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

forbes.com

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

#461

Post by the_af »

Supermancho wrote: post #431
Karawebnetwork wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stre…

> 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 di…

> 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.

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

#462

Post by lmm »

digi59404 wrote: post #24
sorokod wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it is a Ferrari, are squadrons of Ferraris is what needed to fight wars?

Sometimes you need a Ferrari. Sometimes you need a bunch of hooligans with bullets in a converted tractor. But being caught without either, when you need one isn't a good place to be in.

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.

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

#463

Post by weaksauce »

christoph wrote: post #295
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Edit: I looked it up and a Cessna gets ~15 mpg.

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…

> There’s a shocking amount of people also happy to drive around ignoring warning lights flashing.

...or can't afford the basic maintenance

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

#464

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

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…

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.

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

#465

Post by shazmosushi »

raphaelj wrote: post #393
grecy wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1295883862380294144?lang...

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 ha…

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.

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

#466

Post by mywittyname »

nemothekid wrote: post #142
medium_burrito wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 goa…

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).

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

#467

Post by throwanem »

Analemma_ wrote: post #460
asimjalis wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can we create new incentives to discourage this behavior and to encourage infrastructure projects that provide jobs as well as create superlinear value?

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.

> pork spending was mostly outlawed in 2011

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.

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

#468

Post by bdavis__ »

nonameiguess wrote: post #4
JabavuAdams wrote: post #3

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 tha…

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.

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

#469

Post by bborud »

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…

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.

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

#470

Post by Retric »

greedo wrote: post #389
Retric wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yet you're the one comparing the F-35 to 40+ year old aircraft that would get smoked in combat by the F-35.

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.

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