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The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

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Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

#481

Post by mmooss »

p_l wrote: post #354
mmooss wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide any evidence? What I'm stating are public facts. We can always come up with reasons , but we need evidence of what actually happened.

The "special casing" of "operational capability" is public fact - USMC decided to claim initial operational capability on aircraft that didn't even have complete SMS (stores management system), something that was missing even after first "front line" USAF units got theirs. Block 2 software had only minimal air-to-air and air-to-ground capabilities implemented. Block 3 was the infamous one with constant reboots, with…

Thanks. I do know about most of that but I'm not sure it distinguishes the F-35 from any very large, very complex, bleeding edge technology project.

> the road there was more painful than it should be

See above - it's so hard to say. The conception was such an enormous project: build a bleeding edge system, higher performance than anything to be built for decades, even a new concept of fighter planes (as a sensor node on a network built around situational awareness, more than anything, as I understand it), that satisfies the requirements of not only the Navy, Air Force, and Marines, but a dozen militaries in other countries - and for all, critical to existential survival.

If you've ever had a project with more than one boss who are independent of each other, you know the pain of trying to choose even specifications. Imagine the F-35 meetings.

Was it worth the pain? It did allow an enormous economy of scale, a trillion dollars over its lifetime. They payoff is now, when it's the best fighter plane in the world that everyone wants, and a Dutch jet can land in Italy or Okinawa and get parts and maintenance.

But that doesn't answer the original question of whether the VTOL (really STOL) -B model was included mostly to give Lockheed the contract. In all those countries, there was too much demand for S/VTOL to just skip it, and there were and are zero alternatives. Something else could have been designed - but why when you can leverage all this massive development of the F-35?

> ALIS (IIRC now renamed to ODIN, but awarded back to the same team...), the ground support system critical to even running the airplane, was close to useless in 2015.

Also, I think ALIS was controlled and operated by Lockheed - it was essentially a service from Lockheed. The US military was limited in its ability to do its own inventory, maintenance, etc. Now the military insists on controlling the IP for its acquisition, to a large extent. I don't know what the IP status of ODIN is.

Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

#482

Post by wartywhoa23 »

ACCount37 wrote: post #329
gyulai wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no need to welcome me to war. I'm not in one, despite the fact that the powers that be are hellbent on getting me (and everyone else) into one.

Oh, yes. That's exactly how it works. No one would ask you "do you want to get into a war"? Ukraine didn't want to get into a war. Turns out it wasn't their call to make! Least you can do is be prepared. If a hostile country believes "oh, they can't handle a war, it's going to be so easy", the risk of that country trying shit goes up. And if you really can't, the war would be more devastating than if you can.

The truth is that countries can't want anything, be hostile, or have any other personal trait simply because countries are not animate entities but rather a huge number of absolutely different people with different goals, and most of them would just love to mind their own business and don't want to kill and die in the name of some scum calling itself government.

Speaking of war as something inevitable, something unconditionally built in into human nature, and telling people who want peace to prepare, as in Orwell's "war is peace", simply reinforces the narratives of said scum and spins this morbid wheel up into total destruction.

Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

#483

Post by busterarm »

bootsmann wrote: post #439
busterarm wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And a truck full of low cost drones can swarm your airfield and take all your F35s out while they're still on the ground. The future isn't in pilot-in-seat aircraft at all.

“Drones will make xyz technology obsolete” is probably the most naive armchair conclusion you can draw from the Ukraine war. Food for thought: Russias most impactful innovation of this war so far has been building more precise glide bombs, which notably are dropped by fighter planes (and the reason why Ukraine went after those planes with their drones).

I'm not saying you won't need fighter planes but why do they have to be manned when they can be autonomous or semi-autonomous with remote pilots?

Hence recent projects like X-BAT and YFQ-44A. Sure, YFQ-44A says the mission now is to support crewed fighters, but I don't expect that to last.

Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

#484

Post by jandrese »

ntonozzi wrote: post #466
jandrese wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're looking at this all wrong. Taking 20 years to develop an airframe is fully intentional. The whole point of that project is to keep military contractors in business in peacetime because if war breaks out it will be much harder to start a company from scratch. If the company were efficient and pumped out aircraft like a normal company the government would be stuck with thousands of otherwise useless machines to…

Is this goal documented by the Department of War somewhere? Or are you guessing that there has to be a strategic reason for what seems quite wasteful. It sure seems like there's more efficient ways to achieve this goal.

What would you suggest as a more efficient way to achieve this goal? Building thousands of advanced fighter jets for private citizens? Keeping highly skilled engineers up to date on the most modern technologies and maintaining specialized factories is inherently expensive. You can't leave the factories mothballed because you need to keep the skilled workers employed and practiced with manufacturing.

Maybe there could be something like a weekend warriors but for machinists? One weekend a month, one week a year you build fighter jets. This does mean there needs to be private sector demand for those skillsets so the reservists have relevant day jobs.

Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

#485

Post by wartywhoa23 »

ares623 wrote: post #231

You’re about to find out how Russia’s military couldn’t beat a smaller force despite looking very fierce for decades.

The reason that Russian military is unable to beat a smaller force is beause some entities need this meatgrinder to churn on as long as possible and grind as many Slavic men on both sides as possible. It's a perfectly controlled process.

Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

#486

Post by msabalau »

delfinom wrote: post #295
msabalau wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have scaled artillery shell production, it's about 3 times what production was prior to the conflict in Ukraine. And the Pentagon claims they'll double that again by next Spring. Given that the actual peer conflict that matters to the US will almost certainly be decided by air and sea power, this all seems very much like pointless distraction. But evidently it can be done, because it is being done. I suppose we ar…

The problem is, the US sea power is being dwarfed by China rapidly, who have now surpassed the size of the US Navy and are quickly going to be even larger. And the US does not have enough missiles for a war with China or even Russia realistically. It's why there's a panic for artillery shells. They realize any real symmetrical with an enemy that isn't some guys in caves would become a war of attrition through numbers…

To the extent that there is a gap in sea or air power, you fix that, you don't waste attention or money on side projects like artillery shells.

The administration claims that it isn't distracted by Ukraine and Europe, and wants to focus on threat from China, but the strategic imperative for increasing shell production is Ukraine and the threat from Russia to Europe. Let the Europeans sort that out. And, if the Israelis want lots of shells, let them sort it out, or better yet do without.

Or acknowledge that you are doing something that is apart from your main strategic focus. It is possible to walk and chew bubblegum. Bubblegum doesn't cost all that that much.

But the pretense that artillery shells are desperately needed for deterrence in the South China Sea is rather tiresome. There are far more important munitions supply gaps. Just because a couple of conservative think tanks wanted to make hay about about sending shells to Ukraine a couple of years ago is political drama, not something actually important.

Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

#487

Post by w10-1 »

Don't let hatred of bureaucracy blind you.

Russia and China definitely love this: choosing time over features or quality is a recipe for failed products and corrupted contractors who specialize in defrauding the government.

This turned the universal hatred of bureaucracy against our greatest capability.

The US has both more features and more quality in all its armaments, which has given us enduring advantages (notwithstanding being spread too thin).

Unlike making products, time actually matters less than feature or quality in war-making because you avoid war as long as possible, and you choose to engage/deploy based on your actual capabilities.

Yes, in rare occasion when you've stumbled into an assymmetrical quagmire, you need to catch up, with armor against roadside bombs in Iraq or drone swarms now. But it's critical to be better by default, and be faster as needed.

The US military has expressly countered the sclerosis of bureaucracy by pushing decisions down to local commanders and funding a broad swath of experimental technologies. But a program like the F35 necessarily involves a ridiculous amount of integration, and it's just hard to get that right. Saying "just do it faster" is an armchair quarterback fantasy.

Never let your enemy use your weaknesses against you.

Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

#488

Post by senordevnyc »

jandrese wrote: post #484
ntonozzi wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this goal documented by the Department of War somewhere? Or are you guessing that there has to be a strategic reason for what seems quite wasteful. It sure seems like there's more efficient ways to achieve this goal.

What would you suggest as a more efficient way to achieve this goal? Building thousands of advanced fighter jets for private citizens? Keeping highly skilled engineers up to date on the most modern technologies and maintaining specialized factories is inherently expensive. You can't leave the factories mothballed because you need to keep the skilled workers employed and practiced with manufacturing. Maybe there could…

Rather than the sarcastic non-answer, you could just respond to the question as asked.

Is this an official goal, or at attempt to handwave away the fact that we seem to waste trillions and decades to get anything done?

Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

#489

Post by w10-1 »

scuff3d wrote: post #232
stackskipton wrote: post #47

As someone who has some familiarity with this process, just like safety regulations are written in blood, Federal Acquisition rules are written in misuse of money, sometimes criminally. Yes, we have swung too much towards the bureaucrats but I'm not sure throwing out everything is solution to the issue. Move fast works great when it's B2B software and failures means stock price does not go up. It's not so great when…

Given there is apparently a large emphasis on the performance of these individual "portfolio" managers, and speed of delivery is made to be such a big deal, this is definitely going to get out own people killed.

> this is definitely going to get out own people killed.

But the key feature making this a horrible decision is that the people responsible for getting our people killed will not be discoverable, and they will never face the consequences. Heck: they might not even know, because they're doing good by their standards.

That's exactly how you make a broken but persistent and entrenched system: incentives without consequences for exported costs.

Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

#490

Post by w10-1 »

chiph wrote: post #41

> Design For Rapid Scale In a Crisis One of the things that I think Anduril (Palmer Luckey and other founders) is doing right is designing for manufacturability. The invasion of Ukraine has shown that future conflicts will use up weapons at a very high pace. And that the US capability to build them at the rate needed to sustain conflict isn't there anymore. But that one thing that could help is making them easier to…

> that one thing that could help is making them easier to build

That means anyone can build them.

Be wary of advances that benefit your enemy as much as you, and make more of your enemies capable of war.

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