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US military grounds entire fleet of F-35 jets

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Re: US military grounds entire fleet of F-35 jets

#101

Post by mmmmmmmmm »

Buldak wrote: post #85
kibwen wrote: post #26

Over a trillion dollars over 28 years. There are about 250 million U.S. taxpayers. That's $150 out of the pocket of every single taxpayer, every year, just to cover the cost of this one monumentally embarrassing failure. If you're a U.S. citizen born after 1974, you've been setting fire to this money annually for your entire adult life. No value has been provided other than as a government subsidy to military contrac…

I'm kind of baffled by the number of people here defending this. I can only imagine that Americans have an emotional investment in their military that inclines them to overlook waste that they would never tolerate in any other area.

I'm kind of baffled by the number of people here opposing investment in technological advancements. You'd think hacker news of all places would understand the risks inherent in investing in an any sort of state-of-the-art technological project. Not all projects are going to succeed; but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.

It seems the real reason these people are angry is because they hate how strong the US military is. You know they don't actually care about the wasted money because they're also the same people who think we should be spending billions of dollars a year on state-funded healthcare to keep octogenarians alive a year longer.

Re: US military grounds entire fleet of F-35 jets

#102

Post by iooi »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #90
imglorp wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an interesting theory, that there's a foreign disinformation campaign smearing the program, because they don't want it fielded against them. I'd argue against that theory though, on the grounds that a corrupt/greedy congress, military and defense contractor network will do more against the country than our opponents ever will. Remember that time we bankrupted the USSR in an arms race? This time we're doing it…

> there's a foreign disinformation campaign smearing the program Do we have any evidence of this? > Remember that time we bankrupted the USSR in an arms race? This time we're doing it to ourselves The Soviets spent 25% of their national income on their military in 1980 [1]. Most years, it was above 10%. In contrast, the United States spends low single digits of its GDP on its military [2]. [1] https://nintil.com/2016…

Wow, talk about cherry picking.

> The Soviets spent 25% of their national income

> United States spends low single digits of its GDP

Why are you comparing income vs GDP? Apples and oranges, please..

"In FY 2017, the Congressional Budget Office reported spending of $590 billion for defense, about 15% of the federal budget." [1]

[1] https://www.cbo.gov/system/files?file=115th-congress-2017-20...

Re: US military grounds entire fleet of F-35 jets

#103

Post by 1001101 »

jki275 wrote: post #25
signa11 wrote: post #12

sensationalist headlines at best. grounding is temporary for 24-48 hours due to crash in sc

Pretty standard response -- inspect everything to make sure there aren't any more of the faulty components (which evidently they've identified, which is a bit surprising in terms of speed), and then let them fly again. Happens all the time.

This surprised me:

"If suspect fuel tubes are installed, the part will be removed and replaced. If known good fuel tubes are already installed, then those aircraft will be returned to flight status."

How do they not know this? What if we were at war?

Re: US military grounds entire fleet of F-35 jets

#104

Post by 0xcafecafe »

netcan wrote: post #97

At the turn of the century, the Wright brothers were building their bicycle planes. Within 10 years, by the start of WW1 there were triplanes fit for war use. By the end of the war, Germany had metal planes with a single wing... not all that different from a modern crop duster. Amazing what the competitive (and "save our nation") pressure of an industrial war can do. Immediately after the great war, helicopters and a…

It might seem like stagnation but we have made rapid advancements in other sectors (the mobile computing revolution being an example). About air travel, I think the evolution has been more about safety than anything else ever since (barring exception of concorde which tried to optimize for speed). The modern passenger jet is much safer than its 60s counterpart.

Re: US military grounds entire fleet of F-35 jets

#105

Post by dragonwriter »

dragontamer wrote: post #98
maxxxxx wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Anyway, the point of power-projection is that these bases are mobile. As we finish up our job in Afghanistan / Iraq, we can move these super-carriers elsewhere for support. Puerto Rico was serviced by a super-carrier Abraham Lincoln for instance (hospitals on board, + Helicopters delivered supplies), while the Super-Carrier Ronald Regan helped Japan clean-up the Fukashima Nuclear disaster." I know that's reality but…

I'm unsure if any other sea-bearing vessel has a ton of helicopters that can deliver supplies to and from a remote area (ie: Puerto Rico once all the roads were wiped out by Hurricane Maria). Helicopters need an area to land and refuel. The pilots need an area to sleep. Carriers seem like the ideal service vehicle. And sure, the Nimitz class carrier, with two nuclear reactors and outfitted with enough weaponry to tak…

> The alternative is to build a ton of smaller carriers... but smaller carriers can't launch airplanes.

Outside of the US supercarriers, all other carriers are smaller, and many launch planes (often V/STOL aircraft, particularly commonly Harriers.)

Re: US military grounds entire fleet of F-35 jets

#106

Post by kibwen »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #50

Most people reading will recognize that it is a standard procedure to ground everything until you understand the risk. In this case the risk is a faulty fuel line, and apparently there is a test that will let you know in the field if you have it or not so you can return the plane to service immediately if the test comes up negative. There is a remarkable amount of disinformation that is spread around about this plane…

> assumes it is because it is so far beyond what "opposing" forces can field they will do anything to delay its operation

This doesn't hold water; nation-state propaganda doesn't have any effect on the funding this program receives. Nobody should have any trouble believing that an overly-ambitious pie-in-the-sky kitchen-sink project that has been in development for 30 years might be having a hard time meeting its lofty goals, or indeed nailing down its goals in the first place.

Consider the Space Shuttle program, and now realize that in four years the F-35 will have been going on longer than the shuttle program, and that the F-35 has already cost five times more than the entire shuttle program, and that the shuttle is also today considered an overall failure (and this opinion is not ascribed to "opposing forces"). And if the shuttle can be a failure while achieving more than the F-35, while costing less than the F-35, with a smaller (though still huge and confused) scope than the F-35, by what possible metric can the F-35 not be considered a failure?

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Re: US military grounds entire fleet of F-35 jets

#108

Post by Rebelgecko »

chris72205 wrote: post #43
robotrout wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was a very educational tweet steam. I hadn't heard of 2/3rds of the issues he raised.

I'd take some of it with a grain of salt. He brought up one point about peeling paint and requiring special hangars. But outside of the RT article he linked to, I can't find mention of that elsewhere. I didn't look into all of his points, but that one struck as me a little ridiculous even for this flying bucket of crap... which makes me question some of his other tweets in that stream.

I can't find a source for a lot of the things he says... Norway is parking their F-35s outside under tarps while they build hangers, so the 0% humidity thing seems questionable

Re: US military grounds entire fleet of F-35 jets

#109

Post by derefr »

netcan wrote: post #97

At the turn of the century, the Wright brothers were building their bicycle planes. Within 10 years, by the start of WW1 there were triplanes fit for war use. By the end of the war, Germany had metal planes with a single wing... not all that different from a modern crop duster. Amazing what the competitive (and "save our nation") pressure of an industrial war can do. Immediately after the great war, helicopters and a…

That's one way to explain the last 100 years, sure.

Another way: militaries around the world stumbled upon a new source of low-hanging fruit (air supremacy), one that could win wars with just the slightest investment, as long as the enemy had invested less/none. Technological progress sped up in the space as everyone exploited the low-hanging fruit. Then, having picked all the low-hanging fruit, further advances in avionics were now just as expensive as advances in any other domain—so the world's military spending moved back to a general balance.

This same thing happened for submarines, and for steel-hulled warships before that. When R&D has higher ROI (i.e. wins more battles for less money) than simply building more of what you've got, you invest in R&D. When it doesn't, you don't.

For the latest 50-year period, the low-hanging fruit in military spending has been satellite technology—i.e., C2 and intelligence superiority. GPS-guided ICBMs on the one hand; reports from spies delivered over Iridium on the other. We got the Internet and cell phones from this one, before it slowed down.

But this latest R&D "sprint" has indeed had most of its low-hanging fruit plucked as well, which is why we've lately seen military R&D spending leak away from satellites and back into other targets—including avionics R&D! (Sometimes a mesh-network of jet fighters works better than a satellite uplink. Expensive, though.)

Not sure what the world's next military R&D focus might be. Cyberwar, maybe, but that might be point-of-view bias.

Re: US military grounds entire fleet of F-35 jets

#110

Post by 3rdAccount »

jfk13 wrote: post #93
3rdAccount wrote: post #21

Does anybody in the industry know why there was a push to move away from specific role planes that excel in one area to ones that can do any area decently? I know in theory that there would be savings having one platform, but making one jet modular for 3 different roles is seeming to be more difficult than just designing 3 different jets. It can't beat the EuroFighter in a dog fight and can't match the stealth bomber…

> can't match the stealth bomber for ordinance carried It's "ordnance", not "ordinance". Different words.

Apologies. That makes sense to me too off of the way I've heard it pronounced.
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