The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed • Hacker News Board

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#101

Post by samstave » Wed, Feb 24, 2021, 7:38 PM UTC

digi59404 wrote: post #30

ElMono wrote: post #10

I would guess that the NGAD prototype[0] has given USAF leadership confidence to publicly alude to F-35 shortcomings. [0] https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a34030586...

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…

>*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?

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#102

Post by CivBase » Wed, Feb 24, 2021, 7:38 PM UTC

> 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.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#103

Post by rjsw » Wed, Feb 24, 2021, 7:39 PM UTC

nvoid wrote: post #77

>With a sticker price of around $100 million per plane, including the engine, the F-35 is expensive Why say including the engine? Do they sell them without the engine?

That is how the US military accounts for them, yes. The engine is not included in the price paid to Lockheed Martin.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#104

Post by andi999 » Wed, Feb 24, 2021, 7:39 PM UTC

QuesnayJr wrote: post #92

supernova87a wrote: post #63

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…

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.

A platform is always a bad idea.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#105

Post by phaemon » Wed, Feb 24, 2021, 7:40 PM UTC

misiti3780 wrote: post #86

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 chan…

> we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. No chance we could do something like that in this toxic environment of today.

Indeed. If you killed hundreds of thousands of civilians today you'd probably get cancelled by leftists or something! Toxic.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#106

Post by johnklos » Wed, Feb 24, 2021, 7:41 PM UTC

digi59404 wrote: post #7

“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…

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.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#107

Post by tele » Wed, Feb 24, 2021, 7:41 PM UTC

cwhiz wrote: post #89

rayhendricks wrote: post #72

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.

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.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

"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."

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#108

Post by IggleSniggle » Wed, Feb 24, 2021, 7:41 PM UTC

Judgmentality wrote: post #71

digi59404 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 in…

> 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 awa…

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.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#109

Post by mnd999 » Wed, Feb 24, 2021, 7:41 PM UTC

cwhiz wrote: post #89

rayhendricks wrote: post #72

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.

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.

Healthcare is super expensive in the US though. If the system was more efficient, like European systems, it could work.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#110

Post by exar0815 » Wed, Feb 24, 2021, 7:41 PM UTC

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.