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The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

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Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#841

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in Australia, after my tax return is lodged, I receive an income tax receipt with a breakdown of where my tax dollars went. It's only broken down by category though (e.g. Health, Defence, Education), except for Welfare, which has subcategories (e.g. Aged, Disability, etc). There's an example and further explanation here on the ATO website: https://www.ato.gov.au/Individuals/Lodging-your-tax-return/I... There's a…

What a nice idea, wish we had something like this in Germany - not digging on websites but a tax receipt.

I’ve gotten this before in the mail as a US resident. It’s quite interesting regardless of your thoughts on the budget

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#842

Putting aside the good-plane/bad-plane discussion, this program is the poster child for one of my pet wishes: that the costs of government programs would be expressed in $/tax-payer. There are about 100M tax payers in the US; this program is expected to cost about $1,500,000M; so the F35 program is expected to cost about $15,000 per tax payer. True: that's over 50 years; still, un-discounted, that's $300/year/tax-pay…

but why in the world does it need to cost that much? what's wrong with just using the jets we already have. I mean we have like a gazillion of those things. what percentage of the military/armed forces is currently being used or has been used over the last 10 years. I'm guessing it's a very small percentage.

> what's wrong with just using the jets we already have.

The problems with the F-15/F-16/F-18 is that Chinese and Russian missiles might be able to shoot them down more easily than the F-22 or F-35, since the F-22 and F-35 are stealthed.

The problem with the F-22 and F-35 is high unit cost, so they can't have as many as they'd like.

It's also possible that their stealth might not work so well on future Russian/Chinese radars, for example they might use different frequencies. You can be sure both those countries are working on countermeasures to stealth aircraft.

Possibly the solution will be an unmanned aircraft. This would be able to pull >10g manouvers, which aircraft with a pilot in can't.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#843

Putting aside the good-plane/bad-plane discussion, this program is the poster child for one of my pet wishes: that the costs of government programs would be expressed in $/tax-payer. There are about 100M tax payers in the US; this program is expected to cost about $1,500,000M; so the F35 program is expected to cost about $15,000 per tax payer. True: that's over 50 years; still, un-discounted, that's $300/year/tax-pay…

I'll pay $300/year for global security any day of the week. Honestly, I don't give a shit if it costs $10,000/year, I want the U.S. being the global police because I am most comfortable with the status quo. Simple as that.

How is 9/11'ing an Afgan goat farmer or a Pakistani wedding "global security"?

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#845

Putting aside the good-plane/bad-plane discussion, this program is the poster child for one of my pet wishes: that the costs of government programs would be expressed in $/tax-payer. There are about 100M tax payers in the US; this program is expected to cost about $1,500,000M; so the F35 program is expected to cost about $15,000 per tax payer. True: that's over 50 years; still, un-discounted, that's $300/year/tax-pay…

Very interesting proposition. Small side note - a lot of this $300/year/tax-payer is flowing back into paying US salaries in various states... which is probably recursively why the ticket price is so high in the first place (cost-plus, politicians and all). Also, the $60,000/tax-payer Covid ticket price (though I find that source questionable) is missing averaging out over multiple years as you said yourself. Needs t…

I take issue with comparing a single project to a generic relief. A fair comparison would be to only compare a single stimulus effort (say the $1000 one). Or if you want to compare the total covid effort, compare it with the total military budget.

This type of comparison reminds me of how people abuse statistics by comparing a city (or even a neighborhood) to another state (or even a country); say the average New Yorker vs. the average Swede.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#846

Putting aside the good-plane/bad-plane discussion, this program is the poster child for one of my pet wishes: that the costs of government programs would be expressed in $/tax-payer. There are about 100M tax payers in the US; this program is expected to cost about $1,500,000M; so the F35 program is expected to cost about $15,000 per tax payer. True: that's over 50 years; still, un-discounted, that's $300/year/tax-pay…

I'll pay $300/year for global security any day of the week. Honestly, I don't give a shit if it costs $10,000/year, I want the U.S. being the global police because I am most comfortable with the status quo. Simple as that.

Are you serious? Global security for whom exactly?

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#847

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll pay $300/year for global security any day of the week. Honestly, I don't give a shit if it costs $10,000/year, I want the U.S. being the global police because I am most comfortable with the status quo. Simple as that.

Are you serious? Global security for whom exactly?

Yemeni people celebrating weddings?

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#848

If we are looking for 'affordable, lightweight fighters' to 'complement a small future fleet of' F35s sholdn't we just build a ton of uber cheap drones? The F35 is supposed to have amazing networked situational awareness (idk the military terms) which seems like a great platform to control a fleet of slave drones? Kind of like an aircraft carrier, surrounded by a lot of support.

The square-cube law implies some performance characteristics that only big-enough craft can fulfill, and at that size point you aren't saving money with "disposable" cheap-and-small drones. Specifically, air resistance scales with cross sectional area, while fuel storage and engine power output scales with volume. You can trade off fuel for engine power by making a more missile-like design, but then you're left with a conventional plane.

Like, this is the fundamental reason why ground-based missiles don't rule the skies. Aircraft can go high enough and travel fast enough that any intercept solution has you firing well before they've committed to flying into the effective range of the missile.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#849

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We can build cool shit, but our government and most companies don't optimize for that. ARPA was always kind of a jobs program, but nonetheless it created the internet at the same time as NASA was putting a man on the moon, the government was successfully building the interstate highways and Bell Labs was Bell Labs instead of whatever it is now. Today we get the F-35 and the Big Dig and whatever other money furnace…

don't worry it just needs war to get there things going. Warfare drives all innovation. I can't think of anything major last century that wasn't developed for military uses. I think we will get another infusion of war in about 18 years when China will start blowing everyone out of antarctica. Government will carry on pretending to care about environment and proceed to release vast amounts of carbon in the South Pole.…

The pieces on the wargame board are going in place for a round one canceling out of 2B+ population between India, China and expect the thermal nuclear exchange to melt the snow on the high altitude mountainous region keeping them apart.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#850
How does the F35 compare with something like the EuroFighter Typhoon? I know the F35 took a lot of the orders away from the Typhoon, but the Typhoon has already been quite successful in multiple modern conflicts?

(EDIT) Accidentally hit 'comment' before finishing.

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