Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the US were to permanently lose a big chunk of its airpower, Taiwan would have to rejoin China soon after.
This assumes that the F-35 is essential for maintaining air superiority, which is unsupported.
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US military grounds entire fleet of F-35 jets
71–80 of 178 posts
Re: US military grounds entire fleet of F-35 jets
#72Over a trillion dollars over 28 years. There are about 250 million U.S. taxpayers. That's $150 out of the pocket of every single taxpayer, every year, just to cover the cost of this one monumentally embarrassing failure. If you're a U.S. citizen born after 1974, you've been setting fire to this money annually for your entire adult life. No value has been provided other than as a government subsidy to military contrac…
Out of curiosity, does the 250 million taxpayers include tax paying businesses?
Nope, and although that suggests that $150 would be an overestimate (if we disregard the huge portion of taxes that are earmarked for social security, individual income tax contributes 80% of government revenue), this is countered by 1. the fact that the $1 trillion price tag is a low-ball estimate, 2. the fact that the tax base was 50 million fewer 30 years ago, and 3. the unlikelihood that the price tag is adjusting for inflation, which would increase the real value of contributions over the past 30 years (according to CPI, prices in 2017 were 87% higher than prices in 1990).
Re: US military grounds entire fleet of F-35 jets
#73I haven't been paying any specific attention to F-35 news, but I can only ever recall reading negative press. I know this particular project has been extra troubled, but is that the norm for new military vessels/vehicles?
Yes it is, for American weapons systems at least. And it has been so for many decades now. It's extremely common for the first version of a new weapons system to have major (or even disastrous) flaws that only get ironed out in later revisions at great expense.
Here's one example. Today's median American soldier's primary weapon is the M4 carbine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M4_carbine), which by all accounts is a solid piece of kit that has acquitted itself well in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But the M4 is the end of a long line of revisions made to an older weapon, the M16 rifle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M16_rifle), which first rolled out during the Vietnam War. And the first version of the M16 was so bad it got a lot of soldiers killed.
See, rifles have a lot of moving parts, which typically means they have to be well-maintained -- periodically stripped down into parts, and then all the parts individually cleaned and lubed -- or else they start to malfunction. Maintaining their weapon was a standard part of a soldier's job; not something anyone enjoyed doing, but something they did because they didn't want their rifle to fail on them in combat.
But Colt, the makers of the M16, advertised it as a revolution in small arms -- a "self-cleaning" rifle that used Space Age materials to remove the need for all that fussy work. And so, when the Defense Department rolled out the M16 to the troops in Vietnam, it didn't bother to issue any of the usual cleaning tools along with them.
Which meant that a lot of soldiers found themselves in an awkward spot when it turned out that Colt's testing processes for the "self-cleaning" M16 hadn't really accounted for the rough jungle conditions of Vietnam. M16s started jamming all over, frequently so seriously that the entire weapon was rendered useless; and even if the soldiers carrying them had wanted to start cleaning them to try and prevent those jams, they lacked the tools they'd need to do so. So soldiers started getting killed, shot down in battle while frantically struggling to un-jam their bricked rifles.
The situation got so bad that it prompted a Congressional investigation, which found a host of reliability problems with the M16. Colt went back to work and created a revised version, the M16A1, which mostly resolved those issues. The M16A1, notably, was not advertised as self-cleaning. And when it finally rolled out, it came not only with a set of cleaning tools, but with a comic book-style manual by the famous comic artist Will Eisner explaining exactly how to use them (which you can read here: http://www.astrotx.com/M-16A1%20Rifle.pdf).
And then there were even more revisions developed; the M16 remained the Army's standard rifle through the early 2000s. And then it was replaced by the M4, which was just a shorter, lighter, even more further developed M16. So eventually the government was able to throw enough money at a terrible weapon to turn it into a decent one.
It's a shame so many grunts had to die along the way, of course. But hey, Colt got paid twice! You know?
Re: US military grounds entire fleet of F-35 jets
#74If only it were permanent.
Why? Air superiority is important for power projection. Edit: So I'm getting a comments here that are much lower-quality than I expect from this place. Geopolitics is not like interpersonal relationships. There is nobody governing governments. It's a free-for-all, literally the state of nature. In societies it seems like "Might makes right" is a dated concept, but you have to remember that's within the frame of a gov…
yeah, that's the kissinger line of thought. "realism". except it doesn't hold up to reality, at least not in the modern or even the premodern era.
iceland has no military, and no real political or economic significance in the world. it has no genuine allies to whom it is worthwhile. why doesn't anyone/everyone invade them? nobody would risk a major war over them. they're what could amount to a strategically useful port. they might have some minerals or something. it wouldn't even be hard.
the answer is that nobody cares to. just as you don't bother taking a free cupcake at a catered event because you're not hungry, the world's governments do not necessarily increase their own power on the international stage with perfect game-theory play.
so, "air superiority is important for power projection", sure. if you were playing perfect game-theory and optimizing your country's power to the very limit of what is theoretically possible, you'd always buy the best air superiority solution. except we don't really see anyone else doing that. russia doesn't, and china doesn't. why? the answer is that they are sated with their current solution, even if it isn't the maximum possible solution. they're not interested in exerting the effort that it would take to build something like the f-35 because they recognize that it wouldn't improve their state's power enough that it would enable them to do anything new, nor is doing anything new such a big concern given that their main security issues are internal rather than external.
true geopolitical "realism" is realizing that the idea of 100% pervasive and cynical power maximization is an artifact of the american mind. countries are far more benign than kissinger ever expected.
Re: US military grounds entire fleet of F-35 jets
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
All of those skilled workers could have been building something useful , however. The waste of their time and skill is indeed burning resources, in an even more concrete sense than setting money on fire.
> those skilled workers could have been building something useful I wouldn't say the F-35 is useless . It contains a breathtaking integration of advanced technologies. There are benefits to that R&D. It's also an incredibly capable platform–the principle complaint is it's too capable, that we could have gotten more bang for our bucks with more less-capable planes.
In some ways, the point of war is to burn resources for no reason. Solving the crisis of overproduction. So if we can do it with less war, maybe that's a step in the right direction.
Re: US military grounds entire fleet of F-35 jets
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
All of those skilled workers could have been building something useful , however. The waste of their time and skill is indeed burning resources, in an even more concrete sense than setting money on fire.
> those skilled workers could have been building something useful I wouldn't say the F-35 is useless . It contains a breathtaking integration of advanced technologies. There are benefits to that R&D. It's also an incredibly capable platform–the principle complaint is it's too capable, that we could have gotten more bang for our bucks with more less-capable planes.
Does any of that R&D get shared publicly or is it one of those things where the talent that designed it eventually goes on to different companies and the research spreads that way?
Re: US military grounds entire fleet of F-35 jets
#77Over a trillion dollars over 28 years. There are about 250 million U.S. taxpayers. That's $150 out of the pocket of every single taxpayer, every year, just to cover the cost of this one monumentally embarrassing failure. If you're a U.S. citizen born after 1974, you've been setting fire to this money annually for your entire adult life. No value has been provided other than as a government subsidy to military contrac…
If you don't like it, vote for lower taxes.
Also, to claim this program has produced nothing of value is an outright bold-faced lie. The US has received over 300 planes from this project.
Re: US military grounds entire fleet of F-35 jets
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's very much the norm. The JSF is the safest program that's ever been fielded -- the Osprey had multiple crashes and fatalities at this stage of its development. Government procurement needs an overhaul, and this program has been badly over budget and time, but it is delivering a successful product.
> It's very much the norm. The JSF is the safest program that's ever been fielded -- the Osprey had multiple crashes and fatalities at this stage of its development. Is that per flight hour or some other metric? Care to provide a link?
The F-35 is at over 100,000 flight hours[1], and the Osprey is at around 400,000. The Osprey hit 100k hours in 2001[2], by which point it had 6 crashes and 34 deaths, most of which were in the United States [3]. The V-22 deaths have been mostly passengers, so technically it's not a fair comparison since the F-35 only seats one. However, this was the first F-35 crash and it has had zero deaths, making the number of people on the plane a moot point.
[1]: https://www.f35.com/news/detail/lockheed-martin-f-35s-surpas...
[2]: http://www.defense-aerospace.com/articles-view/release/3/123...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidents_and_incidents_involv...
Re: US military grounds entire fleet of F-35 jets
#79Over a trillion dollars over 28 years. There are about 250 million U.S. taxpayers. That's $150 out of the pocket of every single taxpayer, every year, just to cover the cost of this one monumentally embarrassing failure. If you're a U.S. citizen born after 1974, you've been setting fire to this money annually for your entire adult life. No value has been provided other than as a government subsidy to military contrac…
Sure, some of the money has gone to a small number of rich people, but there's quite a large number of working class people designing and assembling these planes. To say that the money has been set on fire or that no value has been provided seems a bit harsh, much of the money is employing a large number of skilled people in the USA and in other countries. And it's not just the USA taxpayers who are paying for this,…
I see someone else has already brought the quote from Dwight D Eisenhower, but I would like to hoist a quote of my own from a previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18179654
Since WW2, the question "if this doesn't work, am I or someone I know going to get killed?" has been false for the people designing, organising, funding and procuring these systems.
Re: US military grounds entire fleet of F-35 jets
#80Most people reading will recognize that it is a standard procedure to ground everything until you understand the risk. In this case the risk is a faulty fuel line, and apparently there is a test that will let you know in the field if you have it or not so you can return the plane to service immediately if the test comes up negative. There is a remarkable amount of disinformation that is spread around about this plane…
That's an interesting theory, that there's a foreign disinformation campaign smearing the program, because they don't want it fielded against them.
I'd argue against that theory though, on the grounds that a corrupt/greedy congress, military and defense contractor network will do more against the country than our opponents ever will. Remember that time we bankrupted the USSR in an arms race? This time we're doing it to ourselves.
So if anything, I think the flag waving F35 program supporters are both the defense contractors (obviously) but also all the foreign states that would like us bankrupt and saddled with decreased air power in three armed services. It's genius.