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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

#911

Post by newsbinator »

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…

A flying car is the wrong solution. It’s equivalent to building a faster, much more dangerous horse.

The problem is:

1. People need to commute large distances

2. People need to go fast

It can be better solved by removing the majority of commutes and using very fast, efficient, underground mass transport systems to move people when they (rarely) need it.

I’d rather cities and VR were redesigned so the average person doesn’t usually need to go more than 5 kilometers in any direction on a given day.

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

#912

Post by greedo »

Retric wrote: post #832
greedo wrote: post #730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh and if you compare the flyaway cost of the F-35A to the F-16 Block 60 or 70/72, the F-35 is cheaper...

The US doesn’t have any Block 60 or 70/72 so it’s a tricky comparison due to low production numbers. Looking at the US’s actual fleet the F16 was a much cheaper aircraft and likely would have stayed at roughly those numbers. Anyway, we already had the F22, the F35 was supposed to be the cheaper alternative and it mostly delivered on that. But now we have a very capable aircraft with far to many roles to excel at all…

Roles for the F-35:

1. Supersonic stealthy STOL for the USMC. Check

2. Supersonic stealthy replacement for A-7/F-18. Check

3. Supersonic stealthy replacement for F-16. Check

Despite its detractors, the F-35 is an excellent aircraft that is doing quite well in squadron usage. The USMC loves their B model, operating off of their mini carriers. The USAF is getting enough on the line that sustainment costs are bending down, and flyaway costs are cheaper than the newest F-16s that would get crushed by the F-35.

The only service that isn't as in love with the F-35 is the Navy. They've slowly been realizing that the short legs of the F-18 have hampered them in the Pacific. The F-35 has better range, but is still far shorter than older strike aircraft like the A-6.

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

#913

Post by Spooky23 »

Nasrudith wrote: post #694
Spooky23 wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The easiest answer is probably public financing of elections. Because Members of Congress basically need to continuously raise money, there’s always an incentive to spread the wealth among congressional districts. For the F35, I can think of one company in a rural area who fabricates some metal component for the project. Because of the way it is contracted, acceptance standards, etc they sell it for something like 50…

Public financing would help as a component with corporate lobbyists but pork barrels wouldn't be affected. I use the term with a slight distinction - pork barrels are for parochial voter influnce while an "industrial complex" involves a company's interest in exchange for political benefits. The two may overlap if what helps the company also gets votes in itself. A stereotypical but perhaps unfair example of both (as…

I would agree that it isn't magic. Keep in mind that one man's pork is another's bacon. Pork is part of the political process.

In the modern environment, material pork barrel spending is at the corporate/national level. Most congressional districts due to gerrymandering or demographics are very secure... the era of political machines handing out turkeys is gone.

If the craven corruption around defense contracting was only 80% as wasteful as it is today, you could give every member of congress a substantial slush fund to waste and still save money. Plus you would have working fighter jets that are able to compete with countries like Russia, that has a GDP equivalent to Texas but seems to be able to procure weapons.

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

#914

Post by dalbasal »

015a wrote: post #457
dalbasal wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Broad statements like Thiel's shouldn't be taken too literally. I don't think the main point is the broad statement about the trends themselves. The main point is the classification: Flying Cars vs 140 Characters or Bits vs Atoms. FB is worth almost $1trn. No real technical achievements or advancement. If fb didn't exist, something else would be the friendster. Tesla, Apple, MSFT, Google, etc. are closer to the flyin…

> Ancient civilizations managed to build incredible aqueduct systems, public buildings, etc. We've regressed. This feels like an extreme take. (Most) Every city in America has a functional clean water delivery network. Every city has electricity. Most cities have sewage. Most cities have very nice paved roads. This is billions of miles of pipes, wires, roads, bridges, dams... Billions. And you're comparing what the U…

I think you might be taking me to literally. I didn't mean that we've regressed technologically, or on average as a civilization. Of course our technology, ability to build pyramids, is greater.

I'm mean that we're having a very hard time with problems that are ultimately tractable. Pyramids, aqueduct systems and other impressive endeavours were big achievements. They put a lot of resources into these things, pushed boundaries and succeeded. When it comes to public works these days, it seems that fiasco avoidance is the high bar we set.

Can we add a train system to a city from scratch? Impossible. More expensive than WW2. Think smaller. Well... such things aren't impossible. They're just hard. Equivalent projects have succeeded in the past.

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

#915

Post by imtringued »

KDJohnBrown wrote: post #330
dsr_ wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The foreign military aid is also a jobs program. It gives money to US manufacturers by giving money to other countries that they have to use to buy US products.

The justification for foreign aid to Israel is always pretty much “but it’s OK because most of it comes back to us via arms sales”. Essentially billions of dollars of American taxpayer wealth transferred to defense contractors laundered through the IDF.

The irony is that this is why foreign aid never works. It's mostly spent on weapons and if there is no foe the government can just use the weapons to suppress its own population and thus ask for even more foreign aid.

Developed nations don't care because their defense contractors get the money.

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

#916

Post by CoffeeDregs »

kumarvvr wrote: post #767
CoffeeDregs wrote: post #725

Putting aside the good-plane/bad-plane discussion, this program is the poster child for one of my pet wishes: that the costs of government programs would be expressed in $/tax-payer. There are about 100M tax payers in the US; this program is expected to cost about $1,500,000M; so the F35 program is expected to cost about $15,000 per tax payer. True: that's over 50 years; still, un-discounted, that's $300/year/tax-pay…

> How much of your $60,000 did you see? For that, you need to calculate the cost of every US govt program and calculate usage costs. Very complicated. However, this statement is confusing to me. Do you agree to a bailout, as a society, to eventually get all of it back? And, I also take issue with 100M tax payers. Are these Individual Income Tax payers? If so, what about all the non income tax payers and companiss tha…

I agree that it could get fairly complicated but these seem like the two propositions to me:

Un-normalized: $6T + interpretation + understanding + doubt that it's really $6T.

Normalized: $60k (get the GAO to provide a standardized number) + interpretation + understanding.

I get that it's imperfect but I have a hard time understanding how the "un-normalized" version is more-perfect or more comprehensible than the "normalized" version.

I suspect politicians would hate my suggestion: they've acclimated us to nonsense numbers. Per Dirksen (maybe): “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money." Again, I'm not pro/con high-speed rail but: CA probably has 15M taxpayers; estimates of high-speed rail ranged from $30,000M-$100,000M; how in the world was a CA taxpayer to recoup $3,000-$10,000 of cost? Put in those terms, it's a lot easier for me to think about the proposition.

I definitely think a Covid bailout was necessary. I do have some questions about where my $60k went...

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

#917

Post by sheepybloke »

titzer wrote: post #323
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…

Clear requirements, small teams, small budgets, custom-built, no over-thinking, absolutely must work, chop a path through the jungle with a machete. We do everything opposite these days: no thinking about requirements, huge teams, no budget, off-the-shelf everything, over-think everything, OK with failure (because golden parachutes, team churn, and "blameless" culture), and wait 5 months for the bulldozers to get shi…

I think the bigger thing is that we think about requirements, but they change so frequently they require rework. I was working on an FMS for a customer and they changed their high level requirements every 3 months or so, driving huge costs and timeline overruns. It's easy when the Air Force gives you a solid set of requirements to work with, but what happens when the Army 5 months later gives you something contradicting those?

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

#918

Post by sheepybloke »

wtf_is_up wrote: post #892
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in defense and the approach to software development is hell. Imagine package managers and Git being newfangled scary technologies and not unit testing anything. Now slap tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on there and you've got a defense program. I'm actually quite tired of it and I'm looking elsewhere.

Yes, and the user community and PMs on the gov't side are terrible at defining requirements. Even moreso as the number of stakeholders increases.

Exactly. How can I build and test a system when you change the system requirements and scope every 6 months?

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

#919

Post by TheCoelacanth »

cgearhart wrote: post #200
supernova87a wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

At least three things happened: - 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 do…

Risk tolerance, even outside of wars, has shrunk quite a bit. People used to do things that are considered practically suicidal now. In 1956, only 2% of Ford customers opted to have seat belts in their cars, and even for the 2% who did have them, those cars were complete death traps compared to modern ones.

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

#920

Post by imtringued »

tootie wrote: post #665
3nf wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is mostly a myth. https://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-the...

I don't know about hammers but I don't know who on earth is willing to pay this much on a manual crimping tool other than governments looking for certified tools.

https://eu.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Molex/19285-0084/?qs=KMH...

At this price point one would assume that you are buying a crimping machine.

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