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

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161–170 of 233 posts

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

#161

Post by tsotha »

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.

Sure, after two years of getting kicked around by its enemies. Modern war moves too quickly for that.

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

#162

Post by sremani »

Silhouette wrote: post #156
philwelch wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Eu…

So will Germans fight for Greece ? I doubt so, so what if Poland is attacked are the Spainyards willing to fight and die for that. We all know, the answer, and its a resounding NO. Italians are not going to fight for estonians. When it hits the fan, and I am sure it will, Americanos will come to rescue and lead the charge. You have to not look beyond the late 90s and Kosovo, to look at the collective action, or should we say the inaction of European states.

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

#163

Post by tsotha »

leoc wrote: post #114
venomsnake wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, that was the driver. We knew they were trying to build such a device, but we didn't know how far along they were. Given the German lead in other war technology areas (like guided missiles), it would have been foolish to underestimate them.

Of course the Germans were lucky to have lost before the bomb was ready. Otherwise instead instead of memorials at Hiroshima and Nagasaki they might be at Munich and Hamburg.

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

#164

Post by tsotha »

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…

>The A10's minigun is ineffective at killing modern main-battle tanks, so I wouldn't say it's a raging sucess.

Heh heh. No. There isn't a tank in the world that can survive an attack from the GAU-8. And it's not a "minigun". A minigun is, you know, small.

The A-10 also can carry a variety of missiles and bombs to get the job done.

I don't necessarily disagree with your conclusion, though. Sniper pods have made "low and slow" unnecessarily risky.

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

#165

Post by tsotha »

TheCowboy wrote: post #154
zipwitch wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Drones are far more expensive than people realize. The reason the Air Force and CIA have held off on retiring the U-2 is that it's cheaper to operate than its unmanned competition.

Sure, small drones with a video camera and LOS control are cheap, but once you start talking about drones with nontrivial amounts of ordinance and satellite quality sensors you're up into the tens of millions of dollars. For the most part they are cheaper than manned alternatives, but by more like a factor of two than a factor of ten.

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

#166

Post by zaroth »

tim333 wrote: post #155
zaroth wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bottom 40% - All Federal Tax - 2013 - 5.6% of tax revenue. Bottom 60% - 16.5% [1]

A good rule of thumb is all state & local taxes paid generally work out to about 1/5th of your mortgage/rent cost. But that's also not funding the F-35. (neither are payroll taxes)

[1] - http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/numbers/displayatab.cfm?DocID...

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

#167

Post by dlgeek »

adventured wrote: post #137
wazoox wrote: post #49

Just the logical following of the F22 disaster: a plane so expensive that they won't ever dare endanger it in real operations... because $1 billion apiece!

$356 million or so (still an absurd sum, just not $1b absurd) "... the Defense Department shut down production last year after spending $67.3 billion on just 188 planes" http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-advanced-fighter-woes-...

Which includes the entire program development cost - if they'd continued production, the per-plane cost would have of course been lower.

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

#168

Post by erglkjahlkh »

wazoox wrote: post #49

Just the logical following of the F22 disaster: a plane so expensive that they won't ever dare endanger it in real operations... because $1 billion apiece!

I am not sure it was so disaster. The main problems from operational point of view for F-22 are operational costs (maintenance), and that it's heavy and flies like a slug. The latter is due design actually so the real problem is price.

They did not want to compromise the stealth and they wanted the plane to match the two-plane doctrine US forces have used since 2nd world war. Basically you got your agile and light fighters that clear the skies, and then you got the heavy planes with superior firepower that mop up the rest. So yeah, that's what they got.

F-35 attempts to be made from cheaper parts and with cheaper costs, and lighter. That means a lot of pea counting, and using simply worse parts. No wonder that program has had problems.

Operationally, F-35 is barely stealthy, and it doesn't fight that well. I'd rather sit in the cockpit of F-22 at this point.

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

#169

Post by scintill76 »

to3m wrote: post #134
scintill76 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like I've seen this type of C-bashing (vs. C++) recently, and I don't understand it. How is well-written modern C less type-safe than C++? I define that as something along the lines of "using the latest language specification, making judicious use of all features possible, turning on extra-strict compiler warnings and errors." To address your specific scenario, you could just as well cast a void* to seagull_…

It's much easier to do in C, as no cast is required.

I didn't realize that distinction, so it's good to know. Still, as I originally assumed, I confirmed that gcc with `-Wall -Werror -std=c99` flags won't compile an initialization of a "struct seagull * " with a value of type "struct enemy * ", or passing a mismatch of those types to a function. If those would be the main reasons to use C++, I'd personally rather just use C with extra checks. But to be fair, maybe that's because I'm not very comfortable with C++, to the point that I didn't notice it checks pointer types.

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

#170

Post by philwelch »

acveilleux wrote: post #145
hackuser wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. Doesn't that seems like a tiny sample, and aren't those far inferior foes?

It's as well tested in combat as any of the other fighters still flying. Pending a US-Russia or US-China war, that's all that's ever going to happen.

Not like anyone's anxious to pull the P-51 or Spitfire out of mothballs, certainly.

While the Hornet doesn't have a huge combat record, it has a long flight record and a long record of carrier operations and has excelled at both with less maintenance burden than its predecessors.

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