Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

jqpublicblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 233 posts

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

#151

Post by tim333 »

xnull2guest wrote: post #67
Tloewald wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The basic perversity is building a gigantic military in peacetime because the arms companies have enormous lobbying power. Everything else flows from and is secondary to that.

Isn't it more complicated than that? Today being behind on military technology by as little as 5 years can be decisive in confrontation. The last decade has brought huge changes in military technology including super and hypersonic missile delivery systems (these can defeat the US's current interception capabilities), THAAD technology, directed energy weapons, new reactive armors, satellite bombing systems, startling…

>US's military might has everything to do with the geopolitics that continue to make it rich

I'm sceptical that the military might does that much to make the US rich besides providing basic peace. Obviously things would be screwed if WW3 started.

The US has got rich mostly by trade and enterprise and producing much of the worlds high value stuff. Spending a huge portion of governments revenues on the military rather than things like education, R&D and science has probably been a drag on growth.

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

#153

Post by spiritplumber »

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…

I wonder what a drone built on the same philosophy as the A-10 ("We built the most awesome machine gun ever, let's strap a plane to it") would look like.

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

#154

Post by TheCowboy »

zipwitch wrote: post #41
WhitneyLand wrote: post #25

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

The Air Force. The biggest limitations aren't practical, they're political.

Going into more detail on this would have been more useful, but it is part of the problem. I believe it has to do with the culture of promotion that favors pilots, not to mention the revolving door.

The other major part of the problem is that drones are cheaper and present real competition to juicy manned contracts, so defense contractors don't like them. Drones might be an example of actual disruptive technology: a cheap alternative that also creates a new market (planes that can stay in the air longer than a pilot ever could). Losing one drone, or even a dozen drones, is always smaller than losing the life of a single pilot or their plane.

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

#155

Post by tim333 »

zaroth wrote: post #142
GoodIntentions wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just inconceivable. Unless the primary goal was to transfer tax dollars from the unwashed to the privileged.

Don't be silly, the "unwashed" don't pay taxes. E.g. the bottom 50% pay 2.9% of total income taxes collected. Edit: Heck, according to the IRS, in 2013 the bottom 20% paid -1.6% (negative 1.6%) of total income tax collected! I assume that's because of the EITC.

The bottom 50% pay a bunch of other taxes. Payroll taxes, sales taxes, taxes on booze, cigarettes, property etc.

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

#156

Post by Silhouette »

philwelch wrote: post #81
Tloewald wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The basic perversity is building a gigantic military in peacetime because the arms companies have enormous lobbying power. Everything else flows from and is secondary to that.

Gigantic? http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/24/us/politics/pentagon-plans... Have you considered the gigantic military requirements that are placed on the United States? By treaty alone, the US is required to defend almost all of Europe, Japan, and South Korea. These are not easy requirements to disentangle from; if Japan alone were allowed and required to rearm, it could lead to an arms race that would destabilize all…

Have you considered the gigantic military requirements that are placed on the United States?

Placed by whom, exactly? It's not as if the US took on those treaty commitments involuntarily or expecting no benefits in return, and it's not as if the rest of the world would not adapt if the US reduced its military commitments over time.

For example, you talk about the US being required by treaty to defend almost all of Europe, but Europe already has collective defence agreements that are becoming stronger over time, over a million active military service personnel, thousands of aircraft, thousands of heavy armoured vehicles, hundreds of ships, special forces to rival any in the world, and two independent nuclear powers. There is exactly one sovereign state on earth that could single-handedly give the combined forces of Europe a serious fight today, and the consequences for all concerned would be so devastating that such a conflict is almost inconceivable.

There is a reasonable school of thought that argues the world would be a much safer place if the number of military superpowers in it was zero, and that as the only old-school military superpower remaining, the US is therefore a negative factor on global stability and peaceful relations.

Given the recent track record of the US, both acting as an aggressor under often dubious conditions and failing to act as a defender when weaker nations faced aggression by others, there seems little no moral high ground for the US to take here, nor any general mandate to act as the world's policeman. The alarming frequency with which the US military and its political leadership presume to take such positions anyway brings me back to the previous point about the world being better off in the long run with no military superpowers at all.

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

#157

Post by tim333 »

mcguire wrote: post #132
hackuser wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the A-10 was designed to fight Soviet tanks in Europe, and I doubt the top armour of tanks has thickened that much since then. And there's lots of APC's and other semi-hard targets that would be killed just fine. From what I understand, the A-10 was designed for that role as it was envisioned in the 1970s, 40 years ago. The air defenses have greatly improved since then and planes like the A-10 won't get near the ba…

In Europe, perhaps. In Syria?

They took out about 900 mostly Russian made tanks in Gulf War 1. Plus over 3000 other targets. Four A-10s were lost, shot down by surface to air missiles of the large, non man portable variety. A-10s are effective if you can remove the serious air defences first. Syria apparently has a lot of serious air defences which could be taken out but it would be a major effort.

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

#158

Post by javajosh »

hackuser wrote: post #86
ArkyBeagle wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how this was downvoted - it's completely true. Read any bio of Eisenhower. Eisenhower was involved in big experiments just to see if men and materiel could even be moved across country in the US by wheeled vehicles.

> I don't know how this was downvoted Perhaps it was the tone, "utterly false". When I see writing like that, I generally stop reading; often what follows is another hyperbolic Internet rant and I've seen enough of them for my lifetime.

Interestingly, the score for my comment has fluctuated back and forth between +6 to -2. Clearly something touched a chord, which is strange because a) WW2 is a valid counter-example to the claim that you need a huge standing army to fight and win wars, and b) the extent of my "tone" was a single word, "utterly".

May all the 'hyperbolic internet rants' limit themselves to a single word.

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

#159

Post by josephagoss »

kev009 wrote: post #40

The air force as a whole is a large scam committed on the taxpayer. What an irrelevant organization for the 21st century. Misappropriations like this are responsible for increased casualties in current military engagements.

Why is the air force irrelevant?

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

#160

Post by tsotha »

Tloewald wrote: post #51
feedjoelpie wrote: post #10

The author mentions "perverse" incentives in Congress, but what he doesn't mention (because it's a very politically difficult subject) is the perverse incentives afforded military officers. When you have a system in which it's so common as to be expected that the officers who influence your purchasing will in a couple years retire into a job with the private contractor from whom you're purchasing, you have a recipe f…

The basic perversity is building a gigantic military in peacetime because the arms companies have enormous lobbying power. Everything else flows from and is secondary to that.

The US military is on the order of 4% GDP. That's comparable to pre- WW II levels.
Post reply on HN