16 ms·
F-35 logistics system to be reinvented and renamed, official says
- p_l 7y agoStill done by the same incompetents (but with good sales team in parent company).
- pixelface 7y ago"ODIN will be based in the cloud and designed to deliver data in near real time on aircraft and system performance under heightened cyber security provisions, Lord said. " heart warming to see us draw ever closer to the cyberpunk dystopia of my childhood dreams.
- chinathrow 7y agoWait till you learn that some F-16s run with Kubernetes on board. https://thenewstack.io/how-the-u-s-air-force-deployed-kubernetes-and-istio-on-an-f-16-in-45-days/ https://thenewstack.io/how-the-u-s-air-force-deployed-kubern... "“One point for the team was to demonstrate that it could be done,” Chaillan said. He challenged the Air Force and its partners to get Kubernetes up and running on a jet in 45 days, and while that was as difficult as it sounds, the team met the goal and F-16s are now running three concurrent Kubernetes clusters, he said."
- heavenlyblue 7y agoI can run Kubernettes on my laptop even while in orbit.
- jon-wood 7y agoI’m having enough trouble seeing why you’d want one Kube cluster on an F-16, never mind three.
- m4rtink 7y agoI guess some sensor/radar data processing ?
- jmnicolas 7y agoProbably because there are tons of censors on modern jets and you need something to manage them. However I wouldn't use a civilian made system for this, you're going to spend the rest of the program lifetime correcting security holes.
- lowdose 7y agoBecause civilian made is not invented here?
- imtringued 7y agoI don't understand how you can even imply that it's because of a stupid reason like that. No the reason is that there are fundamental differences in the risk profile of the civilian and military sector. Adversaries will insert spies in mission critical projects if they are publicly accessible. Once the main contributors stop maintaining the project the military will have to hire people and train them for maintenance but all the people that can train the replacements have already left. The military has to verify every single line of code every time the code base is updated. All of these problems don't exist in projects where the full life cycle is taken care of by the military. The internet of things suffers from the same problems. Once you are dependent on a vendor and that vendor shuts down or cancels a product you're stuck with a lot of paperweights. The vendor is usually not acting in your interest.
- lowdose 7y agoIf there's one open source project government can easily adopt it is kubernetes. Have you heard of the cloud native computing foundation where members have committed to longterm investment in kubernetes development? Kubernetes is the commoditization of infrastructure layers and serious forward looking companies are member of CNFC. I assume you are aware of the history of Silicon Valley with defense contractors. And you probably also heard that the FBI approached Paypall for fraud detection capabilities. Hence Peter Thiel's venture Palantir. https://www.cncf.io/about/members/ https://www.cncf.io/about/members/
- bsaul 7y agoi was 100% certain this comment was a parody.. until i clicked on the link...
- p_l 7y agoAt least it's on board. ODIN being in the cloud is nothing new - a big pain point with ALIS is the fact that it's cloud based.
- Yizahi 7y agoOh no, oh no no no... Please tell me you are joking. The good news though is that World War III is officially cancelled now. If anyone will ever decide to start it, they would probably debug crashing pods and spaghetti code in startup scripts for years afterwards.
- p_l 7y agoAll avionics are done these days in the form of communicating microservices, the main difference is that scheduling and routing is static and assigned upfront.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ISL 7y agoA few EMP bursts can demolish the cloud, at least as we civilians know it.
- clSTophEjUdRanu 7y agoHow do you get EMP bursts powerful enough to do that?
- ganzuul 7y agoNukes. But in space.
- LargoLasskhyfv 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_nuclear_explosion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_nuclear_explosio...
- clSTophEjUdRanu 7y agoYeah that's my point. If the vulnerability relies on nukes then is it even a vulnerability? If nukes are being exchanged that's game and it's a moot point.
- LargoLasskhyfv 7y agoIs it? I thought about it like that for a long time also. But nowadays i think think this thought applied to the 'city killers' on or slightly above ground only. OTOH there are many satellites up there whose missions are unknown (to us). Who is to say that some party wouldn't try it, maybe during a geomagnetic storm? Or, maybe some crazy like NK because, hey, got china watching my Six!1!! Of course the orbits, and therefore the owners are known. This does not need to be 'high tech' in the way some understand rocket science or reentry vehicles to be. Just some crude device which survives start and waiting 'up there', then being ignited later, without the complications of reentry heat and burn.
- akiselev 7y ago
- apcherry 7y agoI wonder if it was proposed by a Neal Stephenson fan (DODO)?
- yborg 7y agoThe functioning or non-functioning of the logistics system for the F-35 is largely irrelevant, as just demonstrated Lockheed is paid whether it works or not; and non-functioning is much safer for the program, as non-flying F-35s are safe from combat and accidents. In fact, low availability just provides an excuse for the Air Force to demand additional budget for aircraft. This isn't so much a combat system as a corporate welfare program. In practice, the US has already demonstrated that its primary airpower projection is via unmanned systems, the manned combat aircraft is the mounted cavalry c. 1920.
- divbyzer0 7y ago(with my tin-foil hat securely fastened) I've always had a suspicion that the generous piles of cash thrown at the F-35 program was really going to two programs: 1) A well-publicised cover (F-35) 2) A secret Skunk Works project like F-117, SR-71 But a corporate welfare program as you suggest is more likely.
- ptero 7y agoReal work is (comparably) cheap. With F35 budget well over a trillion dollars this is 2-3 orders of magnitude larger than needed to fund maximum number of projects Skunk works can sustain, at max manpower. It is bureaucratic waste with minimum productive output. My 2c.
- wolfgke 7y ago> Skunk works can sustain, at max manpower. It is bureaucratic waste with minimum productive output. My 2c. Isn't the idea of skunkwork projects exactly to avoid bureaucratic waste for the sake of radical innovation?! Let me give three quotes from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Skunkworks_project&oldid=920062373 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Skunkworks_projec...: "A skunkworks project is a project developed by a relatively small and loosely structured group of people who research and develop a project primarily for the sake of radical innovation." "Everett Rogers defined skunkworks as an "enriched environment that is intended to help a small group of individuals design a new idea by escaping routine organizational procedures."" "[T]he term [skunkworks] was generalized to apply to similar high-priority R&D projects at other large organizations which feature a small elite team removed from the normal working environment and given freedom from management constraints.". In this sense, the projects you are talking about surely cannot be skunkwork projects, but are just ordinary cooperate projects with a huge conservative cooperate-bureaucratic structure.
- nabla9 7y agoThis was not a fluke. The failure rate of large scale IT projects is the huge. For large, complex projects the statistics is 2% success 42% challenged 56% failed https://www.standishgroup.com/sample_research_files/CHAOSReport2015-Final.pdf https://www.standishgroup.com/sample_research_files/CHAOSRep... The new system has probably similar 50% change for success. I think giving the new project to the same contractor may improve the changes. Hhey have hopefully learned something.
- adrianN 7y agoHack: Start development of n systems in parallel, to get 1-(0.98)^n success probability.
- mikorym 7y agoIf only the variables were independent, right...
- ipnon 7y agoIsn't this sort of the FAAAM strategy regarding senior talent retention? Pay 10x engineers to work on pet projects rather than have them jump ship.
- fulafel 7y agoThis has been proposed and it seems like a credible strategy. The actually implemented versions seem to always end the competition phase relatively early so they are not very good experiments for validating the idea.
- p_l 7y agoIn this case the chances of success are even lower, given the track record of the company doing it. Which involves as stellar things as delivering a not-working (but "valid under contract" so we couldn't sue them) system for logistics management (everything from ensuring parts are on the shelves to assigning jobs to technicians and pilots for a mission) that we later found was rebranded broken car logistics support software, something that was found 3 years post original delivery date by new employee of a team working on fixing it - which meant we had to rework a crucial module. Said software had gems like JS copied from geocities in 1998 handling drop down menus (which were broken unless very specific browser versions were used) - in 2012. (original delivery date was 2009~2010). The "redo" contract is going to the same guys who just did the failure, and I've seen no mention of removal of one of the bigger pain points, which was use of cloud.
- plumednom 7y agoMaybe, instead, we could scrap the piece of garbage, and put that $1,500,000,000,000 into healthcare, education, and our environment? Call me crazy.
- plumednom 7y agoNow we know why Trump just cut $7bn (10%) of the education budget and gave another $38bn in welfare to the military.
- apcherry 7y agoI'd loved to see this bumped up so that it appears on the front page right next to the link on "Why do we fall into the rewrite trap?" for a nice little juxtaposition. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22106367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22106367
- twic 7y agoI'd like to see someone dig up this bit from The Art of Computer Programming, where Knuth says rewrites are compulsory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22105850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22105850
- euler_angles 7y agoALIS. Jesus. What a disaster it was. We had to use it in flight testing and our instantiation was so poor that you literally couldn't use it to order a part. You had to send an email to order parts. And for the engineering tasks I was doing, there were no good ways to categorize the task, so I eventually gave up and called all the data loads I was doing "LUBRICATION/OTHER". Hey, making the data flow better is a kind of lubrication, right? I would say "maybe it's gotten better since I used it years ago" but from this article it looks like the answer is a solid "No".
- TheCondor 7y agoWhat all is it supposed to do beyond parts orders?
- p_l 7y agoIn a system like that, ordering parts is one of the least important elements. It covers things like tracking wear&tear of components so that you know when to replace parts, and more importantly, know when to schedule repairs - it's crucial that you have well-planned maintenance that ensures maximum availability of aircraft, so you need to stagger them - which is non-trivial to do. That's probably the "MVP" level, which to be practical might involve tons of other stuff. On a predecessor to ALIS for a different plane, even planning a mission went through it - you had someone come to you with requirements, and you'd arrange which plane, which pilots, which technicians to prepare it for flight, where are the tools they need for it, generate a fueling chart, everything based on the availability and qualifications. Once the plane returned from mission, you'd enter various flight data, including stuff like "how many rounds the autocannon fired" so that the underlying MRP system could calculate maintenance dates and the like. The ultimate goal is that you have a squadron that has maximum possible availability so it can fulfill its job in the air, without surprise maintenance (or worse - stuff breaking down) foiling your mission plans, and where your stores contain enough of all materiel necessary. ALIS covered, AFAIK, all elements of logistics for F-35, a giant integrated system. Great on paper as the top level idea, everything got worse the more you got into implementation of the goals. I heard of rebasing where the bringup of local ALIS node took longer than the whole rebased mission. Downloading flight records post-flight would take longer than the flight. Planes that won't fly unless connection with "cloud" part of ALIS (all hosted centrally in USA) was done at least once a month. Gigantic amounts of data you had to transfer between "cloud" and local instance, making it more than problematic to run on ships equipped with F-35B and F-35C. And of course the fact that data packages describing the operation theater can be generated only by one or two labs in USA (good luck, export customers!)... which is part of the ALIS cloud (and now ODIN cloud), which also is hosted by Lockheed Martin in USA. Now that I think of it, ALIS explains significant portion of the money USAF puts into Starlink as its only customer...
- StLCylone 7y agoLets just call it what it is, welfare for the educated. Its a money giveaway to support defense workers.
- p_l 7y agoWelfare for the corporate offices of Lockheed-Martin. I'm not sure how well they pay, given the level of crap they deliver, at least in L-M Global Training & Logistics (the actual vendor for ALIS and ODIN).
- blaser-waffle 7y agoThere is a reason the richest counties in the US are all suburbs of Washington DC...
- svth 7y agoObligatory War Nerd post: https://pando.com/2015/09/24/war-nerd-why-f-35-albanian-mushroom/ https://pando.com/2015/09/24/war-nerd-why-f-35-albanian-mush...
- bboreham 7y ago“Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.” Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month (1975)