191–200 of 1001 posts
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Sorry...what countries?
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.
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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.
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.
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…
SpaceX is an interesting exception. They innovate really fast, their pace resembles that of the positive examples you mention.
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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.
> 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 tha…
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.
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.
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> But I can't really see much benefit to that Look at the recent Nagorno-Karabakh conflict to see how much UAVs are a game-changer: https://www.csis.org/analysis/air-and-missile-war-nagorno-ka...
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.
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 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 alw…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incid...
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…
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.…
- 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.)