6 ms·

After a lot of bad news about the F35 it seems the PR effort has started to make it look better. Lots of positive articles about it all of a sudden.

nerdponx 8y ago
From a purely technological perspective, it's always been pretty damn cool.
UweSchmidt 8y ago
HN is a small, but not unimportant battlefield in the global information war.
- duxup 8y ago
  I was recently in western China and it's nothing like people say it is. It is very peaceful and I don't have to wear my backpack facing forward and worry about thieves like I do when I'm in Ameri ---- oops wrong story. In all seriousness, this article is pretty interesting and kinda stands on its own.
  - ArtDev 8y ago
    You should also visit Tibet. There are roadblocks and military everywhere. It is bizarre. Once I saw drunken Chinese soldiers spinning circles in the middle of a small town with a stolen tractor. Super weird scene. The locals were not happy about it. I had the sense that mainland China IS pretty safe from petty theft because all the police. However, what is up with all the open prostitution when is it supposed to be illegal? What were we talking about?
DangitBobby 8y ago
It's just as likely that there were negative opinions created for your impression, and way people actually feel is coming to light. Disinformation cuts both ways.
dsfyu404ed 8y ago
Systems get better with refinement. The F35 is getting into the "mature technology" part of the progress curve now so it's naturally going to look better. It took a lot of money to get there but we're starting to see more positive results. People are more likely to submit what they're reading if a similar post has already proven to be popular. Overall JSF program aside, this is a fairly interesting and in depth (at least for this audience, this is probably just a high level overview to someone who works on electronic warfare technology) article on a particular subsystem so why wouldn't it be popular here?
eatonphil 8y ago
My impression is that there are two things at play: 1) Once you've noticed something, you tend to notice it more often. 2) Novel (or uncommon) articles on HN that get to the front page tend to attract other articles on the same topic. I can imagine this along the lines of: Human 1: Hey apparently there's an audience on HN for topic X that I enjoy! I wonder if HN is also interested in this related article on topic X. Or Human 2: Hey here's this interesting related article I discovered while looking at front-page article Y on topic X. The summary of all of this is to say that my guess is that like attracts like and uncommon topics die down fairly quickly in time. I imagine that it is less of a concerted effort by stakeholders to push and direct topic X than just the effects of a curious and diverse group.
- locklock 8y ago
  On the other hand, this is the second positive article on this plane to hit the top of hacker news in 3 days [1]. A trillion dollar plane that is notorious for costing way too much probably has a pretty decent marketing budget behind it, and it's not very difficult to assume that these articles are part of that somehow. For an article that came out before this recent press rollout began, try this one: "The F-35 Is a $1.4T National Disaster" article: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-f-35-14-trillion-dollar-national-disaster-19985 https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-f-35-14-trill... HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16869679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16869679 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19506763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19506763
  - drstewart 8y ago
    >"The F-35 Is a $1.4T National Disaster" A trillion dollar plane that's cutting edge probably has a pretty decent opposition market budget behind it from adversarial nations, and it's not very difficult to assume that these articles are part of that somehow.
    - rhizome 8y ago
      no, it really is that ridiculous.
thunderbird120 8y ago
It's actually been getting lots of good press for quite a while now if you follow defense news, mostly due to very good performance in wargames exercises and serious problems being resolved. That said, it's somewhat bizarre seeing a bunch of articles related to it on HN. This is really not the kind of community which usually follows that kind of thing closely. /r/CredibleDefense over on reddit is much more suited to discussions about this kind of thing.
jjoonathan 8y ago
This has happened to me a few times before following a single boredom-induced chumbox click. Advanced military toys are always good for nerd sniping, recommender algorithms know this, and they will eagerly amplify a small amount of demonstrated interest into a deluge of recommendations. I'm pretty sure that's what's happening here. So yes, it's certainly a bought and paid for PR effort, but I wouldn't conclude that it's localized in time, just that HN recently wandered into it. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll take my leave to go read about the fabulous toys my tax dollars are paying for.
- codeisawesome 8y ago
  Your comment made me feel like HN needs a “give gold” system. Proceeds could go to funding startups =)
- peteretep 8y ago
  > Advanced military toys are always good for nerd sniping That and active measures. Eroding public support for your enemy's shiny new military hardware is a cheap way to destroy morale and increase the chances it'll get cancelled.
themodelplumber 8y ago
The "positive" articles are at least talking about the F-35's attributes as they relate to its primary mission of SEAD. To me this is a recovery of some signal against all the previous noise, wherein we wondered if the F-35 was the all-around best fighter ever, and if not why not, etc.
aurailious 8y ago
It wouldn't surprise me if things changed and its actually good now.
partiallypro 8y ago
I always found the F-35 "bad" news to be agenda driven, possibly by a foreign actor. The people I know in the Air Force are fans of the F-35, but the media never has been. I think there are certainly cost overruns, etc that deserve coverage...but I am always struck by the negative opinion even the most common person has of the fighter just from headlines, that in some cases are misleading. I just can't shake the feeling that some of it is manufactured. I could be wrong, but it has certainly felt that way to me. So, it wouldn't surprise me if the DoD is doing a bit of a PR push to restore public faith in the project.
- ken 8y ago
  It's $100,000,000 per aircraft, and US military spending is bigger than the next 7 countries combined. The news stories I've read about America in the past year are about how our water pipes are still full of lead, people are dying of gun violence, and government workers who live paycheck-to-paycheck got hurt by the shutdown. I don't need a foreign actor to explain why people in America today are unsympathetic to a new technologically advanced fighter jet. Even the foreign threats of today aren't the type where air superiority would help at all.
  - sgc 8y ago
    Air superiority is the defining aspect of modern war. Whoever owns the skies wins. Whatever one's opinion on the FXX planes, the goal of maintaining air superiority into the future is completely obvious and necessary.
    - WJW 8y ago
      Well, only if you can keep fighting a defined enemy who is at all vulnerable to a traditional conflict. An enemy who is globally distributed and just targets vulnerable energy and water infrastructure over the internet is much less targetable with air power.
      - bordercases 8y ago
        But if you don't keep up at least a modicum of pretense for building air superiority, you will have two problems. In the case of domestic extremism the theatre gets pushed to surveillance + communication monitoring.
Symmetry 8y ago
Every new fighter the US has added since 1970 has followed the same pattern so it's not surprising. At least the F-35 hasn't killed a bunch of pilots like the F-14 did before they worked the kinks out.
shin_lao 8y ago
The aircraft is likely to be very capable and since it embeds so much new technology delays and problems are not something surprising. Most of the negative coverage is more around that such very expensive aircraft (and program) may not be that useful, for example, to fight terrorism or low-tech nations (and like another person mentioned in this thread, there may be more pressing matters in the US). In the longer term however, it can be argued that maintaining that kind of advanced aerial capability may be paramount to keep balance vs countries like China. And if you think the F-35 is too expensive, check out the F-22 which was purely air superiority!
Kadin 8y ago
Sorta makes sense -- it was subject to a lot of bad publicity for a long time, because all anybody knew of it was that it cost a lot, and didn't work well. That's kinda true of any product when it's in its final stage of development: there's a lot of money sunk into it at that point, and if you brought a user (or investor) in, they might question what the hell is going on if they don't have the right level of expectations set in advance (which by and large the public doesn't). Now that the thing is actually flying, and we're starting to hear from pilots and people have gotten to see it at airshows, etc., naturally it's getting better press. This is the payoff, it's what the thing is designed to do. So it better damn well fly well and look good doing it. There's still an open question and a debate to be had about whether the aircraft is WORTH the insane cost, and WHY the damn thing cost so much to begin with, though. I suspect it's like most things American at the moment -- we pay far too much, and get far too little for our money, compared to literally anyone else on the planet who might choose to build the same thing. (See also: healthcare, education, public transportation, physical infrastructure... we pay more and get less. Military equipment is no exception.) But yeah, I'd expect to see better press now than when the thing was all but vaporware and a big bill.
- adventured 8y ago
  > There's still an open question and a debate to be had about whether the aircraft is WORTH the insane cost, and WHY the damn thing cost so much to begin with There's no question about why it costs so much. The cost is including ~3,000 planes and covers up to 2070 in maintenance costs. That's a ridiculous number of planes to be maintained for decades. We'll never come close to building 3,000 however, the program will end long before that. Russia's new Su-57 planes are at least $50 million each. Their GDP per capita is 1/6th that of the US. Imagine paying for that if you're them. Equivalent to $300 million in the US economy, except Russia is a very poor nation and can't rationally afford anything close to spending even $50m per plane. Let's go with Russia's $50m number however. 3,000 planes at $50m = $150 billion just to get them built. Russia would probably spend another $600 billion maintaining those planes over four decades. The F35 unit cost is around $80 to $110 million depending on the version. The US is getting a stellar deal in scope to its economy compared to what the Russians are spending on their latest planes. The MiG-35 will cost at least double what the last MiG-29 variation did, or around $40 million. $240 million when adjusted to US per capita output figures. For Russia it's even worse if we look at the absolute scale of their economy (from which the cost of those planes must come out of), a mere $1.6 trillion, or nearly 1/13th the size of the US economy. If you adjust the cost on that basis, it's like the US spending $650 million per F35. Nobody would think that's a deal. Russia isn't even remotely close to matching the US in adjusted terms on its new jet costs, their wild spending is on another planet entirely. The Chengdu J-20 looks to cost $50 million per unit or more. That's in China, where they should be able to do everything radically cheaper than the US, and where they also have a GDP per capita 1/6th that of the US. $50 million is an astronomical sum for them to be spending per plane based on their economy. Or if we adjust based on the absolute size of their economy (the US economy is roughly 47-50% larger), it still pushes that unit cost up near the cheapest F35 variant. The Eurofighter Typhoon, an older plane, costs as much per unit as the F35. I'm not seeing any evidence that the F35 is expensive compared to other jets in the latest generation when you adjust for the US economic output level.
lvs 8y ago
And it's all from the same URL, showing up on successive days on HN.
Haga 8y ago
Time to write one about the enormous waste of funds for PR on this project.

nerdponx 8y ago

From a purely technological perspective, it's always been pretty damn cool.

UweSchmidt 8y ago

HN is a small, but not unimportant battlefield in the global information war.

duxup 8y ago
I was recently in western China and it's nothing like people say it is. It is very peaceful and I don't have to wear my backpack facing forward and worry about thieves like I do when I'm in Ameri ---- oops wrong story. In all seriousness, this article is pretty interesting and kinda stands on its own.
- ArtDev 8y ago
  You should also visit Tibet. There are roadblocks and military everywhere. It is bizarre. Once I saw drunken Chinese soldiers spinning circles in the middle of a small town with a stolen tractor. Super weird scene. The locals were not happy about it. I had the sense that mainland China IS pretty safe from petty theft because all the police. However, what is up with all the open prostitution when is it supposed to be illegal? What were we talking about?

DangitBobby 8y ago

It's just as likely that there were negative opinions created for your impression, and way people actually feel is coming to light. Disinformation cuts both ways.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago

Systems get better with refinement. The F35 is getting into the "mature technology" part of the progress curve now so it's naturally going to look better. It took a lot of money to get there but we're starting to see more positive results. People are more likely to submit what they're reading if a similar post has already proven to be popular. Overall JSF program aside, this is a fairly interesting and in depth (at least for this audience, this is probably just a high level overview to someone who works on electronic warfare technology) article on a particular subsystem so why wouldn't it be popular here?

eatonphil 8y ago

My impression is that there are two things at play: 1) Once you've noticed something, you tend to notice it more often. 2) Novel (or uncommon) articles on HN that get to the front page tend to attract other articles on the same topic. I can imagine this along the lines of: Human 1: Hey apparently there's an audience on HN for topic X that I enjoy! I wonder if HN is also interested in this related article on topic X. Or Human 2: Hey here's this interesting related article I discovered while looking at front-page article Y on topic X. The summary of all of this is to say that my guess is that like attracts like and uncommon topics die down fairly quickly in time. I imagine that it is less of a concerted effort by stakeholders to push and direct topic X than just the effects of a curious and diverse group.

locklock 8y ago
On the other hand, this is the second positive article on this plane to hit the top of hacker news in 3 days [1]. A trillion dollar plane that is notorious for costing way too much probably has a pretty decent marketing budget behind it, and it's not very difficult to assume that these articles are part of that somehow. For an article that came out before this recent press rollout began, try this one: "The F-35 Is a $1.4T National Disaster" article: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-f-35-14-trillion-dollar-national-disaster-19985 https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-f-35-14-trill... HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16869679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16869679 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19506763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19506763
- drstewart 8y ago
  >"The F-35 Is a $1.4T National Disaster" A trillion dollar plane that's cutting edge probably has a pretty decent opposition market budget behind it from adversarial nations, and it's not very difficult to assume that these articles are part of that somehow.
  - rhizome 8y ago
    no, it really is that ridiculous.

thunderbird120 8y ago

It's actually been getting lots of good press for quite a while now if you follow defense news, mostly due to very good performance in wargames exercises and serious problems being resolved. That said, it's somewhat bizarre seeing a bunch of articles related to it on HN. This is really not the kind of community which usually follows that kind of thing closely. /r/CredibleDefense over on reddit is much more suited to discussions about this kind of thing.

jjoonathan 8y ago

This has happened to me a few times before following a single boredom-induced chumbox click. Advanced military toys are always good for nerd sniping, recommender algorithms know this, and they will eagerly amplify a small amount of demonstrated interest into a deluge of recommendations. I'm pretty sure that's what's happening here. So yes, it's certainly a bought and paid for PR effort, but I wouldn't conclude that it's localized in time, just that HN recently wandered into it. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll take my leave to go read about the fabulous toys my tax dollars are paying for.

codeisawesome 8y ago
Your comment made me feel like HN needs a “give gold” system. Proceeds could go to funding startups =)
peteretep 8y ago
> Advanced military toys are always good for nerd sniping That and active measures. Eroding public support for your enemy's shiny new military hardware is a cheap way to destroy morale and increase the chances it'll get cancelled.

themodelplumber 8y ago

The "positive" articles are at least talking about the F-35's attributes as they relate to its primary mission of SEAD. To me this is a recovery of some signal against all the previous noise, wherein we wondered if the F-35 was the all-around best fighter ever, and if not why not, etc.

aurailious 8y ago

It wouldn't surprise me if things changed and its actually good now.

partiallypro 8y ago

I always found the F-35 "bad" news to be agenda driven, possibly by a foreign actor. The people I know in the Air Force are fans of the F-35, but the media never has been. I think there are certainly cost overruns, etc that deserve coverage...but I am always struck by the negative opinion even the most common person has of the fighter just from headlines, that in some cases are misleading. I just can't shake the feeling that some of it is manufactured. I could be wrong, but it has certainly felt that way to me. So, it wouldn't surprise me if the DoD is doing a bit of a PR push to restore public faith in the project.

ken 8y ago
It's $100,000,000 per aircraft, and US military spending is bigger than the next 7 countries combined. The news stories I've read about America in the past year are about how our water pipes are still full of lead, people are dying of gun violence, and government workers who live paycheck-to-paycheck got hurt by the shutdown. I don't need a foreign actor to explain why people in America today are unsympathetic to a new technologically advanced fighter jet. Even the foreign threats of today aren't the type where air superiority would help at all.
- sgc 8y ago
  Air superiority is the defining aspect of modern war. Whoever owns the skies wins. Whatever one's opinion on the FXX planes, the goal of maintaining air superiority into the future is completely obvious and necessary.
  - WJW 8y ago
    Well, only if you can keep fighting a defined enemy who is at all vulnerable to a traditional conflict. An enemy who is globally distributed and just targets vulnerable energy and water infrastructure over the internet is much less targetable with air power.
    - bordercases 8y ago
      But if you don't keep up at least a modicum of pretense for building air superiority, you will have two problems. In the case of domestic extremism the theatre gets pushed to surveillance + communication monitoring.

Symmetry 8y ago

Every new fighter the US has added since 1970 has followed the same pattern so it's not surprising. At least the F-35 hasn't killed a bunch of pilots like the F-14 did before they worked the kinks out.

shin_lao 8y ago

The aircraft is likely to be very capable and since it embeds so much new technology delays and problems are not something surprising. Most of the negative coverage is more around that such very expensive aircraft (and program) may not be that useful, for example, to fight terrorism or low-tech nations (and like another person mentioned in this thread, there may be more pressing matters in the US). In the longer term however, it can be argued that maintaining that kind of advanced aerial capability may be paramount to keep balance vs countries like China. And if you think the F-35 is too expensive, check out the F-22 which was purely air superiority!

Kadin 8y ago

Sorta makes sense -- it was subject to a lot of bad publicity for a long time, because all anybody knew of it was that it cost a lot, and didn't work well. That's kinda true of any product when it's in its final stage of development: there's a lot of money sunk into it at that point, and if you brought a user (or investor) in, they might question what the hell is going on if they don't have the right level of expectations set in advance (which by and large the public doesn't). Now that the thing is actually flying, and we're starting to hear from pilots and people have gotten to see it at airshows, etc., naturally it's getting better press. This is the payoff, it's what the thing is designed to do. So it better damn well fly well and look good doing it. There's still an open question and a debate to be had about whether the aircraft is WORTH the insane cost, and WHY the damn thing cost so much to begin with, though. I suspect it's like most things American at the moment -- we pay far too much, and get far too little for our money, compared to literally anyone else on the planet who might choose to build the same thing. (See also: healthcare, education, public transportation, physical infrastructure... we pay more and get less. Military equipment is no exception.) But yeah, I'd expect to see better press now than when the thing was all but vaporware and a big bill.

adventured 8y ago
> There's still an open question and a debate to be had about whether the aircraft is WORTH the insane cost, and WHY the damn thing cost so much to begin with There's no question about why it costs so much. The cost is including ~3,000 planes and covers up to 2070 in maintenance costs. That's a ridiculous number of planes to be maintained for decades. We'll never come close to building 3,000 however, the program will end long before that. Russia's new Su-57 planes are at least $50 million each. Their GDP per capita is 1/6th that of the US. Imagine paying for that if you're them. Equivalent to $300 million in the US economy, except Russia is a very poor nation and can't rationally afford anything close to spending even $50m per plane. Let's go with Russia's $50m number however. 3,000 planes at $50m = $150 billion just to get them built. Russia would probably spend another $600 billion maintaining those planes over four decades. The F35 unit cost is around $80 to $110 million depending on the version. The US is getting a stellar deal in scope to its economy compared to what the Russians are spending on their latest planes. The MiG-35 will cost at least double what the last MiG-29 variation did, or around $40 million. $240 million when adjusted to US per capita output figures. For Russia it's even worse if we look at the absolute scale of their economy (from which the cost of those planes must come out of), a mere $1.6 trillion, or nearly 1/13th the size of the US economy. If you adjust the cost on that basis, it's like the US spending $650 million per F35. Nobody would think that's a deal. Russia isn't even remotely close to matching the US in adjusted terms on its new jet costs, their wild spending is on another planet entirely. The Chengdu J-20 looks to cost $50 million per unit or more. That's in China, where they should be able to do everything radically cheaper than the US, and where they also have a GDP per capita 1/6th that of the US. $50 million is an astronomical sum for them to be spending per plane based on their economy. Or if we adjust based on the absolute size of their economy (the US economy is roughly 47-50% larger), it still pushes that unit cost up near the cheapest F35 variant. The Eurofighter Typhoon, an older plane, costs as much per unit as the F35. I'm not seeing any evidence that the F35 is expensive compared to other jets in the latest generation when you adjust for the US economic output level.

lvs 8y ago

And it's all from the same URL, showing up on successive days on HN.

Haga 8y ago

Time to write one about the enormous waste of funds for PR on this project.