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Stealth airplanes are extremely complex engineering projects that stretch across many fields. Maintaining any individual skill set is easy, but they're all high

Stealth airplanes are extremely complex engineering projects that stretch across many fields. Maintaining any individual skill set is easy, but they're all highly specialized and require the industry to be maintained or else the combination of cross disciplinary skills, including project management, disappears. Think back to Boeing's problems with the Dreamliner, where Boeing tried a new model of splitting out the design to a bunch of subcontractors and ended up with tons of problems with the integration ranging from missed design milestones due to problems with the composites to miscommunications leading to battery problems in production and so on. Those are a small taste of what happens when the engineering-management hierarchy is broken up and fractured across organizations. It becomes a lot worse when they are fractured across time. The US famously lost it's top launch capabilities with the Saturn V and we didn't have a domestic replacement until the Falcon Heavy in 2018! By their very nature, maintaining the capabilities needed for weapons of war that can be deployed anywhere in the world is even more expensive if you want to have any sort of certainty that they'll work when the shots are fired instead of once a few years when you want to launch a satellite.

ska 7y ago
I don’t think we are disagreeing, but I wouldn’t rely on the industry to define how much is needed.
- akiselev 7y ago
  I'm saying that the resources cannot be redirect towards "more useful infrastructure projects and still maintain skills". The cross disciplinary skills in military aviation are unique. Whether or not the cost of the F35 program is an efficient way to maintain those skills is a different issue altogether that gets at the fundamental structure of our government and how money impacts politics. That's a much more difficult discussion than "can we reasonably defend ourselves in the future."
  - ska 7y ago
    sure, but it’s the more interesting discussion to have, and it’s what I was pointing out. Plausibly the majority of the resources spent on this program could in fact have gone to more useful programs without affecting baseline capability. Plausibly the could not ... but it’s not clear anyone who should be asking that question, is.

ska 7y ago

I don’t think we are disagreeing, but I wouldn’t rely on the industry to define how much is needed.

akiselev 7y ago
I'm saying that the resources cannot be redirect towards "more useful infrastructure projects and still maintain skills". The cross disciplinary skills in military aviation are unique. Whether or not the cost of the F35 program is an efficient way to maintain those skills is a different issue altogether that gets at the fundamental structure of our government and how money impacts politics. That's a much more difficult discussion than "can we reasonably defend ourselves in the future."
- ska 7y ago
  sure, but it’s the more interesting discussion to have, and it’s what I was pointing out. Plausibly the majority of the resources spent on this program could in fact have gone to more useful programs without affecting baseline capability. Plausibly the could not ... but it’s not clear anyone who should be asking that question, is.