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Isn’t the reason we spent unlimited money on the F35 is to have one super stupid plane for all branches that does everything you ask but nothing well except cos

Isn’t the reason we spent unlimited money on the F35 is to have one super stupid plane for all branches that does everything you ask but nothing well except costs tons of money? Anyway, glad to see the USAF was building something useful in the background. Wouldn’t be shocked if it was a small team with few resources.

jeffrallen 6y ago
Starved to cleverness!
jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
This is the F-22 replacement. It's one of the highest priority projects within the AF at the moment. Tens of thousands of people are working on this. The F-35 was a misconceived project and burned money and time in its early stages. It's been beaten back into shape today however, largely because Ash Carter switched Lockhead from a cost plus contract to one where they have the lion's share of any non trivial cost overruns moving forward. How shocking that suddenly LM got the marginal cost to build a new F-35 under 90 million as a result.
plazmatic 6y ago
Did you even read the article, dumb fuck? Why is this the top rated comment on here? Jesus christ.
ChuckNorris89 6y ago
I can recommend you read the book Skunk Works by Ben Rich and he'll tell you that overpriced useless planes are a government corporate welfare program designed to keep military contractors in business and skilled workforce employed. His case in point was the B2 which was supposed to got to Lockheed as they had the better tech and could have made it cheaper but instead they gave the contract to Northrop to prevent Lockheed having too large share of the defense pie and to keep Northrop afloat as they were denied other lucrative contracts in the past.
- gumby 6y ago
  BTW this book is also chock a block full of other great advice on how to move very fast without breaking things.* it’s a slim book about classified work so very high level, but that’s what makes some of the examples more applicable than if it has just been about how to design a plane quickly. * of course most of the work, being warplanes and a ship, was intended to break things :-/.
- gumby 6y ago
  > ...to keep Northrop afloat as they were denied other lucrative contracts in the past. This is not terrible in principle (assuming you support having a military at all) in order to preserve a diversity of sources. This mentality (from both military and private sector) is why AMD has a license to produce x86 instruction set hardware (although that license may not matter so much today): up into the late 70s people would not buy parts if there was not an independent second source. Unfortunately this managed competition was destroyed in the 90s — not the managed part but the competition part. This same reason justifies the expensive and horrifically distorting agricultural subsidies. The principle is to make sure there is adequate food production even when it is not economically self justifying so that people don’t starve due to lack of food supplies. You can argue that the system doesn’t work properly (hint: it doesn’t) but at the minimal baseline it is better than not existing. As the 2008 and 2020 crises demonstrate, this kind of baseline diversity has withered away over the last 40 years, especially but hardly exclusively in the US, and made the whole system more fragile.
mobilefriendly 6y ago
The F35 is the Space Shuttle of the military budget. Does everything, but nothing well. Is so complicated and un-maintainable that it consumes the entire budget. Let's hope the F35 doesn't cost as many lives as the Space Shuttle or a similar project, the Osprey.
- huffmsa 6y ago
  The v-22 actually flies though.

jeffrallen 6y ago

Starved to cleverness!

jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago

This is the F-22 replacement. It's one of the highest priority projects within the AF at the moment. Tens of thousands of people are working on this. The F-35 was a misconceived project and burned money and time in its early stages. It's been beaten back into shape today however, largely because Ash Carter switched Lockhead from a cost plus contract to one where they have the lion's share of any non trivial cost overruns moving forward. How shocking that suddenly LM got the marginal cost to build a new F-35 under 90 million as a result.

plazmatic 6y ago

Did you even read the article, dumb fuck? Why is this the top rated comment on here? Jesus christ.

ChuckNorris89 6y ago

I can recommend you read the book Skunk Works by Ben Rich and he'll tell you that overpriced useless planes are a government corporate welfare program designed to keep military contractors in business and skilled workforce employed. His case in point was the B2 which was supposed to got to Lockheed as they had the better tech and could have made it cheaper but instead they gave the contract to Northrop to prevent Lockheed having too large share of the defense pie and to keep Northrop afloat as they were denied other lucrative contracts in the past.

gumby 6y ago
BTW this book is also chock a block full of other great advice on how to move very fast without breaking things.* it’s a slim book about classified work so very high level, but that’s what makes some of the examples more applicable than if it has just been about how to design a plane quickly. * of course most of the work, being warplanes and a ship, was intended to break things :-/.
gumby 6y ago
> ...to keep Northrop afloat as they were denied other lucrative contracts in the past. This is not terrible in principle (assuming you support having a military at all) in order to preserve a diversity of sources. This mentality (from both military and private sector) is why AMD has a license to produce x86 instruction set hardware (although that license may not matter so much today): up into the late 70s people would not buy parts if there was not an independent second source. Unfortunately this managed competition was destroyed in the 90s — not the managed part but the competition part. This same reason justifies the expensive and horrifically distorting agricultural subsidies. The principle is to make sure there is adequate food production even when it is not economically self justifying so that people don’t starve due to lack of food supplies. You can argue that the system doesn’t work properly (hint: it doesn’t) but at the minimal baseline it is better than not existing. As the 2008 and 2020 crises demonstrate, this kind of baseline diversity has withered away over the last 40 years, especially but hardly exclusively in the US, and made the whole system more fragile.

mobilefriendly 6y ago

The F35 is the Space Shuttle of the military budget. Does everything, but nothing well. Is so complicated and un-maintainable that it consumes the entire budget. Let's hope the F35 doesn't cost as many lives as the Space Shuttle or a similar project, the Osprey.

huffmsa 6y ago
The v-22 actually flies though.