The Pentagon's $399 Billion Plane to Nowhere

I'm a realist, so I understand and accept that the Pentagon's main goal is keep its budget healthy. What I don't understand is why can't we do that in a way that gets us good airplanes?

I'm a wary optimist. Trust, but verify. Hope, but plan for the worst. I don't understand enough to know whether we're living in a Pax Americana or a Pax McDonalds. I hope it's the spread of globalization and liberal democracy, but I'm willing to spend the money just in case it's actually the shadow of the American military machine that keeps our relative peace. If my fears are justified, however, it's our military machine, not our military budget that keeps nation-states polite.

I can be a ruthless critic. I'll buy spin (multi-role is cheaper) only as long as I don't think much about it. But, now I'm thinking about it. It's obvious that an F-35 is a joke. 2500 of them is less funny, but still not nearly as awe-inspiring as it could be.

But, I'm apparently naive. I don't understand why some ambitious politician can't take this opportunity to really do something of note. Why can't somebody take this political machine we've built, with contractors lined up in many states, and repurpose it to produce useful, best-of-breed airplanes? I would buy the spin that it's cheaper and easier to design four different planes each tasked do one job extremely well than it is to design one single plane to fill those four roles simultaneously. There is such a thing as the opposite of synergy. Somebody could coin a phrase here, sell the public something huge, and come out looking like a hero for making good on the money we're inevitably going to spend. Let the Pentagon have their budget. Let the politicians have their jobs. And let me have a military with the best equipment in the world.

You mean 90 senators (out of 100)

Well, the wars were off the books until Obama put them on but they are "over" now so that is money mostly already spent (like 1 trillion).

When I say black hole I mean money that is wasted. Health and Human Services and Social Security are things that benefit us while wars, our military, and homeland security not so much. Social Security for example is an entitlement that everyone pays into that has always run a surplus so it's paid for... Politicians raiding the fund is a different story.

Our bad foreign policy decisions of the last century are bleeding us dry. Wake up people! Ready for round three in Iraq?

The problem isn't just that the F-35 is multirole but is trying to cater to the various quirks of multiple services. I mentioned it upthread, but an example of this is the very shape of the aircraft was determined in large part due to the Marines' vertical take off requirement. This necessitated a huge lifting fan in the fuselage, which had major ramifications on the maneuverability of the aircraft and the pilot's visibility out of the cockpit. Then there are all the modifications made to the C variant to accommodate carrier landings for the Navy.

The end result is that you have an airframe that was meant to save money by being common between all three services which has ended up with a parts commonality of only 25-30%[1] and whose performance has suffered because of the requisite compromises made to chase that goal.

I think one of the other big things that gets lost in these conversations is that the F-35 was meant to be cheap and widely fielded. The problem is that the program's bloating to the point that they're getting too expensive to field in numbers that would replace the existing force.

The response is usually that the high tech gadgetry in these planes will save the day. That's problematic. This is going back to the F-22, but RAND ran a widely-circulated simulated conflict in the Straight of Taiwan a few years back[2]. The result was that the F-22s held their own... until they ran out of missiles and were overwhelmed by the sheer number of opposition planes that were being thrown at them.

So, basically, my answer to your question would be forget the super planes and focus on cheaper, more, and good enough. Accept that fighter, bomb truck, and stealth is a pick two proposition. Design something light, cheap, and modernized to fill the multirole capability of the F-16 today; it's very difficult to replace a $40M jet in the same kind of numbers with a $150M one. Supplement the F-22 with new production F-15SEs. Look into things like the Textron AirLand Scorpion to fill the permissive environment CAS role that the A-10C fills today.

KISS.

[1] http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/lightning-rod-f-35-fight...

[2] http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2009/RA...

No one said food stamps = social security but they both are social programs that benefit people.

Social Security is in fact an entitlement as in workers are "entitled" to their benefits by paying into the system. Republicans later smeared the word entitlement because it now also refers to welfare programs (entitled by law) so people get confused.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entitlement