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The Little “Fighter” That Couldn’t: Moral Hazard and the F-35

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Re: The Little “Fighter” That Couldn’t: Moral Hazard and the F-35

#111

Post by PhantomGremlin »

philwelch wrote: post #93
javajosh wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There was hardly a single American who lived through that war who didn't make sacrifices and materially contribute to victory. Contrast this with how Americans were told to support Iraq 2 and Afghanistan: "Go shopping." The best possible policy for peace-loving American's to adopt would be a "no war without conscription" law. This seems counterintuitive, but it is my believe that when Senators' and Presidents' and C…

The rich and powerful have always found ways to avoid conscription.

Usually. Sometimes they enlist (or allow themselves to be drafted) because they think it will further their larger ambitions.

Here's an interesting story of a potential future US President who didn't survive WWII: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_P._Kennedy,_Jr.

His younger brother took his place doing that whole presidency thing.

Re: The Little “Fighter” That Couldn’t: Moral Hazard and the F-35

#112

Post by leoc »

Shalomm wrote: post #50
venomsnake wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree with you http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11

Nice rebuttal. The Apollo program was also delivered on time (JFK's "before this decade is out" deadline). I'd also add the Manhattan Project to this list. I wonder: why can the government execute Apollo and Manhattan projects, but botches such simple projects as the Bradley APC carrier?

Apollo wasn't all that different. It ended the successful relationship with McDonnell-Douglas which had produced Mercury and Gemini and brought in a number of different contractors at the same time: this was the result of lobbying and pork-barrel politics IIRC (I am not an expert). Unsurprisingly this transition set back the space program quite badly. IIRC things only really started to shape up again after the Apollo 1 fire which killed three astronauts.

Re: The Little “Fighter” That Couldn’t: Moral Hazard and the F-35

#113

Post by Diederich »

tomjen3 wrote: post #97
WhitneyLand wrote: post #25

What's the biggest practical limitation to switching to unmanned drone fighters?

Lag and poor visibility. Drones work on slow ground attack convoys and buildings where they can fly around for a time but they are controlled via satelites so there is a couple of seconds of lag between when the image is recorded and the orders are received by the drone. In a dog fight, which is really what you have to build a fighter plane for, that kind of lag means you lose every time. Add to that that drones are…

I wonder how possible it would be construct UAVs that were specialized for air to air combat. They could operate in something of a hybrid mode, perhaps with ground control most of the time, but acting in full automatic mode during the dogfighting.

There'd be a lot of advantages. I presume such a dogfighting UAV would have visibility in all directions, all the time. They could potentially pull much tighter turns than any aircraft with a human on board, and with real-time point to point communication, could work together in ways that are impossible with human flown fighters.

Part of me wonders if a lot of the amazing game AI that has been developed could apply directly to such a project.

Re: The Little “Fighter” That Couldn’t: Moral Hazard and the F-35

#114

Post by leoc »

venomsnake wrote: post #64
Shalomm wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do or die? I'm not sure. Neither Apollo nor Manhattan were do-or-die situations (for the US). Maybe "First-system" vs "Second-system syndrome" is the difference? Apollo and Manhattan were definitely "First systems". Bradley APC and F-35 are classic "Second systems", suffering from second-system syndrome [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_system_syndrome#The_sec...

In the times they were conceived they were. A different european theater would have made nukes absolutely needed at least as deterrent. And US urgently needed to catch up in the space race - space is very efficient way to drop nuke on someone.

IIRC it was increasingly unlikely that the Axis could actually win a conventional war in Europe during the period of the Manhattan Project. The big fear was that Germany could develop its own atomic bomb first.

Re: The Little “Fighter” That Couldn’t: Moral Hazard and the F-35

#115

Post by semi-extrinsic »

CountSessine wrote: post #91
zanethomas wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, that's scary, I would accept C for such a job but C++ provides too many opportunities for things to go wrong in strange and difficult to find ways.

Are you kidding? Accept C but reject C++? That's completely ridiculous. "Well, the scout leader's fire control computer should have returned fire at the MIG. It should have, but the C-programmed fire control software cast the void* target object to a ... well, a seagull_t object. I guess you could say that the scout leader was shot down when a seagull fired a radar-guided missile at him. That's pretty funny, right? R…

Linus Torvalds once quipped (in a discussion over Git) that "even if the choice of C over C++ had no other benefits than keeping the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to prefer C".

Re: The Little “Fighter” That Couldn’t: Moral Hazard and the F-35

#116

Post by vacri »

Shalomm wrote: post #18
gnoway wrote: post #6

It is just inconceivable that we have a multi-decade program to develop a new fighter to fill all these roles, and what we've produced is either equivalent to or worse than the incumbent in all cases, is not safe to fly in combat situations, and is more expensive to boot. I mean we've seen this sort of thing happen on a smaller scale before, but versions of this plane are supposed to replace, like, everything in mult…

Just a friendly reminder why governments and large corporations can't develop shit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXQ2lO3ieBA

According to that clip, the key point of failure was the project manager, who just rolled over rather than properly manage expectations. Still part of the 'government', but the hero of the piece is actually the central villain.

In any case, you're suffering from confirmation bias. Plenty of government/large corp work is more than successful, from the SR-71 to Predator drones to the Mars rovers.

Re: The Little “Fighter” That Couldn’t: Moral Hazard and the F-35

#117

Post by vacri »

tomjen3 wrote: post #97
WhitneyLand wrote: post #25

What's the biggest practical limitation to switching to unmanned drone fighters?

Lag and poor visibility. Drones work on slow ground attack convoys and buildings where they can fly around for a time but they are controlled via satelites so there is a couple of seconds of lag between when the image is recorded and the orders are received by the drone. In a dog fight, which is really what you have to build a fighter plane for, that kind of lag means you lose every time. Add to that that drones are…

Dogfights are a thing of the past. Fighters don't joust at close distances anymore. I did a small part of my degree at a defence research place in the mid-90s. I remember someone showing me an experiment on how best to present range information about other planes to a fighter pilot, in terms of physical appearance. What was curious was the names for the ranges: 'safe', 'lethal', and 'very lethal'. 'Very lethal' was still several kilometers, and I asked about the guns and dogfighting - and got 'that doesn't happen anymore'.

More significant issues are speed, weather, and payload size. If you need fighter cover now, you don't want to hear "but it's raining". And speed is needed to increase operational range and response time.

Re: The Little “Fighter” That Couldn’t: Moral Hazard and the F-35

#118

Post by transfire »

acdha wrote: post #106
transfire wrote: post #35

What should have been. https://www.google.com/search?q=boeing+joint+strike+fighter&...

Why? It's easy to look at rosy predictions but is there any reason to think that this project would have avoided the same systemic problems which have been endemic for the F-35? A quick glance at the Wikipedia page shows several questionable elements of the design, all of which seem to be due to the same problem of requiring one design to fill too many roles.

Actually there is. Boeing's design was forward thinking, e.g. using carbon fiber before anyone else --now common place. They also figured out a way to use the main engine to provide vertical take-off and landing, instead of having a separate engine, which would have made a big difference in cost. I watched an excellent documentary on the whole project long ago, and it was clear that Boeing design was superior, but they got shafted b/c, as other have pointed out, it wasn't about the best product, it was about defense contractor dollars.

Re: The Little “Fighter” That Couldn’t: Moral Hazard and the F-35

#119

Post by Scramblejams »

javajosh wrote: post #61
sithadmin wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're not talking about scaling out cloud deployments or something here. Building a military takes an incredible amount of lead time. If you don't have a strong standing military force during peacetime, you won't have one during wartime.

Utterly false. Prior to involvement in World War 2, the US had hardly any standing army and rather weak tooling industries (being wiped out by the Great Depression) and yet still managed to field like 2 million troops and vast amounts of weapons for allies in a very short period of time.

And because the US wasn't ready the Japanese were free to run wild in the Pacific for six months, taking many islands that had to be retaken at terrible costs to combatants, civilians and treasuries.

It would have been better simply to be ready.

Re: The Little “Fighter” That Couldn’t: Moral Hazard and the F-35

#120

Post by vacri »

krapht wrote: post #19
spiritplumber wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So get rid of the USAF / fold it back into the Army, this way the Navy has an air wing, and the Army has an air wing. Large sky battles are unlikely to happen ever again... the USAF was designed to deal with those, right around when they had become obsolete. Hooray for Parkinson's laws. The A-10 is a magnificent brute of a plane and does exactly the job it was designed to do, very well... so of course they want to mo…

The A10's minigun is ineffective at killing modern main-battle tanks, so I wouldn't say it's a raging sucess. In addition, it would certainly be blown up immediately if it came within shooting distance of a tank by any number of man-portable anti-air missiles. What it can do is provide reasonable close air support against Toyota pickups and infantry, but replacement parts for the plane or the molds to create them don…

In addition, it would certainly be blown up immediately if it came within shooting distance of a tank by any number of man-portable anti-air missiles.

Why do man-portable anti-air missiles only exist near tanks?

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