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The F-35's $400k helmet

washingtonpost.com

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Re: The F-35's $400k helmet

#71

Post by cpursley »

rimantas wrote: post #37
Htsthbjig wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish the US go home instead of seeding war anywhere they go. I visited Ukraine last month and one of the best things I saw was that war there was contained and "light" using mostly light weapons. Russia probably has not the tech the US has, but Europe does, and Europe does not need a heavy nuclear war or loosing their main energy supplier(Russia).

Europe needs the bully who feels free to do whatever comes to mind (like grabbing territory of the another country) even less.

You mean a territory that belonged to them only a few decades before? This idea that Russia wants to take back its former USSR territories is a fantasy.

Re: The F-35's $400k helmet

#72

Post by rayiner »

furyg3 wrote: post #25

It's a very 'agile' project. When will it be done? Don't ask! How much will it cost? Who knows! It's going to be awesome, though! But... you don't have to wait to see how powerful this weapons system is. The F-35 completely took out the Dutch government before one even rolled off the assembly line! Note to governments: when ordering your weapons systems it may be a good idea to get a cost-per-unit quote before signin…

Defense systems go over-budget for the same reason software projects do--it's all custom and custom development is unpredictable. It's not like these companies can sell the U.S. stuff they had lying around having developed it for another customer.

I used to do development for a DOD project. At the outset of the project, it's often not clear what you're trying to do will even work. It might not even be clear what you should be trying to do. It's an iterative process of the government telling the engineers what it wants, and the engineers going back to the government with what can be done. That's not the say that projects like the F-35 weren't badly managed. But even well-managed defense projects are unpredictable.

The world just looks very different when you can't count on massive consumer volumes to amortize R&D. Imagine going to Apple and saying "we need you to develop the iPhone, and oh by the way we will order at most a few thousand of these. What'll be the unit cost?"

Re: The F-35's $400k helmet

#73

Post by mkaziz »

JohnBooty wrote: post #65
sschueller wrote: post #5

All this technology just to kill people. It is a sad world we live in.

The good news is that war kills less people than it used to. Paradoxically, these fantastically lethal killing machines might be actually preventing deaths. The US/Iraq war and occupation lasted about a decade and there were less than 200,000 direct combat deaths. Contrast with WWII, in which there were quite a few individual battles with greater death tolls... between one and two million people died in the Battle of…

Pedantic but: it won't ruin the planet - the planet is remarkably resistant. But we might succeed in killing ourselves and a bunch of other species off.

Re: The F-35's $400k helmet

#74

Post by powertower »

trhway wrote: post #24
x4m wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No modern Russain Federation tanks can be seen around Donetsk (like T-14 or at least T-90). No regular army either (except DPR army).

T-14 is still not in the army. Probably not even in the mass production yet. No T-90 has been sent to Ukraine. Modernized versions of T-72 is still in wide service with Russian army. Regular Russian army units (at the scale of several "battalion tactical groups", about 2000-3000 soldiers total) were sent to Ukraine in August 2014 - they stopped very successful Ukraine offensive by encircling significant forces near I…

Did you get that information from the US State Department or from a western Ukrainian news source?

Not that it really matters.

Re: The F-35's $400k helmet

#75

Post by bunderbunder »

furyg3 wrote: post #25

It's a very 'agile' project. When will it be done? Don't ask! How much will it cost? Who knows! It's going to be awesome, though! But... you don't have to wait to see how powerful this weapons system is. The F-35 completely took out the Dutch government before one even rolled off the assembly line! Note to governments: when ordering your weapons systems it may be a good idea to get a cost-per-unit quote before signin…

It's more a classic example of the situation that agile methodologies seek to avoid.

The biggest thing Agile tries to do is minimize up-front planning. The reason for that is that you have the absolute least knowledge available to inform your decisions at the beginning of a project, so decisions made early on are massively more likely to be poor ones. Worse, you tend to get locked into them because other components in the system were designed around these decisions and that creates major impediments to change.

F-35 had reams and reams of design decisions made long before anyone started assembling the thing. To an Agile team that's the worst possible thing you can do. You decide you're going to do X long before you have any idea how long X will take or what it will cost or how well it might work. OK sure, yes, you've written down some numbers on paper, but to be blunt that's just blowing smoke up your own ass. It's inevitable that the end result of so carefully specifying the requirements up-front would lead to a virtually unbounded schedule and budget.

By contrast, an agile project's schedule and budget are theoretically unbounded, but you're supposed to strive to always be at a point where it's possible to ship on short notice so the practical reality (not always accomplished) should be that it's always possible to fix one or the other at a defined point by saying, "OK that's enough, let's ship." Or you can even pull the plug on the whole project if you decide it's just not working, and that's actually a realistic option because by delaying decisions you haven't encumbered yourself with a mountain of contracts and financial obligations.

Which isn't to say you could get away with using Scrum or Kanban on a project like this. Just that the problems you're talking about aren't really emblematic of Agile so much as the problems Agile is designed to fix.

Re: The F-35's $400k helmet

#77

Post by hencq »

furyg3 wrote: post #53
jacquesm wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Note to governments: when ordering your weapons systems it may be a good idea to get a cost-per-unit quote before signing. What makes you think they're unhappy about the outcome?

Well considering parliament dissolved over the issue I can imagine there's a lot to be desired. However, like construction projects, the original politician/official get the credit for signing the contract and their successor actually has to deal with the terms.

I'm curious which government you think collapsed over the F-35. I can't think of any. Granted, there have been a lot of debates about the JSF program in Dutch politics, but unless I'm suffering from faulty memory none caused the government to collapse.

Re: The F-35's $400k helmet

#79

Post by engi_nerd »

josefresco wrote: post #67
skeuomorf wrote: post #49

While the technology in this helmet may turn out to be pretty great, I still can't view the project as a whole (The F-35) as more than a failure. It's taken them a lot of time and money to develop a mediocre aircraft, here's Pierre Sprey's opinion on it (Designer of the F-16) "The F-35 was born of an exceptionally dumb piece of airforce PR spin" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxDSiwqM2nw

Former pilots, and aircraft engineers are typically very proud of their machines, relish a more simple time when the pilot mattered more, and won't hesitate to bash modern technology.

I will bash modern technology that I struggle with in the same way that a programmer might bash a well used but quirky part of their toolchain (much as I was just griping to a coworker about MATLAB...). If something is really screwed up I will have the same sort of gripes about it that anyone has about something that's gone off the rails.

If anything I pine for the days when it was much simpler to make a direct and meaningful engineering contribution on a large project.

Re: The F-35's $400k helmet

#80

Post by enraged_camel »

rayiner wrote: post #72
furyg3 wrote: post #25

It's a very 'agile' project. When will it be done? Don't ask! How much will it cost? Who knows! It's going to be awesome, though! But... you don't have to wait to see how powerful this weapons system is. The F-35 completely took out the Dutch government before one even rolled off the assembly line! Note to governments: when ordering your weapons systems it may be a good idea to get a cost-per-unit quote before signin…

Defense systems go over-budget for the same reason software projects do--it's all custom and custom development is unpredictable. It's not like these companies can sell the U.S. stuff they had lying around having developed it for another customer. I used to do development for a DOD project. At the outset of the project, it's often not clear what you're trying to do will even work. It might not even be clear what you…

>>I used to do development for a DOD project. At the outset of the project, it's often not clear what you're trying to do will even work. It might not even be clear what you should be trying to do.

That's interesting, and also scary. I work in IT consulting where it's extremely rare for customers to pay for a professional services project before seeing a proof of concept demonstration of what will be delivered. In fact, we insist on showing them one before anything is signed, because it aligns expectations and allows for more accurate SOWs.

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