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

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

#581

Post by jeffreyrogers »

Aunche wrote: post #382
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 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.

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

#582

Post by NortySpock »

WalterBright wrote: post #562
wongarsu wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've never heard anyone call free markets communism.

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.

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

#583

Post by greedo »

Aunche wrote: post #572
greedo wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every aircraft can benefit from stealth. Stealth helps to protect you not just from other fighters, but from SAMs etc.

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 c…

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.

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

#584

Post by mywittyname »

the_af wrote: post #444
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…

> This is far from how I learned it 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…

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.

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

#585

Post by jeffreyrogers »

marshmallow_12 wrote: post #487
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 want nuclear propulsion, not more boring jet engines. we can't have jets, so why should we care if the Army has better ones then 15 years ago.

Nuclear propulsion in an aircraft? Isn't that going to spray radioactive matter everywhere?

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

#586

Post by aerostable_slug »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #464
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 sudden…

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.

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

#587

Post by medium_burrito »

agsamek wrote: post #432
bun_at_work wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

You do know the US is now the world's #1 oil producer (and food producer).

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

#588

Post by tdeck »

Karawebnetwork wrote: post #353
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…

> 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.

As a native English speaker I had the same reaction (i.e. "WTF what a disturbing sentiment!")

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

#589

Post by Martin_Beck »

mywittyname wrote: post #466
nemothekid wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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."

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/no-new-ideas/

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

#590

Post by misiti3780 »

the_af wrote: post #444
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…

> This is far from how I learned it 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…

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)?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_Cliff [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo

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