste and corruption. But earmarks served as a useful way for states to get federal involvement in local issues that otherwise would never see the light of day, so their loss not only reduced the ability to get major things done, but also to get even tiny things done.
Earmarks are supposedly coming back this year though.
I don't think it is possible to discourage federal contracts being awarded to the benefit of a particular state. If a state is home to a company with the expertise to complete a project the contract can't just be awarded to a another state that doesn't.
The best we could do is change the way contract funding is performed. Cost-plus pricing without an upper bound is a huge issue. This type of contract encourages bidders to bid low on cost and make up for it with project extensions.
Of course cost-plus is preferred by bidders as they can guarantee a minimum of profit since cost is already covered. However, fixed price contracts are better from the perspective of the government spending. The spend is known up front. It is up to the bidders to determine if they can make a profit or not.
Ideally the government shouldn't care if the bidder is making a profit. It is their duty to spend public funds frugally. Cost-plus makes it impossible to reign in contract spending without terminating the contract.
Yes, a while back I was interested "where does billions we spend on national defense actually go" and I came to the conclusion that the DoD is really just a giant jobs program.
Ultimately I think the reason we don't have things like flying cars is that the private sector gets stuck in local maxima (such as getting people to click ads) and in the public sector it's very hard to have focused time-blocked short term goals.
I keep seeing people say this. Maybe flying cars just don’t make sense? Wheels work really well when your engine dies. Have you seen people drive in 2d space? You want to add a z axis? What’s the efficiency of a small plane? Surely not better than a Prius.
The average person does virtually no regular maintenance / checking of their car, even basics like tyre pressures and oil levels not being checked regularly, happy to leave as much as they possibly can for an annual check at the garage. There’s a shocking amount of people also happy to drive around ignoring warning lights flashing.
Imagine that scenario with tons of metal that could fall out of the sky when something fails.
Very soon, cars won't really let you do anything without ID/phone number/paired phone/key serial number, gps lock, a full working complement of vehicle sensors, and a network connection to report all of the above in realtime to people you don't know (who are of course obligated to provide all of that data to military intelligence at any time, without a warrant or probable cause).
There isn't really an issue with that sort of lack-of-maintenance stuff where we're headed. It won't be long until cars either totally refuse to operate in extreme circumstances (due to manufacturer liability), or fall back to some impossible-to-ignore state like Tesla's "limp mode". Tire pressure/oil life being good examples of easily-detectable liability issues that no sane manufacturer would let slide.
The current state of affairs is simply because remote monitoring was expensive/infeasible. Most vehicles today ship with an always-on cellular modem in them.
Even my little 4K pocket gimbal camera won't operate without phoning home to "activate", same for all the drones sold by the same company. Flying cars would be sending telemetry from all local sensor measurements to HQ at pretty much all times.
In other words, can't afford to own/operate a car.
Note, that's not a put down on said people. I think it's a shame such situations exist. But, if you can't afford to pay for insurance/gas/maintenance, then you can't afford the vehicle.
But, regarding flying cars: I absolutely do not want more people operating airborne spinny death machines capable of destroying considering we've already established many people don't/can't perform basic maintenance on a much simpler and safer mode of transportation. It wouldn't go well.
> In other words, can't afford to own/operate a car.
Or they know it isn’t worth fixing.
I had an engine light on for about 20000km, and sold the vehicle like that, because it wasn’t worth fixing. One competent mechanic talked me into trying to fix it before I tried to sell it, and that wasted $1000.
Another friend had an engine light on, and the workshop said that happened with that model sometimes and it wasn’t worth fixing.
Both of us could afford to fix the vehicles. That said, if an oil light comes on I stop the vehicle immediately.
That’s a dangerous mindset unless you’re actively pulling the check engine codes daily or more frequently. That one light represents many possible codes, and in all cars I’ve seen it’s on or off instead of, say, on and brighter.
The check engine light is a UI problem. LCDs are cheap now, it should be able to display the real problem. At least with a numeric code on the panel that you can look up in the owner's manual.
Where exactly do you live? In the US it's not common to have more than an aesthetic checkover of a car during inspection. There's not necessarily any reason to clear those lights, and in general you can avoid fixing relatively expensive things that do not prevent the car from running outright.
Contrast to my understanding of Germany's system, where your car must be aesthetically pleasing to the inspector.
Im confused. Most US states if not all require emissions testing at each inspection. Break lights or engine lights are automatic fails. Suffucient tire tred, working wipers etc.
I've never heard of an engine light being a fail, even with emissions test. You could still pass despite whatever the dash says.
But, what some people have been talking about makes sense now. If you get a bad manufacturer who lights up the dash for everything then they're forcing you to spend money.
The number of people who need cars to survive is far greater than the number of people who can afford to fix every nuisance fault. So long as it can keep rolling and comply with whatever minimum safety requirements actually get enforced, people will run it.
But also, the fact that it was impractical is itself a metaphor -- it turns out many of the things they thought would be cool and futuristic were actually impractical when you get to the details.
Sure, but that's besides the point. It's sort of like that meme about "The World If <my pet policy was implemented>" (example: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/394/070/7f2...). It features over the top flying cars and infrastructure because it's trying to make a point.
When one says "we could have had flying cars, but instead we got X", that's the underlying concept. Whether or not the flying car is "practical" is kind of besides the point. Either that, or we need to find some other generally agreed upon term to represent an actually practical but futuristic invention that represents human progress (or the lack thereof).
The maths are about right for MPG. Time is what you (might) save. I'll get around that at cruise - 135kts or 155mph @ ~ 10gal/hour. Better fuel usage if you slow down a bit. Tempted to say if you slowed down to max Prius speeds on the autoban, the C182 might be more fuel efficient. I'm sure it gets 50mpg at 75mph, but doubt it gets that at 109mph.
Here in Norway we have a lot of fjords with small communities all over. The roads are narrow, twisty and often at high risk of falling rocks[1].
Due to the many roads and relatively few people using a lot of these high-risk roads, maybe flying cars would be a more cost-effective option here... would possibly also reduce the need for expensive ferries[2].
Top Gear did a race from Italy to the UK. Clarkson driving a Bugatti Veyron, Hammond and May flying in a Cessna 182. They couldn't fly over the mountains, and May wasn't qualified to fly at night. It didn't save a lot of time.
Not sure which bits you could cut with a flying car - the safety checks, air traffic control involvement, runways, refuelling stop, qualifications/licenses, but it would have to be a lot to make a large difference.
The reason you don't get flying cars, is the very same, you cant make a lot of other technology. People will want to invent the flying car parking house. And they kind of did - on the 11 of September 2001. You can not hand technology over a certain level to a infantile (nicer sound then retarded) species. Its that simple.
Its already madness to allow wealthy citizens into space. Tesla and Amazon are one freight flight to space, filled with tungsten rods, away from becoming there own nation - with non-nuclear deterrence. That somebody - whoever it is, out there is getting humankinds tech progress to a grinding halt, is a blessing in disguise. We actually do not even get a honest discussion about the risks on this path.
Problem is though, we always scienced our way out of our problems with our volatile nature. Tap some energy here, create some fertilizer there, oversupply solves the problems we do not want to solve. Exponential supply for exponential unchecked demand.
Enter social tech- in theory we could limit ourselves, could curb our demands, could become starving monks in the desert, hypnotized by coloured lights playing across enchanted stones. This seems to be the road we need to take, for the other road to be traverse-able.
I do not get it- why is exponential powerful tech, such a serious matter if somebody wants a nuke (Iran, North-Korea) or even just proliferate per-existing ones, considered a serious issue. But once a entity with clear interests in venturing outside the sphere of law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil#Breakup) and the monetary/organizational power to acquire such tech, ventures towards something similar classifiable, such a threat is a joking matter?
Also if you stream a movie tonight, like millions others, who just have a roof, food and a flickering screen that sand in the dessert might be very fine integrated - and already have gotten everywhere. So nobody is asking you or me, might as well discuss the scenarios.
OK, SpaceX applies to launch an orbital bombardment cannon and launch approval is denied. That was a good day, next.
OK, SpaceX ignores the denial and launches anyway. Elon Musk threatens to destroy Washington DC to gain independence for ... some territory somewhere. Unclear where, or why he'd want that since he already has enormous wealth and influence and doesn't need to run his own military to keep it. The United States arrests Elon Musk and seizes all of SpaceX with overwhelming military might. The end.
Is that really as threatening as North Korea developing nuclear weapons?
It's White Collar Welfare. As long as your semi-intelligent, college educated, and socially connected, you can easily get a DoD-related job.
Also, we don't have flying cars because that would be ridiculously impractical. They would be essentially helicopters, which would drink gas and be exponentially more deadly to operate.
There are lots of scientist and inventors around inventing cool new stuff. And there's plenty of research dollars available to anyone with a Ph.D and some grant writing abilities. It's absolutely possible to make a good career out of being an inventor and getting a government to flip the bill on it.
The issue is that we've reach the point in society where technological progress in incremental. Instead of three guys inventing a revolutionary device like the transistor, we have thousands of people working on making marginal improvements to battery chemistry.
Every industry is like that now. Something like four guys entirely designed the original small block Chevy motor, but today, GM has like 400 people designing just fuel system components for the ancestor of that engine. Innovation, it seems, is O(n^2).
This is studied by economists!
"Growth is slowing down at the same time as we’re spending ever more money on research and development. So what that tells us is it’s just taking more and more dollars of R&D to increase growth, or to increase output, to keep growth at a reasonable rate. And the only way to tie these together is it’s just getting harder and harder to find new ideas."
> And there's plenty of research dollars available to anyone with a Ph.D and some grant writing abilities
Do tell.
NIH paylines (i.e., the percentage of grants funded) are in the teens, with some institutes at/near single digits. NSF is a bit better, but the awards are much smaller. I don't think DARPA, CDMRP, (etc) have explicit Paylines, but the programs are very competitive as well.
This isn't entirely true. The US subsidizes military costs for all of our allies. It costs a lot, and a huge amount of funds go to that.
There are parts that are like jobs programs, and the contractors intentionally drive up costs as part of their business model, but there are also real expenses to maintaining stability across the parts of the world where our military operates.
>>> The US subsidizes military costs for all of our allies.
Speaking as one of those allies... not really. Often times US allies spend money they really don't want to in order to keep the US happy. Canada and the UK probably wouldn't have invaded Afghanistan if not for their obligations as US allies. That certainly wasn't cheap. Canada is soon to replace its fighter fleet. Will it buy to cheaper Saab Grippen? Or will it feel obligated to buy the 35, a US program that Canada has paid into (aka subsidized) for many years without actually receiving any aircraft?
This argument would be more persuasive if more countries actually met their recommended NATO spend. In reality it doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
Take for instance Germany. The federal republic increased their spend to $63.8b last year but that's still a shortfall of ~$27b relative to what a 2% spend would be.
Aggressive estimates (above official estimates) of the UK's (a similar sized ally) spending on Afghanistan in 2011m put the total figure at $26b for 10 years.
The cumulative shortfall in NATO contributions for Germany over that period is more than 10 times greater than the entire invasion and continued operations in Afghanistan during that period.
And that argument would be more persuasive if so much NATO spend wasn't funnelled back to the US in both direct and indirect ways.
The UK has Trident and was supposed to be buying F-35s. A number of UK military and civilian aerospace projects were either cancelled (various examples) or crippled commercially (Concorde) because of US interference.
The Afghanistan and Iraq misadventures are still causing significant political costs across Europe. Meanwhile the US has failed to protect the EU against some obvious and immediate threats, including political interference. (Although to be fair it hasn't even protected itself - which is a different problem.)
In any case - the US really isn't a credible victim of exploitation in any of this.
The "recommended NATO spend" is just another way the US is costing its allies money. Sure, in 2019 Germany only spent $50bn (1.3% of GDP). But if the hypothetical enemy is Russia with a military budget of $65bn, then what's the point of spending $80bn? Especially if you are in a treaty that ensures you don't have to defend yourself alone.
The U.S. has no interest in NATO beyond keeping Europe free. Don't think for a second Russia wouldn't pull a Crimea in the Baltics or Poland if NATO were dissolved. And then what, the European Parliament will suddenly get its act together and figure out how to counteract a superpower? Any attempt to do so will last precisely as long as it takes Russia to shut down energy supplies to Germany.
That’s a bit of a stretch... shutting down energy supplies to Central/Western Europe would cost Russia more than it would Germany considering that energy exports are 70% of their total exports and generate over 50% of budget revenue.
Besides there are no good reasons for Russia to occupy the baltic states (or atleast the cost would considerably outweigh anything they might gain from it). Subsidizing Crimea is already very expensive and controlling the baltics (no even speaking about Poland) would cost considerably more (both due to lost income and because they’d have to dedicate considerable resources policing the local populations which (unlike Crimea) don’t want them to be there)
It may be a stretch that Russia has no good reason to occupy the Baltic states, but maybe not. The reason to occupy Eastern Ukraine was that a lot of Russians live there. Guess where else a lot of Russian live.
I think you are probably right. But this is the kind of thing where being wrong is potentially catastrophic. And the world can change faster than you can adjust your defense posture.
Note that I did not mention germany, rather the US and canada, while the OP said "all of our allies". No two countries are ever the same. And NATO /= USA. There are lots of other organizations which would quality a country as an "ally" of the US other than NATO. Canada and the UK are linked to the US through numerous other organizations (eg NORAD).
Because the Eurofighter can't carry the nuclear bombs that the US has stationed in Germany, and Germany wants to be the one providing the pilots and aircraft that deliver them.
And because the US, needed to certify the free falling nuclear bombs on aircraft, signaled that this certification would take way longer on non US aircraft.
Which is, more or less, the main reason.
EDIT: I think the F/A-18 is a great choice and one hell of a plane. The other options, a potentially obsolete F-15 and a maybe delivered in time F-35 aren't that great.
Read more about petro-dollar scheme. Basically US provides military services to oil producers in exchange for global tax. This is only possible if US is able to retain their military position. So every dollar you think is being subsidized to allied countries is in fact paid back with lots of premium from all countries - both allies and enemies.
Petro-dollar is not about US dependences on oil producers. It is the other way. It is about forcing all countries to using dollars to buy oil. This allows the US to sell dollars and charge for this in various ways. On the other hand it requires the US to keep military control of oil logistics. The advatege for allied oil producers it that they can trade oil more easily. You know - transferring billions of dollars over international sea in the form of oil requires a lot of support from military just to make it happen.
The "petrodollar" is just an urban myth verging on a conspiracy theory when talking about Iraq, the fact that oil is priced in dollars (and it isn't always) doesn't mean countries need to have dollars to buy oil, it's just a convenient and stable unit of account. You can use Euros to buy oil priced in dollars in the same way you can use Bitcoin to buy drugs priced in dollars.
> Basically US provides military services to oil producers in exchange for global tax. This is only possible if US is able to retain their military position.
The justification for foreign aid to Israel is always pretty much “but it’s OK because most of it comes back to us via arms sales”. Essentially billions of dollars of American taxpayer wealth transferred to defense contractors laundered through the IDF.
Israel stops Iran from blowing up or conquering the entire Middle East. Also, military intelligence. Also, the military industry is probably more beneficial to the US by being based there rather than being outsourced to China. I think the tax money given to weapons manufactures is paid back in double by tax. Also, you wouldn't want to fight wars with allies in Chinese planes. Hope this answers your concerns.
I am. They have sworn to destroy Israel and America. They are developing nuclear weapons to do so. They are funding proxy wars throught the Middle East. They are trying to gain control over syria, iraq, yemen etc. The irgc is probably the best funded terrorist organization in the world https://www.state.gov/foreign-terrorist-organizations/ . I'm afraid of Iran.
KSA, Syria, Kuwait,
and Turkiye probably have a lot more
to do with it than Israel.
Depends what you look for. Most visible, front- line opposition, certainly. But who does all the high profile bombing and intelligence raids and computer hacking? I think it's Israel.
-Iranians have always treated me
better than Israelis or myy my fellow
Americans have.
That's fine! I'm not asking you to hate Iranians, and i'm also not asking you to love Israelis.
What i am asking you is to recognize that Iran is a global threat to peace and that Israel can offer the best answer. I think that's true.
> They are funding proxy wars throught the Middle East.
Would it be more honorable if they just invaded countries in the Middle East instead, the way the US does? Of course the US is funding proxy wars as well.
If a beligerant and much more powerful country came across the Atlantic and invaded Mexico and Canada, I know I would want some nukes as a deterrant.
Iran couldn't even defeat Iraq during their brutal eight year conflict. Even if Iran wanted to take over the ME, there is zero chance they would be able to.
The parent comment is fine because it adheres to the site guidelines. The problem with your comments is that you've been breaking those guidelines. I don't think it's so hard to see the difference? Please use HN as intended or, if you don't want to, please don't post. We're trying for one type of site here and not another.
The only difference is Marshmallow ultra-zionist claim that Iran was the belligerent dangerous nation trying to “take over the entire region” in contrast to my far more reasonable argument that the only nation in this skirmish whom has done that is the good ol’ US of A.
Racist anti-Iranian propaganda is almost never moderated whereas anything pointing out the reality of the Iranian situation is flagged or down voted to hell.
You wield the site guidelines in bad faith when it comes to Iran.
You're reading too much into how we moderate this place. It's shallower than that. Certainly it isn't based on views about, of all things, Iran.
It sounds as if you may be assuming that it's enough to have a correct opinion. That's not enough. People who have correct opinions (or feel that they do) often believe that their correct opinion entitles them to post as destructively as they please. After all, they're right and their cause is righteous, so what else matters? The answer is that protecting the commons also matters. An internet forum may be a trivial thing, far less important than the fate of a country—nevertheless, those who participate here are responsible for taking care of it. What good does it do the people of Iran, or anyone, if this place goes down in flames?
> Racist anti-Iranian propaganda is almost never moderated whereas anything pointing out the reality of the Iranian situation is flagged or down voted to hell.
Most people who feel strongly about a topic feel that both the moderators and the community are biased against them on the topic. Those perceptions aren't reliable—they're conditioned by distorting factors, such as the tendency to put much greater weight on the posts one dislikes. We don't moderate comments about Iran in any particular way.
Some posts that ought to be moderated don't get moderated, but that's because we don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here. When people run into an egregious post on a topic that they feel strongly about, they tend to assume that we left it unmoderated on purpose, and jump (inaccurately) to the belief that we must tacitly agree with it. The likelier explanation is that we just didn't see it. Anyone can help with that by flagging the post or by emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN and using the site for political and/or ideological and/nationalistic battle? It's not what this place is for, and it destroys what it is for. You've been doing a lot of it, unfortunately.
Just to be clear, I'm not disagreeing with your interpretation of Iranian history. I'm talking about a repeated pattern of breaking the site guidelines, which is not cool. We ban accounts that do that—we have to, because otherwise everyone starts flaming everyone and soon this place burns to a crisp.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. The intended spirit is thoughtful, curious conversation.
We really don't give a shit about that (though I hear you about raspberry pi, and it's refreshing that you didn't say Rust). We're just trying to have an internet forum that doesn't suck, or at least to stave off collapse for a little longer.
The irony is that this is why foreign aid never works. It's mostly spent on weapons and if there is no foe the government can just use the weapons to suppress its own population and thus ask for even more foreign aid.
Developed nations don't care because their defense contractors get the money.
I think that's the benefit gained from the very rich, whether 18th century lords or modern billionaires - they can get us out of those local maxima. I'm thinking of people like Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir humphrey davies, and Elon musk.
We already have flying cars. They're called helicopters. They're very expensive to operate, mainly because of the very high maintenance costs. Those high costs are due to the fundamental problem that helicopters cannot survive losing a blade.
blades are too expensive. We need a powerful new powerplant that can direct a stream of deficient energy in sufficient quantities to enable flight. Powerplant doesn't yet exist, and my energy converter doesn't, either. In the 50's it wasn't imagined that commanding computers would use so many resources, rather human ingenuity would be directed towards revolutionising existing technology. This is yet to materialise. Sad
"directed energy stream of sufficient quantity" sounds like a jet engine, which exists.
if you're proposing something more powerful than that... that sounds like a fantastic weapon. Someone get the Pentagon on the horn, let's get this shit funded!
With apologies to Larry Niven: "A reaction drive's efficiency as a weapon is in direct proportion to its efficiency as a drive."
steam engines were replaced by oil, and then, the rulebook was rewritten when jets were invented. That was 80 years ago. Jets are old. We need to minimise the moving parts. To do so we need to increase the density of stored energy so more can be used. The answer is atoms. Not old fashioned uranium atoms, but fresh, new fusion reactors. They shall create not heat, but clean electricity. It is long overdue. Even professor calculus knew that the best way to get tintin to the moon was by using nuclear energy. We need to reinvent the plane, not make a better version.
Absolutely a giant jobs program, but, as importantly, it's a conservative-friendly jobs program.
Republicans (nominally) care about spending, but make an exception for defense. Democrats care less about spending, and are afraid of being attacked for being "weak on defense".
Neither party has any incentive to rein this sort of spending in, so they don't.
A flying car is the wrong solution. It’s equivalent to building a faster, much more dangerous horse.
The problem is:
1. People need to commute large distances
2. People need to go fast
It can be better solved by removing the majority of commutes and using very fast, efficient, underground mass transport systems to move people when they (rarely) need it.
I’d rather cities and VR were redesigned so the average person doesn’t usually need to go more than 5 kilometers in any direction on a given day.
More than that, thr SR-71 was purpose-built. That means fewer hands on thr steering wheel, and fewer compromises to achieve multiple missions.
The F-35, by comparison, was a platform vehicle, with the base suited to adapting to a variety of capabilities and missions. That means more voices demanding priority of features, more expensive engineering to get a variety of polygon pegs into the same round hole, and many first-of-its-kind features for a variety of ancillary tasks.
> The F-35, by comparison, was a platform vehicle, with the base suited to adapting to a variety of capabilities and missions. That means more voices demanding priority of features, more expensive engineering to get a variety of polygon pegs into the same round hole, and many first-of-its-kind features for a variety of ancillary tasks.
> No real surprise that it didn't work out.
For a humorous presentation of this, watch the movie Pentagon Wars:
Not really. The SR-71 was the final plane of an extended program called OXCART which created the A-12. The program was nominally to replace the U2, but even oxcart was within a large aircraft design plan. There was even a interceptor (YF-12) that was meant for shooting down Valkyrie-class mach3+ bombers. These aircraft were very similar to the 71, so similar that most people seeing them might not spot any difference. Any assessment of the 71's development costs is therefore very difficult.
"YF-12C: Fictitious designation for an SR-71 provided to NASA for flight testing. The YF-12 designation was used to keep SR-71 information out of the public domain."
The basic concept isn't even a terrible one. It was a reaction to the many functionally-overlapping aircraft that the various service branches were having designed and built. But it seems clear at this point that the F-35 tried to be too general purpose.
AND, the problem with F-35, as stated directly in the article, was not that we CANNOT build cool things, its that we didn't need something too fancy, and it became too fancy through add-ins that were not slated as requirements.
This is a fun talking point, but the reality is more complex. The fact that jobs and multi-state payouts are leveraged to ensure programs have political staying power does not mean that the whole shebang is just a corporate / political handout.
It just seems to be what people say when these programs fail, but I don't hear this said about programs that have succeeded.
> We can build cool shit, but our government and most companies don't optimize for that.
ARPA was always kind of a jobs program, but nonetheless it created the internet at the same time as NASA was putting a man on the moon, the government was successfully building the interstate highways and Bell Labs was Bell Labs instead of whatever it is now.
Today we get the F-35 and the Big Dig and whatever other money furnace du jour that consumes more resources than the space race but has yet to put a single human on Mars or make fusion work or cure cancer or whatever else things it could have done but hasn't.
Fusion in particular has never been funded in line with project requirements, we are significantly below projecting "fusion never" levels and that's exactly what we've gotten.
don't worry it just needs war to get there things going. Warfare drives all innovation. I can't think of anything major last century that wasn't developed for military uses. I think we will get another infusion of war in about 18 years when China will start blowing everyone out of antarctica. Government will carry on pretending to care about environment and proceed to release vast amounts of carbon in the South Pole. It's an entirely predictable conflict, yet only China will be partly prepared.
The pieces on the wargame board are going in place for a round one canceling out of 2B+ population between India, China and expect the thermal nuclear exchange to melt the snow on the high altitude mountainous region keeping them apart.
...a jobs and pork program first and foremost, like...
...everything in USA military.
Have we won a war in your parents' lifetimes? Have any of our many military misadventures accomplished any of the goals cited as justification? Has anyone in the Pentagon ever been fired for spending too much money? Does the Pentagon even have any idea what it spends on what?
And it isn’t just a domestic jobs program. Countries that agreed to buy the F35 were rewarded with subcontract work. There are at least a dozen partner countries.
I have always assumed this and the $500 toilet seats are just making room for black projects. There were no publicly visible budgets for the U2/F117 projects.
I had a friend who, many years ago, got a military contract to manufacture an item. I jokingly asked him if he was competing with $1200 hammers and $500 toilet seats and his response was "if you had any idea how much paperwork and red tape is involved in doing anything with the government you'd say that the $500 toilet seat was under-priced and the contractor probably lost money on every one."
My dad was involved in military aircraft purchasing.
It was very tricky to avoid getting in trouble.
Putting stuff out to bid was the main thing he managed. When possible he just went with previous winners as it cut down the paperwork needed.
Lot of times someone would come in really low on the bid, he knew the people and that it would be crap product. So lots of work to get higher bids approved.
Also apparently if you get a ride in the company limousine, the drivers have tons of juicy gossip.
In some places the cost to do a govt deal can be many multiplates easily (and totally justified) normal cost.
The hammer is not actually $1,200. The paperwork can easily be.
Do you have McBride Principles stuff done and documented? Have you trained your staff on McBride principles if they might purchase supplies, documented it and maintained proper documentation (this is about something in Northern Ireland which has very little to do with buying snacks for a kids program). Repeat x100. Where I am the ethnicity / race / national origin stuff is huge, and the different agencies don't have a common set of labels. So you are stuck asking everyone very personal questions even they don't understand. I mean, for ethnicity you are one thing, for race there is another set of labels, so you have to ask them the same race question 4 times under each random set of labels that are being used, for national origin another set etc.
The actual quality of your hammer? Never tested. The details on the paperwork - lots of folks looking and nitpicking. Some of this just starts as a resolution at some level, that gets added on and added on over and over. So some politician will say McBride principles are great. 2 years later a contract analyst or internal auditor asks, how are we documenting / demonstrating compliance with this requirement. They then push their vendors to train staff involved in purchasing on the principles. Then they want documentation of that training. Each one in isolation is a small waste, but at scale it's a monumental waste.
What's even funnier, stuff stays forever. There are requirements in contracts to hand out old IRS forms (W-5) for Advance EITC - that program is long gone, but you still have to hand out the forms - and tell staff that if they fill them out and submit them nothing will happen. Sure builds staff faith in govt efficiency.
You can't even argue this stuff, I used to try and it's a brick wall.
I can't stand it, but if you can push paper and have some political pull it's a gravy train, because cost / quality is so low on the basis of selection list. This tends to attract the wrong type of company (ie, scammers get a lot further than they should, and companies delivering good product don't).
Basically it's the same PITA when it comes to getting things countersigned, approved etc. for spending $200 in parts as it is for spending $2000 in parts. So might as well order in bulk.
I don't know about hammers but I don't know who on earth is willing to pay this much on a manual crimping tool other than governments looking for certified tools.
Also the Air Force admitting it is a failure proves nothing, since the reason it’s a mess is because the US Govt were trying to make one airframe for many customers, weren’t they? One customer, even one collaborator, being upset doesn’t mean the program has admitted anything.
Maybe someone with more industry knowledge or interesting sources can corroborate --
But I believe that one of the things that happened to the military aviation industrial complex was that in the WW2, early Cold War era, planes and military development programs were very much driven by individuals or very small teams responsible for designing the requirements, overseeing the planning, and the outcome of new aircraft. That was how you got such distinctive (and long lasting designs) that served well the needs of the military, even in use up to today. Let's call it (using today's fashionable term, "passion" about the aircraft, and unwillingness to put out a piece of crap.) You could name who was responsible for an aircraft design.
But in the 1970s, 1980s, something happened where the size of projects or the professionalization of military projects caused them to have distributed (read, lack of) ownership by very critical people, and instead by an anonymous/dispersed "committee style" management. Also, the experts within the military often left for better pastures at the contractors (NG, LM, etc).
Add to that the requirement (by Congress, regulation) that you couldn't just use your expert / private connections to other experts to "get things done" and bring in contractors who had expertise, and instead had to farm out RFPs to every company, get their bland input, and fill out a heat map of who did what best, and cobble together a solution "mutually acceptable to all stakeholders".
So no longer was an aircraft project owned by someone who had very certain opinions about what was needed, and not needed, and who something should be designed for. But instead, projects follow a certain recipe, hoping that form produces function, yet not actually produce useful output because of what happens when you lack ownership. You cannot today name who is responsible for an aircraft design (I would say). It is the metaphorical side project among many, of a large dispersed group of people.
It seems to me something was missed in the migration to this new method of working.
But as I said, I would love to hear corroborating observations about whether this was a major factor.
- congressional oversight increased, with the result that the purchasing authority is no longer generally the end user. We aren’t just buying a ship (plane, gun, etc.), we’re maintaining a logistics and manufacturing industrial base to produce that type of item (and maintain jobs in congressional districts). So maybe we should buy a few more tanks/ships/bombs than we need so that we don’t forget how. (A bit dubious, but it’s one of the reasons we make the funding decisions we do.)
- risk tolerance shrank. Especially in war time there was a high tolerance for risk if the payoff was big enough. These days our risk tolerance is basically zero. I once had to get an admiral to sign off on a risk hazard assessment with an estimated likelihood of ~1e-18 (you’re more likely to win the powerball jackpot twice). There was a cap that might pop off an item at high speed during flight, and if it hit someone they would probably miss a day of work. By the likelihood/consequence framework for risk management, that meant it required an admiral’s signature. You can’t move fast in an environment like that.
- complexity increased. Old schools systems like a WW2 jeep were designed and prototyped in 40 days because they were incredibly simple and made liberal use of COTS parts. There’s an argument to be made that maybe we don’t need such complex systems to meet requirements, but I don’t think anyone is arguing that we should be replacing all the F-35 fleet with a WW2-style aircraft. (Although there have been proposals to build super-simple aircraft for CAS missions, etc.)
There's a lot of truth here and it plays out in even more ways than that. I look back through documentation of legacy systems and see so many things designed based on "engineering judgement". Sizing for that bearing? Engineering judgement. Thickness of other minor structure? Engineering judgement.
Now, the load on every little thing requires a 50 page engineering calculation report with figures, charts, and tables, that takes 3 months to prepare and another month to get reviewed by everyone. The littlest things now take forever.
There's a lot of things changed since the era of 'engineering judgement'.
In the 50s and 60s when 'engineering judgement' was common, it was a signal to a skilled machinist that "You have more experience with the material, so use your best guess because I don't know what the right answer is".
Things have changed a lot!
1. Material quality is much higher. Which is to say that batch-to-batch variance is vastly reduced. This means that it's worth investing the effort in detailed understanding of the material because that material is more predictable. Which led to ...
2. We understand a _LOT_ more about material science. Our knowledge of materials is vastly higher, so things that used to be 'best guess' are now 'do this because it will reliably work'. e.g. Spallation and galling used to be poorly understood issues that were worked around based on personal experience and guesswork. Now we understand them very well, and any competent manufacturer will clearly explain exactly how to (eg) install their bearing in a way that prevents such issues.
3. Expertise shifted. The 'machinist' is no longer a 20-year experienced highly trained person, but a CNC operator, who probably won't be within eye-sight of the running machine. So the practice of 'increase the RPM until it chatters slightly then back off' doesn't cut it any more. The answer needs to be known up-front to go into the G-code, not 'feel'. This has led to the obvious cycle where more responsibility moved to the engineering end, which increased the demand for exact knowledge, which reduced the requirements on machinists, which led to lower skill, which further moved responsibility to engineering.
So I totally get pining for the era of 'engineering judgement', but it died for a reason and it's not really likely to come back!
I would've thought your first 2 items there would help increase the use of engineering judgement by reducing pitfalls previous generations encountered. Your third item is definitely a significant factor.
It's not so much that I yearn for the era of engineering judgement so much as I yearn for refocusing on work that's important. Not every little decision needs to written up in professional report, circulated around through multiple drafts, signed off by 4-5 people, briefed out in slide deck form, then never read again.
That would be nice, but you just wait until the root cause analysis of a catastrophic failure gets traced to a backside that was inadequately obscured by "engineering judgement".
A month for review? Where is this glorious Valhalla?! Navy flight certification checklist is a 2-3 column full page of densely packed names for the approval authority on all the different systems. It may take a month to circulate your proposal to those folks just to get a final list of the subset who will need to ultimately sign off. We had cases where item X was used on USAF aircraft Y, but it could not be used on Navy aircraft Z (which was the same airframe) without literally tens of millions of dollars in testing. Not because the loads on the platforms were substantially different, but because the test standards between USAF and USN were different and the approval authorities wouldn’t sign off otherwise. (See also: zero risk tolerance.)
A month for review is an achievable-but-best-case scenario for projects that need to get out the door ASAP, but its not unusual for these reports to be in review for many months. I know of one project report that's been "in review" since 2015.
On risk tolerance, in WW2, the accident rate for a single seat fighter, the P-51, was 274 per 100,000 flight hours[1], for the last 10 years, that rate for f-16's is below 10, and for fatal accidents it's 0.76[2]. Although I'm not sure it's fair to make a 1-1 comparison as the modern accident rating system includes a few scenarios, the orders of magnitude difference is a great illustration of your point!
Exactly. Those accident rates drove the creation of the modern flight clearance system that creates such an onerous risk management process today. It was very successful in reducing casualties, but the consequence is slowing down to an absolute crawl.
Right, the death spiral. But I’m actually talking about the infuriatingly counter-intuitive headlines about buying tanks that the army says we don’t need, or ships that we know will never work as planned. There are only so many places that can build such things, and if we let them go to mothballs then we lose all the manufacturing experience to do it at all—which is a risk for national defense. So the Navy says “I need $40m for planes!” but Congress takes $100M from the plane budget line to keep open the shipyard in Sen. So-and-so’s district. Seems terrible, but that might be the only place on earth that employs the folks who can build such a ship and that keeps it alive. I’m not saying it’s worth it…just that it’s worth considering.
It’s not about make-work. It’s about the intersection of what the military says it needs, what congress folks can get away with, and what contractors lobby for to “maintain the industrial base”.
Building parks & hospitals doesn’t contribute to national defense, and it doesn’t develop or maintain the skills of welders who can join absurdly thick plates in the hull of a ship, or folks who can work with composites and thin aluminum, etc.
I’m not arguing that the system is working or that we have the right balance. But it’s not a simple “don’t build bombs, build hospitals” dichotomy.
The US almost never operates in contested airspace. For that, the F-35 (as the F-22 before it) is overkill.
Do you see a need for manned weapon systems that can survive engagement with other manned weapon systems in the near future? I'm thinking semi-autonomous drones can replace a lot of such systems and, if you can build them quickly and cheaply enough (as in it takes a $1M missile from a $50M plane to down a $1M drone), then you can build lots and lots of them to overwhelm your opponents.
Risk tolerance, even outside of wars, has shrunk quite a bit. People used to do things that are considered practically suicidal now. In 1956, only 2% of Ford customers opted to have seat belts in their cars, and even for the 2% who did have them, those cars were complete death traps compared to modern ones.
I am not sure about "incredibly simple" in general though. Look at how insanely sophisticated the P-51D fighter was, for example. But sure, something in engineering as we see it today, and around it, has been lost.
Risk tolerance is not just engineering, but also how comfortable we are risking human lives.
In a "good war" like WW2 we should recognize that fighting that war is worth the risk and that casualties are going to happen. We don't need our own aircraft to compromise their performance to be 99.9% reliable instead of 99%, because we strongly believe we need to e.g. beat Hitler.
That’s true, but the uniform service folks are much more willing to take risk than they’re allowed to by the oversight process. That’s a big part of why it takes so long to develop and field new stuff. I understand why we do it, but I’m not convinced that we have the balance right.
Why "Oddly?" The F-15 was the best air supremacy fighter of that era; perfect for escorting bomb-laden F-16s that would have had a difficult time protecting themselves.
The F-15As were not better attack planes in 1981; the Israelis used them exclusively in air supremacy roles until 1985 when they bombed the PLO headquarters in Tunis. Israel had just received their F16As, but were well trained at Holloman AFB.
Lockheed is synonymous with Skunk Works ... the F-35 was a Lockheed project. I can guarantee a lot of the engineers who worked on those legendary aircraft also participated in the JSF.
Organizations change. I heard recently at Skunk Works the engineers were told by some bureaucrats that they couldn't change the skunk logo (they had a modified version for some project). It's like how Boeing used to be a great engineering organization and now isn't.
The sad thing is when a downturn happens those bureaucrats saying you can't change the logo will probably keep their jobs while the engineers who could probably be making pretty cool stuff if they had better leadership will be out of work.
A critical part of F-35 problems was developed so far away from Skunkworks it is technically a separate company (still part of the wider Lockheed-Marting Concern) - the Lockheed-Marting Global Training & Logistics.
Having encountered the quality (hahahah ... sob) they produce personally, I'm totally unsurprised US Navy and USMC could find funding a new fleet of space satellites cheaper than re-bribing enough senators to get ALIS (and now ODIN) contract reassigned to someone competent.
First of all how many years have we been hearing about how we'll have fully autonomous vehicles just around the corner? At least a decade.
How many years have we been hearing that human-like AI is just around the corner? At least since the 60's.
I'm skeptical (although optimistic) about massive tech breakthroughs in general. Even more so when it comes to military tech since so many in the mil. industrial complex stand to benefit from the trillions that the DoD sloughs off every few years for the next big thing.
Not an aviator but spent almost a decade in the military. You used to hear all the time about the latest and greatest tech that was going to change the way we fight.
At least in my nearly 10 years nothing really changed in any substantial way. incremental improvements, sure but no massive breakthroughs like are continually trumpeted in popular press.
We won't have general human-comparable AI or autonomous driving (or we will briefly until a few tragic things happen and people come to their senses). Enthusiasts think we will, but people underestimate what real intelligence requires and confuse it with training complex statistical models.
They call it AI, but the "intelligence" there is just a name.
We don't need a human-like AI to beat humans in the air. I can't imagine that the US doesn't already have a fully autonomous aircraft, and a virtual fully autonomous fighter jet waiting for the physical jet to be built, if that hasn't happened already. In any case, we wont be hearing about it for a while. It took seven years from first flight for the F117 to become public.
No matter when it happens, I think that when General AI shows up most of us will be shocked and surprised.
General AI showing up will be kind of like the discovery of quantum mechanics and the nuclear bomb. No matter how much speculative fiction we write about it, we won't be able to predict ahead of time how transformative it will be on society once it actually exists.
I worked in stress analysis in the civilian aircraft world and it was obvious to me that probably 85% of my job could be automated away, and most of what remained could be shifted to the design side if the right software were written and design processes were revised around it.
But the right software would cost a lot of money, and since it would be new, it would need customer buy-in up front (aerospace is in some ways very risk averse when it comes to adopting new workflow tech).
I think there's a revolution waiting to happen in bringing down aerospace design cost and schedule and increasing the ability to iterate on designs. I'm hoping NGAD is the sign of something big that will trickle down soon to the civilian aerospace world.
Until we break new military developments away from the political process of congress people funneling projects to big companies in their districts regardless of competence we will continue to see failure after failure in every area.
We saw many advances during world War I and world War II because instead of rewarding companies with contracts that voted for politicians, all everyone cared about was defeating the enemy.
My suggestion is that the military should put out specs for what it wants and then put out big cash prizes for getting it done similar to what was done with the Covid vaccine. Say a $1 billion prize for a modern tank design. And then a fixed price for each one delivered thereafter.
Avionics software resembled k8s before k8s was designed. Sure, some of the most problematic bits don't exist due to static assignment, but the difference is not that big. Including presence of virtual overlay networks.
Anyway, k8s is mostly for lower-criticality software to be quickly added/removed, iirc, partly because unlike the normal avionics setup it allows dynamic addition/removal.
They've been at this for more than 14 years. I was accidentally part of both the Boeing and Lockheed F-35 teams, and that was 23 years ago.
For a humorous take on the U.S. military platform problem, look for a movie called The Pentagon Wars [1] starring Kelsey Grammar and Cary Elwes. It came out in 1998, and very little has changed since then.
Back the day an engineer cold be there at the start of program, see the maiden flight and even go on to see a second program. Today, the same engineer probalby enters years after the concept phase and retires before the first prototype takes of.
A friend of mine working on a space telescope had to fix a mistake that someone had made on a diagram. When she tried to figure out who made the oopsie, turns out he had worked on the project more than a decade ago and retired while she was in middle school
The movie was based on a book of the same name written by Colonel James Burton, highly recommended. It is a history of how and why the kinds of scope creep occurred in the DoD procurement. Eerily prescient.
... and quietly avoids mentioning that a lot of the problem came from Burton, or that his proposals were found detrimental to the program.
He also was staunch supporter of replicating Volksjäger concept, which was fortunately laughed out of the room (even dumbest Soviet design at the time wasn't that dumb)
Clear requirements, small teams, small budgets, custom-built, no over-thinking, absolutely must work, chop a path through the jungle with a machete.
We do everything opposite these days: no thinking about requirements, huge teams, no budget, off-the-shelf everything, over-think everything, OK with failure (because golden parachutes, team churn, and "blameless" culture), and wait 5 months for the bulldozers to get shipped here.
I think the bigger thing is that we think about requirements, but they change so frequently they require rework. I was working on an FMS for a customer and they changed their high level requirements every 3 months or so, driving huge costs and timeline overruns. It's easy when the Air Force gives you a solid set of requirements to work with, but what happens when the Army 5 months later gives you something contradicting those?
The problem isn't that we don't think about requirements. The problem is that there are no requirements. The Bomb and the SR71 had two very clear things in common - they were built to address existential threats. The bomb was designed for one reason - to fight Nazis we knew they were building the bomb and we needed our own. We knew exactly what to build and we went and figured out how. The SR71 exactly the same issue - we knew exactly what we wanted, we wanted a super fast undetectable spy plane to spy on the Communists.
The problem today is that we've got no damn clue who we're meant to be fighting against and it's been 30 years since the US has engaged in a war where air superiority was even an issue. The level of development in the US right now isn't "We need to build a system that's better than North Korea's" it's more like "Hey guys, I totally think we could build a system that plucks NK's ICBMs out of the air before they even jettison their first shroud".
There's no reason clear and direct motivation for these systems. So the purpose gets lost and we build something with a thousand bells and whistles because we're desperately trying to find some reason for it to exist.
I wonder if this has to do with the overall decline of manufacturing in the US. Supply chains have been moving out of the US so iteration will be slower and more costly. Fewer talents would like to go to manufacturing. Fewer university professors are researching traditional mechanics now, for example, but more on "cutting-edge" stuff like nanometer materials. We also get fewer and fewer highly trained workers on lathing, welding, milling and etc over the years. As a result, it gets more expensive and more risky to build something as complex as F35.
No, its the acquisition process and administrative overhead.
If you give smart people with a good idea a lot of resources to chase it while insulating them from people who want to measure/validate/manage/mandate, you often get good results and sometimes get complete failures.
It is a problem of middle management interfering with the development process, red tape, trying to do everything at once, and requirements that constantly change.
I read a headline and article like that and my immediate reaction is the military leader probably wants to make a name for himself spearheading a new plane – ambition on the part of customers in military acquisition is a real problem. (why are navy ships so big? because navy captains wouldn't feel as important with more, smaller ships)
The problems have little to do with the end-stage production manufacturing, and a lot to do with the engineering R&D.
Part of the problem is that the F-35 was pitched as saving money by doing everything for everyone. It was going to be a lightweight fighter with carrier-landing durability (contradictory) that had options for both single-engine, multi-engine, and VTOL engine (all contradictory), with a big-wing and small-wing version, that could be a quasi-air-superiority, quasi-guided-missile, quasi-bomb-truck, or even wild-weasel/SEAD (all contradictory roles), and replace about 75% of the aircraft in the arsenal.
The SR-71 was designed to do one thing. Go fast and take pictures. It didn't carry bombs. They eventually tried to put a drone on it and it didn't work and was abandoned.
You don't even have to look back as far as the SR-71 though, the F-22 was a reasonably successful program - bumpy, expensive, but it produced what is the world's preeminent air-superiority fighter. It is not a bomb truck, it does not land on carriers. It does one thing well.
Others are not wrong about the fact that the F-35's merit to Congress was as a jobs program, either. This is in fact what a lot of military spending really is. We build tanks only to drive them into the desert and store them, all to keep those production lines running and keep people employed. They could be building trains or something else equally well.
The underlying problem there is that the US political system has become byzantine and cumbersome. When "played" adversarially with all "players" using the maximum extent of their political powers, it takes supermajority control of all three branches of government to govern. This has promoted a byzantine system on top of that to try and come up with mechanisms to fix a broken, unfair, and non-representative process. Massive over-spending on military as opposed to other types of government-sponsored research, production, etc are only one side effect of that.
Interestingly it does a bunch of things well, fast and takes amazing pictures, goes very high, etc.
But most importantly those are synergistic, they form a coherent whole, we even say one thing, because it does so well at these things simultaneously that we now consider it almost inseparable.
The requirement specs for this plane seem crazy. It has to be as agile and fast as an F-22. It needs to do ground support like an A-10. It has to be able to do carrier missions and on top of that it has to take off and land vertically.
And yeah do all this while being cheap and maintainable. It’s basically a unicorn.
JPL just landed Perseverance, and we have had weekly SpaceX launches with successful stage recoveries (thought to be impossible), Falcon Heavy sent a 1st Gen Tesla Roadster which is orbiting Mars as we speak... Thiel's windmill powered Bitcoin operation in Texas, which likely froze last week, is another example of how absurd his statement is. I think Thiel is not liked because he uses hyperbole to make blanket statements that are clearly not true. And his business acumen much like his actual tech skills, are dubious at best despite being immensely wealthy.
The US will always be a leader in innovation in the World, I'd argue this is the larges concentration of talent the World has ever seen, including Florence during the enlightenment.
What we have a problem with is an absurd amount of useless bureaucrats, politicians, lobbyists, Industries that get in the way and all want their slice of the pie for nothing more than being a middleman and ultimately pay no taxes to re-invest in the education of said future talent, all while the entrepreneurs and talented labour take all the risk and get little to no reward for their efforts due to a depreciating fiat currency and ever increasing taxes and more and more diminishing social mobility due the aforementioned concentration of wealth.
CRISPR is not going to solve much if any of your problems, maybe your kid's but not yours. If you think the US cannot build amazing things, and is somehow not a leader in this the problem is with you and, I guess Thiel.
I work in defense and the approach to software development is hell. Imagine package managers and Git being newfangled scary technologies and not unit testing anything. Now slap tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on there and you've got a defense program.
I'm actually quite tired of it and I'm looking elsewhere.
> Fission was discovered in 1938/1939 and we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. No chance we could do something like that in this toxic environment of today.
I think that I am misunderstanding this paragraph. You mean the speed at which a new inventions was put into production, right?
It could be my English failing me but putting it through a translator did not help.
Of course, I don't mean killing hundreds of thousands of people was good, but it did end WWII, and presumably saved lives that would have been lost via a land invasion (US + USSR)
This is far from how I learned it. I am not saying either of us is right, just noticing how interesting it is that historical facts taught differently completely change a person's perception.
We will probably never learn the truth as none of us were there.
I have always been told that Japan was already ready to surrender and that dropping the bombs was simply the first step into the cold war -- a bombing to show strength to the USSR.
"The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan." - Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet
"The use of [the atomic bombs] at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons" - Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, President Truman's Chief of Staff
"The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment ... It was a mistake to ever drop it ... [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it." - Fleet Admiral William Halsey Jr., 1946
I researched this for a while some years ago. I'm no professional historian, but I did find some key points that are accurate to the best of my knowledge:
The key debate within Japanese leadership was what conditions of surrender to accept. They'd known for some time they were going to lose, but hoped to drag out an invasion of Japan enough to get better concessions, keep the Emperor in power etc.
The nuclear bombings ended up not playing a huge role in their decision making. At the time all the major cities in Japan had been firebombed except Kyoto. The fission bomb technology was shocking, but ultimately it meant they did with one bomb what had already been happening via thousands. When the US firebombed Tokyo it killed over 100,000 people in a single night, mostly women, elderly men, and children. McNamara has said he believes he'd have been convicted of war crimes for that had the US not emerged the winner.
Russia steamrolling through Manchuria in just under 30 days, utterly routing the Japanese forces there weighed heavily on the minds of Japan's leadership. Once Russia declared war and was clearly committed to being part of the invasion of Japan, they realized they most likely would not be able to extract concessions by further resistance.
It's a bit more complex than all that, and there is a debate among historians on details of these points, but I believe it's reasonably accurate. The simple narrative that it saved US lives is a way of avoiding looking at just how ugly things got.
I'm also not from the US, and I was similarly surprised when I found their position on this piece of history differs with how it's learned in pretty much the rest of the world.
Speak to someone outside the US about the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: most, if not all, will say it was a terrible thing, almost a war crime. In some (Western!) countries the consensus is that it was a crime, but because it was perpetrated by the victor, it went unpunished. We outside of the US are also aware of the dissenters who spoke against the bombing, how it wasn't necessary, etc.
Speak about the same with someone from the US: more likely than not, they'll admit it was a terrible thing, but emphasize it was necessary to win the war, how the Japanese were fanatical and weren't going to surrender without heavy bloodshed, etc.
If anything, it's an interesting exploration of national perceptions...
Americans are finally accepting the truth around Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Especially now that so many documents around the war on declassified.
But from the American perspective: it's easy to buy into the false narrative that the nuclear bombs "saved lives." We've all been raised with this notion that American is Inherently Good and that anything Bad America did was for the Greater Good.
The Post-911 world has made it more socially acceptable to say that the country isn't inherently good (well, maybe the Post-GFC world). We are allowed to acknowledge the atrocities perpetrated in the past and have more open and honest discussions about it.
It may have been a war crime, not sure about that, it was never officially a war crime, so it is what it is. My understanding is basically the following:
Right before the bombs were dropped, the US was in a situation where they were trying to end WW2 and they did not want the Soviets to invade Japan (which they did anyways).
Before Trinity, the US was bombing the hell of out of Japan already. ~100K Japanese died in Toyko in a single night [2], and other cities were being bombed also. The US was also under the impression (because of a few previous land invasions) that the Japanese were fighting to the death. There were mass suicides of 1000s because the Japanese wanted to die instead of get captured [1]. (The emperor did not agree to the Potsdam Declaration after until the 2nd bomb was dropped) The US was planning to invade but then Trinity worked and we of course didnt.
I'm from the US, and I did not learn anything I am saying in school, I read it on my own accord. It may be wrong, but if it is wrong, tell me why it is wrong so I can learn what is right.
Basically, if you are not from the US, what scenario do the education systems think would have played out if Truman didnt ok the bombs? Also, given the US avoided the land invasion, how did that not save lives (US lives, but lives nonetheless)?
This is a short version of what may be taught outside of the US.
Japan knew it had lost the war. The only question remaining were the conditions of surrender. Japan hoped that they would be able to negotiate a conditional surrender, with the help of the Soviet Union. Then the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, on August 8, 1945, by invading Manchuria, forcing Japan in accepting an unconditional surrender.
To quote wikipedia: "The Soviet entry into the war was a significant factor in the Japanese government's decision to surrender unconditionally, as it made apparent that the Soviet Union was not willing to act as a third party in negotiating an end to hostilities on conditional terms" [1]
Another quote: "The Japanese army went so far as to believe that they would not have to engage a Soviet attack until spring 1946. But the Soviets surprised them with their invasion of Manchuria, an assault so strong [...] that Emperor Hirohito began to plead with his War Council to reconsider surrender." [2]
Personally I don't think we will ever know why Japan War Council members made this decision. Even if the members were still alive, we (humans) have a tendency to rationalize decisions after the fact. Between nuclear bombs, that new war in Manchuria, loss of lives, and ultimately loss of hope, reasons to surrenders were aplenty.
US will push the US narrative, and dismiss the Soviet Union. Russia will do the opposite. I'm neither American nor Russian so I don't really care one way or the other.
To be clear: I'm not seeking to challenge your view, and the kind of "learning" I'm talking about is not only the formal education system, but also the consensus among people who discuss these things, news articles, etc.
What I find interesting is how the average US person and the average Westerner (I.e. people in the US sphere of influence during the Cold War) differ on this. To the former, it was a necessary act -- terrible but just -- to end the war. To the latter, it's an abhorrent and immoral act committed by the US.
More importantly, the US seems unaware of how the rest of the world remembers the atomic bombings. It seems many in the US readily accept the Vietnam war was immoral (the domino theory becoming less and less accepted as justification), but not as many think of Hiroshima and Nagasaki likewise.
To repeat it once more: I'm not that interested in discussing whether it was moral or justified (I've had my share of this discussion over the years) but more on why the perception of the US and the rest of the world differs so much.
> The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment ... It was a mistake to ever drop it ... [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it.
That is a shockingly flippant quote that shows a lack of critical analysis. Disappointing.
There was a political message in bombing Japan that communicated to Russia (and supported China). There was utility for the US. The Japanese were both divided and weighing on who to surrender to. The Japanese Imperial Army were notoriously staunch in their bushido teachings and with a lack of cohesion at the highest ranks, some would undoubtedly continue to follow orders. eg There were tens of thousands ready to repel an American land invasion in Kyushu* It had the desired effect in practical Japanese military planning.
> There was a political message in bombing Japan that communicated to Russia (and supported China). There was utility for the US.
Agreed, outside the US this is a common understanding. If you've visited the Hiroshima museum in Japan, you'll note that's also the stated position of the museum: the purpose of the bombings was not so much to defeat Japan, but to show Russia what the US was technically capable of and willing to pull off (I can't remember the exact words, but this is the gist of the museum's position). I'm not saying the museum is impartial on this topic, of course -- that's just an example, and there are many outside Japan too.
However, I've noticed that in online discussions with people from the US, they often don't acknowledge this. Perhaps because as a strategy it was long-term and cold-blooded. So they focus on how Japan was a genocidal empire, how the average citizen blindly followed the Emperor and would fight to the death, how the atomic bombs helped prevent more bloodshed, etc.
The common view in the US is distorted because as the cold war developed people were shown a lot of propaganda lionizing the US's victory and distracting from things like the firebombing. When you talk to more serious people in the US there's awareness of the point you're making, you just won't find it in Hollywood's movie version of things anytime soon.
A similar issue is how Band of Brothers, an otherwise excellent show, re-enforced the idea that D Day happened to stop the holocaust. Those who've read a bit more history however know it was to stop the soviets from marching all the way to Portugal, and that the US and allies declined to take even simple measures like bombing the railway lines to the death camps to fight the holocaust. In particular the treatment of holocaust survivors like a game of hot potato afterwards makes clear what the priorities actually were.
Yes, I have to disagree with that quote. Erico Fermi and Leo Szilard explicitly tried many times to prevent the bomb from being used. They were key scientists who were responsible for the bomb (Fermi discovered beta decay i think), and they knew what it mean once it was dropped.
You need a purpose behind progress. Look at any of the major developments of the 20th century and there is something huge providing the motivation.
Science continues on and incredible discoveries are made all the time. But when it comes to building incredible things... there just isn’t any push for it right now.
For more detail on how effective Skunkworks was, read Kelly Johnson's book. It was recommended to me by a buddy at JPL and it's a wonderful view into how they did things on time and below budget on projects like the SR71.
I love the problem solving stories. My favorite is the one about transporting the prototype from Washington to Nevada on a very wide trailer- which involved sawing signposts apart and bribing a bus driver...
>The saddest thing about all of this IMO is they have been working on this for 14 years, and how much money was spent/wasted?
You think that's bad? In Canada my government funded the F-35 program but we're not buying any F-35 jets. Spending a bit less than $1 billion for nothing.
It is digital technology specifically where we are seeing accelerating progress, largely because the progress compounds, using one generation's machines to design and produce the next generation's.
Also, most digital technology is developed outside of the government procurement / military industrial complex, so all the problems inherent to those systems do not apply.
If the Singularity is reachable, it doesn't depend on the ability to create aircraft or weapons of any sort, whereas it would be impossible to reach the Singularity without digital technology.
Why? Even if we upload a mind, even via whole brain emulation, that then becomes modifiable, optimizable. If uploaded minds start enhancing the process it can become a lot faster.
Sure, probably for them that will just look like how it looks now to us.
I think your points are certainly common ones, but unfortunately they rely on three major misunderstandings.
The first is that all the "cool shit" we built in the first half of the century was the low-hanging fruit of new scientific understandings and materials.
It's not that we were smarter, it's nothing to do with toxicity, it's just that we exhausted most of what you can easily do with nuclear, steel, engines, etc.
The second misunderstanding is that we're not still building amazing things. Being able to access Wikipedia or Google through speech recognition, or talk to anyone in the world from a cheap videophone in your pocket, is astonishing.
And the third is that flying cars somehow respresent the future. But flying car enthusiasts only focus on the "cool" aspect of it, rather than nuts-and-bolts issues like how they could be fuel efficient, how an average driver will avoid fatal crashes, if we really want urban skies filled with visual, noise and emissions pollution, etc. Flying cars exist. But they don't make any economic or practical sense to use.
If you think we're still not accomplishing astonishing things today, you're not paying attention. Did you notice, for example, how multiple companies put together COVID vaccines in record time? How is that not amazing?
Flying cars marry terrible airplanes with terrible cars. I’m not sure what would cause that general rule to be broken, but the demands of crash safety for cars add a lot of weight and weight is the killer negative metric for aircraft.
If you're going to license it as a low-speed vehicle (limited to 25 mph federally by Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard No. 500), you will be barred from many surface streets with speed limits of greater than 30 mph, depending on state law.
In trying to map out whether I could get from my house to my local airport exclusively on roads with 30 mph or lower speed limits, I had a hard time proving it. All of the obvious routes that I actually use had at least one segment with a speed limit of 35 mph or higher, which is barred by my state law (Massachusetts).
How many urgent messages do you need to dictate while you're running without your phone?
I'm actually surprised that the watch would work for that without the phone.
It wouldn't have network, so it works offline by itself and saves the urgent message until it regains a network connection?
I'm very thankful that I'm not physically impaired so I'm not forced to rely on the garbage that is the current state of voice commands.
I find it so infuriating to use that I won't do it, but you go for it. Perhaps your training data will improve it enough to eventually arrive at a usable state.
We did send multiple car sized rovors to mars on a pretty decent budget. And have reusable rockets. So, not sure if we "can't build cool things" anymore. More so that were not at risk of global war is a driving factor for not having to innovate military much.
Broad statements like Thiel's shouldn't be taken too literally. I don't think the main point is the broad statement about the trends themselves.
The main point is the classification: Flying Cars vs 140 Characters or Bits vs Atoms. FB is worth almost $1trn. No real technical achievements or advancement. If fb didn't exist, something else would be the friendster. Tesla, Apple, MSFT, Google, etc. are closer to the flying cars end of that spectral dichotomy. We could debate where.
Thiel attracts antagonists in the same way like leftists do. Paypal, Palantir, his capital allocation theories & such are not very performant on his own flying cars VS 140 characters test. It's a hazard of being an idealist. The traditional question a leftist authors get (chomsky, etc) is about selling his books on amazon.
But yes. There certainly is a lot of failure in western economies, especially in the "public-private" realm. These aren't constructive failures, and this sort of stuff is deeply limiting. You know, cutting edge aerospace engineering is risky. Let's take easier examples. Why can't we procure buildings or do basic infrastructure without scandals and runaway costs?
Ancient civilizations managed to build incredible aqueduct systems, public buildings, etc. We've regressed.
I'm not dismissing the value, I'm dismissing the notion that fb itself is necessary in order to have that value.
Huge communication networks is what the internet does. Social networks always proliferate online. They're not technically that hard to build. Etc. We're not going to want for any of the "goods" that fb provides. That overall space is abundant.
> Ancient civilizations managed to build incredible aqueduct systems, public buildings, etc. We've regressed.
This feels like an extreme take.
(Most) Every city in America has a functional clean water delivery network. Every city has electricity. Most cities have sewage. Most cities have very nice paved roads.
This is billions of miles of pipes, wires, roads, bridges, dams... Billions. And you're comparing what the US, and actually most economies, have accomplished in this domain to a handful of ancient roman aqueducts made of stone, transporting barely potable water, and saying that modern society has regressed? That's wild.
The public library in my city of ~800,000 people is twice the size of the Parthenon. Hell, there's a LITERAL 1:1 Parthenon replica in Nashville TN, which they basically built for the hell of it as a showcase for a fair. Across the street from me, they just finished up construction on a (I dare say, beautiful and modern) 32 story apartment building; a building like that would be the singular crown jewel of an ancient civilization, more advanced and useful than anything Rome ever built, and its not even remotely the only one in my 3rd tier US city, let alone worldwide.
Sure, the Pyramids of Giza are impressive. 455 feet tall, probably took a lifetime to build. You know who has a bigger pyramid? Fucking North Korea; the Ryugyong Hotel, 1082 feet tall, constructed in 1992. The Luxor Pyramid in Las Vegas is 350 feet tall, and its part of a fucking casino. The Memphis Pyramid in Tennessee, 321 feet tall, and its a BASS PRO SHOP. The pride-and-joy of Ancient Egypt, the effort of an entire civilization for decades, is nearly replicated in the US, and we use it to sell bait and tackle for fishing.
Is that regression? No. Its progression. We've gotten so good at putting buildings up and laying infrastructure that people are no longer impressed by any of it. Its easy to look at a Roman aqueduct as a massive feat of engineering; no one sees the miles upon miles of pipes below an average city that enable you to turn on a faucet and always have water (anomalous events aside like bad storms or the Flint crisis).
And now, squarely in the 21st century: No one sees the thousands of servers it takes to power google.com. No one sees the billions of miles of tiered fiber criss-crossing the country. No one sees the ten million dollar cooling systems, and the billions of person-hours that went into making it possible for you to search for "boobs" and receive back 1.4 billion fully indexed and browseable results. People ignore the 3.8 million pixels used to display those results on your screen. They disregard the 13.2 billion transistors in their graphics card, capable of 12 trillion floating point operations per second, and that any human in the country can order a laptop that has all of this and have it delivered to their doorstep in 48 hours. Even more impressively; most people can afford it.
The problem isn't that we've regressed. The problem is that we've lost appreciation for where we have progressed. Sure, a lot of it is by private corporations; but a lot of it isn't. And if that's what it takes to actually drive humanity forward, maybe that's the path we need to take.
Nitpick because I used to live there: the Memphis Pyramid, aside from being a miserable goddamned eyesore, is actually an arena. I think if anything that would make it more legible to a lot of ancient cultures, which also took sport seriously and invested heavily in their own venues for it. Bass Pro Shops just pays upkeep to put their logo on it, just like with every other stadium in the country - Camden Yards here in Baltimore has gone through probably five or six such sponsors in the two decades I've lived here.
(It's not even a miserable goddamned eyesore on account of being monumental! If they'd faced it in basalt or nitrided steel, it could be an amazing excrescence of the Blade Runner aesthetic into reality, and I'd love it. But, in a literally blinding display of architectural tastelessness, they had to go and make it reflective...)
I believe the Memphis Pyramid used to be a basketball arena, but that was shut down a few years back, and now it just serves as a Bass Pro Shop storefront.
> In 2015, the Pyramid re-opened as a Bass Pro Shops "megastore", which includes shopping, a hotel, restaurants, a bowling alley, and an archery range, with an outdoor observation deck adjacent to its apex.
I was going to make a Laser Moon joke [1], but then I read further down in the same article and saw that the Pyramid does in fact now also have laser tag, and I just don't know how to top that.
I think you might be taking me to literally. I didn't mean that we've regressed technologically, or on average as a civilization. Of course our technology, ability to build pyramids, is greater.
I'm mean that we're having a very hard time with problems that are ultimately tractable. Pyramids, aqueduct systems and other impressive endeavours were big achievements. They put a lot of resources into these things, pushed boundaries and succeeded. When it comes to public works these days, it seems that fiasco avoidance is the high bar we set.
Can we add a train system to a city from scratch? Impossible. More expensive than WW2. Think smaller. Well... such things aren't impossible. They're just hard. Equivalent projects have succeeded in the past.
The F-35 program is spread across hundreds of vendors with representatives grabbing a piece for their constituents. I wouldn't be suprised if different diameter o-rings are coming from different suppliers.
This is a strategic approach that both jacks up the price and gives you plenty of powerful allies who will fight to keep the program afloat.
They could very put such an aircraft together at half the cost and time if cost and time were targets for the people deciding to fund this.
Well, IMO what you're really advocating for is massive government-initiated research and development that ISN'T outsourced as pork to contractors.
The lobbyists destroyed those types of programs.
We used to have a pipeline for PhD candidates to these government programs, but that doesn't seem to exist anymore.
Speaking of unpopular guys, Musk's Tesla and SpaceX are very much "skunkworks" companies. Maybe the US could, say, incubate more companies like that? The irrational hate of Musk reflects America's deep and strong anti-intellectual anti-nerd anti-engineering popular culture bias. Sure Musk isn't a boy scout, but the list of evil noxious business executive that are objectively worse than Musk in the last 50 years is probably about 10,000 to 20,000 longer than anything Musk has done. Possibly 100,000. Huge numbers of healthcare insurance, petroleum, defense, mining, and manufacturing executives. Microsoft and Intel's run of market manipulation and monopoly. Cable/Telephone companies sitting on their monopolies.
The 50s and 60s still had the overarching group achievement and patriotism from WWII. But our modern era has steadily fallen more and more to greed, apathy, laziness, and especially narcissism.
> Fission was discovered in 1938/1939 and we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945.
> No chance we could do something like that in this toxic environment of today.
Not just a vaccine. A 95% effective vaccine. That's never happened before in such a short time frame. The high efficacy vaccines that most of us have been injected with took decades to develop.
I can't believe that you're talking about the mass-murder of civilians like it's some sort of triumph, especially since you could have made the exact same point citing the trinity test. And it's so weird that you use the term "toxic environment" right after that.
IMO AI progress in the last 10 years has drastically exceeded reasonable expectations.
I dont think the "mass-murder of civilians like it's some sort of triumph", although I can see the way I wrote it sounds like that is what I mean (and I cannot edit it because of HN). Quit assuming bad faith in my comment. Why on earth would I think that ?
I meant that we discovered fission and then we built a bomb in under 6 years. Even if you disagree with the outcome of what happen in Japan, the Manhattan Project was an amazing scientific accomplishment, and there is no way the US could do something of that scale, scientifically in 2021.
Still, I think it's pretty hard to compare engineering achievements like this. Is it harder to make a fission bomb in 6 years with 1940s technology, or a COVID vaccine in 1 year with 2020s technology?
Also, I seems like we could be having this conversation in 1940 about an american battleship program.
The COVID vaccine was an achievement, without a doubt, but i still think we need time to see how effective it will be as the virus mutates and make sure there are no long term side affects. If the vaccines achieve herd immunity ends the pandemic then history will be very kind to it and the scientists that created it.
One thought is the actual creating of the vaccine must have been considerable less complicated than the atom bombs if it was really created in one day.
It’s only less complicated if you exclude the years of research into the techniques and we’re seeing delays manufacturing because those are not easy to scale. This work started in the 2000s so I think it’d be closer to thinking of how long it took to build a bomb after you had developed the physics, built the mines and processing systems, etc. To me it really highlights how easy it is for us to forget how much science depends on less publicized work - there must have been hundreds of people whose careers went into the manufacturing techniques alone.
NASA just successfully sent a helicopter to Mars. We developed two very effective vaccines using mRNA technology in a few months and had it through FDA trials in under a year. CAR T cell therapies (3 FDA approved and more coming) are changing how we treat cancer. There's amazing technology all around you.
Life sciences is about the only area of science that has promising new technology coming out of it. Almost every other area is incremental.
Nuclear reactor design: mostly already considered by the Navy in the 50s and 60s.
Space Exploration: Space shuttle was reusable too. Rockets that could land were demonstrated in the 90s IIRC (admittedly SpaceX improved on this quite a bit).
Electric/Renewable Powered Aircraft: Soviet Union had a hydrogen powered airliner.
I'm not saying the new stuff isn't impressive. It is and those small improvements add up to a lot, but it's not revolutionary in the way a jet engine or a nuclear reactor was.
We as a species were sending stuff to Mars and to Venus (which imho is a lot more interesting than Mars) back in the '70s and '80s, not that much novelty in recent events (even though I must admit the helicopter gimmick was interesting, until the novelty very quickly worn off, that is).
> had it through FDA trials in under a year.
That was by political decision, at least that is my understanding.
The science that made this possible was in the works for decades, and it took Moderna and BioNTech many many years to get the technology right.
So that's many years of effort with the stated goal of getting a vaccine out the door fast when it's needed. But there was relatively little "science" left to be done when COVID struck.
The only interesting aspect here are the logistics to make vaccines in the required quantities, and honestly it's not looking too great, considering where we are with vaccinations. Though maybe it just wouldn't have been possible to make doses any quicker, regardless of effort.
Interesting. You are arguing with something I've never said. I was just responding to the comment above that said "We developed two very effective vaccines using mRNA technology in a few months". That indeed those few months were about two weeks. Of course, given all the preexisting research that went into both creating the mRNA platform and the coronavirus vaccines in general. (The spike protein can be produced by itself due to the replacement of two amino acids, which allows it to keep its shape without being on the surface of the actual virus. This is a 3-4 year old result.)
So, yeah, I'm fully aware of it, I was just responding to the comment above, using the same context. (The very point of the mRNA vaccines is that they are a generic and easy to use platform where we can get a vaccine candidate very quickly.)
You may be overreacting to one news story. The US Air Force designed the F-35 successor and built a prototype much faster and less expensively - in just one year - using advanced digital engineering and manufacturing simulations:
There are of course many different reasons to "we just cant build cool shit anymore", but one is not understanding tradeoffs.
I think it is more likely for everyone involved, team, management, project, product, client, end user etc, to understand & accept that you have to make tradeoffs when you are on a tight time frame and/or budget. You solve one thing, not a hundred different things, even though they can be equally as important in the grand scheme of things.
F-35 tried to replace fighters in three different branches (Air force, Navy and Marine) and be multirole and also do close ground support, all with a long time frame and huge budget.
Some tradeoffs can be solved with a bigger budget, but many tradeoffs can't. If you want your bombs to be stored inside the fuselage to be more stealthy like the F-35, then of course the fuselage will become bigger, thus creating more drag. No amount of money will change that.
F-35 seems from the outside like a project that didn't understand & accept tradeoffs.
Their advantage is that they are very mission driven and don’t really have to answer to anyone. I think its one of the key ingredients why Elon’s companies & adventures are so successful.
A company or organization which is pulled in different directions because of politics or financial influence is always at a disadvantage.
But SpaceX can can develop a tin can fast because it is not expected to have martians shooting at it. Imagine planning to go to Mars but your tin can had to be stealthy, manoeuvrable and armed to the teeth. You'd get Ripley's drop ship!
Experts from EASA didn't say it was impossible, but rather not economicaly feasible. And with SpaceX not publishing any financials we have no way to tell which side is right.
Are you really suggesting that throwing away a booster worth many tens of millions of dollars is more economically feasible than reusing it?
Elon makes it pretty clear in this tweet it's very financially sound to bring back a booster
"Payload reduction due to reusability of booster & fairing is <40% for F9 & recovery & refurb is <10%, so you’re roughly even with 2 flights, definitely ahead with 3"
A payload reduction of 30-40% is huge. And even if refurb and recovery is less than 10%, you still loose the 2nd stage at every lunch (18% of the rocket by weight). You then have to include the extra development costs and additional risk of failure.
I highly doubt they hit break-even with only two launches, the math just doesn't add up.
If reusing rocket was so profitable, there is a high chance someone else would have done it before. Landing a rocket isn't totally new tech. NASA did it on the moon 50y ago.
After the massively incorrect analysis by popular YouTuber Thunderf00t, I made a video analyzing SpaceX's reusability https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36o4UrS9OS4 It's 8 minutes but I recommend watching at 2 times speed.
The latest numbers are that the marginal cost of relaunch is $15 million, with $10 million of that the second stage. Refurbishment cost is 27 days with a $1 million refurbishment cost (not $250,000 as I mistakenly said in the video, see description). The net effect is the cost of marginal cost of reflight is approximately 25% but the payload reduction is 30%, which leads to a break even point of 3 launches. After 10 flights, the cost to orbit per kilogram is halved. SpaceX has demonstrated 8 flights of a single booster.
Note, these are all using SpaceX's own numbers (but so was the payload reduction and original reuse cost figures). It depends on recovering the $6 million fairing (which does not happen every mission). All numbers are sourced from an Aviation Week May 2020 podcast that I linked to. Yes, the cost numbers are from SpaceX but the only public refurbishment cost analogue we have is their 27 day turnaround time.
SpaceX are currently operating at a sixth of the rest of the industry and use their cost advantage to launch 60 Starlink satellites at their $15 million marginal cost.
The traditional military-industrial complex with cost-plus accounting is "subcontractors all the way down", and the incentives weren't aligned to make an industry dominating rocket until arguably the 1990s commercial satellite boom (eg, the original Iridium constellation). Until 2008, there hadn't ever been a privately funded rocket reach orbit ever. Until SpaceX. Prior rockets we designed, owned and approved by the US government under World War 2-era cost-plus accounting arrangements.
While the 2nd stage is 18 % of the rocket by weight, it only has one engine. The booster has nine. Engines are by far the most expensive part of the rocket, or used to be. (ULA says that engines make 65 per cent of the total cost of their first stages.)
> If reusing rocket was so profitable, there is a high chance someone else would have done it before.
AFAIK it is only like 10-12 years that computers and engineering software got good enough to simulate everything that happens in a rocket engine, sloshing of fuel etc. Cruder simulations were available before, but not good enough for that.
SpaceX engineers did most of the design and testing on computers. It took them only a few tries in the real world to nail the first landing.
Earlier pioneers would have to try in practice, which would mean a lot more failures and a lot more money, with a possible deadly incident in between.
There were mutiple reason, citing from top of my head as I don't find he old paper anymore. Reasons were:
- Reliability and insurance costs
- limited number of launches
- refurbishment costs of boosters ompared to new ones
- heavier and more expensive boosters to make them reusable
This paper was way before SpaceX tried that. And whther or not reusable boosters are really a financial success is impossible to tell without published financials from SpaceX. The paper alsosaid, that reusable boosters become interessting with a high number of commercial launches, something they didn't see to happen. And that part alone makes Starlink so interessting, because it is basically SpaceX increasing its own number of launches.
If you're seriously arguing that F9 reuse is not a financial success, then you're not paying attention. Flight insurers "like" the F9 since it has proven itself reliable. Otherwise you're arguing that SpaceX is either a welfare queen, or a ponzi scheme.
I am citing an old paper from EASA. Again, how the true financials are is impossible to tell without SpaceX finances. Which we don't have. Except for really old leaks. And even with these numbers, we would have to account for Starlink launches.
We know the Falcon 9's marginal cost for relaunch (with fairings reused is $15 million). Of this $10 million is for the second stage, $1 million is for booster refurbishment, the rest is for operations (including the landing barges) and fuel (which is $300,000 to $400,000 at the moment). These numbers are from Elon Musk's May 2020 Aviation Week podcast. I haven't yet found a good recent figure for the sticker price of relaunches though.
Spacex couldn't afford to launch Starlink if F9 wasn't dirt cheap. So either it's cheap or some financial strategy is hiding money? EASA has underestimated SpaceX from day one.
EASA is the European Union Aviation Safety Agency. I think you meant to say ESA, the European Space Agency? But ESA's not that relevant here, as the European governments fund and develop launch services through Arianespace, a consortium of space industry companies led by the French aerospace companies Airbus and Safran.
Correction aside, I agree with your point that Arianespace did underestimate SpaceX.
You're correct; the one I was replying to wrote EASA and I mentally farted. I was also unaware that ESA had a smaller role in developing spaceflight in Europe. Thanks for correcting me :)
How much can we attribute to the financialization of capitalism? I think it's the driving force. Some historical societies have recognized paying interest on capital at every level of the value stack creates an anti-competitive costs of production. Maybe they just didn't like creditors.
Islam prohibits dealing with interest, yet that didn't stop the incredible progress and flourishing during the Islamic Golden Age. Interest is immoral and parasitic, there are other ways which aren't to achieve progress.
With heavy use of computers, including one special that was built just for the project effectively - and it was critical for the project getting off the ground at all. And even then a lot of the calculation was done on specialised scientific calculators operated by low-status (human) "computers".
The point is that if every project is just for the votes and friends then essentially you are going to ignore the engineering and other parts. I'd argue further that it's the same for business projects as well, just that you do it for the stocks and friends.
What’s going on with all the Reddit level comments below your post?
I think you bring up great points. This could be a case of low hanging fruit being picked. We are at the point where everything being added is just bells and whistles since the foundation has already been built.
Not sure, I accidentally started a flamewar! I wouldnt consider the atomic bomb low hanging fruit either, it took many different breakthroughs in nuclear physics and structural engineering to procure the isotopes.
Well your single customer is your paycheck and your deal with the devil. If you triple the price of what you really think it will take because the gov will be inflating dollar supply by double digits every year and you're working a 10 year project, then the gov may go for a different/multiple contractors. So you have to just milk the project for as long as you can beyond 10 years and hope you can dollar/cost over time for the best profit. Lockheed should offer a store of value price and a dollar price. Otherwise, this is the new standard for long-term gov contracts. Lockheed can't lay their legendary game down when dealing with this kind of client. Is what it is.
I'm sure that the 50th time in the last 20 years I've heard we will have hyper inflation will be the time it happens. Any day now the house of cards build will fall and gold will be the only currency worth anything.
What makes you think that there will be a food shortage? The USA produces enough food to feed itself. It would take a war to destroy the food supply.
Hyperinflation isn't something a central bank is causing. It's a response to an underlying event. It happens precisely when the government has no choice but to print money.
Right now the US government has zero obligations that force it to produce more dollars. The stimulus packages are entirely voluntary and designed to help the economy and therefore reduce the need for future stimulus.
Hah, and throw in this dimension: Don't need F35's patrolling the Persian Gulf, because the need for oil is disappearing. Can't fuel those planes with petrodollars, just burning paper. This is not good.
Since your customer also will bail you out when you fail what's the point in even trying? It's a lot more profitable to bill like your planes work, but to provide planes made out of cardboard.
Until you start executing companies (or CEOs) for incompetence you will keep getting the same results.
Yeah, but that's a pots and kettles issue. We are commenting from our mountain about a business that has dropped into the gutter. None of the parties will change.
I love the SR-71 as much as anyone else, but I don't think that's entirely fair. 12/32 were lost in an accident, so it looks like we lost a lot of reliability in exchange for a much faster development.
It also pushed the boundaries of what aircraft were capable of. Required all sorts of new materials technology, probably required new controls as well. I think it is fairer to compare the development of the SR-71 to something like the early development of rockets/missiles, than to the F35, which is much more incremental.
> It was also pushes the boundaries of what aircraft were capable of
Are capable of.
The SR-71 remains a marvel and it's unlikely that we could build something better today with the same design constraints. Which is part of why the successors to the SR-71 removed the on-board pilot (UAV) or the ability to lift-off without aid (satellites).
If it stops us producing Civilization Ending technologies like the A-bomb then I'm all for the toxicity...
Not all progress is linear, efficiency is no as vitrue unto itself!
Well, someone would have invented it sooner or later, because after the discovery of nuclear physics it doesn't take that much brainpower to figure out the basic concept of "if we smash a bunch of neutrons in these unstable isotopes, then we're going to get a big kaboom!" The actual technological legwork is a bit more effort (and the Germans famously failed at it, although they probably would have gotten there eventually), but not insurmountably hard either.
This is the curse with a lot of these technologies.
IMHO innovation isn't linear: when you discover something new (say the combustion engine for example) you make great progresses at first but then you spend decades or even centuries refining these progresses.
Add to this the office politics, corruption and big players crushing any hint of competition and you have general stagnation.
I have read about the eventual failure of the F35 for years now. The naysayers had solid arguments but were ostracized by people with conflict of interest.
I sadly agree. Unis spend so much time teaching CAD software, processes, etc, you wonder how much understanding engineering grads actually have. I just think we've stagnated as a technological society. We rely so much on computers to do everything, that we can't innovate in the same way anymore. Unless our new x has an onboard super-computer, we just can't get it to do anything.
> Unis spend so much time teaching CAD software, processes, etc, you wonder how much understanding engineering grads actually have
That's interesting. The popular sentiment in programming world seem to be Unis don't tech practical stuff enough, or interviews for (junior) developers don't test their practical knowledge enough- a point I always found a bit strange.
I'm in a university dealing with this stuff and we get both ends at the same time, they (companies) want more immediate technical skills (e.g. programming) while also complaining that grads don't know their math fundamentals enough.
In an engineering department (as in not CS) I'd say the bias is overwhelmingly towards the math end of the spectrum, partly because faculty largely don't even keep up with the technology. You'd have to heavily revise your course constantly (imagine teaching how to use google products...). Plus it just feels less worthwhile teaching things that will become obsolete in a few years.
Oh and by the way we need to teach them to write better too. Kids can't communicate these days. And economics. And ethics. It ends up being a very tight squeeze we can cram in maybe two courses on programming if it's a top priority.
I've seen theories that it's more related to how, at least aerospace graduates, appear to have much less practical experience at least passed as theoretical knowledge, and churn out designs that might be generally good when assembled, be possible to assemble... but totally impossible to maintain. Things like too small tolerances on pretty much everything, having to disassemble huge portions of an aircraft because there was no maintenance hatch of appropriate size, etc.
In a way, F-35 (but also recent F-16) suffer from related issues, where the complexity of maintenance is staggering, and the tools you're given to help manage that suck too much.
I wonder if anyone has any theories as to why? Assuming it's true that technological innovation peaked in the mid 40s/50s, it begs the question why it has ground to such a halt now.
Recognizing that is a big assumption of truth, would anyone here be willing to posit an explanation?
It’s a combination of factors but all with the same theme.
Basically nobody is willing to take any risk for anything.
This is on every level, from being wrong about a simple decision all the way up to not taking any personal risk with your life.
And it’s impossible to argue against it because at any point you can always make an argument for reduction of risk, and anyone arguing against it is demonized.
How can you argue against more health and safety standards after all? More rigourous engineering standards? More environmental protection standards? More consultation with the public?
But it’s not just a government thing, it’s on a societal level. In large companies it’s the same exact phenomenon of buck passing and responsibility dodging.
Each thing only has a tiny multiplicative cost, but the sum total of all of it is the inability to make any progress.
Because it’s not worth it. People built all the low hanging fruit of cool shit already. A plane would have been “cool shit” 100 years ago, today it’s just a glorified bus.
What else is there to build? Spaceships? For what? We’ve seen Mars and the Moon. More military crap? USA already won now it’s just showing off. AI stuff? Turns out people think it’s creepy and they like to keep their jobs anyway because it makes them money. Mega structures and arcologies? NIMBY!
We’re in the long tail of cool shit now. Each generation gets harder and harder to impress.
Necessity is the mother of invention. In the mid 40s a very large urgent necessity, the war effort, went away. There were some residuals after that as motivations and industries shifted.
Maybe check out Ross Douthat's recent book about "decadence" as a place to start. Not sure I buy the argument, but this is part of what he's talking about.
For me personally, I think it's just the point we're at in the current technological revolution (in the Carlota Perez sense). We're due for a new one (maybe biotech, eg. driven by crispr, mrna, etc.) so things feel stale.
I mean, it's kinda well known that war is the mother of all innovation right?
That explains it right there if you take the theory as true. WW2, Cold War. I mean even the moon landing was part of that cold war era technology advancement.
So now instead of governments/military pushing for needs, it's now companies trying to innovate for money. Which can work, but you need CEOs to take risks like Musk or even Jobs.
Nah, we build cool shit all the time. We just rolled out a whole new vaccine technology across the world in under a year. You never really wanted a flying car, and AI-driven tech is everywhere but you just don't call it AI any more.
I might be mistaken, but I thought I'd seen the Skunkworks logo being used when talking about the F-35. Which is kind of pissing on the legacy of Skunkworks as Skunkworks effectively stopped existing in the 1970s.
I think it's a combination of science is simply harder because the low picking fruits have mostly been picked, and environments that lead to breakthroughs like fission appear only under exceptional circumstances
"Fission was discovered in 1938/1939 and we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. No chance we could do something like that in this toxic environment of today"
I believe some people consider WW2 and the nuclear wipeout of 2 cities of common people to be "toxic environment", too.
The core problem is the failure of the contracting agency to set requirements and stick with them. Once a contractor gets galloping requirements you get instant proof that better is the enemy of good.
I want just to add that Peter Thiel is one of the reason why we cannot have / invent ‘cool stuff’. But he is also not wrong about what he saying: I’m just saying that it is not so simple.
How do you blame Thiel for bureaucratic bloat in the US government? NASA, the canonical example of a formerly productive organization becoming hopelessly turgid, was dysfunctional by the time he was a teenager.
Thiel believes that rent seeking monopolies are desirable and necessary to enable innovation. He's plainly wrong about that as a mater of economic science. Lockhead's use of regulatory capture to extract as much money as possible is directly in line with how Thiel thinks business should be done.
I don't think Thiel thinks this. I think Thiel's argument about monopolies is that good businesses act like monopolies because they have no competition, i.e. it's better to be Tesla[0] than to be starting a fast food franchise. I don't agree with Thiel on this, I think you're more likely to get rich in an area where there is already demand, but Thiel is more focused on people that pioneer new industries.
[0]: Yeah, I know there are other EV manufacturers, Tesla is really not competing with them at this stage and never really was.
He's been quite explicit about it in his talks for years. He sees monopolies as necessary to concentrate enough capital under one person's control to enable them to be an innovator.
To be rather blunt about it, much of his rhetoric is ultimately just about saying indirect forms of "let John Galt do whatever he wants and be grateful peasant."
This is why he's financially supported Yarvin, who quite literally wants to turn the world into a technocratic monarchy, with some very nasty "scientific racism" style stuff mixed in. It's a drop in the bucket compared to Thiel's wealth, but he clearly has no problem providing millions of dollars in support of this kind of thinking.
Also pay attention to how Palantir does business. They behave very similarly to Lockhead Martin when it comes to over promising their technology and under delivering in order to pull as much money off the table as possible, including from governments.
Ehhh, I've read his book (which is really just a rehash of Michael Porter) and I've seen some of his talks and while I see where you're coming, I wouldn't be quite as harsh, although Thiel might be sailing a bit close to "real monopolism has never been tried."
With regard to Yarvin I have no idea what Yarvin wants because he takes 10,000 words to explain himself and I can never find the energy to finish reading anything by him. He has a much less long winded brother who has a somewhat interesting blog though (totally unrelated topics to the better known Yarvin). I do think it is good that people like Thiel support these sort of thinkers though. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and I'm sure some of their ideas have merit.
No, Yarvin's thinking does not have merit, and his entire approach is to exploit attempts at good faith debate with his own bad faith behavior. It's similar to the approach a lot of creationists use. There's no reason to indulge it. Here's a piece that's mostly about the Star Slate Codex drama, but covers the issue well: https://modelcitizen.substack.com/p/climbing-the-bell-curve-...
You're giving NASA way, way, way too much credit. The organization was a clusterfuck from the very beginning. The only reason they managed to get anything done is because top brass quickly figured out that they are primarily a presidential vanity project.
There are some great interviews from the 70s on YouTube with some of the first high ranking officials within NASA speaking rather candidly about how terrible it was there. Everyone hated them: Congress, Military Brass, the American public.
We're just fat, lazy, entitled, and lacking all motivation at this point. In the 20th century we went from dropping grenades out of cloth covered biplanes to shooting radar guided nuclear missiles from supersonic jet fighters in 20 years because our survival was at stake. Global hegemony has a predictable way of softening societies that is empirically observable throughout human history. Compare the pace of change and development in the US to what is happening in China now, and you can see where the global locus of innovation has shifted.
Yep, is it Fahrenheit 451 or another Ray Bradbury story where the planes zip around the globe to start and end a war within a couple minutes, without anyone really realizing or caring?
Thiel is wrong. What is happening in batteries is insane. SpaceX is doing amazing things in space and many smaller companies are doing great things too. Starlink itself is revolutionary, Starship is arguably even more so.
And btw the advancements in batteries and EV is exactly what is needed actually do flying cars, if that is even a good idea in the first place.
Government programs are often massively badly managed, politically captured, this is not new. But it doesn't mean nobody is inventing anything new anymore.
I might be digging my self in some mud here but when you say:
> Fission was discovered in 1938/1939 and we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. No chance we could do something like that in this toxic environment of today.
Are you for real? It is hard to find any more toxic place in resent history then during the horrors of World War 2.
This time saw a holocaust with forced labor and mass killings of religious and ethnic minorities in multiple countries accross at least 3 continents. It saw indiscriminate bombing of heavy civilian population centers in densely populated centers in Asia and Europe. It saw mass famine and starvation in several regions of the world. About 3% of the entire world population died in these horrors, and many more lost their homes and livelihoods.
And you mention the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as some kind of an achievement. Between 129,000–226,000 people died in that terror, and two whole cities were leveled to the ground, with the mass homelessness and medical and social emergencies that follows.
Perhaps it is not your intention to devalue these horrors and you are simply trying emphasize what was possible when the political climate was more unified. But please be careful with your words. Don’t describe our time as toxic while glorifying the most toxic times ever witnessed in our recent history.
Given a compelling need for innovation we could potentially do that. But today’s innovation is about social equities. Billions will be pumped into that for the next decade until - heaven forbid- there’s a new need for tools to perform catastrophic things.
On the other hand, we just managed to create an effective vaccine against a novel virus in something like 48 hours (and another 8 months to get it FDA approved but still!)
In general I don't think that we've forgotten how to build cool shit. It's just that in a lot ways we don't have the incentive to do so anymore. When we DO have the incentive (like with COVID) we are capable of feats of engineering an innovation that are amazing. More to the point, the incentives now seem to work against rapid innovation. We tend to think of infrastructure projects and defense projects as jobs programs so nobody wants it to be done quickly.
I’m in the UK, over here we developed a vaccine to an unknown virus in about 10 months and then gave it to nearly 20 million people in 2 months. I’ll take that over the next generation of pointless aircrafts any day!
When it matters, I think we have shown to be perfectly capable of moving fast. Just look at how quickly we came up with a vaccine for covid. In a state of war (or cold war, or pandemic) you cut the red tape. Approval processes that typically take weeks magically take only hours.
But it is true that when there is no particular urgency, the multiplication of bureaucracy and regulations compounded with the complexity of modern technologies makes it difficult to deliver cheap and fast.
WE DEVELOPED AND DEPLOYED SEVERAL VACCINES TO A NOVEL VIRUS IN LESS THAN A YEAR.
The year over year progress on computing power/efficiency/size is beyond impressive. Modern computer hardware is an amazing feat of engineering.
The first complete sequences of the Human Genome was completed in 2003, as part of the Human Genome Project which started in 1990. Total cost of $100,000,000. That's actually not so expensive given the payoff is literally a complete copy of our own genetic code. Today, less than 20 years later, the cost of sequencing that same genome is about $1,000.
The LHC? Super fucking cool.
We do build cool shit. Incredibly cool shit. WAY cooler than dumb ass killing machines like fission bombs and space-age fighter jets. And BTW, going from fission in theory to something actually useful for doing something other than killing people did take a couple decades (first nuke power plant turned on in 1954).
We can build all that cool shit you want, too. Flying cars? We've been able to do that for decades. You don't have a flying car because you'd almost certainly end up killing yourself or someone else and probably couldn't afford the fuel to operate it on the daily. There's a reason you can't just rent a Cessna and go out for a joy ride without any training.
The "no cool shit" thesis always uses killing machines and rich person toys as examples. I don't want stupid rich person toys that even rich people don't actually use when they get them (flying cars). I want to be able to Zoom with my parents during a pandemic.
Crispr, while awesome, has not yet turned into real concrete technology that is making our lives better. I think the best example of serious technological advances recently is the mRNA vaccines.
We already have flying cars; they are called helicopters.
I'm not sure you want to live in a neighborhood that has people commuting by helicopters; it would be very noisy.
Want an example of crazy cool shit we just accomplished?
Covid vaccine. Creating a vaccine/testing in less than a year and now distributing it at such a massive scale will likely go down in history as an event akin to the Manhattan Project.
> Fission was discovered in 1938/1939 and we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. No chance we could do something like that in this toxic environment of today.
The first thing that springs to mind is the fact that the covid-19 vaccine was imagined, developed and started to be synthesized over the course of a single weekend.
> The first thing that springs to mind is the fact that the covid-19 vaccine was imagined, developed and started to be synthesized over the course of a single weekend.
Piggy-backing off the efforts of mRNA vaccines for the past decade or two, and existing efforts for personalized cancer immuno-oncology vaccines.
There ain't no chance you figure out the lipid nanoparticle magic in a weekend.
(Indeed, it's not really figured out: what we have is inadequate for mRNA drugs, which are the holy grail... but the shortcomings were realized to be useful for vaccines ~a decade ago).
That's why it doesn't yet exist! Find a way to either contain or limit the radiation. Use hydrogen fission. I'm not fussy about the details. Tony Stark managed to fit a reactor in his chest! why can't we?
Technically the vaccine (at least the moderna one) was built in 48 hours. They had it prepared before they even had a sample of the virus. Chinese researchers uploaded the genetic sequence to the net and that was all moderna needed to build the vaccine. It was trials/testing/approval that took the rest of the time. Truly some mind-blowing stuff.
Thiel and his ilk are the reason we can't build cool shit anymore. Look at PayPal, horrible outdated interface that is still a kluge with old functionality glued to new functionality because it's just too big to be too concerned, and horrible customer service too. There is so much corruption and profiteering due to monopolization of various industries that this sort of behavior happens, Thiel is the guy who walks away with all his money before shit from his philosophy hits the fan; society being the bag man. Look at Trump who Thiel supported or his general idea of a monopoly. Monopolies are bad, competition and distribution is good. Thiel does not know what he's talking about. The rich can capture all the value, but what happens after that, they continue to capture all the value and don't have to improve or innovate to continue to exist, you can't hold them up to anything because what are you going to do you are locked in.
Do things 10x better he says, and then you will have so much network effect that you can do things 10x worse and people still have a hard time getting rid of you.
Putting aside the good-plane/bad-plane discussion, this program is the poster child for one of my pet wishes: that the costs of government programs would be expressed in $/tax-payer. There are about 100M tax payers in the US; this program is expected to cost about $1,500,000M; so the F35 program is expected to cost about $15,000 per tax payer. True: that's over 50 years; still, un-discounted, that's $300/year/tax-payer.
I'm not arguing for or against these programs; I'm arguing for expressing them in comprehensible terms. $6,000,000,000,000 societal total; or $60,000 for you. Do you expect to receive $15,000 of value from the F35 program? I'm not sure I won't: perhaps it'll keep oil/energy prices stable and I spent well more than $300/year on energy...
I think the stats for COVID site are very misleading, particularly when you compare them to defense spending. The majority of "COVID bailout" according to that website is "Federal Reserve Actions"-- just the vagueness of that statement should give you pause.
I am not saying Federal Reserve actions don't have a cost, but comparing that to defense spending is apples to oranges. The federal reserve buys securities and created SPVs. You could say that is a cost but by some measures the money the Federal Reserve "spent" made money in the 2009 crises. If that were true this time your cost per tax payer is way, way off.
Or to put it in more plain language, you are comparing the cost to tax payers if the US government bought $60,000 of Lockheed martin stock as opposed to paying Lockheed Martin $15,000 for a fighter that doesn't seem to work well. It's more complicated than that even, but still it is a terrible and biased comparison that you are making.
For that, you need to calculate the cost of every US govt program and calculate usage costs. Very complicated.
However, this statement is confusing to me. Do you agree to a bailout, as a society, to eventually get all of it back?
And, I also take issue with 100M tax payers. Are these Individual Income Tax payers? If so, what about all the non income tax payers and companiss that pay taxes? For every item you buy, some amount goes to the government in the form of sales tax.
And ultimately, what does the govt spend money on? You and your fellow citizens. Sure, now you are in a position to say you pay more taxes than the govt provides services, but if your kid turns out to be poor and homeless, the govt ought to take care of them, and they pay no taxes while enjoying govt services. So if you compute what you get back, would it be fair to say you have to take multi generational values?
Normalized: $60k (get the GAO to provide a standardized number) + interpretation + understanding.
I get that it's imperfect but I have a hard time understanding how the "un-normalized" version is more-perfect or more comprehensible than the "normalized" version.
I suspect politicians would hate my suggestion: they've acclimated us to nonsense numbers. Per Dirksen (maybe): “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money." Again, I'm not pro/con high-speed rail but: CA probably has 15M taxpayers; estimates of high-speed rail ranged from $30,000M-$100,000M; how in the world was a CA taxpayer to recoup $3,000-$10,000 of cost? Put in those terms, it's a lot easier for me to think about the proposition.
I definitely think a Covid bailout was necessary. I do have some questions about where my $60k went...
Very interesting proposition. Small side note - a lot of this $300/year/tax-payer is flowing back into paying US salaries in various states... which is probably recursively why the ticket price is so high in the first place (cost-plus, politicians and all).
Also, the $60,000/tax-payer Covid ticket price (though I find that source questionable) is missing averaging out over multiple years as you said yourself. Needs to be consistent with the other number.
I take issue with comparing a single project to a generic relief. A fair comparison would be to only compare a single stimulus effort (say the $1000 one). Or if you want to compare the total covid effort, compare it with the total military budget.
This type of comparison reminds me of how people abuse statistics by comparing a city (or even a neighborhood) to another state (or even a country); say the average New Yorker vs. the average Swede.
Sure, it's $60k per tax payer by just dividing the total paid by the tax payer cardinality. And in that sense, that much of the federal budget that you have a voice for was allocated in that way.
However, comparing that number to how much tax you're paying in a given year is wildly inaccurate.
The mean income tax paid in the US last year was ~$15k, but the median is closer to ~$5k [0]
The ultra wealthy pay very disproportionately more of the total income tax and skew the mean upward significantly.
Therefore, the average US tax payer would have contributed likely far less than $300/year at something more like <$100/year.
I've always wished for (and wanted to develop) a calculator which would take in your taxes paid, and calculate exactly how many dollars and cents of your tax bill went to which programs. I'm sure the results would shock most Americans.
There's a certain sense of satisfaction in being able to see in slightly more real terms what my tax is being spent on.
But it's misleading, perhaps deliberately so. The money is not being spent on "Health" but on the "Health department". What percentage of that money actually delivers health, and what merely funds the bureaucracy?
Here in the UK only about a third of defence spending goes on the armed forces themselves. Another third goes on service pensions, which is fine, but running the MoD itself is a full third of the budget! It wouldn’t surprise me if the same was true of the NHS.
The problem with that is that there is no direct correlation between tax receipts and budget outlays. Money being spent in 2021 is not being "paid for" by taxes received in 2021, or for that matter in 2022, 2023, or any other particular year. That's the theoretical problem; the practical problems you encounter as a result include how you deal with programs that are technically 'paid for' by specific taxes (do you try to present those separately or exclude them?), how you account for budget deficits (do you present a breakdown that adds up to >100% of the tax bill?), and how you deal with tax expenditures.
I mean, forgive me for being obtuse, but...why do we even pay taxes at all? Like, I understand the "prole logic" of a balance between income and expenditures, but if the government doesn't seem to care, why should I?
In the longer term, the ability of taxpayers to pay taxes is a signal of the nation's ability to produce enough to meet its debt. It's just spread over an extended period.
Paying taxes is a form of civic participation. Sounds crazy, but reading about the system Russia uses makes me leery of forcing the government to make itself financially independent of its citizenry.
Theirs is a system called "tributary taxation." How it works is, anybody who is anybody in Russia has a boss. Not a boss like you have a boss, a political boss, think Boss Tweed back in the day. That boss has a boss, who has a boss, and so on until you have the one person in Russia all this money flows to, President Putin.
How much do you pay to your boss? As much as you wish/can. This isn't the mob. The price for falling behind isn't Ivan turning your knees into baseballs. You simply find yourself slowly forced out of political relevance. Pay to play at it's highest and finest. At a certain level you become untouchable by low-level cops and the like.
The government getting its operating budget from us makes the government accountable to citizens in the end. What we call 'corruption' becomes the norm otherwise.
There’s something similar for the UK here[0], but my guess is that most people don’t care beyond “defence”, which in the UK is 5% and the US is 15%. As others have mentioned though, there’s potentially a pretty good multiplier effect [1] on military hardware acquisition.
Not exactly what you're describing, but here's where someone did a fairly detailed analysis of which federal, state, and local programs their salary goes to using a Sankey diagram:
> Do you expect to receive $15,000 of value from the F35 program? I'm not sure I won't: perhaps it'll keep oil/energy prices stable and I spent well more than $300/year on energy...
But from the article
> The Air Force alone wanted nearly 1,800 F-35s to replace aging F-16s and A-10s and constitute the low end of a low-high fighter mix, with 180 twin-engine F-22s making up the high end.
> Fifteen years after the F-35’s first flight, the Air Force has just 250 of the jets.
I'd say it's just as valid of an argument to make in this case that I'm not sure I won't see more than $60,000 of value out of efforts to prevent the economic infrastructure of the U.S. from crumbling, especially amortized over 50 years ($1,200/yr in preserved income or purchasing power).
I don't disagree that it's a decent frame of reference to use when looking at government programs...but it's important to apply the same level of rigor to measuring output value.
yeah, but you're cleverly (or nefariously) pitching this as both a neutral unit of measure - say, $/square meter in the US - then right away using it as a non-neutral measurement based on the individual (/your/ $60k - as if it was "ours" to begin with). that's not really appropriate.
but why in the world does it need to cost that much?
what's wrong with just using the jets we already have. I mean we have like a gazillion of those things. what percentage of the military/armed forces is currently being used or has been used over the last 10 years. I'm guessing it's a very small percentage.
Because the U.S. military basically runs a massive socialized jobs program and every politician works to get a piece of it for their state.
No politician wants to be the one to make the case to shut down the factories that produce these things, even when the military has advised Congress to do so [1].
What I’ve always found strange about this is that there would be far better areas to spend money that would directly benefit society. Education, rail, manufacturing modernization, health.
Instead we have jets we don’t need, and tanks sitting in a desert unused.
Additional housing would even pay itself back on its own. Yes the government would take on debt but it would also receive rent payments that pay the debt off. The economic benefit of more housing in large cities is undeniable. Lots of people move to the city to work there, the end result is that you have employed both the construction industry and the future resident. There would be a net tax gain even though its a jobs stimulus program.
what's wrong with just using the jets we already have.
Two words: metal fatigue. Every airframe only has a finite amount of hours it can fly before its structure becomes too weak. Fighters in particular that regularly perform high-g manoeuvres. So they have to be replaced anyway.
The war in Afghanistan saw Western militaries burning off airframe-hours at a phenomenal rate using expensive fighters designed for neer-peer conflicts to drop dumb bombs, when you could have done the job for a fraction of the cost with simple propeller planes like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_EMB_314_Super_Tucano
> what's wrong with just using the jets we already have.
The problems with the F-15/F-16/F-18 is that Chinese and Russian missiles might be able to shoot them down more easily than the F-22 or F-35, since the F-22 and F-35 are stealthed.
The problem with the F-22 and F-35 is high unit cost, so they can't have as many as they'd like.
It's also possible that their stealth might not work so well on future Russian/Chinese radars, for example they might use different frequencies. You can be sure both those countries are working on countermeasures to stealth aircraft.
Possibly the solution will be an unmanned aircraft. This would be able to pull >10g manouvers, which aircraft with a pilot in can't.
Restarting production, long after all the workers have been laid off and moved to other cities, would take decades. If those workers don't keep working, the capability is lost. The timeframe for recovery makes this dangerous.
I'll pay $300/year for global security any day of the week. Honestly, I don't give a shit if it costs $10,000/year, I want the U.S. being the global police because I am most comfortable with the status quo.
As a hardcore leftist, even I have to admit there are benefits of neoliberal policy to a strong internationally present military that at least pretends to uphold human rights and has a bunch of other countries that also pretend the same. It’s better than the alternative.
I think the war in Yemen is a good case study of the downsides of the US as global police. It is a war that was only possible through the US and UK supplying arms, and was prosecuted by a nation that doesn't even pretend to uphold human rights.
This is also pretty typical - while many western nations 'care' about human rights, they don't see any problem with arming client regimes who are often gratuitously sadistic, genocidal, etc.
I'm also not sure where human rights come into the picture when you consider the various US wars in the last century. All of them (especially the Korean war) were extremely brutal to civilian populations, and the prosecution of all of them (except maybe the 1990 gulf war?) skirted very close to the line on war crimes, or crossed that line entirely. I don't think there was even lip service paid to human rights in this period.
The human rights track record of the USA military should for sure include:
* Arming the Saudi regime with intent to sustain the horrors in Yemen
* Extrajudicial killings with drones in various sovereign non-warring nations such as Pakistan and Libya often with far more civilian casualties then combatant.
* Illegal indefinite detention and torture in offshore prison such as Guantanamo.
Those are the human rights horrors which the USA military is currently engaging in. History shows us that it is capable of far worse and there is no reason to believe it won’t engage in in the near future.
As far as security goes there is little reason to believe that it extends any further then to secure the interest of private companies engaging in foreign affairs. It seems to me that the human rights narrative of GPs is entirely fiction.
The alternative being... the same invasion of sovereign nations to keep the industry-military complex going, just without the pretense of caring for human rights?
“The F-35 has failed” is a strong statement that depends on what your definition of success is. Did it fail because it couldn’t replace the F-16? Did it fail because it’s expensive and bloated?
Do those things even matter?
I’m not defending the F-35 but anyone deeply and intimately familiar with the platform knows and understands that it is a Ferrari. You don’t bring your Acura TSX to a Formula 1 race track to win a race. Just like you don’t bring your Ferrari to the farm to haul material (not anymore anyways).
The F-35 may be a Ferrari; but the thing about Ferraris is that their technology trickles down. Now we have electric cars with carbon fiber shells. The same is true for the F-35. The technology inside it has and will lead to the resurrection and long standing use of older planes like the B1 and U2. Where the airframe is solid but the tech and stealth is not. It will also lead to revolutionary new planes which are cheaper to make and build.
Through the F35s use of distributed computing and treating hardware components and their software as services, we’re not going to be doomed to the same fate as the F16 where we can’t find hardware. Instead, we’ll have more component oriented aircraft systems where each aircraft is no bespoke and can use from a menu of technologies.
So did the F35 fail because we spent too much? Depends on how much it saves us later.
Did it fail because it didn’t replace the F16? What if it makes the F16 viable again? Did it still fail?
Some may see this as a slippery slope. What matters is the objective outcome that comes from this project. Not the success criteria some folks have perpetuated or thrust upon the project.
Allow me to restate your comment more briefly: "The F-35 depends on your definition of success. It has not achieved the goals in its original funding application, but some of its traits might inspire future traits in future other things that might turn out to be good and worth the money we've spent so far, so therefore it's not right to call it a failure yet."
That's not a friendly restatement, no. "Might" does not make right.
That's mis-categorizing my statement. There is no "might". The innovation that's occurred in the F-35 program has already produced fruit in many other airframes and the US Air Force has already "re-written the playbook" on what it means to have a new airframe and what revitalizing an old airframe is.
It's not about whether it may or may not - It has, that's a definitive statement.
It sounded more as if waffling about possible future results than a description concrete present results. The F-35 has cost $4e11 so far, says a random site on the web. What are the results of its innovation, the results that definitely and already have occurred and arguably are worth $4e11?
This may be a statement that the U.S militaries post-ww2 doctrine of air superiority is no longer viable. Large Battleships once had to face a similar reality that it was impossible to make them survivable if the enemy had air superiority.
Drones are cheap, good missiles are 1/100th the price of an F-35. It's possible that aircraft will no longer be able to enter contested space without significant risks just as it was pre-ww2 where it was impractical to achieve air superiority or to destroy anti-aircraft placements.
Considering the extreme investment of the US into aircraft as a means of projecting power and winning wars against conventional militaries, there is a chance that an opponent with a much smaller military budget could "win" in a conventional fight - making the multi-trillion dollar aircraft projects pointless.
A tomahawk cruise missile isn't too far off from a one-shot fighter jet when it comes to attacking fixed, or very slow-moving targets. They also don't need a human pilot, which cost an extraordinary amount of money to train, way more than their salary.
China has already developed what is effectively an ICBM designed to sink/punch through warships from above.
In any major future conflict our satellites will be the first casualties. They won't be available for overhead imagery, communications, or navigation. So remote piloted drones will be useless. Loitering missiles will be important but only work against a limited set of targets.
For the price of the f-35 a defensible satellite installation could be placed in orbits that would be difficult to shoot down.
There is nothing stopping a satellite from maneuvering out of the way of an incoming missle, or for it deploying counter measures.
Satellites can be launched on arbitrarily large rocket boosters with an arbitrary number of in orbit assembly/refueling flights. Anti satellite missiles require that the missile can be deployed to a useful location that can’t be immediately disabled.
There is no such thing as a defensible satellite installation. The only way to make a satellite really difficult to shoot down is to put it in a high orbit, but that makes it less useful for reconnaissance. While launch costs have come down slightly, the total cost for building and launching a large military satellite remains far higher than an F-35. Even large satellites carry very little maneuvering fuel and have small thrusters which don't allow for effective evasive maneuvers. Adding more fuel and larger thrusters would drastically increase costs and reduce the mass available for useful payloads. And that's not even the biggest problem. Satellites lack the sensors necessary to detect when they are under attack. It's just not practical to load them up with multiple radars and IRST sensors that would be necessary to detect an incoming antisatellite weapon.
So in short your idea won't work in the real world.
Contested is the point. Contested by other jets, I'd say no. All other air forces with modern fighters are still using Gen 4 fighters at best. The true threat comes from anti-aircraft weapons. To the point developers of FCAS are worried about man-held missiles. These missiles can take down legacy as well as 5th gen fighters. That's also why saturation is a thing, overwhelming the enmy with numbers. At 100 mil a piece, that startegy might be a tad expensve with the F-35. Hence drones. Whether rones work or not has to be seen.
my bestguess is, that n a conventional conflict between industrilized states the air campaigns will be over after the first three major engangements or so. Because by then replacing the losses would ruin everyone.
China has two Gen5 fighters in serial production right now. And show me a manpad that can take down a Gen 5 fighter at 30K feet. No manpad is energetic enough to do so.
Most flights aren't conducted at low levels, unless you're fighting 3rd world insurgents. And again, which manpads are you claiming can down a Gen 5 aircraft?
The Ferrari metaphor is revisionist at best. The F-35 program wasn't created to build a Ferrari, it was designed to build the best, cheapest commuter car possible using economies of scale and shared cost. That the only role left for it is as a Ferrari (after the design was butchered by stakeholders) is a testament to how far it fell from its goals, not a success story.
The race car/pickup truck analogy is useful here. The F35 failed because they tried to make a vehicle that could be both a race car and a pickup truck, and wound up making one that is more expensive and worse at both jobs than building two different vehicles. Or just using existing fleets of vehicles.
Although personally I think that in the event the US military needs to scramble a bunch of F35s to serve as in legitimate air to air combat we'll have bigger problems than a costly jobs program not producing something useful.
> Not the success criteria some folks have perpetuated or thrust upon the project.
This isn't an art project where interpretation is in the eye of the beholder. This is a taxpayer-funded set of contracts; the success criteria are defined as part of said contracts, they're not "thrust upon" the project by "some folks".
Your trickle down benefits would come from any innovative project, whether it were a success or a failure. They'd just be more generally beneficial due to more extensive application in a successful project (and probably more cheaply usable by other areas of industry). Either way they would exist in either scenario: if their existence is what defines success, then failure is impossible.
>Your trickle down benefits would come from any innovative project, whether it were a success or a failure.
Take the $3e11, convert them to physical banknotes, burn all $3e11 bills in Texas last week for warmth, and according to the grandparent the program would still be a success because the money ultimately provided utility to people!
>Grandparent: What matters is the objective outcome that comes from this project.
No one froze to death! We gained _something_ from the program! Operation successful! /s
In industry when you realize a project is going to fail it is common to pack it with a bunch of marginally related things that you want in your project but cannot afford. Then when they complete what you want you take it for no cost. It makes your project look better on the bottom line (ROI or whatever metric accountants use to judge), and the other project eventually is written off.
Would the company be better off just paying for the things they want in each project and accepting a lower ROI is an open question. I just watch the game, not make the rules.
Well, it failed to replace the F-16, for starters. And the A-10. It failed in becoming the NATO / Western end-all jet. It is expensive, there aren't that many. The stealth capabilities are lacking by modern standards. Maintenaince if expensive and the combat aircraft equivalent of an iPhone.
Compare that to the cold war fighters. High numbers, used by the majority of US allies and even comparable cheap. Desiged to be usable under cold war circumstances. And modernized to this very day.
The biggest issue I see, also with stuff like the FCAS (French and German Eurofghter / Rafale replacement) is cost. Just imagine you loose, say, 50 of them in a war against Russia or China. How many you can reasonably replace? At that price tag? All other enemies, you hardly loose legacy fighters against those. And that is not even taking training into account.
Well, the B-52 is still flying. Maybe it will reach 100 years of service.
How has it failed to replace the F-16? It is objectively superior to the F-16 in just about every performance parameter. It costs less than 4.5 Gen peers like the Eurofighter and Rafale, while having more build at a total of 600 thus far with over 100 more built per year now.
As for losing them, yes it would be bad, but it's the most survivable jet being produced today. Recent conflicts have shown just how lopsided a conflict is if you have a technological edge over your adversaries.
Survivability is not a given. They successfully tagged F-35s at various occossions with ground based radar. There are also account sof F-22s loosing dog fights against Rafales and Eurofghters. And the F-22 is the better dog fighter compared to the F-35. And there are still thousands of F-16s to be retired for F-35s, seemingly not going to happen if the Air Force is axing F-35 procurement.
Air Force isn't axing procurement. Just because it has been tagged under ideal conditions on various occasions doesn't mean that it's survivability isn't vastly better than it's non stealthy alternatives.
Yes F-22's have lost dog fights, that's why their K:D's ratios aren't infinite. I really don't understand what your point is though, because the F-22 has lost a dog fight it's overwhelming win rate no longer is relevant?
And sure the F-22 is a better dog fighter but it doesn't have active production line and the costs of restarting production are exorbitantly expensive.
My pint is that all air forces agree, to a certain extent, that stealth alone is not enough to over come modern air defence. It is even not sufficient to beat other somewhat stealthy fighters. And the F-35 isn't even that stealthy to begin with. The examples are to show that the F-35 is alread now, at the very beginning of its service life, hte real risk of being not as surviveable as thought.
The point of the F-35 is to be so technologically superior that you do not get into a war of attrition where you are bleeding planes at the same rate as your enemy. If that was the case it would mean none of the technology upgrades actually gave an advantage, which would be strange given their fundamental nature.
What really matters is how many F-16s or cold war era aircraft an F-35 could take out before being shot down. There is a discussion of such numbers below.
And that fact has, more or less, been answered. And even the to-be-delveloped aircraft are expected to fight in enviroments in which they more often loose against air defence and have equal odds against same gen fighters with slight adavtages against fighters one gen behind. The latter largely depends on Command-and Control. And on radar. Basically, stand-off attacks only work against between stealth and non-stealth fighters. Between stealth ighters, it's up close again.
Radar already now can tag, reliably, the F-35. And will tag next gen stealth jets. The same radar already now can trace 100s of contacts per installation, making saturation difficult. Air combat really is getting expensive... The problem steath jets have , is that you need only a handfull of ground based radars. Which can be develeoped and deployed fatser than new stealth jets. Stealth, so, is loosing its usefullness over the service life of a model. And that service life will be long.
Stealth will still be needed to not be at a disadvantage against other stealth jets, so. Unfortunately for the F-35, it is the fisrt of these fighters.
Radar can tag any aircraft currently in public flight. Whether that radar can provide accurate and adequate targeting information to weapon systems is not proven at all.
~1.7 Trillion dollars so we can have a bleeding-edge Ferrari while our "enemies" in the PRC and Russia are still driving around in Yugo 45s
So many people seem to still buy into the Cold War mindset that we just need the latest bleeding edge platforms or the Soviets are going to invade and we'll all be reading Trotsky.
The US and NATO militaries are so far ahead of the Russians and China it's comical to claim another 1.7 trillion dollars for a "ferrari" is a prudent use of taxpayer dollars.
China can't even field a blue-water navy yet. I guess they're only about a century behind the US there lol
> The US and NATO militaries are so far ahead of the Russians and China it's comical to claim another 1.7 trillion dollars for a "ferrari" is a prudent use of taxpayer dollars.
Russia and China don't need a Yugo to out-speed the US's Ferrari, they have ICBMs and the Russians have nuclear subs that work well enough.
And the US's Ferrari did a really, really poor job in the off-road terrains of the Middle East, with Iraq at best a draw (and a huge loss for the local population, but who cares about that?) and a definite defeat in Afghanistan.
How does the F35 or its cool successor prevent MAD?
Iraq and Afgh were counterinsurgency fights. Any China or Russian fight will not be the same.
And the US absolutely crushed the Iraqi military within a matter of days in both Desert Storm and OIF. The problem was the "nation building" COIN fight.
You don't stay ahead by spending way over yours means.
it is a key reason the Soviet union collapsed. They were trying match US spending in many sectors and capitalism can outspend communist economies any day.
Diverting spending from say infrastructure to miltary does not help a country in the long term.
This reads word-for-word like an email from a PM to management talking about how their project that imploded embarrassingly has so many intangible future benefits that really, it's a huge success when you think about it.
Exactly, unless those were the upfront deliverables of the projects, its a failure. Sure, not all the effort was 100% completely wasted but the goal didn't get achieved.
No - I doubt any PM would write what I said. What I said is more a IC in tech saying
"Sure, what the PM asked for an laid out was X. But really, in the middle we found out the architecture didn't work as expected. So we pivoted and in doing so found more success using Y's Suggested Architecture"
Innovation and Tech is messy. More often than not, Your definition of success changes as time goes on as you get further into a project that's groundbreaking.
> Your definition of success changes as time goes on as you get further into a project that's groundbreaking.
If you fail to meet your original goal because you are not capable of doing it, and then you change your goal to accommodate this reality, it doesn't change the fact that you failed in your original goal.
If my goal is to go to Mars and I only make it to the moon because it turns our Mars is just too far away, even though I did something revolutionary, amazing, and extraordinary, it does not change the fact that I failed in my original goal.
I don't even consider this to be semantics. It's people trying to justify to themselves that there is no failure. You've literally failed by your own definition of what success is. Changing the definition of success doesn't change reality.
I disagree that this is justification of failure. If anything, it’s the opposite.
We failed in our goal. We also learned and developed things of real value while pursuing that goal.
This is salvaging what can be salvaged to make headway in an adjacent goal. That said...
> Your definition of success changes as time goes on as you get further into a project that's groundbreaking.
Sometimes the goal is, itself, a failure. It was born of not fully understanding the problem at hand. When the goal is stupid, but that is only discoverable by pursing that goal (ie “intent”), then redefining success is the right thing to do.
Simply by admitting this, you've already contradicted the person I was responding to.
His entire scribe is "what is failure? have we really failed? no" instead of "yeah we failed, but we can learn from it"
Failure is fine. Failure is expected. Failure is the best way to learn an iterate.
But then don't say "well we always got what we wanted out of it anyway, which was to learn" when your goal was "to build the ultimate fighter jet at this budget in this timeline"
I didn't get the same thing out of the comment you were responding to...but I otherwise agree with you entirely:
> Failure is fine. Failure is expected. Failure is the best way to learn an iterate.
and
> don't say "well we always got what we wanted out of it anyway, which was to learn" when your goal was "to build the ultimate fighter jet at this budget in this timeline"
> I didn't get the same thing out of the comment you were responding to
This is my fault, as I was mostly paraphrasing what he said in other comments. So that's just lazy commenting on my part, and probably I deserve downvotes for it.
The F-35 program did not fail to foresee the rise of unmanned vehicles, they built and adapted the aircraft and avionics around this concept. The F-35 cockpit, avionics, and helmet are designed to allow an F-35 pilot to command a fleet of drones performing roles ranging from scouting and EW to SEAD and direct attack.
Human flying and directing drones to do some tasks is such a 20th century thinking. For one, human pilot in F-35 directing drones would be the weakest link.
Why would you want to send a human pilot to face drone(s) that does not care for it's survival, can pull more Gs, calculate trajectory and make decisions faster?
This comes up in every HN thread about fighter jets.
Modern fighter aircraft are mobile missile launchers. They are judged primarily by whether they can get close enough to where they need to go without being detected, detect what they need to, and then launch good enough missiles. The missile is effectively the drone. Modern missiles are basically self-piloting autonomous drone rockets. In that regard the F-35 is fine, and automating the pilot is not necessarily a win because the AI isn't going to be doing ultra-high G dogfight turns anyway. The humans job is to react to unexpected situations and figure out something smart in situations where remote control isn't reliable or desirable (e.g. due to risk of detection).
I think it boils down to this: F-35, compared to unmanned aircraft, does not cost less than 6 million dollars a piece and it exposes American life to enemy fire.
Why would you want to send a human pilot to face drone(s)
Because an F35 can communicate over direct line-of-sight to its accompanying drones, so the whole package is very resistant to jamming or other interference.
Trickle down, whether it's in the economy or here, is bullshit.
Spending a trillion dollars on a program may lead to some good coming out of it, but it's about as disingenuous as saying that spending $3000 on a shitty computer that crashes all the time is OK because the cat got a box out of the deal. Yes, it's technically true, but completely unrelated.
The F35 is far more advanced than the F22 in everything except actual kinematics. The F22 is faster and more maneuverable, and that's the least interesting thing that separates the F22 and the F35.
I know nothing about the F-35, but it sounds like it's basically the Servo of aircraft?
As in, it hasn't evolved into a complete product that can wholesale replace its predecessors, but its innovations will be incorporated into them over time.
>Did it fail because it didn’t replace the F16? What if it makes the F16 viable again? Did it still fail?
Yes, because lots and lots of F-16s have been replaced with something that isn't what it was bought as. So unless you count it as a win that allies now have worse capabilities than they should have had and paid for because it might make them also buy F-16 parts, I would say it is a huge fail.
The F-35 failed because fighter jet airframes aren’t particularly relevant anymore. You can stick the same sensor systems and missiles on just about anything.
Improved stealth etc is useful, but F-35’s are only slightly better than 40+ year old jets. Thus hardly worth the price vs cheaply manufacturing a minor update of an older design.
Or as the saying goes “quantity has a quality all it’s own.”
Curious what your background is to make those statements. My experience from Red Flag and other exercises is that the 5th gens (22 & 35) have a much better K/D and survivability. When you expend all of your stand off weapons or need to get a B-2 deep into a contested airspace, including against SAMs, you need a 35 going in to do sanitization. No F-16 is fighting off both SAMs and a huge ass wave of J-10s or any J-20s while protecting a bomber.
Now is that 35 worth the price? If our policy continues to insist for preparing against an impossible push peer adversary landmasses, then maybe. Personally I don’t see those pushes happening, but that’s more due to the tyranny of distance and having like 10 minutes of play time before needing to refuel.
I have some background wargaming for the DoD. As to Red Flag numbers generally reported, it was setup to heavily favor F-35’s. Amusingly at one point they further boosted the K/D ratio after the fact from 15:1 to 20:1.
Actual air war looks very different, with a significant focus on cruse missiles early on etc. But again, comparing the F35 with outdated equipment is missing the point.
No. Modern sensors, communications systems, missiles, etc are absolutely crucial on a modern battlefield.
Further, the F16’s people are talking about very much needed a replacement. The newest was built in 2005 and while it’s a solid multi-role, all weather, air-to-air and air-to-ground fighter the design is showing it’s age.
But, the F35 isn’t simply a modernized F16 now it does stealth, STOVL, etc. So you need to consider what it could have been not compare it to what’s being replaced.
PS: I very much believe stealth aircraft are needed, but the same F35’s are eventually facing the sensors of 2050+. That’s the context where it starts to look very questionable.
Where are you getting your information the the newest F-16 was built in 2005? F-16s are still in production. Whether it's the Block 60 or the Block 70/72, the F-16 is being equipped with AESA, can carry almost every Western weapon, and other than lacking stealth, is still quite competitive in the air.
Is this really realistic though? I'm curious about your professional perspective.
My impression of the present/near future of air combat is a stealthy fighter with AMRAAMs in front, radar off, and a quarterback aircraft in back out of missile range, with the radar on. The front fighter fires and turns around, and the missile gets mid-course updates from the quarterback aircraft. When the AMRAAMs are depleted, you leave. It seems like if you get into Sidewinder range and you're outnumbered, you're going to have a torrent of medium range missiles coming at you from all sides.
It's not clear to me how well newer radars can track the B-2, but it's hard for me to see how fighters could really protect it. I'd expect that in a conflict with China, if they can track the B-2, that the B-2 would be withheld until the fighter threat was neutralized.
So if you buy into the concept of maneuver warfare you want to hit the enemy's center of gravity and reduce their will to fight. If you're trying to do that to China, you need to hit them hard and fast deep in their country's borders (I mean, Russia too to an extent). If you play this tit for tat fighter threat game, that doesn't happen and you're essentially in a war of attrition. That means you don't hold B-2s until a fighter threat is neutralized, you send them in to hit the CoG early so the war lasts days instead of years.
F-35s are really going to be doing counter IADS so their loadout reflects that. Maybe you get a couple A2A missiles loaded in, but primarily for self defense. If you want offensive counter air, you're bringing the F-22s (or probably the NGAD) loaded out appropriately.
Anyway all this just affirms the original idea, which is that you can't prosecute a war against peer adversaries with 4th gen fighters. Our 4th gens can still take down the enemy air threat, but the IADS means those 4th gens are not even getting into the air space.
Makes sense. It seems to me that the key question is whether or not the B-2 is trackable. I've never had a clearance, so I don't know, but I suspect that over China's own territory, it probably is. Maybe not "weapons quality", but good enough to get a fighter within IR missile/cannon range. It seems difficult to get the B-2 through reliably under those circumstances, and I'm not sure a fighter escort is of much help, because they will allocate a lot of fighters to a B-2.
The unknown then is how much can be done with decoys and EW, or even things like cyberattacks on radars and control nodes.
Yeah, that's what the Egyptians, Syrians, Jordanians and Iraqis thought in their various fights against Israel through the years. Yet somehow, the Israeli quality came out on top every single time.
Stating the F-35s are "only slightly better than 40+ year old jets shows a stunning lack of knowledge.
The US doesn’t have any Block 60 or 70/72 so it’s a tricky comparison due to low production numbers. Looking at the US’s actual fleet the F16 was a much cheaper aircraft and likely would have stayed at roughly those numbers.
Anyway, we already had the F22, the F35 was supposed to be the cheaper alternative and it mostly delivered on that. But now we have a very capable aircraft with far to many roles to excel at all of them while still being quite expensive to operate.
2. Supersonic stealthy replacement for A-7/F-18. Check
3. Supersonic stealthy replacement for F-16. Check
Despite its detractors, the F-35 is an excellent aircraft that is doing quite well in squadron usage. The USMC loves their B model, operating off of their mini carriers. The USAF is getting enough on the line that sustainment costs are bending down, and flyaway costs are cheaper than the newest F-16s that would get crushed by the F-35.
The only service that isn't as in love with the F-35 is the Navy. They've slowly been realizing that the short legs of the F-18 have hampered them in the Pacific. The F-35 has better range, but is still far shorter than older strike aircraft like the A-6.
To be clear I think the F35 is a very solid aircraft, but don’t gloss over the details.
The F35 is aiming to be both an air superiority and strike aircraft, and do electronic warfare and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, while being stealthy and cheaper than the F22.
Now add F18 missions like fighter escort and fleet air defense which add yet more demands.
You get less stealth, less speed, less range, less payload, and or fewer sensors etc than an aircraft dedicated to a smaller range of roles. Meanwhile you need to pay for all the capacity that aren’t particularly relevant when doing any specific mission.
Sure, generally being capable of Mach 2.2+ for example isn’t such a big deal. However, if you’re deep in enemy territory and low on munitions it’s quite valuable to quickly escape any reinforcements that show up. On the other hand when escorting a fleet all that extra engine is mostly wasted and costing you fuel.
Peer state war where everyone has Ferraris? Or at least fleets of Benzes, so you want to one up them with fleets of Ferraris.
Even without getting into a shooting war, you could argue your Ferraris will terrify the Benzes from even coming out to play, thus avoiding war. Not to mention the Toyotas and the Volkswagens.
That said, I know some people will argue a peer state war between superpowers (say, US, Russia, China, etc.) will inevitably escalate to nuclear. I don't claim to know enough to say how valid that is.
Also, at full production, the US is supposed to have a ridiculously overwhelming large zerg fleet of F-35s (more than 2000 between the branches, according to wikipedia). That totally eclipses anything planned by Russia or China for their own 5th gen fighters.
Building a handful of an experimental, envelope-pushing design is reasonable. Mass-producing hundreds of a mainline fighter is reasonable. Combining both in the same aircraft, and ramping up production before you've validated the design, always seemed crazy to me.
>So did the F35 fail because we spent too much? Depends on how much it saves us later.
It might not be a lot. The concept of flying Corvettes is strong, culturally and industrially, but it might be on the verge of becoming like cavalry with the advent of drone swarms.
Drone swarms that can counter fighter jets is a concept that makes no sense. At best you can make something like a guided missile that can loiter. But I can't really see much benefit to that. It would still require the same the avionics and performance as a guided missile. Not to mention stealth aircraft counter the concept even further.
But how do you translate that into hitting something going Mach 1 at 40k feet? A UAV capable of attacking a jet can exist. My point is that it would need to be a fully capable aircraft not something that can be produced cheaply and deployed in swarms. There's a lot of space in the sky.
The drone swarm concept is irrelevant to the high and fast fight, but very relevant to infantry and armour. Of course HN is getting it confused. '3D printed jets!' they cry.
However smart jets will be a thing, as evidenced by the Boeing Loyal Wingman program (awful name). The uninhabited jet will push further into the engagement envelope, pull higher Gs, risk SAM lock-on to take out the SAM, fly in the dust like Tornados used to. And it will get task guidance from the X band data link from a human piloted jet. But that UAV will likely be as expensive as a regular jet (more including development cost of AI tech, retrofitting remote control into other jets).
Swarms of loitering munitions make sense in countering mobile SAM sites, as the Syrians/Russians (in Syria) and Emiratis(in Libya) are finding out -- so many Pantsir-S (SA-22) point defence systems destroyed by Turkish drones. So how long before S-400 systems (long range AAAD) get eaten?
The failure of Pantsir in Libya has been fascinating. One has to wonder if it's a failure in design/tech or in training and operations? Same with the drones that were used with impunity in Nagorno-Karabakh. I also wonder if the Russian's have been hyping their SAM systems too much. Not that they're not formidable, but they often seem to make their A2AD systems sound impenetrable.
If you're flying an Apache and you crest a hill and there's a ZSU or an SA-9 on the other side that is a brown pants situation. Obviously you try everything possible to avoid that engagement envelope. But with a drone it is feasible to push harder.
It's possible that the Pantsir-S export firmware isn't as good, but being totally spanked can't be good for export sales. The Turkish drones (eg Bayraktar TB2) have the indigenous KORAL EW system for both sensing and jamming, and given the platform SWaP constraints it must be pretty smart, though I don't know how they are preventing algorithm compromise given drones get shot down fairly often. Crypto presumably.
Given the relatively static setup, it is likely that the positions of the SAM sites is heavily compromised via local informants, leakage from cell phones and aerial surveillance. And rather than integrated A2AD it is probably more isolated sites. But still very impressive for a 659kg drone to be able to take them out.
They can be produced cheaply because all of the life support, human facing controls, and armoring aren't included. This reduces weight which shrinks the airframe and reduces operational costs significantly.
The largest cost for a fighter is its engine, followed by radar and weaponry. The cost for including a human is a nit. And there isn't any armor in modern fighters. The A-10 has titanium , but fighter jets don't pack anything like that.
There's dollar cost, and then there's political cost. A pilot shot down and killed or captured is a political liability and military planners have to take that into account when deploying manned aircraft vs drones.
Agreed, but that doesn't mean that an autonomous aircraft will be cheap simply because it lacks a pilot. The cost for a Global Hawk is north of $250M, and it sure isn't a fighter bomber.
How do you get those UAV's there? The combat radius of a F-35A (without drop tanks or refueling) is 1000km's. If this UAV is going to travel 1000km's then it's going to be quite big, expensive, and likely easy pickings for defending F-35's. If it's carried by something then that something too would be an easy target and would probably need to be escorted by something which would fight said fighter jets.
Hence counter-swarm swarms. Either single use, fired from a canister, or with their own little runways, flying low level CAP and ready launch at any time, unsleeping vigilance. Plus a bunch of CIWS (C-RAM), which are very effective despite scaring the fuck out of you as they tear open a portal to hell.
Indeed.. There was another article today about how onboard systems saved 2 fighter pilots that passed out.
I was wondering even then, why do we still put pilots in these things? They'll fare better on their own and will have less performance constraints.
I think part of it is the military adolation of the fighter pilot. Probably not the only reason though, a hacked swarm of armed drones is a frightening prospect.
You put a pilot in there because we are nowhere near giving an autonomous drone command authority on a kill. The pilot is also smarter than any UAV and has situational awareness that even a drone ground control station lacks. Oh yeah, and that F-35 can be commanding portions of that swarm of armed drones.
I guess along the way, the activity of designing and building the plane became more important than the outcome / functionality of the plane itself.
You see it all the time in projects. People look busy and seem like they're building things, so some progress must be happening. Or is it?
Blink an eye, and in a couple years you unwittingly accumulated a platform that served to fulfill every random team's desire to load on requirements, systems, electronics, sensors ("go find out what people want!"), with very few people making the countervailing decision to trade off / cut things for an overall desired outcome ("what do they actually demonstrate -- not say -- they need?").
Well, they didn't have to pay for it, so there was no harm in giving their requirements. And if the actual willing payor (Congress) had little incentive (or technical chops) to be ruthless about costs or actual useful output, well then there's few checks on that happening. Until some top level general says, "why aren't these hugely expensive planes being used like we thought they would be?" Too late.
I guess it kept people employed in the meantime. How can you cut 10% of the workforce in Huntsville when the representative sits on the Armed Services committee? (I don't know that, but just for example...) Which, sometimes, is a national goal in itself for strategic purposes.
It might be good though, to have a more deliberate plan about these kinds of things, if that's the goal.
> How can you cut 10% of the workforce in Huntsville when the representative sits on the Armed Services committee? (I don't know that, but just for example...)
Close. Alabama Senator Shelby is the Chairman of the Committee on Appropriations and the Chairman of its Defense Subcommittee.
Edit: My apologies. Was the chairman. See nobody's comment below.
I have the same problem with my personal projects. I have one project I've been in a "groove" on for several months, and now that it is close to complete I'm having an existential crisis, wondering what the point of the project was in the first place.
"the activity of designing and building the plane became more important than the outcome / functionality of the plane itself."
Yes. After a while was it about building the plane or keeping the aerospace industry employed and engaged? The design tried to do everything for everyone and fulfill every Colonel's dream feature and mission. Its the ultimate story of feature creep.
Youhave to maintian the industrial base, so. To maintain the stuff for the next decades and replace any losses. Hard during peace time. In preparation of a war of attritition against an equal oponent close to impossible. How do you maintain the necessary base to produce hundreds of jets, F-35s or whatever Gen 5, once all have been delivered? That aspect alone is critical for the success of such a weapon system. It doesn't help to have a couple of hundred Gen 6 fighters if you cannot replace them in a war against someone who can replace his gen 4/4+ jets.
I think the original requirements were unreasonable. They wanted a single plane that could support the Air Force, the Navy, and the Marines. This was too hard, so they compromised on a platform that could be adapted to multiple uses, but even that was a bad idea.
Keep in mind that it's very difficult to compare prices like this, because you're buying a lot more than just the aircraft. There's spare parts, maintenance equipment, and simulators. The prices are also going to vary based on the procurement schedule: ordering 12 planes to arrive in the next 6 months is going to be more expensive than requesting one plane arrive each month for the next year. Countries also try to include some sort of technology sharing or shared production deals, where the company agrees to build some of the parts or components in the host country. This is often done to benefit the country's domestic arms industry (NB: this isn't necessarily nefarious, there are plenty of benefits to having a good domestic arms industry. It means your weapons and components are made locally, so they can't be intercepted in a time of war and your enemy can't use diplomacy to cut you off from your supplier. And other countries tend to have export restrictions, so that the top-of-the-line equipment their companies make won't be available to others.)
Buying weapons from your global security partners is part of a larger geopolitical picture/strategy. The cost is almost secondary. Look at who the US sells weapons to, what countries are banned by us weapons export ban laws. Look at who Russia sells weapons to. There is not a whole lot of overlap between the two countries.
Posting countries and dollar figures is part of the picture, but does not tell the whole story.
And when there is an overlap, people freak out. Just take Turkey as an example. They almost got kcked out of the F-35 program after buying Russion air defence systems. The US feared the Russians could learn too much about the F-35.
Brazil's purchase from Saab includes technology transfer.
The United States bid on this contract with the F/A-18E. I can't imagine the U.S. approving the sale of F-35 technology to Brazil at any reasonable price.
Someone else mentioned a few of the costs not taken into account, such as the Navy needing to spend money they didn't initially plan on spending so the heat of the F-35B doesn't damage the flight deck of the amphib ships. Those had been built to expect the heat of the A/V-8B which is significantly less than what comes out of the tailpipe of the F-35.
A $10 billion investment in anti aircraft missiles that forces a $100 billion investment in aircraft instead of schools and semiconductor fabs is great ROI for an adversarial nation state that knows their government would be wiped off the face of the planet if they ever decided to use them.
Not really the case for the USA. Its military is way larger than needed for defensive purposes. Heck it isnt even threatened by invasion by any of those countries.
Where's the quote from the Air Force saying the F-35 failed? There is none. As far as I can tell this article is just misrepresenting a quote to push a narrative.
I took his quotes about how the F-35 is now a high end boutique plane instead of the replacement for everything. The Air Force changed the F-35's designation, which the author takes as a tacit admission of failure. How else would you read the Air Force's statement? "That plane that was supposed to replace all our planes will only replace a few of our planes. We need a new plane to replace all the rest."
Shocked that a project that started out in 1993 would change goals? That requirements would change as both the political/military environment as well as technology changed? It's like saying the B-1 bomber was a failure because we're sending them to the boneyard.
And this is not to mention that the Air Force ALWAYS wants something new and shiny.
It's an inference. The author is saying that because the Air Force is pursuing a new plane with the same fundamental goals that launched the F-35 program, then the F-35 evidently failed to deliver. He's saying they're really just asking for a do-over.
> Instead of ordering fresh F-16s, he said, the Air Force should initiate a “clean-sheet design” for a new low-end fighter. Brown’s comments are a tacit admission that the F-35 has failed.
(Emphasis mine. Tacit means "implied without being stated".)
> The F-35 is a Ferrari, Brown told reporters last Wednesday
It became a Ferrari due to feature creep and an enormously complex and expensive technology stack. The F-16 is not a Ferrari and NATO needs a multirole single-seat fighter that is affordable to purchase and fly.
My most charitable view is the F-35 became a jobs program for Lockheed Martin and subcontractors. People were trained and (allegedly) useful technology was developed. But the price tag appears unreasonable by an order of magnitude, and this puts no accountability on the program management or people signing the checks.
As for arguments about technology trickling down from the F-35:
* The argument needs evidence. I've seen no attempt to identify the value of the technologies developed against the time and money spent.
* Too much time was surely spent on integration and one-off details specific to the F-35 platform, and this is sunk cost unlikely to be recovered in future platforms designed by new teams.
The US has done this before, they had a winner with the F5E/F-20 Tigershark back in the day, they could have sold those to everyone but they killed the program to boost F16 sales.
It was cheap to buy, cheap to run (like really cheap for the capability which in the case of the F20 matched F16’s of the era) but because the USAF didn’t want to buy them it got cut off at the knees.
Damn thing has a thrust to weight ratio of 1.16 to 1 (it could accelerate in a vertical climb) and do Mach 2, largely because they shoved a single F18 engine in to replace the two much older engines the F5 had.
This is just another sign that the US defense establishment has opened its eyes to the reality that the US could lose a war of attrition against a major power. We have focused too much on high tech weaponry, and we're now vulnerable to being overwhelmed by large numbers of low tech enemies. It doesn't matter if your fighters have a kill ratio of 10:1 if your enemy can replace those 10 fighters faster than each one of yours that you lose.
Just because you can replace those 10 fighters faster doesn't mean you can replace the pilots with equivalently good ones as quickly.
Great power wars in the modern era will have some of the most decisive action happen far sooner than you can get into production capacity battles. At which point one side will lob several hypersonic missiles into the shipyards, factories, and fabs of their opponents and the ability to replace lost platforms will have been neutralized.
You don't need to replace 10 excellent pilots with 10 good pilots to win a war of attrition. You just need 10 pilots that can fly, lock a missile and fire. Because if you're losing 10 planes to every 1 that you're killing the life expectancy of any pilot is going to be really low period.
Counterpoints:
1 - Most critical infrastructure is located far inland away from areas that are vulnerable to cruise missiles and the like.
2 - Hypersonic missiles are mostly vaporware still today. Uncertain if people would even use them, as there's a significant risk of escalation to a full nuclear exchange.
3 - Critical infrastructure can be built faster today than it ever could be in the past. Most countries have stockpiles of critical strategic goods with the understanding that they would be able to stand up their own factories before those stockpiles were depleted.
>You don't need to replace 10 excellent pilots with 10 good pilots to win a war of attrition. You just need 10 pilots that can fly, lock a missile and fire.
That's not how it works. The F35 will detect those pilots far sooner than they will detect it and shoot them down before they even see them. Combine a battle space with dozens of MALD decoys flying around drawing shots, those poor pilots would have never had a chance because the F-35 pilots would never give their enemy the chance to shoot at them in the first place.
> Most critical infrastructure is located far inland away from areas that are vulnerable to cruise missiles and the like
I can't find the map now, but just about all of China is within reach of US cruise missiles launched from bombers if the need would arise.
> Critical infrastructure can be built faster today than it ever could be in the past
You're not going to build a Fab overnight. If you knock out a radar factory, that's going to be offline for months. Same thing with a turbine factory.
What I don't think you also appreciate is that of all planes to try to claim that someone could win a production race against, the F35 is a very poor target. There are already produced at rates of ~130 per year and expected to rise to 180. There is no existing line that is manufacturing aircraft that comes close. Not only is US Air power technologically superior but they have the numbers.
> That's not how it works. The F35 will detect those pilots far sooner than they will detect it and shoot them down before they even see them. Combine a battle space with dozens of MALD decoys flying around drawing shots, those poor pilots would have never had a chance because the F-35 pilots would never give their enemy the chance to shoot at them in the first place.
It matters when we're talking about full scale war between major powers. For some context, the US alone built 85,000 planes at the height of WW2 in one year alone. Granted planes back then were much simpler, but industrial processes have significantly improved. It's reasonable to say that the Chinese could produce 10,000+ 3rd or 4th gen fighters per year. Even at ridiculous kill ratios of 100:1 for each F22 and F35 it's easy to see that the balance of power would be pretty tenuous there. If the US wants to decisively win, it needs to ensure surge production capacity of up to several thousand stealth fighters per year.
Since the US let the INF lapse it will certainly build longer range cruise missiles. The entirety of mainland China will certainly be within range of those missiles from a variety of platforms within a few years if not sooner.
Not overnight, but it can be done.
Generals in every war for the last 150 years have been sure that technology would let them break the back of their opponents in record time. The reality is that in almost every case wars turn into long drawn out affairs that rarely go as well as one side had hoped before the conflict started.
> It's reasonable to say that the Chinese could produce 10,000+ 3rd or 4th gen fighters per year.
No it isn't, and it wouldn't most certainly would not maintain any of that capability within a few months of a conflict.
I'm sorry but this line of thinking is simply out of date. The proof is in the pudding: the Chinese themselves are not massing loads of cheap platforms, they're throwing everything into the J-20, putting an enormous amount of effort into fewer more expensive platforms. Just look at their navy. They have cheap catamarans by the dozens. Instead of building hundreds or thousands of those, they're putting serious investments into building large surface vessels which attempt to match America Burke class destroyers.
You seem to be under the impression that if, say China has 10,000 jets to 1,000 American jets where the American jets enjoy a 10:1 advantage that they would at a stalemate. That's just not true.
The CCP watched the first Gulf War with horror as they saw technologically superior American forces wipe out division after division of war veteran Iraqi troops. Their doctrine then was one similar to Iraq, relying on larger less sophisticated forces. The CCP's since trillions of dollars in investments in matching American capability is their assessment of that previous doctrine.
There is a presentation, given by a Ukraine-Russia war observer to new officers at a US academy. The guy had talks with Ukraine generals and was analyzing the war.
He said that the ukraine air force was broken and destroyed by the russian system. The same thing happend to Israel, where at the time they had one of the best air force.
Any planes and helicopters werr forced to fly really, really low because of the S300 and S400. The information of a incoming object was given to a mobile squad who where anticipating and waiting for the plane. Then they simply shoot the plane down from atleast two sites with their portable and advanced SAMs.
He also said, that the US is not ready for that kind of war and is not trained for it. The US had always had the assumption of a given air superiority in any conflict. But air superiority is not given, if fighting close to Russia or China. And the russian system showed how easy it would be to contest it. For that reason, the US would lose air superiority in a conflict close to russian border and because you can't always count on stealth fighters, they are too unreliable, specially if fighting far away without a secured air base close to the conflict.
>The same thing happend to Israel, where at the time they had one of the best air force.
When are we talking now? Because the Israeli's have destroyed numerous Syrian owned cutting edge Russian SAM's using non stealthy F-16's.
>He also said, that the US is not ready for that kind of war and is not trained for it.
The US own S300's which they have trained against. The F35 is practically purposefully designed to counter Russian SAM capability in order to fight in contested airspace. And it is exceedingly good at it. There is no country in the world which is better at SEAD than the US.
> And the russian system showed how easy it would be to contest it. For that reason, the US would lose air superiority in a conflict close to russian border and because you can't always count on stealth fighters, they are too unreliable, specially if fighting far away without a secured air base close to the conflict.
This is quite difficult to take on face value as nothing more than laughable. Russian SAM capabilities have been utterly embarrassing in their performance in Syria.
The biggest problem the US has as far as fighting for air superiority would be fighting near China due to the range of China's A2AD capabilities which would likely flatten just about every runway within range. But that's what the USAF's tanker fleet is for. Ultimately NGAD will provide the range required to neutralize that problem.
And afford to replace them. Just take the UH-1, one engine helicopter of the Vietnam era. One engine, because a second one was considerd waste given the short service live of these birds in Vietnam. And now we have 100 million dollar jets...
F-35 had the same fundamental problems as the Space Shuttle.
High level requirements: Dog fighting, close in air support, stealth, long range, automatic weapon systems, VTOL variant.
It was said many times over the decade but this plane has no specialization, so it sucks at everything. F-16's can beat it in a dogfight, A-10's are better close support, etc etc.
The Space Shuttle was rightfully cancelled (Still, I was sad) because it was a bucket of requirements that had huge reliability and cost problems.
Don't worry, this will repeat itself. A bunch of specialized tools exist and then someone says "I can build you a swiss army knife" and someone high up gets sold the dream of the multi-function tool. "It's gonna solve all our problems, you'll see..."
The multi-function tool looks f'ing fantastic on paper. It does everything! Until you put it up against actual specialized hardware and then decision makers say "ohhhhh yeah that's why we did it like that..."
I'm not a military expert, but just as a civilian tired of seeing my taxes wasted, doesn't the US military need to be completely reimagined anyway? Who is it built to defend against?
As an example - the flyover at Super Bowl 55. Terrifying air power that could wipe out a civilization, but those bombers don't stop some rogue idiots from storming the Capitol, or any number of foreign and domestic hacking threats.
The test of a combat aircraft is in combat. Nobody will give a fuck what the programme cost or that it couldn’t do X if it gives you a decisive advantage in war.
It’s fashionable to hate on the F-35, but let’s face it: if the allies have to establish air superiority somewhere in the world, they will be using F-35s to do so, and I’m not aware that anyone has the platform to stop them.
My question would be: if you buy N drones for price of one F-35, do you get better military value for your money or not?
At the very least, N drones can't be destroyed at once (unless stored really carelessly) and can be individually specialized in a way that provides wider spectrum of capabilities.
A massive bonus: pilotless aircraft can perform manoeuvres unsurvivable for humans, and the ability to maneuver was always a strong point in the air.
When I go looking for a source I see a lot of "may be" and "soon will" but I've heard one capability of the F-35 is to command drones without connection to base stations, since radio relays can become (lets say) unreliable in open war. There are also offensive capabilities against enemy drones, remember when Iran landed a US drone by hacking it? Whose to say that any drones in the vicinity of an F-35 aren't captured mid-flight and turned against their own team?
The radio troubles that you mention is probably the main reason why the US military is so interested in Starlink. Few potential opponents have the capability to destroy Starlink, or even jam it thoroughly.
It’s obviously possible to imagine a scenario where you have a massive number of drones, the question would be whether you could channel that into tactics that would give you an advantage. Numeric superiority is sometimes useful, and sometimes a liability.
The F-35 currently has a massive advantage over cutting edge drones - a MK I brain in control of the airframe that cannot be jammed. Its electronic warfare capabilities could create havoc for the drone swarm and deny the enemy remote sensing etc.
Until there’s actual conflict though, it’s pretty much like asking whether Mike Tyson or Bruce Lee would win in a fight :)
Bruce lee would win a street fight easily. A boxing match ? Mike tyson will probably be better at.
It doesn't have to be theoretical at all. The air force can just easily have mock battles v drones to evaluate performance if they wanted to.
The speed of autonomous avaition navigation development is far exceeding the speed of innovation in traditional nth generation fighter planes. Inherently the human will always be slower. The drone will have higher manuverbilty has high g will not be a factor. Imprvoing the algorithms to match or improve human response will happen sooner or later (it is not hard AGI category of problem). The drones are cheaper and easier to manufacture then fighter planes or pilots trained for this kind of high end aircraft.
AFAIK the electronic warfare capabilities of f35 are not designed towards drones. Even then performance against cluster of drones is different matter altogether.
These drones themselves are rather expensive, and you need large numbers of them. Also, smaller drones would tend to be expendable one-use things. But sill that's what most concepts call for today. These concepts do need refinement, so, especially on the cost side. An for continued use in a conventional conflict.
Empires fall from within. Yes, nobody will stop the US with military, and nobody would try because that's not how you win. You don't need a big military to crush the fragile supply chain that a plane like this demands.
I don’t really understand this line of reasoning; it’s not like the person bearing the most rudimentary weapons is at an advantage? What’s the plan, lose in aerial combat but win in a fist fight?
Who says it has a fragile supply chain anyway? It certainly has a complex one, but then so do things like nuclear weapons and nobody is clamouring to abandon them on that basis. Protecting that chain and the logistics around it is a staple of military operations. It’s not like someone is going to surprise them by going after supply chains.
I think the point is that if you want to harm a nation you have various avenues of attack of which overt military action is only one.
If the US is unbeatable militarily then you, as a poorer advesary, don't try to match it, you use one of the other avenues like causing political de-stabilisation for example, interfere with elections maybe.
Therefore is the military persuing "perfect" at high expense instead of "good enough" at a lower expense which would still be good enough to fulfil its requirements.
They must have A/B tested the title to see what gets the most smug confirmation bias clicks (title is clearly not intended to optimize for outrage clicks so what else could it be).
The whole article is about the history of the program, why it costs so much and what the options are going forward. If you squint you can make it seem like failure but the article does not make that claim.
The NGAD Prototype is built upon some of the technology that the F-35 pioneered. The F-35 now is and has been used as an airframe to test more advanced technologies. Like distributed computing and autonomous technologies.
So, it's reasonable to say that NGAD may not be possible if it weren't for the F-35. I'd argue this is less about the F-35's shortcomings and more about the fact that we're seeing a dramatic change in air war-machine design, development, and theory.
In defense news below, you can see them speak (in meta) about how the NGAD Prototype was built. Some of those things were pioneered on the F-35.
Having also seen your comments elsewhere this thread, I'm wondering: Did you have a personal stake in the F-35?
"Failed" things nearly always embody good and great ideas that go on to be used in successful things. For example, the Newton was clearly a failure, and yet there are echos of it all over today's phones and tablets.
>*Like distributed computing and autonomous technologies.*
Can you expound on this? Why is distributed computing neeeded - is it simply such that "if hit in this location, there are backups that can handle the load?"
For autonomous, what relief does this bring to the pilot? Targeting? Nav? Trim?
There's a claim in the article that it's too difficult to update the software on the F16s. Could someone (ideally with military aircraft software experience) comment on this? I don't understand -- I would think that software would be the easiest (but not necessarily cheapest) thing to upgrade. Computers have only gotten smaller and faster.
I can't comment from the perspective of the F16 specifically, but from experience working on upgrade efforts of military and IC ground processing systems, the challenge is the legacy systems are very tightly coupled to the hardware. They make strong assumptions about register size and number, bus bandwidth, filesystem block size, all kinds of things that software developers rarely think about any more, but things that mean the software is only going to run on the hardware it's currently running on, and when the hardware vendor hasn't even sold that product for over a decade, I've seen government programs literally scrounge eBay to find replacement parts. So upgrading the software isn't just a matter of installing an upgrade. It's a total from the ground up rewrite and also requires new hardware.
Worked around F16's and F22's when I was in and can attest that this is the source of the issue for upgrades. Everything in the software is so tightly coupled to the hardware that updating the F16's would be a monumental effort. The difference between a 4th and 5th generation air frame are night and day in terms of software capabilities. Hell, even the different between 5th generation jets can be massive on the software side such as the gap between F22 vs F35 the later being far more advanced on the software side.
Please forgive my ignorance of military processes involved.
Could that be addressed by old software trick of modularising components - software and hardware-alike - and rely on some extensive semi-open protocols to connect these? I think car manufacturers have faced that at some time in the past, even inside single manufacturer (not sure if they have solved it completely). Sounds like they need Ada-like project, but for hardware side.
Full disclosure: I don't work in defense, but I've read Wikipedia.
>>> I can't comment from the perspective of the F16 specifically, but from experience working on upgrade efforts of military and IC ground processing systems, the challenge is the legacy systems are very tightly coupled to the hardware. They make strong assumptions about register size and number, bus bandwidth, filesystem block size, all kinds of things...
>> Worked around F16's and F22's when I was in and can attest that this is the source of the issue for upgrades. Everything in the software is so tightly coupled to the hardware that updating the F16's would be a monumental effort.
> Could that be addressed by old software trick of modularising components - software and hardware-alike - and rely on some extensive semi-open protocols to connect these?
I think the military has already done that to a degree, see:
It sounds like there are two issues: 1) protocols and standards themselves can become obsolete, so it's like updating Apple II DOS to read a ZFS array (or a modern Mac to work with 5 1/4 floppy drives).
Thank you. I guess it is a good start. But, as a solution - develop new protocols and standards, and declare that military does not buy _anything_ that does not interoperate on these standards, no matter how advanced your shit is?
> Thank you. I guess it is a good start. But, as a solution - develop new protocols and standards, and declare that military does not buy _anything_ that does not interoperate on these standards, no matter how advanced your shit is?
But that wouldn't likely make it any easier to update the software. Say the military makes the PowerPC ISA (e.g. RAD750 processor) and IEEE_1394 bus the new standards. If you have to port a program written to run on a MIL-STD-1750A processor with a MIL-STD-1553 data bus, you're dealing with an entirely different ISA, new drivers, and probably a lot of behavioral differences between the old and new bus behaviors.
And given this is aerospace, some options for dealing with those differences (e.g. emulators) may be totally off the table (for instance, I think I read somewhere that coding standards for one of the recent US fighters forbids dynamic memory allocation).
How well did that work? Well: "The Marine Corps, tired of waiting for new equipment, built its own battlefield network system for the war in Iraq, called CONDOR—based on off-the-shelf satellite phone and encrypted WiFi technology."
Maybe, but it isn't easy. Often the code is written around the performance of the hardware in question. Thus you still have to rewrite all the software before any new hardware can be used. Or write an emulator that is cycle perfect to hard real time standards. Neither is cheap or easy.
I know of companies (I can't talk about which) that spent a few billion dollars trying to replace old hardware, only to abandon the track taken and have to start over. All the while the stores of the obsolete and no longer made CPU are getting smaller and smaller. All this for a controller that marketing doesn't see any reason to add more features so they can't even justify some off the cost as new features.
The F22 and F35 are far more modular. No more soldering irons and oscilloscopes were needed in the shop after the upgrade. Just swap out the module and you're good to go. Can't go into too much more detail than that.
I don't think so.. Probably less safe as software in the 80s was definitely built with less of a focus on digital security. Back in those days telnet was considered secure :)
New F16's have new CPU's and millions of lines of new code. The mission processors have been updated many times over the years.
And new radars and sensors and weapons. And data link.
The airframe is old and non-stealthy. It also carries a limited amount of bombs / missiles.
A device that's faster and slicker than everything else. That has a version that can fly vertically.
If you're in the sf bay area, go take a tour of the SS Jeremiah O'Brien when things reopen. It's a WWII Liberty Ship freighter. They built well over 2000 of these things, fast, and cheap, to haul military stuff from continent to continent. They had to be fast to build: many were needed. They had to be reasonably cheap: the enemy sank many of them.
And, look at the design of this here Hacker News web app. Functional. High capacity. Simple.
Why can't US weapons factories build stuff like liberty ships and simple web sites, that work and are serviceable?
Too many committees? Too many senators? Unwillingness to tell some branch of the service (the Marines) to use helicopters? Another branch (the Navy's aircraft-carrier service) to use purpose-built planes?
I wonder if engineering and business schools should reintroduce this thing I was taught in college. "Any clod can build something heavy for a dollar. It takes skill and dedication to build something light for a quarter."
Arguably it is the wrong strategy, especially if the unspoken possibility of war with China becomes a spoken one. The USA has an edge in raw technological prowess. The F-35 plays to that strength, with tons of advanced technology that took a long time to master and develop. Setting up factories that can churn out cheap planes en-masse is certainly possible and if the USA found itself in a war of attrition it'd probably do that surprisingly fast. But why get into such a situation, in which the US would have no real advantage and perhaps some disadvantages, when it can compete on pure tech and build one plane that can take out many of the opponents cheap planes?
The funniest anecdote about the F-35 I like to tell is this: the Air Force decided the F-22 was too expensive, they needed something cheaper, so they made the F-35. The F-35 ended up being the most expensive weapons program in human history.
Now, I understand that is oversimplifying things, bending the truth a little, and omitting crucial details... but it's not that wrong.
Is it better for the prospect of peace if the U.S. and its adversaries all have large fleets of cheap warplanes or small fleets of expensive ones? I would argue that the F-35 is not only very expensive for the U.S., but has actually increased the cost of fielding fighter jets (as well as air defense systems) for the entire world. And therefore it has made it more expensive to fight a war for every country. Now ask yourself would you rather live in a world where the cost of wars is lower or higher?
Russia, China, India, Pakistan, and several other countries all have 5th gen/stealth fighters under development. Most at least look to have been heavily “inspired” by the F-35/F-22. These new fighters are all quite costly for their respective countries. It’s basically the international military version of “keeping up with the Joneses”.
What a complete load of BS. The program was expensive, but as soon as someone tells you that $100m for brand new fighter is expensive, you know that they're either lying or don't know what they're talking about.
Edit: None of you, including me, have enough understanding of this topic to even begin to discuss it in a serious manner. Have you ever heard some technically illiterate family members debate Apple vs Microsoft vs Dell computers? That's what you all sound like right now.
The problems with the F-35 feel analogous to problems we face in the software industry.
At the implementation level, we tend to underestimate the cost of making a system extensible and "future-proof", and underestimate the value of implementing a narrowly focused system from scratch.
At the specification level, product managers too often are willing to add every feature that big customers request.
If the primary purpose was to funnel money from you -> .mil -> military industrial complex it succeed wildly beyond all expectations. Otherwise not so much.
I lived and worked very close to Eglin Air Force base where all the initial F35's went. Many Air Force people thought the primary design decisions were to spend money and little else.
But there's a reason to funnel that money besides padding pockets: the nominal reason (and not a bad one if you are not a full pacifist) is to retain development capability for the next time you actually do need a military aviation innovation burst. And arguably this wasn't really successful. Chances are that rebuilding capability from a hypothetical starved state would yield better results than restoring efficiency from the comically fattened state they got.
> the nominal reason (and not a bad one if you are not a full pacifist) is to retain development capability for the next time
Is the F-35 a good example of what we want our next aircraft to be? It seems to me that we now have a whole development infrastructure set up to build expensive, buggy aircraft. That "development capability" that we've retained isn't a good one.
Given the type of both recent and predicted conflicts that the US has been involved with, it's not 100% clear to me that the US needs yet another aircraft. That is, fighting in proxy wars or fighting in countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, or Syria don't need anything new. And fighting a sophisticated enemy would probably ramp up to nuclear deterrents and diplomacy anyway...fighters wouldn't make a notable difference in that kind of war.
Won't happen, but it seems like they should just buy fighters from allies where the F-35 isn't a good fit.
China, so we can defend Taiwan without having to go nuclear to do it. Russia, over the rest of the Ukraine. Perhaps Iran, if we have to stop their nuclear program by force, or some other contingency.
It doesn't escalated because neither Moscow nor DC are willing to go nuclear over Tallinn while Beijing is overwhelmingly inferior in their nuclear capability compared to either.
I don't know that we have a good historical example to confirm that. I remain skeptical that we could have direct fighting between American and Russian/Chinese soldiers/aircraft/etc and somehow keep that in a box. The Cuban missile crisis was insanely tense, and no real shots were exchanged.
One could argue that is the precicely the problem.
If there is no specific credible enemy to fight, there are no strict reguirements that MUST be met, so one makes the plane do everething, because you dont really know what you need.
Are fighter jets a necessity when we have drones? Other commenters bemoan the lack of technological progress in fighter jets, but a drone is capable of maneuvers that humans cannot survive, and the use of drones also limits the loss of pilot lives.
Investing money in drones over fighter jets seems like the cost effective move here. Flying the jet yourself is definitely cooler than doing it by remote control, but I don’t think it will make much sense in warfare in 20 years time. We have to skate to where the puck is going.
Drones aren't as cheap as you might think when you actually tally the total system cost, including ground systems; and the UAVs still have significant issues operating in various mixed airspaces. Take a look at the costing for General Atomics Predator and Northrop Grumman Global Hawk systems, as well as the issues the Germans have had with the latter.
First, not an expert, just armchair critic so take what I say with a large pinch of salt, but...
I think something US should take out of this is consider what Russia do with their monkey model strategy. Basically with something like tank/jet they do 2 models, one with all the bells and whistles and the other is a simple version.
This has 2 main uses;
1) Export market so they can sell simpler/cheaper and not share all tech. America does this somewhat but more on the tech protection side I believe.
2) Manufacturing output potential, so in a war countries win in the either the first strike or attrition. If you hit the attrition stage you want simplified options so factories can output faster vs the multiples the premium version take in time and resource.
If they had this, it might have given a low cost daily driver option while not forgoing the top end capability.
The other thing I thing Russia does I feel countries like mine (Australia) and other western nations should do more of is work out how to expand military into absorbing civilians. This way you can scale down the size generally whilst having solid plans on how to scale up quickly beyond the usual reserves. I've raised this before but people say military tech is too advanced. But I feel humans are smart and adaptable, I've little doubt if they look into this they would realise maybe women in their 60's (example/guess as far from normal military recruits) might make great radio operators with minimal training or drive supply lorries. Having this knowledge would give a huge force multiplier to armies if they want to scale fast and ideally help reduce the need for as large standing forces.
I think something US should take out of this is consider what Russia do with their monkey model strategy. Basically with something like tank/jet they do 2 models, one with all the bells and whistles and the other is a simple version.
> My armchair general understanding is that the requirement of the F-35B variant is responsible for a whale sized portion of the F-35's woes?
The desire for commonality between the A/B/C variants (notionally to reduce cost) is the big driver, but the B (STOVL) variant probably has the most difficult individual requirements.
It absolutely blows my mind how antiquate air force research is.
An effort to develp an array of remotely controlled C4 packing "kamikaze" drones that when produces in mass would cost about $1k each is infitnitely more interesting, and yet gov. spends this kind of money on over complicated technology.
Unless the Forbes author has inside information, the airforcemag article in no shape or fashion says the F35 is a failure. The airforcemag article quoted Gen Brown saying the combat commanders are using the F35 too much. And wearing out the available ENGINES. With a limited budget and the mission he he has to fulfill he wants a cheaper alternative that he can sends into low threat theaters. And preserve the F35 if and when the US must fight near peer enemies. Eg Russia and China.
Ah, the F-35 disinformation campaign continues. If you read the article you'll see that there is nothing substantiating the claim other than the author connecting yarn on pegboard.
My opinion here is the Air Force recognizes the cost overruns from the program mean they need to make sure the USA's "near peer rivals" (their words) are lulled into a false sense of security, As they won't be able to spend this money again for a good 20 years. China is 12-15 years behind, Russia maybe 3-5.
An incredible amount of risk was undertaken in the project. Hopefully the lessons learned make future development much cheaper, as nothing like the aircraft has ever taken to the skies.
You may end up with something that can not fly far, can not fly high, can not carry a big payload, can not dog-fight, has an insane maintenance requirement and may, or may not be invisible. No plane can be invisible by definition. It may or may not be invisible on specific radars. The F-35 was not build to fight Iraq or Iran. I was build to fight China or Russia. This makes it a big bet.
I don’t have much an opinion about the F-35 but one thing I have noticed:
A lot of people are mentioning Skunkworks planes like SR-71 and U-2. I don’t think that’s a fair comparison. Skunkworks basically built highly specialized prototypes that performed well within their intended use but were super expensive to maintain and couldn’t be deployed on a larger scale. I would compare them more to an F1 team that can build great cars quickly but need 20 people just to get them ready for a lap.
Building impressive prototypes is way easier than building something on large scale in an efficient way.
Again, I don’t know much about the F-35 but Skunkworks is not the model.
Is there any benefit for a multi-role fighter to have stealth? It seems like any applications where stealth is important, you might as well have a specialized air-superiority fighter.
That's a good point about the usefulness of stealth in general, but I don't think that applies for multi-role fighters. From what I understand, the main benefit of multi-role fighters is one of cost. You don't need to pay for a bunch of specialized planes during peacetime. The trade off is that they're not particularly great at anything, but that doesn't matter when your enemy is much weaker than you. In the F-35's case, stealth completely cancels out any cost-benefit of being multi-role.
1) Almost every fighter is now "multi-role." So the word really doesn't add any meaning.
2) Stealth is now table stakes for fighting a peer or near peer opponent. Modern A2AD systems are extremely difficult for non-stealth fighters and bombers to counter. Sure, you can soften them up with Tomahawks, but even those are starting to be less effective. (which is why the US has been developing JAASM and LRASM).
3) While stealth does add costs, especially in maintenance routines, compared to software and systems costs, it's not as significant. And stealth generally doesn't affect performance; the F-35 is an excellent aircraft in terms of range and maneuverability, as is the F-22, the Chinese J-20 and FC-31.
It's ironic the X-35 (Essentially F-35 prototype) came from the LM Skunkworks. The very same organization than once preached lean development. Kelly Johnson's [0] Rules of Management should be required reading for any project manager or contracting official.
Gee I never would have guessed that a one size fits all replacement for every F- aircraft (and more than a few A-‘s) in the inventory for every branch would be difficult.
It was a trillion dollar stimulus package (or welfare) directed at the good old military industrial complex, plus it helps placate the chicken hawks in Congress who wanted pork for their district. Like most weapon systems developed in peacetime with unclear use cases, it’s kind of just an expensive tech demo.
At the time they were the best production engines in the world. General Electric originally was competing with the Pratt and Whitney engine F-135, called the F-136 but that was since canceled. However they're is the GE Adaptive Cycle Engine that has since been developed which produces greater thrust while having the ability to also achieve greater fuel efficiency for greater range by changing it's characteristics.
If we are looking for 'affordable, lightweight fighters' to 'complement a small future fleet of' F35s sholdn't we just build a ton of uber cheap drones?
The F35 is supposed to have amazing networked situational awareness (idk the military terms) which seems like a great platform to control a fleet of slave drones?
Kind of like an aircraft carrier, surrounded by a lot of support.
The square-cube law implies some performance characteristics that only big-enough craft can fulfill, and at that size point you aren't saving money with "disposable" cheap-and-small drones. Specifically, air resistance scales with cross sectional area, while fuel storage and engine power output scales with volume. You can trade off fuel for engine power by making a more missile-like design, but then you're left with a conventional plane.
Like, this is the fundamental reason why ground-based missiles don't rule the skies. Aircraft can go high enough and travel fast enough that any intercept solution has you firing well before they've committed to flying into the effective range of the missile.
But wouldn't there still be a lot of savings for not having a human and all the controls that come with it - and maybe some more flexibility in design?
It sounds like they are looking for air-to-air replacement?
Not caring bombs saves a lot of weight and size.
Hell maybe even just do what terrorists have learned and make cheap kamikaze drones which are really fast and simply blow up.
This is just an attempt to get funding for aircraft that will be bad.
Any new aircraft they develop to be cheaper will suffer the same scope and budget creep that the F-35 did.
We won't send pilots out in planes that are known to have low survivability, so when the new aircraft is insufficiently stealthy/fast/survivable, more money will be spent to make it even worse than the F-35.
There's at least one proposal to get around this by adopting a foreign design like the Saab Gripen: http://www.stairwaypress.com/bookstore/american-gripen/ . The US could rename it the Freedom Chimera and manufacture it under license in Kentucky to manage the politics.
The Gripen is a fine aircraft, but introducing a foreign made aircraft into the USAF doesn't happen very often. I can only think of two examples, the Canberra bomber (B-57) and the Dauphin helicopter the Coast Guard bought in the 1980's.
Plus new-build F-16s would be better at most roles than the Gripen.
To quote Pierre Spray, one of the "Fighter Mafia" who had a hand in the design of the F-15 and drove the design of the F-16, the F-35 has been a massive success. What's not asked is "What is the mission of the F-35?" and in Spray's opinion the mission of the F-35 has been to drive funding to Lockheed.
Pierre Spray is also a luddite who vehemently rejects the concept of a multirole fighter. The F-16 he advocated for is not anywhere close to the actual F-16. If it were up to him the USAF fighter force would consist of low tech pure dogfighters that didn't have radars or long range missiles. To him the F-5 is the pinnacle of fighter technology.
His and the rest of the fighter mafia's extreme views are not popular within the defense community.
Preferring a fighter that doesn't rely on electronics isn't the same as being a luddite. Also, the state of electronics since the early/mid 70s has changed significantly: specifically they have become much lighter, compact, and reliable (none of the three were true when 45 years ago).
The main design driver shaping the F-16 was Boyd's energy–maneuverability theory. A major criticism of Sprey is that the F-15, which was crap according to Boyd's math is undefeated in combat. This is true but it also hasn't gone up against the best opposition in the world either. Boyd, Sprey, and the rest of the Fighter Mafia have been hated for decades in the Pentagon but history is showing that their predictions are accurate. One thing which is too classified to know at the moment is whether advances in missile technology have finally gotten to the point where electronics and firing first matter more than the ACM abilities of the pilot and the airframe to which they are strapped.
Either way, dismissing Spray as a luddite is an incorrect statement.
You still have to shoot down a fighter jet to disable it. An enemy can't hack the pilot remotely and safely land it on their own air strips, which has happened with drones.
I think if you make a fighter jet expend its missiles putting it in Winchester mode, and block its path to safety, thus expending its fuel... it drops from the sky. IMHO that would be a disable/defeat.
That seems like all the more reason to invest more in our cyber-warfare/security capabilities instead of dumping the money in machines designed to carry meat-bags.
> That seems like all the more reason to invest more in our cyber-warfare/security capabilities instead of dumping the money in machines designed to carry meat-bags.
We're talking about nation-state on nation-state hacking here. The kind of investment you're talking about would have to be absolutely massive, and even then it still might not do the job.
And even if that kind of investment in cyber-warfare/security capabilities is undertaken, the military isn't going to stop "dumping the money in machines designed to carry meat-bags" until after it's very clear the investment was successful. It's not realistic for a first rate to take the kind of risk you're talking about if it wants to remain first rate.
If the plane is connected to anything else, it can be hacked. Just because it hasn't been reported yet doesn't mean it's impossible or even that it hasn't happened.
> If the plane is connected to anything else, it can be hacked. Just because it hasn't been reported yet doesn't mean it's impossible or even that it hasn't happened.
And if that's a realized threat, the planes can be disconnected and still function at a reduced capacity. That's not true for drones.
It's like GPS. It's a really nice technology, but warplanes and weapons also have IMUs, so they'll still be effective if GPS has been jammed/knocked out.
And how did the work out for the british in WWI? They could have invested in tanks and used the Blitzkrieg one war early, but the officers loved their horses. Using horses was not a sign of health, it was sign of backward thinking and nearly cost them everything.
> This is our ‘high end’ [fighter], we want to make sure we don’t use it all for the low-end fight.
What exactly is a "low-end fight" when it comes to the USAF?
Seems to me like the real problem is the F-35 was built to be a do-it-all plane when it would make far more sense to have a more varied fleet of more cost-effective, purpose-built aircraft.
I do remember these discussions around FCAS, the French-German F-22 if you want. The concept called for a Gen 5+ stealth jet and supporting drones. The jet itself should also be a strike bomber. And then the official concept papers say, that these jets in engangement with comparable craft, will end up in close dog fights. Because both sides see each other rather late. In these dog fights, a dedicated air superiority jet will beat a multi-role strike bomber. They also want to have the strike bomber capabiliy covered by the drones. I was basically laughed at when I asked why the manned FCAS element would be anything else than a specialized dog fighter.
The Tucano several other comments have mentioned was a strong contender. The Scorpion also looked pretty great, and went from concept to first flight in just over two years:
Low end is Air to dirt against shepherds with rusty Kalashnikovs. The best plane for that is the A-10. Interestingly, exactly the plane the Army grunt and brass loves and the Air Force Brass wants to get it killed ASAP.
The best plane for that isn't a plane, but a helicopter which has better loitering time. Combine that with the range and speed of the Future Vertical Lift program proposals and there is no need for the A-10 in the future.
I know nothing about this, but could it not be things such as patrolling? Lots of hours in the air with little expectation of combat, but with readiness if need arises?
Probably the issue is that during wartime (and I think the Cold War counts) the object of a weapons program is to defend one’s country, whereas in the absence of any major foe the object of a weapons program is to spend money. From that standpoint the program was a spectacular success.
Fine in theory. In practice you know only in hindsight if you spent the money incorrectly. If you spend your money correctly that looks just like spending your money incorrectly and getting lucky in hindsight.
So we end up with a lot of politics where people say "I'm right, because [insert some factor that may or may not be relevant]", and then argue about who is right.
I think I read that this generation of fighter requires a lot of rare earth materials?
I wonder, in light of a shifting geopolitical situation, if the next generation of fighter might be a stab at something the west can build completely independently on it's own materials?
The people who brought us the F-35 want more money to build another new airplane? If the alternative is surrender, then I surrender without hesitation. The Air Force should just order fewer lattes, take a 20% budget cut, and do the best they can.
So, Israel flies lots of pilot hours and seems to think that the plane is a good deal.
The F-35 failed in its original goal of being lightweight, but is perhaps fine in the new goal of being a modern fancy fighter that dominate the sky. In which case, it has pivoted to become a success.
To extend their analogy, if you live near the Autobahn you would use your Ferrari daily?
It's hard to use Israel's purchase of the F-35 as proof that it's an excellent plant. I think it probably is, but FMS sales are hard to decipher; we give military aid to countries via FMS, but require that money to be spent on US produced equipment. We decided not to export the F-22 (which Israel would have definitely purchased), and the F-16 is a bit long in the tooth. So for their specific needs (stealth fighter-bomber) it might have been the best choice. And Israel negotiated a wide latitude of privileges that allows them to extensively modify the Adir.
Plus I don't think being "lightweight" was a goal of the JSF (or its predecessor JAST) program. Being more affordable than the F-22? Definitely.
= every American paid around $1000 for this failure.
These funds could have gone into schools, roads, social programmes, ... Instead they served to enrich the small crowd owning the defense industry, with little to show for it all.
Fifteen years after the F-35’s first flight, the Air Force has just 250 of the jets.
This approach is very typical of the UK MoD as well. Buy fewer than planned of an item to "save money" without understanding that the R&D cost is the same and will be spread over however many of them you buy. Then fatigue them to death because they are too few to meet the commitment, driving up maintenance costs and bringing forwards the date at which they will need to be replaced. Rinse and repeat.
The UK looks to be cutting its order from 138 to 48 F35s, but who knows what will be in next month's defence review...
It's quite simple. The successfull military programs are the ones building one thing to do one thing well. A-10, F-16, B-52. The Programs wanting to do everything in one System fail. F-35, Zumwalt, Eurofighter.
I'm not sure how the F-16 is an example of "building one thing to do one thing well," it's a great example of a multi-role fighter. Almost all combat aircraft developed in the last 30 years are multi-role aircraft too. And by what metric the Eurofighter is a failure?
I wouldn't pu the Eurofighte rin there. It is working just fine for the Brits and others. And is still a rather capable fighter, even if more dedocated strike aircraft, e.g. Tornado or a strike eagle, are slightly better in these roles.
I'm so glad you named these specific models/platforms. Thank you for your half-nut, as went with everyone else. Best post on Hacker News. Totally agreed.
Interestingly enough Wikipedia says that the request for proposals for the F16 happened in January 1972 and the first completed fighter was accepted in January 1979. That’s 7 years, without the use of computers.
The F-16 is as very interesting case and it's worth reading about it. It was intentionally built to be a single role aircraft and the people who wanted an effective airplane in that role effectively bypassed most of the politics that would have diluted it. So, yes, the F-16 is one of the great success stories of fighter plane development.
I'll have to disagree there. It's regarded as successful because it was all that was available. Pierre Sprey, John Boyd and Harry Hillaker envisioned a light weight, day only, radarless aircraft with no bomb hard points.
Yet the single-role F-16 was morphed into a bomb truck and was considered successful by block 70 or whatever in the late eighties. Hillaker said "if I had realized at the time that the airplane would have been used as a multimission, primarily an air-to-surface airplane as it is used now, I would have designed it differently".
So as a square in a round hole, it was made to work but it wasn't brilliant foresight or (early) development.
And it's arguable that the original vision for the LWF was mistaken. Its goal was to be able to counter the Warsaw Pact airforces, airframe for airframe in a quantitative battle. But the Soviets were in the process of introducing the Fulcrum that would have outclassed such a simple fighter. A radar-less aircraft would have relied upon GCI, which the Soviets would have been quite successful in jamming/spoofing.
I have an interesting old book (which is falling apart, sadly) about the F-16 and it's an interesting comparison with the main competitor at the time, the YF-17, which ultimately became the basis on which the F/A-18 was developed. Both very successful designs.
similar to the AR-15 platform -- it was proto'd, built, and adopted FAST. But in the decades following ... the US has floundered while troops use a 70 year old rifle (albeit with scopes and rails)
The F-35 failed from a certain institutional perspective by becoming a real plane. It is no longer a magic money pot where you could park your pet projects for funding.
In other industries, you would look for ways to cost-down the product. We often keep the same basic structure or components, but figure out less expensive ways to accomplish the same goals. Often, the revised product can be more durable and reliable too.
It is a shame that the incentives in weapons system development / purchase don't seem to help with this at all. It seems all the incentive is to make the product more and more expensive, and requiring more service.
The goal seems to have been to siphon as much money as possible to defense contractors while being politically unassailable, so I think it's succeeded admirably.
The us does not need new fighter jets. The current generation drones is enough.
If the us needs something it is cheaper and better air to air missiles. Not that there is anyone to fight anyways.
A drone with 2 guided missiles that can be lost with no human casualty is allot better than any human carrying fighter aircraft could every be. And it does not have to be fast cause 1. the missiles are fast 2. it does not matter if the drone is lost.
Hmm, If I were the Indian govt. I'd atleast attempt to sell the Tejas to the US. Engine is American anyway (GE-404), Israeli radar and avionics compatible with a lot of Western block missiles. Would be an interesting reversal of fortunes.
It's sad that the F-35 is in this state. The whole "sensor fusion" (no doubt, overhyped) sounded interesting. I am curious as to how well implemented the same system is on the SAAB Gripens.
No they are not. There are requirements for various configurations of planes (Single engine, Twin engine, stealth) and Tejas fills one of them. Besides they just ordered 83 from HAL. There is a Mark 2 also in the works , apart from newer twin engine designs.
> The 17-ton, non-stealthy F-16 is too difficult to upgrade with the latest software, Brown explained. Instead of ordering fresh F-16s, he said, the Air Force should initiate a “clean-sheet design” for a new low-end fighter.
It's more difficult to upgrade the F-16 systems than to design a whole new aircraft? I mean, maybe there are other reasons to design a new aircraft, but this doesn't sound like the whole story.
They could upgrade the systems all day long, but the fact remains that the F-16 is a pre-stealth airframe and it is simply the wrong shape. What the Air Force wants in a low end fighter is F-16 level systems in a new stealthy airframe.
Why start with a clean slate and develop a new plane? If the F-16 is still working, why not start with its design and upgrade the avionics and software?
One reason would be the age of the airframes. Technically, why not? But at a certain point you will need to compleely rebuild the airframes, like completely down to the last bolt and rivet. Only to still have an old airframe, in some sense. So new aircraft it is. And developing new enngines, avionics and software to put them into a new, and most likely modernized airframe, is frightingly close to a completly new aircraft design. And will give people the oppertunity to add features as well. And of course, because common sense doens't play a role in military development and procuremt for anything more complex than a Hummvee. Looking at the proposed Humvee replacements so...
It's hard enough to build something like the F-35 for one customer, let alone three. Especially when those three customers have wildly differing requirements. Not that it can't be done, but it can't be done they way they did it. Unless they rethink their approach, the next fighter is doomed to the same fate.
The Finnish air force is in the final stages on deciding the purchase of next-gen fighters to replace the aging F/A-18 Hornets. I wonder how this might affect the decision process.
(Currently on the short list are: F/A-18 EF Super Hornet, F-35A Lightning II, Dassault Rafale, Eurofighter Typhoon and JAS 39E/F Gripen.)
I dunno Lockheed Martin managed to put out a banger so it's not a total loss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF7x0ZIFeVc We at least got this instead of paying teachers more, or healthcare.
There's a fantastic book called Augustine's Laws where the eponymous author extrapolates trends in defense spending to reach the conclusion that "in the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one aircraft."
I'm sure Lockheed will give us a great deal on it though...
Why order more F-16s and miss out on all the rich contracting and design deal flow?
Plus because the length of development is longer than pharma's, nobody involved in kicking off the project will be around to deal with the deployment problems.
The F-16 was introduced in 1978 and no new F-16s have been purchased since 2001. Are you suggesting that they don't want new F-16s in 2021 because ... they want to make money? Isn't the simpler explanation that maybe a 42-year old design is out of date?
> Are you suggesting [...] they want to make money? Isn't the simpler explanation that maybe a 42-year old design is out of date?
I'm sorry I was too pithy. To answer your second question first:
Old aircraft are not inherently bad. The most famous case is the B-52, already in its sixties and when the current round of refurbishment completes (if it hasn't already) should continue fighting with airframes over a century old. The A-10 Thunderbolt (Warthog) is still in service despite many attempts to kill it as there is no replacement.
(Old aircraft aren't inherently good either; even the Harrier, despite being heavily used and not really having a replacement, eventually became too expensive to maintain)
The F-16 was brought up specifically in the article; the claim was that it is too difficult to upgrade its electronics, not that the airframe or engine were obsolete. Indeed the specific use case a new plane is being considered for is the kind of thing where an older, airworthy craft would be better (the station wagon vs Ferrari example from the article).
So for your first question, money: yes I am explicitly suggesting that. Without getting into the politics of consolidation in the US arms industry, since the B-1, weapons production has been structured in part as a jobs program (The B-1 was the first weapons system to explicitly have had its supply chain structured to have parts made in 100% of all congressional districts) while the purchasing procedures are so complex that they require ex military on the private sector side just to make them viable. That revolving door is not subject to any lobbying rules and is, TBH the only real retirement plan for senior officers below three star rank. And of course spending money on arms is always popular with the voters, as part of the "support the troops" slogan, even though the actual troopers, humans, get low pay, mixed-quality post-service health care (some amazingly excellent, other terrible) and are not protected against the depredations any number of predatory corporations while in the service. Oh, but that shiny gear shows off as well in the USA as it does in norks.
To be more charitable, generals and admirals also always want to push for the new and shiny because that's how they demonstrate status, in war and especially in peacetime. This is a social factor in all groups, this is merely how it manifests in military hierarchies world wide. Doesn't mean it's an effective use of funds nor that it necessarily improves warfighting (much less prevents it).
I think sea ships have less lifetime than these frames... I guess designers of B52 did a hella good job. Akin Nasa folks who have sent Mars rover "for just a couple months" :)
How does the F35 compare with something like the EuroFighter Typhoon? I know the F35 took a lot of the orders away from the Typhoon, but the Typhoon has already been quite successful in multiple modern conflicts?
(EDIT) Accidentally hit 'comment' before finishing.
So on one side, we have a program that costed > 406.5 Billions (2017) [¹] for a failed jet.
On the other side, we have the entire Apollo program that cost $156 billion (2018)[²], was stopped because too expensive. And we never have been able to go on the Moon since because "cost".
Decisions that lead to the usage of public money by governments is definitively a mystery.
I wish the Lobbyists of the Army/Lockheed Martin/Military complex could do a bit of training for NASA and the research sector. Something tell me humankind could benefit a lot from it.
Maybe the fighter mafia will finally get their way after all. For anyone interested in some behind the scenes of how fighters get developed I recommend the book "Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War."
F-35 is perhaps one of the ultimate "scope creep" stories, though a lot of military vehicles have the same problems (tanks come to mind). Every big wig wants some bell or whistle for their use case baked in.
It did not fail at providing money to the military-industrial-congressional complex. But of course we need more fighter jets instead of Medicare for all and UBI.
China is not going to send fighters over to Bomb the us mainland, this thing is totally unnecessary.
How are you sure someone isn't `going to send fighters over to Bomb the us mainland`?
I'm pretty sure no one is going to do that and yes we way overspend on the MIC but really sending militaries over to other countries was the status quo for almost as long as countries have existed.
There is no real reason to expect that will not happen again just because we are going on 80 years since anyone made a serious effort to do it. You could also argue that it has been 80 years because it was made so expensive to wage war that money/resources is no longer a reason to do it. There just isn't an ROI.
The US and NATO is so far ahead of China and Russia in the conventional fight it's comical.
No one outside of the US or its allies even has a blue-water Navy. China has ONE carrier and it's a pile of shit compared to what we have. We have 11 super carriers, add in the smaller ones and we have another 40 or so. That's not even counting the rest of NATO.
Let's not even get into to the backwater that is the PRC's air force.
Yeah they have 1.3 billion people. Big deal. How exactly do they get them over here?
Nuclear war, now that's a different story but having another cool bleeding-edge fighter jet isn't going to stop a full scale nuclear conflict. China and Russia have enough nukes they all might not make it to the continental US but it's enough to destroy us. We can certainly do the same. The basic game theory of MAD hasn't changed much in the past few decades.
There are multiple account of carriers being "sunk" during excersices by non-nuclear subs. Numbers still matter, and while the Russians and Chinese are't he best in force projection, the Chinese not yet, neither one is to be triffeled with in their backyards.
What I am saying is that if they do we have a backup of about 40-50 more. And that's not even counting Nato.
Or the fact that hundreds of other ships and subs led by Navy folks that are far better trained and with better equipment than anything China or Russia could ever hope to compete with in the next 15-20 years at best.
My point isn't that China can't give us a bloody nose or two, it's just that they are so far behind the NATO force's militaries that we don't need to waste another few trillion on the latest greatest tech.
The total costs to keep all F-35s in the air until 2070 (likely after you and I are dead and in the ground), would not even cover 6 months of Medicare for all or UBI. Not sure how you can draw such an equivalence.
I just took Bernie Sander's estimate, which looks like it comes from Yale. His website says $4.7 Trillion per year. But you can really take any estimate out there, and it wouldn't change my point.
You could take the entire defense budget, and the defense budget from every other country in the world, and you would be less than 50% of the funding you would need for a single year of Medicare for all. The US spends about $3.6 trillion per year on health care. I have no idea what UBI might cost, but I know we don’t have the tax revenues to get even close.
Maybe the money printer can go brrrr a little bit faster.
"Taking into account both the costs of coverage expansion and the savings that would be achieved through the Medicare for All Act, we calculate that a single-payer, universal health-care system is likely to lead to a 13% savings in national health-care expenditure, equivalent to more than US$450 billion annually (based on the value of the US$ in 2017). The entire system could be funded with less financial outlay than is incurred by employers and households paying for health-care premiums combined with existing government allocations. This shift to single-payer health care would provide the greatest relief to lower-income households. Furthermore, we estimate that ensuring health-care access for all Americans would save more than 68 000 lives and 1·73 million life-years every year compared with the status quo."
That really doesn't have any bearing on the point that the costs of the F-35 and M4A are dramatically different. Funding or not funding the F-35 isn't the determining factor in funding M4A.
The Lancet study is very flawed on several economic fronts, the biggest being that it assume the government could tax / collect 100% of spending that Americans do voluntarily today in the private system to devote it to a government run plan. That is completely improbable and unrealistic expectation.
it also assumes government run systems will be as or better efficient than private system, we have 100's of years of history (including this very story) the proves that to be a fallacy
What people don't seem to understand is that you can't just vacuum money out of a giant industry. The money we spend in health care doesn't go into an incinerator. There are approximately 16.5 million people working in the health care industry. This study assumes we'll save 13%, a wildly optimistic figure, but we'll go with it.
Ah so now we're talking about the elephant in the room, the huge tax hike. Most people pay a percentage of their healthcare costs, their employer covers the rest, and it comes out of pre-tax dollars. We'll still need all that money so now it will have to come in the form of a huge MFA tax on businesses and individuals.
That 3.6 trillion dollar, I don't think it's well spent and I wonder how much went to the Insurance companies, big Pharmas. SOmehow as the most powerful country in the world, US has shitty medicare comparing to Canada, Germany, etc.
Just because we SPEND money doesnt mean that the price is VALID.
"Medicine" is grossly overpriced.
our entire model is FUCKED.
Source: designed and built and commissioned several hospitals and an entire family of doctors. Fuck the US health care system and fuck the military-industrial-spyware-congressional-graft system. I was the tech designer for SF General (before Zuck stuck his name on it) (I designed the entire nurse call system there, among many other things)
My brother was the head of the VA for Alaska, commander of the 10th medical wing USAF, personal flight surgeon to the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the pentagon.
Grandmother was a surgical nurse for decades in Silicon Valley.
Top cardiologist in California (and mayor of Saratoga)
Aunt is top NICU nurse at El Camino Hospital (which I was TPM on building...
Among other many accolades that my family has; we all agree - Healthcare is GROSSLY overpriced and BS.
FFS I had to go to the hospital recently and they charged me $4,000 for the ride to the hospital and $12,000 for giving me vitamins and holding me over night.
The business model for healthcare is divorced from the actual healthcare provided. Emergency care for instance tends to be billed at nutty rates. IMO, the best thing to do is to avoid ambulance/emergency if possible, although this isn't always an option and can be risky, and to shop around for everything where possible. Call up your insurance company with codes and provider numbers and find out what everyone around you actually charges for something.
Each medical group can also have their own economic models which are optimized for different things. One local group actually has reasonably priced specialty visits, but their outpatient services are crazy expensive ($1000 in-network for a NCS/EMG), and that's how they've structured things. Another semi-public group (University of California based) charges significantly more for visits, but significantly less for outpatient procedures ($1000 for an in-network 3.0T MRI).
Yes, and this would decrease, significantly if the us healthcare system were more proactive and more people had good insurance. Not to mention that much of this is what is already spent, so clearly we can afford it. If taxes increased by exactly what your premiums were before, it's revenue neutral.
> You could take the entire defense budget, and the defense budget from every other country in the world, and you would be less than 50% of the funding you would need for a single year of Medicare for all.
How in the world to other countries pay for Healthcare?
The USA has tax revenue per capita very similar to New Zealand, the UK, Italy and Canada - all of which have good Healthcare for all. [1]
The USA has more than double the tax revenue per capita than South Korea, which also has good healthcare.
It's not about the cost, it's about how the USA is choosing to spend it's tax dollars.
They started from a different baseline. Now we have an industry that supports over 16 million employees and is a significant percentage of GDP. You can't just pull the rug out from under it.
Many countries have far worse standards of care than the US.
I live in Canada, and waited more than a year for a specialist. It took me 2 years to find a family doctor with decent reviews who was accepting patients . I needed an MRI once and the wait was measured in months. I waited four months for just a cortisone shot, before the pandemic.
I'm not claiming one system is better than another. Certainly if you're wealthy and have good benefits in the US, the standard of care is much much higher.
On the flipside, if you need cancer care in Canada you're probably not going to need to declare bankruptcy.
> Many countries have far worse standards of care than the US.
I'll need a citation for that.
When a country has 29 million people without health insurance [1], and medical bills are the number one cause of bankruptcy, I think it's safe to say the average standard of care is way, way lower than Canada, Australia, Germany, etc. where literally every person gets care.
It really depends on what you mean by "standard of care".
Yes, there are a lot of people without coverage in the USA, and there are a lot of people in deep medical debt.
However, when it comes to the actual quality of the healthcare facilities, the USA does have some of the best in the world (CHOP, UPenn, Mayo Clinic, etc.). The fact that it's extremely expensive/overpriced is a different issue.
It’s just distributed weirdly and almost designed to be difficult to navigate.
If you’re poor and in a blue state you get free healthcare comparable to the rest of the developed world. But go over the 30k/year threshold and you’re getting a high-deductible plan and a random number generator for a hospital billing department. Then once you get a job at FAANG and you get great healthcare.
It depends how you look at standards of care. Despite medical coverage gaps the US still has the highest or among the highest 5 year survival rates for most forms of cancer.
your reply to this comment is too many deep - I can't reply.
My reply is a sample size of one because I actively don't speak for other people, on purpose. That isn't a flaw in my argument, that's intentional. If there was one delay in a health procedure it wouldn't be of note. But there are lots of delays, and my doctor needs 2-3 months notice for an appointment, and only wants to discuss one thing per appointment so he can maintain the # of appointments he needs to do throughout a day by not making any one to long, and get paid again for another consult, and he's a good doctor (for real).
But again, you have to actively ignore the last 3 sentences of the post you replied to, for this to be a reasonable and in good faith response to what I wrote. I have no interest in engaging with people who don't read what I write, while telling me what I have to think.
Your reply is anecdotal with a sample size of one.
You need to look at how healthcare works for everyone in a society. It's not OK when the mega rich have it great, the middle class OK and literally 30 million people have nothing.
Not a USAian but from distant observation I wonder what proporation of the total spend would disappear if you had "socialised medicine". In an ideal world this would be counter-intuitive, because competition usually increases efficiency, but as far as I can tell the provision of medical care in the US suffers from the same legalised near monoplies that many other parts of the US economy do.
The contractors of these projects know they can lock in long term deals for a ridiculous amount of money and take their time building and then after so long they end the project and then repeat.
I disagree with the conclusions of this article, and feel that the author didn't provide nearly enough evidence to back up a pretty big claim. The notion that the F-35 is a high-end and expensive asset is not some new admission, nor does it mean it is a failure. While it was meant to be a lower-end plain initially, it hasn't been considered that way in a long time. And while I agree that the F-35 is expensive and we may need to supplement it with a lower-end fighter, that's hardly a failure. That's exactly why we ended up developing the F-16: because we needed a lower-end fighter to supplement the F-15.
There's plenty to criticize about the F-35, particularly about the procurement strategy and development cycle. But we are starting to see real results. The F-35 has performed very well in exercises like Red Flag. And I don't think you can understate the importance of the F-35B. Yes, it has markedly worse availability rates and maintenance issues than the other variants, but that's pretty common for STOVL aircraft, like the Harrier it is replacing. And not only is the F-35B the only stealth STOVL, it's also the first production STOVL aircraft capable of supersonic speed.
I also think it's weird to imply the reason the F-35 has failed (and I don't belive it has) because it's been made in three different variants. That really isn't the reason for all of these delays. There are several examples of aircraft being able to work in multiple roles, like the F-4 and the French Rafale. The fundamental issue is in avionics and logistics. All of these sensors and systems are very complex and difficult to integrate together. Any aircraft with a modern, full-featured AESA radar and IRST sensors sees a protracted development time.
In terms of purchasing new, lower-end aircraft, I do think that's a good idea. Depending on where you want that to fit in in terms of doctrine, you've got a couple of options. The USAF is already starting to purchase some F-15EX planes. It's got decent range, good performance in air-to-air and air-to-ground engagements, and it's based on a mature platform which should reduce costs and improve availability. But it's a fairly big beast, and operational costs will still be higher than legacy F-16s. The other option is to go with a genuine light fighter like the JAS-39 Gripen. Cheaper, much lower operational costs, and capable of operating from short, rudimentary runways, but shorter range and less payload capacity. I also think there's space for a "featherweight" plane, like the A-29. When we're engaging Taliban targets that don't have anti-aircraft defenses beyond small arms fire, a simple turboprop will get the job done efficiently and cheaply, and that frees up jets to be used in other theaters.
You need to command them from close by, because anything else will be jammed. It needs to be an integrated concept with manned fighters, AEW&C, strike, etc.
Yes but FCAS will take forever, repeating the mistakes of JSF by coupling everything in a giant program. The Chinese will have it by the end of the decade.
FCAS will be a combination of the F-35, Eurofighter and A-400M. I'd put money on at least 15 years of delay.
The Australians and Boeing have a fighter companion drone in the air already now. I didn#t follow that to closely, so. I also think that the manned component of FCAS, the fighter, might be ready earlier. And that fighter is everyting the French want from the program.
Boeing sees Loyal Wingman / ATS as a way to stay in the game when LM owns the only 5th gen western manned aircraft. The dual seat Super Hornet is a better control aircraft than the JSF and has a huge power budget. Boeing have also been careful with the ITAR aspects so they can sell it outside of primary US alliance countries. A system with Israeli or even Indian electronics is a possibility.
I presume the French just want to save their aerospace industry. Before Corona Airbus was looking really screwed, with 777/787 being much more efficient than the A380, but with 737 MAX fiasco and limited intercontinental flights the A320neo is looking good. But I digress.
We need more Andurils - small (relatively) defense startups that bring innovation and competition to the table with modern approaches to project management.
so the us needs a lightweight multi role fighter? we have that already in Europe. it's called the eurofighter typhoon.someone in the pentagon should just pick up the phone and order some. they come in opened-never used, refurbished, new, or as a diy kit, they also pretty good at what they do. if they buy enough, i'm sure eurofighter will chuck in a free bomb or 2.
I wonder if that also means that they are going to cut funding to the astroturfers who show up in every thread in every forum on every post singing the praises of the F-35 now.
This has got to be my favorite astroturfing conspiracy. Imagine the US government paying people to convince the oh so important programmers at HackerNews that their jet fighter is effective.
But certainly its an unhinged conspiracy that government and the military would push their own narratives via astroturfing. Everyone knows they have far too much respect for how they spend our taxpayer dollars and they have far too much integrity to be so devious. Certainly all of the stalwart defenders of the F-35 that pop up on every internet forum and message board to sing the praises of that boondoggle must be sincere.
Allies have cut back on the F-35 orders too on about the same scale. But no I don't think it was ever planned to replace the F-22. The F-22 is really an interceptor, the F-35 is much more multirole like the F-16.
F-15 -> F-22 + some F-35
F-16 -> F-35
F-18 -> F-35 carrier version
AV-8B -> F-35 STOVL
It is unfortunately compromised in weight by needing to do the carrier role. But on the flip side, the extra strength in the fuselage means they could last a long time.
This isn't just planes, this seems to be everything nowadays. Fission was discovered in 1938/1939 and we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. No chance we could do something like that in this toxic environment of today.
I know Peter Thiel is not popular here, but his conversations about technological progress seem to be spot on: we just cant build cool shit anymore. I really did want a flying car, and all I have is 140 characters and promises of AI that never come true.
Maybe, you could say there are some exceptions like CRISPR, but that is TBD.