13 ms·

The F-35 may be unsalvageable

128 points by SQL2219 6y ago

SQL2219 6y ago
It is one thing to build a complex piece of technology, it is quite another to deploy it and expect it to work 24-7. $1.7 Billion was spent on this program.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  The major issue of the F-35 is trying to be too many things to too many people at once. It has to fly fast, yet be able to be slow enough to offer ground support. It has to be maneuverable to dogfight, but have short wings to land on carriers. It has to be light, but needs a complex nozzle and a fan to do STOL/VTOL. That's very hard to do.
  - typon 6y ago
    Sounds a classic example of design by committee
    - mbreese 6y ago
      And that was the take home message from the article: > The design by committee, Swiss-army knife approach has been a resounding failure.
  - GekkePrutser 6y ago
    Well to be fair it never aspired to do all of those things within the same model. They did split it in three different ones. Also, maneuverability and short wings go together really well. Slow flying and short wings doesn't though. Still, it was clearly a mistake, three totally different designs would have been cheaper and better.
    - yellow_postit 6y ago
      Shared platforms seem to work well in the automotive industry, why does it seem to be such a failure in this application? My assumption is high performance constraints requires deep customization and the shared platform hampers that.
      - selectodude 6y ago
        Some platforms just can't be shared. You're not going to be able to turn a Lamborghini into a body-on-frame truck without changing basically everything.
      - oetnxkdrlgcexu 6y ago
        Consumer automobile manufacturers can use shared platforms because the biggest difference between their vehicles is the body, which are metal boxes of different volumes. This is sometimes seen in aircraft: look at how many models of 777 Boeing produced. Automobile manufacturers couldn't, for example, have a shared platform between a vehicle designed for racing, an armored limousine, and a golf cart, as these vehicles have different performance requirements. That's a better comparison to to what they're trying to achieve with the F35. The needs of the branches of service are very different.
      - bewo001 6y ago
        I guess that in the automotive industry different models are often only done to achieve price differentiation or to serve local markets. The technical differences are superficial.
      - GekkePrutser 6y ago
        I think the VTOL in particular was too much of a stretch. If you see the complicated drive bar setup with that big fan, it really makes me wonder how this thing could possibly get airborne :)
      - jabl 6y ago
        My understanding is that in the aerospace industry, particularly at the cutting edge, margins are so low that common platforms don't really work out. In the car industry, say, a 10% penalty in, say, weight might be worth it if it enables the manufacturer to share the platform among many different products. In aerospace, not so much.
  - bewo001 6y ago
    The arguments for and against general purpose planes sound eerily familiar for someone in the telco space. You either have The Converged Fixed/Mobile Retail/Business platform that is complex, inflexible, and expensive or several smaller platforms where some parts have to be developed several times. The usual argument for the converged platform is drastically reduced operating cost. The price is drastically reduced flexibility, as each new feature has to be checked against all existing requirements and dependencies.
- Someone 6y ago
  “$1.7 Billion was spent on this program.” If only. FTA: “Total acquisition costs now exceed $428 billion, nearly double the initial estimate of $233 billion, with projected lifetime operations and maintenance costs of $1.727 trillion.” Also, https://www.airforcemag.com/massive-34-billion-f-35-contract-includes-price-drop-as-readiness-improves/ https://www.airforcemag.com/massive-34-billion-f-35-contract... talks about a $34 billion contract for 478 aircraft. At that price, $1.7 billion buys you about 24 of these planes.
  - omgJustTest 6y ago
    Does anyone sue the us govt for recouping taxes due to such catastrophic results?
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    Holy. That's about 5x what's needed to eliminate world hunger (330B $, per https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/oct/13/ending-world-hunger-by-2030-would-cost-330bn-study-finds https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/oct/13/e...), which would probably have a lot more positive effect in achieving / maintaining peace and mass migration than that fleet of airplanes.
    - omgJustTest 6y ago
      but not for managing climate change.
    - dencodev 6y ago
      And this is the problem with the world. We easily have the resources to home, feed, educate, and provide medicine to everyone. But we don't due to greed
- FlyMoreRockets 6y ago
  It gets worse. From the article: "Total acquisition costs now exceed $428 billion, nearly double the initial estimate of $233 billion, with projected lifetime operations and maintenance costs of $1.727 trillion." Much like the SLS, it seems that it is more a jobs program to dump money into select congressional districts than a project actually focused on deliverables. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System#Funding_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System#Funding_hi...
  - woofie11 6y ago
    I think it's helpful to focus on dollars per citizen. $428 billion means I spent a bit over $1000 on this failure. My family spend a few thousand dollars. Adjusted for income (I pay above-average taxes), it probably cost my family a minimalist car. The 1.7 billion price tag is around $5k per citizen. That could mean a lot to a lot of families.
    - imtringued 6y ago
      You could even get more than $5k per citizen out of it if you had put it into something that nets a return either directly or indirectly. Infrastructure projects like renewables, road upgrades, internet upgrades and so on. If you need busy work there is a lot of useful work to be done.
BitwiseFool 6y ago
"In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one tactical aircraft. This aircraft will have to be shared by the Air Force and Navy 3½ days each per week except for leap year, when it will be made available to the Marines for the extra day" - Augustine's Law #16
- keanebean86 6y ago
  Original design goals: * Faster than light outside atmosphere (s model used by space force) * Take off from underground * Returns a vastly increased radar signal to damage ground radar * Air superiority * Water superiority * Negative emissions * Generates new car scent * 600,000 lbs of ordinances * 3 pilots * Autonomous * Made in Mississippi * Troop carrier * "None of those dumb green screens" Edit: single -> signal
- ngcc_hk 6y ago
  That might be a worry. But the f35 is a good aircraft demo by Israel that it can strike without detection. Not sure it can beat the chinese as there area and drone might be an issue. But without replacement one can talk talk talk but the flight go on.
nickhalfasleep 6y ago
Imagine if we held a war, and nobody could afford to come?
- benjohnson 6y ago
  It’s for this reason that people (Bohr for example) who made the atomic bomb saw a ray of hope - it made large scale war too expensive to even try given that your enemy would nuke you back.
  - asdff 6y ago
    That is unless we all sign paperwork saying we won't use these big huge wastes of GDP we've stockpiled like someone with a hoarding complex, and resume war as usual.
    - bluGill 6y ago
      You don't even need the paper. Just the political will on both sides. That is what mutually assured destruction is about: I don't trust them to not use theirs, but I can assure they don't win if they do. It has been hotly debated on if mutually assured destruction is actually why we haven't got into a nuclear war or not. You can take either side of the debate with no way to know for sure who is right.
- hindsightbias 6y ago
  People are always confused when I say I'm the F-35s biggest fan - because disarmament isn't a viable political option but aircraft programs like this effectively make it a practical one.
  - scarmig 6y ago
    It reminds me of a funny little anecdote. In 1989, the USA instituted an arms embargo on China after Tiananmen (which was itself performed with tanks outfitted with American-made guns). However, President Bush allowed a certain existing deal ("Peace Pearl") that would help modernize the PLA's airforce to continue based on the requests of certain well-connected military contractors. But in 1990, China cancelled the deal unilaterally, despite it being the only access they had to Western military tech. Ultimately it went with Israeli and Russian sources. Why? The US arms exporters were running into massive cost overruns and development delays. China thought it was some kind of intentional sabotage, but it was nothing of the sort: it was just the general fucked-upness of American military procurement running into the realities of a culture unused to that level of fucked-upness. An international arms embargo couldn't accomplish the disarmament of China of American weaponry, but the brokenness of the American arms industry could.
imglorp 6y ago
While it might be a failure from the taxpayer's and military's point of view, it's a raving success for Congress and the contractors. The metrics for the latter are jobs, grandstanding, campaign donations, kickbacks, crony benefits, and mountains of cash, plus guaranteed more mountains ongoing until it's killed. I wish this was the cynical view but it's more like reality of government procurement.
- baybal2 6y ago
  How much harm did those fellows do, and how much all communist spies/saboteurs/subversives/seditionists combined did?
  - imglorp 6y ago
    Not exactly a new problem. > It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress. - Twain
- imtringued 6y ago
  This is a waste of jobs though. The only reason why you want to wastefully spend money on jobs creation is that you somehow discover new things in the process, you are building up a workforce that will work on productive things after they completed the boondoggle or you just want to hit inflation goals. I'd say the F-35 fails at all three. It's just a slightly cheaper F-22 that can be exported, the work was handed to existing companies for the sake of politics instead of creating new ones, the project is decades old and failed to hit inflation goals.
  - cyberge99 6y ago
    Your presumption that F-35 is a delivery vehicle is flawed. It may be an unconventional capability codename.
- mcv 6y ago
  If creating jobs is so important, why not simply create those jobs in other areas? There's plenty of infrastructure in dire need of maintainance.
F00Fbug 6y ago
Col. Boyd must be spinning in his grave! One of my favorite books: https://www.amazon.com/Boyd-Fighter-Pilot-Who-Changed/dp/0316796883 https://www.amazon.com/Boyd-Fighter-Pilot-Who-Changed/dp/031... There's a lot about what's wrong with aircraft procurement in this book and how he fought against it. Idealism and pragmatism still lose to politics and money fifty years later!
- jnwatson 6y ago
  There's an argument, by Boyd causing the F-15 and F-16 to succeed, he delayed the inevitable rethinking of the procurement process. If not for Boyd, the Air Force would have had perhaps 1 qualified success (F-18 Super Hornet) in the last 50 years of air platform development.
  - u10 6y ago
    The Air Force doesn't fly the F-18. Boyd was against the F-15, so I'm not sure where you are getting that from.
    - F00Fbug 6y ago
      The F-18 and F-15 prototypes were competing for the same job. F-15 won and MD managed to salvage their investment and sell the YF-17 to the Navy as the F-18. The F-16 was the card up Boyd's sleeve that nobody saw coming but couldn't argue against it once he put it on the table!
      - u10 6y ago
        The F/A-18 was never in competition with the F-15 WRT the Air Force. It was mandated by congress for the navy to replace the high cost f-14 with something more reasonable costwise. It's true that the F/A-18 was competing with a navalized version of the F-15 but cost factors and the lack of organic multirole made the navalized version of the F-15 unfeasible. The F-16 did not conform to what Boyd wanted out of a combat aircraft, execpt for the lightweight part. The F-16 has a RADAR, BVR, and while designed as an air superiority it has exceeded expectations as a multirole platform.
GekkePrutser 6y ago
I'm surprised they don't go for updated F-16s now, but instead for a new design. Which again will have the chance of running over budget, having teething issues, etc etc. With the F-16 these things are already long figured out. They were even built here in Europe for a while. I know it doesn't have stealth but it has proven itself in asymmetric warfare. I wonder what the EU partners will do now. The Netherlands wanted the F-35 as the successor to the F-16 which it never became. They had to scale down orders as the price went up. I bet they will need a new plane too to fulfill the F-16 role. They can't cancel the F-35 purchases though as it was an intricate patchwork of local supply deals in return for orders.
- rswskg 6y ago
  I imagine they will just skip to drones mostly now.
  - GekkePrutser 6y ago
    I wonder... Right now the Netherlands has no armed drones at all. Just surveillance ones.
  - chasd00 6y ago
    Switching to drones makes sense to me, it seems to give a lot of bang for the buck. However, the risks and operational requirements are very different than a traditional manned plane so it would require a lot of change everywhere.
black6 6y ago
This has all happened before, and it will all happen again. The Pentagon Wars is available for viewing on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ir0FAa8P2MU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ir0FAa8P2MU
- partiallypro 6y ago
  This is a great movie and I highly recommend it. It used to be on HBO Go, so I'm sure it's on Max.
  - Koshkin 6y ago
    What's wrong with watching it on YouTube?
KptMarchewa 6y ago
Just tangentially related, but I find it very weird that people push one-system-that-replaces-all (or, in this case, planes) as cost cutting measure, compared to few specialized systems. Which do not have to take tons of compatibility stuff. In this case, probably some problems of Air Force's F-35's are related to the constrant that the requirement of being able to land on carriers pushes. At the end, results are at best mediocre, costs exceeded, and everyone is unhappy.
- imtringued 6y ago
  The VTOL capability of the F-35B is nice in theory but the vast majority of navy aircraft are going to be launched off of carriers anyway. VTOL needs its own ship+aircraft concept or it is dead on arrival.
  - mcv 6y ago
    VTOL is certainly nice, but it's ridiculous to use it as a requirement of a variant of a plane of which most versions will not be using VTOL at all. Like stealth, it has a massive impact on the shape of the plane. It's ridiculous to burden non-VTOL planes with a design meant for VTOL. Just make a specialised VTOL fighter if that's what you need.
    - wespiser_2018 6y ago
      This. You can see in the design of the f-35 the massive space in the middle of the body for the lift fan that partially obstructs the pilots view behind them.
  - u10 6y ago
    The VTOL capability are for Marine squadrons operating off of LHD ships (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Essex_(LHD-2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Essex_(LHD-2)), or for partner nations who don't have aircraft carriers CATOBAR launch systems.
  - NikolaeVarius 6y ago
    The F35 CAN VTOL, it is not meant to be used that way since it extremely limits fuel and armaments. The carrier variant is meant to be STOL, since its a JOINT Strike Fighter meant for multi-country use, and many countries do not have large carriers with catapults. Namely Great Britain, whose largest carriers are not equipped with catapults, since they are designed to use STOL planes.
walrus01 6y ago
The F-35 isn't an airplane, it's a defense industry jobs program to spread subcontracts widely around a sufficient number of congressional districts and states that it can't be killed.
georgeecollins 6y ago
One reform I would support would be mandating that all defense projects are made in ten states or less. That way you could spread the project around if you needed to, but it wouldn’t have enough support to continue only as a jobs program.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  They'll just stick the program in three metro areas that are highly over-represented in congress. Jerrymandering runs both ways. If you carve <city> up into ten districts you've just created ten congressmen who give a crap about bringing muh jobs to the <city> metro area.
SQL2219 6y ago
Military expert Pierre Sprey, the founder and designer of the F-16 & A-10 Warthog airplanes, Explains why the f-35 will not cut it on the modern battlefield. https://youtu.be/UQB4W8C0rZI https://youtu.be/UQB4W8C0rZI
- u10 6y ago
  Pierre Sprey is on the wrong side of history. If the fighter mafia had their way the F-15 would have never existed. RADAR and BVR would have never existed. the F-16 would never have had a multirole purpose. And the A-10 was obsolete the minute it rolled off of the assembly line. Most estimates that the majority of A-10's would have been destoryed within 72 hours of the Warsaw Pact rolling across the German border. The gun is not particularly effective against modern armour, and the same mission can be carried out better by other aircraft like the F/A-18 or the F-16, as seen in the 1st Gulf War. It's found new life in Afghanistan and Iraq but even than drones would have been better suited for the role. In fact, the AF wants to get rid of the A-10, but congress wont let them.
  - greedo 6y ago
    The A-10 was designed to be a more modern Spad (A-1 Skyraider). The Spad was well appreciated in Vietnam in CAS roles, but the Viet-Cong didn't have SAMs. The introduction of SA-6, SA-8 etc made this design a failure in any European conflict.
  - mullen 6y ago
    > Most estimates that the majority of A-10's would have been destroyed within 72 hours of the Warsaw Pact rolling across the German border. But that is in the design of the A-10. The A-10 was not made for anything other fighting in Europe for the first 72 hours of the Soviets invading Western Europe. If the Russian speartip was blunted and there was some A-10's left over, then the A-10 would have been considered a success.
  - why_Mr_Anderson 6y ago
    Oh well, at least get the facts right. A-10 was designed to kill T-55s, T62s and T-72s (most modern tank USSR had at that time), not today's tanks. GAU-8 was extremely effective against armor from that era and still is very useful against armored vehicles, structures, etc. F16's can't do what A10 does the best (CAS). In 1st Gulf War A10s are credited with something like 1000 tanks destroyed (mostly with Mavericks though) AF is trying to get rid of A-10 for decades, but it still survives ..
ConceitedCode 6y ago
While there are certainly issues, the issues are more with the procurement process than the actual aircraft. Virtually every single aircraft program has been flogged by the press for being too expensive and less capable than the aircraft it replaced. This included the F-111, the C-5, the F-14, the F-15, the B-1, the F-16, the A-10, the F-18, the C-17, the B-2, the V-22, the F-22, and now the F-35. Overall the track record for these aircraft turned out to be outstanding, far exceeding the capabilities of their predecessors. The actual track record for the F35 has been very positive. Most the reports I've seen from pilots are generally very positive [1]. Other countries continue to buy it over other platforms [2]. Most the major complaints are around costs compared to the aircraft that are being replaced, but this isn't a fair comparison. As for the cost to fly the F-35, a unit measure the Air Force terms “cost per flying hour,” today the F-35 costs around $35,000 per flying hour. Comparative aircraft in this class are generally in the mid $20,000s, a target the F-35 is slated to hit by 2025. However, it must also be remembered, as the F-35 pilot’s above comment highlights, far fewer F-35s can accomplish far more with fewer aircraft than legacy aircraft types. It does not require a math major to understand this yields far lower real-world total costs to achieve a particular mission result. [3] [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/italian-pilots-raved-about-first-red-flag-exercise-with-us-made-f-35-2019-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/italian-pilots-raved-about-f... [2] https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2019/5/24/international-market-for-f-35-heats-up https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2019/5/24/i... [3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davedeptula/2020/07/20/f-35-problem-child-or-on-track-for-success/?sh=524a454315d1 https://www.forbes.com/sites/davedeptula/2020/07/20/f-35-pro...
- dehrmann 6y ago
  Wow, the F-14, F-15, F-16, and F-18 were all first flown in the 70's. The F-35 was 2006. It's easy to see some of the motivation for the F-35: there were a silly number of fighter models built in that decade.
- maxerickson 6y ago
  My recollection is that the only aspect of the F-22 people screamed about was the price.
Pxtl 6y ago
Here in Canada a major issue of the 2015 elections was whether to buy in on the F-35 project. The liberals wanted open procurement and specifically said they wanted the to avoid the F-35. The conservatives wanted to continue with the process that was basically designed to justify procuring F-35s. In the meantime, Canada's F-18s are absurdly old, and we have a tradition of screwing up open procurement by sandbagging it for decades. So the Conservatives looked quite reasonable in wanting to buy in on this internationally supported plane made by our closest allies. I think the liberals are vindicated at this point.
- zepearl 6y ago
  I just did a search => this article (Dec 2020) sounds funny: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/f18-fighter-jets-canada-australia-1.5836504 https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/f18-fighter-jets-canada-aus... > Only three of seven F-18 fighter jets purchased from Australia by the Canadian government have been integrated into the air force so far, and the Department of National Defence says key upgrades to as much as one-third of Canada's fighter force will take up to five years, according to documents recently tabled in the House of Commons. > The slow introduction of the used warplanes — meant to bolster Canada's existing CF-18s squadrons — and the long timeline for radar refurbishment have the opposition Conservatives questioning the value of the interim fleet. > When it first announced the plan three years ago, the government said it expected to keep most of the existing CF-18 fleet flying until 2032. Is the article correct? Anyway I'm not laughing because here in Switzerland we have as well to replace our relatively old F-18 which might generate a huge debate with the potential result of nothing happening (F-35 is as well one of the candidates, but I've personally always been against it for various reasons).
  - Pxtl 6y ago
    Yup. Canada's F-18Cs (aka CF-18s) are ancient and were so bashed up that we ended up buying used Australian leftovers for parts and repair as a stopgap until we can decide what we're doing for our next-gen fighters. Basically we're procrastinating on the decision because the F-35 is at once the best and worst option - our closest allies are heavily standardized on it. But it's also a boondoggle. For a while Canada looked to be moving up to the modernized version of the F-18 platform, the F/A-18 Super Hornet. But then Boeing started a fight with Bombardier, a company that the Canadian Liberal government is very protective of. So the plans to invest in F/A-18 planes was scrapped. So Canada is basically endlessly procrastinating on what new jet to buy because of the F-35 boondoggle.
deleted 6y ago
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jabl 6y ago
Seems a lot of the problems are due to how the government develops and acquires military hardware, with incentives for the various players massively misaligned with the interests of the country as a whole. I wonder what would a sane acquisition program look like? A company developing a product and then offering the more or less completed product to the military worked during WWII, but a cutting-edge fighter (or many other pieces of cutting-edge military hardware) development project is such an expensive and risky project that a company can't do it alone and hope that the government then comes and buys the finished product. So going back to how things were done back in the day isn't an option. Likewise the government taking the main design responsibility and using the companies only for building the products the government has designed probably won't work either, as the government doesn't have the expertise. So what would a sane strategy look like?
- jeffreyrogers 6y ago
  I'm not sure what a sane system would look like, but the main problems you have to address are: 1. In the current system requirements come from the military to the contractors (I'm simplifying a bit here). The people on the military side generally don't have much knowledge of technological capabilities, so they are limited in what they can conceive of. It dissuades outside-the-box thinking. 2. The military generally looks to existing contractors. I'm not even sure how you would sell to the military unless you hired some executives away from an existing contractor. 3. The way security clearances work and the length of time it takes to get them makes it hard to rapidly develop products. At this point I think the big companies are too big and slow, they need to find a way to get smaller companies involved.
  - GcVmvNhBsU 6y ago
    I’m going to disagree with all three points. 1. To think that the military does not know what they need shows a very narrow understanding of the people fighting a war. If you ask a pilot “What do you need to accomplish your mission”, they will tell you. They may not know how to necessarily do sensor fusion or “cyber” things or the math/physics involved, but the way they will describe the problem and what their solution would be will show that they are thinking outside the box. Now, I will be fair and say that there is probably a disconnect between the end user and Air Force Materiel Command and it’s therefore up to the program management office to solicit feedback and requirements from the expert users. 2. The military follows the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement. There may be instances where contracting officers prefer and write requests for proposal that target specific contractors, but that should be an edge case and not the standard. I’d argue the real challenge is the scale of federal acquisitions and consolidation of industry players. In order to meet certain contractual obligations, you have to be large enough, which brings us to... 3. Security clearances take a long time to adjudicate, but it does not follow that that causes the inability to rapidly develop products. Going back to size, the problem is DOTMLPF - you cannot just design and purchase one thing, you need to build the entire logistics support chain for the next XX years. Maybe you squeeze a JUONS out that gets a capability “rapidly” developed but there’s still the expectation that you re-evaluate and create that long supply chain at a certain point.
greedo 6y ago
Yet another anti F-35 article that really doesn't bring anything new to the table.
albanread 6y ago
Any chance the UK can get a refund then? "Before the end of this decade, the F-35 Lightning will provide the ultimate punch of the Royal Navy’s Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers. The F-35 is an Anglo-American joint effort, designed by the best and brightest in the two nations’ aircraft industries."
- arethuza 6y ago
  For anyone wondering the UK's new carriers explicitly rejected the traditional CATOBAR approach to take-offs and landings in favour of a design that pretty much requires the F35B STOVL variant.
  - Pxtl 6y ago
    Such carriers could still be used for the UK's Harrier jump-jets, couldn't it?
    - Someone1234 6y ago
      The UK doesn't own any Harrier jump-jets. They sold them all to the US Marines.
anewaccount2021 6y ago
Pilots love it. Pundits hate it. It isn't going away or being "cancelled"...the US already has hundreds, will receive hundreds more. I don't know why these articles continue discussing the F35 like it is a proposal...its in service and will be in service in 2060.
stanfordkid 6y ago
I think there is room in the market for an Elon Musk style entrepreneur to completely re-define the industry as was done by Space-X. I think defense filters out a lot of potential founders due to it's inherently bloody nature -- at the end of the day these are machines are designed to kill people efficiently, whatever the reason may be.
- greedo 6y ago
  Bert Rutan tried to do that. Selling aircraft to the US military is a tough sell unless you're one of the big boys.
  - sneak 6y ago
    This is a kind way of saying that the defense industry and their sole customer are vertically integrated and serve as a way of transferring HUGE amounts of tax money into private hands without any accountability or real market forces at work of any kind. The whole thing is a criminal enterprise designed to rob public funds and enrich a small group. It's been widely known for decades and everyone who thinks this is a bad thing is powerless to stop it. It teaches one a lot about the true nature of the USA.
    - greedo 6y ago
      Well, part of this integration is inevitable. Defense materiel is so complicated, leading to high expenses that the DoD is required to manage vendors. Much of the aerospace consolidation that has happened in the past 30 years has been "encouraged" by the Pentagon as they think a smaller vendor can't really compete. At the same time, they want to preserve the industrial capacity so that they have flexibility when the military equivalent of the 737MAX strikes. That's why ULA is still around despite SpaceX kicking its butt.
- chasd00 6y ago
  With Space anyone can try to get there and prove their technology. There's even an event held once a year out in Nevada where you can show up with whatever rocket you want and try for it. War fighting isn't the same, you can't prove your plane is good in combat on your own. You need a war and a side willing and able to fly it in combat.
Rochus 6y ago
Does anyone have first hand information on how big of an impact the decision to use C++ instead of Ada had on the "staggering array of persistent issues"?
- angry_octet 6y ago
  The coupling between systems is insane, and it's all super rigid, with legal contracts specifying what, when and how often something can communicate. Many millions of dollars ride on these contracts. Basically it's a big jumbled big of Lego that's covered in Kraggle. With those constraints, lots of bugs are mis-design. IDK bug counts, or if that is even meaningful as it depends on thoroughness of testing, but a huge emphasises was placed on coding standards, static and dynamic analysis. They could well be the biggest single customer of Coverity. Overall I'd say it hasn't been a critical issue, given the larger architectural problems. The use of something like Ada SPARK in particular components might have focused attention on proving rather then testing, i.e. a completely different philosophy.
polytely 6y ago
>There has also been significant investment in the program by North Atlantic Treaty Organization members and other allies. A lot of the time with these investments it seems like it is mostly a signal of investment in the alliance with the US and that getting the planes is a sort of side effect.
steve76 6y ago
The J-20 copied the F-35. Now the international marxists are trying to junk it with their bought and paid for media. Bold move. A few dirty secrets about war. Really powerful people do start them over petty arguments at home. They loose power, and then make life as worst as possible for everyone until they are back in power. Some have a heart and things just gets out of hand. Some view other people's lives like poachers view deer in the wild or oil from a well. Mine it till it runs dry, move on. They are convinced of their immortality. Part of me sometimes question my doubt, like if they have some state secret medicine. A cockpit is not a pretty place to be. It kills you just the same as anything. Fumes, oil, vomit, sunlight, stressful long hours. Replace it with drones all you want. People will find out what really kills drone operators too, and it will probably be generational. Increasing the knowledge requirements so you only study, don't have a family, and your city is filled with junkies. Sap them across decades and centuries. War is killing first. How you do it comes next. Cold calculated killing, weaponizing everything we know. It's best to avoid it. And if you think about what provokes, and what soothes violent people. Materialism and moral license, with their drunkenness, boredom, search for meaning tend to provoke. It's then you have the street fights. Lofty moral standards, such as I just built a gravity application with the new black hole imagining data, something that will kill everything EVER, tends to calm things down, mystify and give them something to achieve.
xnx 6y ago
With advances in drones and remote imaging, is there still a role for manned jets like this? I similarly wonder about manned spaceflight.
- sneak 6y ago
  The USAF/USSF seems to have already made the switch to unmanned spaceflight (the x37b).
- bluGill 6y ago
  Yes, at least for now human at the controls is better than AI or remote control. This is quickly changing, but as things stand today you need a human for some operations. Soon though humans won't stand a chance.
  - nickik 6y ago
    And the major reason for it is that no program as expensive as the F-35 has been done to attempt to develop such a thing. Or rather multiple different drones depending on what thing you actually wanted to do.
29athrowaway 6y ago
How many times have you heard the cliche phrase: the US spends more money in its armed forces than the top K other countries combined? Well, spending and results not always go hand in hand. And in the case of aerospace contractors, they can be rewarded for being inefficient at the expense of the taxpayer.
sneak 6y ago
The amount of money spent on this weapon of war could have been used to build a $700k house for every one of the 550,000 homeless people in the USA. If you taxed Jeff Bezos at 100% of his wealth and simply confiscated all of his US$183 billion of assets and liquidated them, you would have to find another 1.3 of him to do the same to to cover the cost of this program, which is 2.3x his net worth. Even if you tacked on Elon Musk's US$164B, you wouldn't have enough to pay for this.
WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
Although it has an extraordinarily poor track record, killing off the JSF entirely will prove difficult. According to a map showing the economic impact across the country... I'm not a fan of maintaining bad/harmful industries to prevent job loss. If we're that concerned, redirect those trillions into beneficial jobs - like oh, say, badly needed infrastructure repair.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  > I'm not a fan of maintaining bad/harmful industries US defense is not a bad or harmful industry - it protects the free world. WW2 wouldn't have happened if the US wasn't isolationist. We've had 75 years of relative peace thanks to being a superpower.
blackrock 6y ago
I’ve heard it said that stealth is a lie. That radar technology from World War 2 era is able to detect stealth aircraft. The Russians just built up more of that kind of radar band to detect current stealth planes. This is how the F-117 got shot down in Yugoslavia. It was supposed to have the radar cross section of a small bird. Can anyone provide insight to this?
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  > This is how the F-117 got shot down in Yugoslavia. It was supposed to have the radar cross section of a small bird. The US got complacent and was flying the same route at the same time daily. I think in this case the pilot also did a maneuver and the angle reflected radar. So it was incompetence.
- jabl 6y ago
  > I’ve heard it said that stealth is a lie. The pop culture version of stealth providing perfect invisibility was always a lie. But it does provide decreased detection range. If your radar detects a traditional plane at 300 nm but a stealth plane at 30 nm, you're effectively blind as a bat. > That radar technology from World War 2 era is able to detect stealth aircraft. The Russians just built up more of that kind of radar band to detect current stealth planes. > This is how the F-117 got shot down in Yugoslavia. It was supposed to have the radar cross section of a small bird. Stealth technology apparently isn't that good for old school low frequency radars, so yes, there's a grain of truth there. But such radars provide poor resolution (which is why modern radars tend to use higher frequencies) so they are not that useful for targeting. That F-117 case was AFAIU a combination of poor operational planning (flying the same routes over and over again), as well as a 'lucky' shot. There's of course a lot of research into 'stealth-defeating' technologies. IR guided missiles, multistatic radar etc.
cyberge99 6y ago
If this is a headline, it means that everything behind the scenes is happening as expected. US Gov doesn’t leak. This is a distraction from current MILOPs capability.
- zaptrem 6y ago
  Source? I’d be interested to hear about this.
g42gregory 6y ago
I remember when F-35 was just coming out, it was cast as a significantly cheaper alternative to F-22s. I think it was in the documentary “Battle of X-Planes” (not sure of exact title)? I am amazed how this turned out. Should we have kept producing F-22s?
- booi 6y ago
  Probably not, air superiority isn't a big focus anymore with the advent of drones, missiles and planes like the F-35
nickik 6y ago
Another service update, nuclear weapons exist. Any situation that involves high tech piloted planes fighting each other in the sky is almost impossible to happen. Dropping insane amounts of resources into piloted figher plane is bordering on insanity. The same money could have literally created a Mars, doing far more for US politically and done wonders for its global credibility. Or you know, become global leader in electric mobility or many other things that would have been useful to both the US government and its people. Bombing the shit out of pure Arab, Africans and peoples from central Asia without a government can be done with planes from the 90s just fine.
- bendbro 6y ago
  > Another service update, nuclear weapons exist. Any situation that involves high tech piloted planes fighting each other in the sky is almost impossible to happen. This is falsified by the Vietnam war. We had apex US fighters fighting apex soviet fighters in a period where nuclear weapons existed. And I'm sure you are aware of this common trope, but it is claimed (and I think supported) that countries will not use nuclear weapons against another nuclear power due to the risk of nuclear war. And further, I think apex air and land vehicles would be required whether nukes are used or not. After the nuke has been deployed, land forces would need to be deployed to take the area cleared by the nuke, and air forces would be required to support those land forces.
  - nickik 6y ago
    Sure, if you engage in strategically idiotic wars in places where there is tacit agreement with the other super power that it is ok, that might happen. But it was not actually relevant. The reason the US never invaded the North was because of nuclear weapons. And the reason these wars were thought in strategically irrelevant places like Vietnam and Afghanistan is because of this tacit agreement between nuclear powers. If you are designing an overall grand strategy where you are willing to send 10s of citizens to their death for marginal strategic value, then such a situation might happen. There are however other strategies you can follow. > After the nuke has been deployed, land forces would need to be deployed to take the area cleared by the nuke, and air forces would be required to support those land forces. Great plan to have your infantry walk into the nuclear wasteland.
roody15 6y ago
The F-35 makes me wonder if US military superiority is as great as it appears on paper. For example our military budget is 10 times that of russia. However does 1$ russia spends vs 1$ the US spends on equipment equate? Think it may be very likely that Russia (and China) are getting more bang for their buck and the gap between forces isn’t quite as extreme. No question the US has the most powerful military in the world and it’s Navy presence is unmatched. However moving forward is this sustainable ? Russia and China catching up?
- randomopining 6y ago
  Yeah that's the BS that I don't buy from the pacifists... "we spend 10x Russia!!" But yeah, Russia has a nuke deterrent and could use that to force a land war in Europe at the same time that China launches an attack on Taiwan and North Korea launches an attack on South Korea and Iran attacks Saudi Arabia. How could the US military respond effectively to all of those at once? Each of those countries wants to carve out their sphere of influence. Once a short term victory is in the pocket for each of them, there is diplomatic negotiations to end fighting and then the new facts on the ground materialize and now 1/2+ the world is under autocrats again.
  - YinLuck- 6y ago
    Let's assume your worst case scenario -- China attacks Taiwan, North Korea attacks South Korea, and Iran attacks Saudi Arabia. None of that would require or even warrant an American response. Both morally and practically. It would just leave the USA in a stronger position when all those factions lose some of their military capacity in those conflicts.
JohnTHaller 6y ago
On a related note, an F-35 shot itself a couple weeks ago on a training run in Arizona causing over $2.5m in damage: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjp7nq/one-of-americas-dollar1358-million-fighter-jets-shot-itself https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjp7nq/one-of-americas-dolla...
- booi 6y ago
  I didn't know the F-35 was also designed to be poetic
randomopining 6y ago
The BS that I don't buy from the pacifists... "we spend 10x Russia!!" But yeah, Russia has a nuke deterrent and could use that to force a land war in Europe at the same time that China launches an attack on Taiwan and North Korea launches an attack on South Korea and Iran attacks Saudi Arabia. How could the US military respond effectively to all of those at once? Each of those countries wants to carve out their sphere of influence. Once a short term victory is in the pocket for each of them, there is diplomatic negotiations to end fighting and then the new facts on the ground materialize and now 1/2+ the world is under autocrats again.
- crocodiletears 6y ago
  Europe could be… Europe's responsibility. South Korea is plenty rich and advanced enough to field a modern military, and outclass its neighbor. Beyond TSMC, why is Taiwan's defense America's responsibility? I'm fine with having a big military budget, but 'because how else is the US supposed to shovel its children on top multiple grenades simultanaeously for the good of every other developed nation' is a poor sales job.
  - randomopining 6y ago
    I agree Europe and SK can field their own stuff. But if the US abdicates its role, China and Russia are going to carve out their own spheres and soon you’ll feel the effects of having to do business (or none at all) with autocratic states controlled by them.
- CyanBird 6y ago
  What a poor quality comment > How could the US military respond effectively to all of those at once? 1st, why does it have to be able to "respond" anywhere in the world, this is not a capability any other nation has, all nations armies are inherently defensive 2nd, Russia has a Gdp lower than Italy with an ever decreasing military age population. They are not the Red Army and jingoistic toybox wanna be Internet Generals ought stop concern trolling they are 3rd, Spheres of influence are the natural state of Geopolitics, tell me, why is the unipolar hegemonic power policing bilateral relations between overseas sovereign nation states? What legitimacy does it invoke to do this? Other than "might makes right" which International Relations has thanks to rationalism been moving away of for the last 300 years
davmar 6y ago
"Weapons, not food, not homes, not shoes Not need, just feed the war, cannibal animal" -Rage Against the Machine, Bulls on Parade
dirtyid 6y ago
A lot of recent f35 is trash reporting is mixed up in lockmart competitors trying to to make clean sheet f16 proposal a thing. f16 also lockheed, so conceivably lockheed gains even if f35 failures need to be plugged by f16s.
therealbilly 6y ago
The F35 is a strange aircraft. It has a very powerful single engine but the airframe is still too heavy. So the plane performs poorly and lacks the potential energy to exploit any particular edge case. So they are pushing it as a "networked" platform that supposedly allows commanders to control the battlefield, because everything is connected in real time. It sounds fanciful and kind of made up.

128 points by SQL2219 6y ago

It is one thing to build a complex piece of technology, it is quite another to deploy it and expect it to work 24-7. $1.7 Billion was spent on this program.

rbanffy 6y ago
The major issue of the F-35 is trying to be too many things to too many people at once. It has to fly fast, yet be able to be slow enough to offer ground support. It has to be maneuverable to dogfight, but have short wings to land on carriers. It has to be light, but needs a complex nozzle and a fan to do STOL/VTOL. That's very hard to do.
- typon 6y ago
  Sounds a classic example of design by committee
  - mbreese 6y ago
    And that was the take home message from the article: > The design by committee, Swiss-army knife approach has been a resounding failure.
- GekkePrutser 6y ago
  Well to be fair it never aspired to do all of those things within the same model. They did split it in three different ones. Also, maneuverability and short wings go together really well. Slow flying and short wings doesn't though. Still, it was clearly a mistake, three totally different designs would have been cheaper and better.
  - yellow_postit 6y ago
    Shared platforms seem to work well in the automotive industry, why does it seem to be such a failure in this application? My assumption is high performance constraints requires deep customization and the shared platform hampers that.
    - selectodude 6y ago
      Some platforms just can't be shared. You're not going to be able to turn a Lamborghini into a body-on-frame truck without changing basically everything.
    - oetnxkdrlgcexu 6y ago
      Consumer automobile manufacturers can use shared platforms because the biggest difference between their vehicles is the body, which are metal boxes of different volumes. This is sometimes seen in aircraft: look at how many models of 777 Boeing produced. Automobile manufacturers couldn't, for example, have a shared platform between a vehicle designed for racing, an armored limousine, and a golf cart, as these vehicles have different performance requirements. That's a better comparison to to what they're trying to achieve with the F35. The needs of the branches of service are very different.
    - bewo001 6y ago
      I guess that in the automotive industry different models are often only done to achieve price differentiation or to serve local markets. The technical differences are superficial.
    - GekkePrutser 6y ago
      I think the VTOL in particular was too much of a stretch. If you see the complicated drive bar setup with that big fan, it really makes me wonder how this thing could possibly get airborne :)
    - jabl 6y ago
      My understanding is that in the aerospace industry, particularly at the cutting edge, margins are so low that common platforms don't really work out. In the car industry, say, a 10% penalty in, say, weight might be worth it if it enables the manufacturer to share the platform among many different products. In aerospace, not so much.
- bewo001 6y ago
  The arguments for and against general purpose planes sound eerily familiar for someone in the telco space. You either have The Converged Fixed/Mobile Retail/Business platform that is complex, inflexible, and expensive or several smaller platforms where some parts have to be developed several times. The usual argument for the converged platform is drastically reduced operating cost. The price is drastically reduced flexibility, as each new feature has to be checked against all existing requirements and dependencies.
Someone 6y ago
“$1.7 Billion was spent on this program.” If only. FTA: “Total acquisition costs now exceed $428 billion, nearly double the initial estimate of $233 billion, with projected lifetime operations and maintenance costs of $1.727 trillion.” Also, https://www.airforcemag.com/massive-34-billion-f-35-contract-includes-price-drop-as-readiness-improves/ https://www.airforcemag.com/massive-34-billion-f-35-contract... talks about a $34 billion contract for 478 aircraft. At that price, $1.7 billion buys you about 24 of these planes.
- omgJustTest 6y ago
  Does anyone sue the us govt for recouping taxes due to such catastrophic results?
- mschuster91 6y ago
  Holy. That's about 5x what's needed to eliminate world hunger (330B $, per https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/oct/13/ending-world-hunger-by-2030-would-cost-330bn-study-finds https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/oct/13/e...), which would probably have a lot more positive effect in achieving / maintaining peace and mass migration than that fleet of airplanes.
  - omgJustTest 6y ago
    but not for managing climate change.
  - dencodev 6y ago
    And this is the problem with the world. We easily have the resources to home, feed, educate, and provide medicine to everyone. But we don't due to greed
FlyMoreRockets 6y ago
It gets worse. From the article: "Total acquisition costs now exceed $428 billion, nearly double the initial estimate of $233 billion, with projected lifetime operations and maintenance costs of $1.727 trillion." Much like the SLS, it seems that it is more a jobs program to dump money into select congressional districts than a project actually focused on deliverables. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System#Funding_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System#Funding_hi...
- woofie11 6y ago
  I think it's helpful to focus on dollars per citizen. $428 billion means I spent a bit over $1000 on this failure. My family spend a few thousand dollars. Adjusted for income (I pay above-average taxes), it probably cost my family a minimalist car. The 1.7 billion price tag is around $5k per citizen. That could mean a lot to a lot of families.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    You could even get more than $5k per citizen out of it if you had put it into something that nets a return either directly or indirectly. Infrastructure projects like renewables, road upgrades, internet upgrades and so on. If you need busy work there is a lot of useful work to be done.

BitwiseFool 6y ago

"In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one tactical aircraft. This aircraft will have to be shared by the Air Force and Navy 3½ days each per week except for leap year, when it will be made available to the Marines for the extra day" - Augustine's Law #16

keanebean86 6y ago
Original design goals: * Faster than light outside atmosphere (s model used by space force) * Take off from underground * Returns a vastly increased radar signal to damage ground radar * Air superiority * Water superiority * Negative emissions * Generates new car scent * 600,000 lbs of ordinances * 3 pilots * Autonomous * Made in Mississippi * Troop carrier * "None of those dumb green screens" Edit: single -> signal
ngcc_hk 6y ago
That might be a worry. But the f35 is a good aircraft demo by Israel that it can strike without detection. Not sure it can beat the chinese as there area and drone might be an issue. But without replacement one can talk talk talk but the flight go on.

nickhalfasleep 6y ago

Imagine if we held a war, and nobody could afford to come?

benjohnson 6y ago
It’s for this reason that people (Bohr for example) who made the atomic bomb saw a ray of hope - it made large scale war too expensive to even try given that your enemy would nuke you back.
- asdff 6y ago
  That is unless we all sign paperwork saying we won't use these big huge wastes of GDP we've stockpiled like someone with a hoarding complex, and resume war as usual.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    You don't even need the paper. Just the political will on both sides. That is what mutually assured destruction is about: I don't trust them to not use theirs, but I can assure they don't win if they do. It has been hotly debated on if mutually assured destruction is actually why we haven't got into a nuclear war or not. You can take either side of the debate with no way to know for sure who is right.
hindsightbias 6y ago
People are always confused when I say I'm the F-35s biggest fan - because disarmament isn't a viable political option but aircraft programs like this effectively make it a practical one.
- scarmig 6y ago
  It reminds me of a funny little anecdote. In 1989, the USA instituted an arms embargo on China after Tiananmen (which was itself performed with tanks outfitted with American-made guns). However, President Bush allowed a certain existing deal ("Peace Pearl") that would help modernize the PLA's airforce to continue based on the requests of certain well-connected military contractors. But in 1990, China cancelled the deal unilaterally, despite it being the only access they had to Western military tech. Ultimately it went with Israeli and Russian sources. Why? The US arms exporters were running into massive cost overruns and development delays. China thought it was some kind of intentional sabotage, but it was nothing of the sort: it was just the general fucked-upness of American military procurement running into the realities of a culture unused to that level of fucked-upness. An international arms embargo couldn't accomplish the disarmament of China of American weaponry, but the brokenness of the American arms industry could.

imglorp 6y ago

While it might be a failure from the taxpayer's and military's point of view, it's a raving success for Congress and the contractors. The metrics for the latter are jobs, grandstanding, campaign donations, kickbacks, crony benefits, and mountains of cash, plus guaranteed more mountains ongoing until it's killed. I wish this was the cynical view but it's more like reality of government procurement.

baybal2 6y ago
How much harm did those fellows do, and how much all communist spies/saboteurs/subversives/seditionists combined did?
- imglorp 6y ago
  Not exactly a new problem. > It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress. - Twain
imtringued 6y ago
This is a waste of jobs though. The only reason why you want to wastefully spend money on jobs creation is that you somehow discover new things in the process, you are building up a workforce that will work on productive things after they completed the boondoggle or you just want to hit inflation goals. I'd say the F-35 fails at all three. It's just a slightly cheaper F-22 that can be exported, the work was handed to existing companies for the sake of politics instead of creating new ones, the project is decades old and failed to hit inflation goals.
- cyberge99 6y ago
  Your presumption that F-35 is a delivery vehicle is flawed. It may be an unconventional capability codename.
mcv 6y ago
If creating jobs is so important, why not simply create those jobs in other areas? There's plenty of infrastructure in dire need of maintainance.

F00Fbug 6y ago

Col. Boyd must be spinning in his grave! One of my favorite books: https://www.amazon.com/Boyd-Fighter-Pilot-Who-Changed/dp/0316796883 https://www.amazon.com/Boyd-Fighter-Pilot-Who-Changed/dp/031... There's a lot about what's wrong with aircraft procurement in this book and how he fought against it. Idealism and pragmatism still lose to politics and money fifty years later!

jnwatson 6y ago
There's an argument, by Boyd causing the F-15 and F-16 to succeed, he delayed the inevitable rethinking of the procurement process. If not for Boyd, the Air Force would have had perhaps 1 qualified success (F-18 Super Hornet) in the last 50 years of air platform development.
- u10 6y ago
  The Air Force doesn't fly the F-18. Boyd was against the F-15, so I'm not sure where you are getting that from.
  - F00Fbug 6y ago
    The F-18 and F-15 prototypes were competing for the same job. F-15 won and MD managed to salvage their investment and sell the YF-17 to the Navy as the F-18. The F-16 was the card up Boyd's sleeve that nobody saw coming but couldn't argue against it once he put it on the table!
    - u10 6y ago
      The F/A-18 was never in competition with the F-15 WRT the Air Force. It was mandated by congress for the navy to replace the high cost f-14 with something more reasonable costwise. It's true that the F/A-18 was competing with a navalized version of the F-15 but cost factors and the lack of organic multirole made the navalized version of the F-15 unfeasible. The F-16 did not conform to what Boyd wanted out of a combat aircraft, execpt for the lightweight part. The F-16 has a RADAR, BVR, and while designed as an air superiority it has exceeded expectations as a multirole platform.

GekkePrutser 6y ago

I'm surprised they don't go for updated F-16s now, but instead for a new design. Which again will have the chance of running over budget, having teething issues, etc etc. With the F-16 these things are already long figured out. They were even built here in Europe for a while. I know it doesn't have stealth but it has proven itself in asymmetric warfare. I wonder what the EU partners will do now. The Netherlands wanted the F-35 as the successor to the F-16 which it never became. They had to scale down orders as the price went up. I bet they will need a new plane too to fulfill the F-16 role. They can't cancel the F-35 purchases though as it was an intricate patchwork of local supply deals in return for orders.

rswskg 6y ago
I imagine they will just skip to drones mostly now.
- GekkePrutser 6y ago
  I wonder... Right now the Netherlands has no armed drones at all. Just surveillance ones.
- chasd00 6y ago
  Switching to drones makes sense to me, it seems to give a lot of bang for the buck. However, the risks and operational requirements are very different than a traditional manned plane so it would require a lot of change everywhere.

black6 6y ago

This has all happened before, and it will all happen again. The Pentagon Wars is available for viewing on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ir0FAa8P2MU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ir0FAa8P2MU

partiallypro 6y ago
This is a great movie and I highly recommend it. It used to be on HBO Go, so I'm sure it's on Max.
- Koshkin 6y ago
  What's wrong with watching it on YouTube?

KptMarchewa 6y ago

Just tangentially related, but I find it very weird that people push one-system-that-replaces-all (or, in this case, planes) as cost cutting measure, compared to few specialized systems. Which do not have to take tons of compatibility stuff. In this case, probably some problems of Air Force's F-35's are related to the constrant that the requirement of being able to land on carriers pushes. At the end, results are at best mediocre, costs exceeded, and everyone is unhappy.

imtringued 6y ago
The VTOL capability of the F-35B is nice in theory but the vast majority of navy aircraft are going to be launched off of carriers anyway. VTOL needs its own ship+aircraft concept or it is dead on arrival.
- mcv 6y ago
  VTOL is certainly nice, but it's ridiculous to use it as a requirement of a variant of a plane of which most versions will not be using VTOL at all. Like stealth, it has a massive impact on the shape of the plane. It's ridiculous to burden non-VTOL planes with a design meant for VTOL. Just make a specialised VTOL fighter if that's what you need.
  - wespiser_2018 6y ago
    This. You can see in the design of the f-35 the massive space in the middle of the body for the lift fan that partially obstructs the pilots view behind them.
- u10 6y ago
  The VTOL capability are for Marine squadrons operating off of LHD ships (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Essex_(LHD-2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Essex_(LHD-2)), or for partner nations who don't have aircraft carriers CATOBAR launch systems.
- NikolaeVarius 6y ago
  The F35 CAN VTOL, it is not meant to be used that way since it extremely limits fuel and armaments. The carrier variant is meant to be STOL, since its a JOINT Strike Fighter meant for multi-country use, and many countries do not have large carriers with catapults. Namely Great Britain, whose largest carriers are not equipped with catapults, since they are designed to use STOL planes.

walrus01 6y ago

The F-35 isn't an airplane, it's a defense industry jobs program to spread subcontracts widely around a sufficient number of congressional districts and states that it can't be killed.

georgeecollins 6y ago

One reform I would support would be mandating that all defense projects are made in ten states or less. That way you could spread the project around if you needed to, but it wouldn’t have enough support to continue only as a jobs program.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
They'll just stick the program in three metro areas that are highly over-represented in congress. Jerrymandering runs both ways. If you carve <city> up into ten districts you've just created ten congressmen who give a crap about bringing muh jobs to the <city> metro area.

SQL2219 6y ago

Military expert Pierre Sprey, the founder and designer of the F-16 & A-10 Warthog airplanes, Explains why the f-35 will not cut it on the modern battlefield. https://youtu.be/UQB4W8C0rZI https://youtu.be/UQB4W8C0rZI

u10 6y ago
Pierre Sprey is on the wrong side of history. If the fighter mafia had their way the F-15 would have never existed. RADAR and BVR would have never existed. the F-16 would never have had a multirole purpose. And the A-10 was obsolete the minute it rolled off of the assembly line. Most estimates that the majority of A-10's would have been destoryed within 72 hours of the Warsaw Pact rolling across the German border. The gun is not particularly effective against modern armour, and the same mission can be carried out better by other aircraft like the F/A-18 or the F-16, as seen in the 1st Gulf War. It's found new life in Afghanistan and Iraq but even than drones would have been better suited for the role. In fact, the AF wants to get rid of the A-10, but congress wont let them.
- greedo 6y ago
  The A-10 was designed to be a more modern Spad (A-1 Skyraider). The Spad was well appreciated in Vietnam in CAS roles, but the Viet-Cong didn't have SAMs. The introduction of SA-6, SA-8 etc made this design a failure in any European conflict.
- mullen 6y ago
  > Most estimates that the majority of A-10's would have been destroyed within 72 hours of the Warsaw Pact rolling across the German border. But that is in the design of the A-10. The A-10 was not made for anything other fighting in Europe for the first 72 hours of the Soviets invading Western Europe. If the Russian speartip was blunted and there was some A-10's left over, then the A-10 would have been considered a success.
- why_Mr_Anderson 6y ago
  Oh well, at least get the facts right. A-10 was designed to kill T-55s, T62s and T-72s (most modern tank USSR had at that time), not today's tanks. GAU-8 was extremely effective against armor from that era and still is very useful against armored vehicles, structures, etc. F16's can't do what A10 does the best (CAS). In 1st Gulf War A10s are credited with something like 1000 tanks destroyed (mostly with Mavericks though) AF is trying to get rid of A-10 for decades, but it still survives ..

ConceitedCode 6y ago

While there are certainly issues, the issues are more with the procurement process than the actual aircraft. Virtually every single aircraft program has been flogged by the press for being too expensive and less capable than the aircraft it replaced. This included the F-111, the C-5, the F-14, the F-15, the B-1, the F-16, the A-10, the F-18, the C-17, the B-2, the V-22, the F-22, and now the F-35. Overall the track record for these aircraft turned out to be outstanding, far exceeding the capabilities of their predecessors. The actual track record for the F35 has been very positive. Most the reports I've seen from pilots are generally very positive [1]. Other countries continue to buy it over other platforms [2]. Most the major complaints are around costs compared to the aircraft that are being replaced, but this isn't a fair comparison. As for the cost to fly the F-35, a unit measure the Air Force terms “cost per flying hour,” today the F-35 costs around $35,000 per flying hour. Comparative aircraft in this class are generally in the mid $20,000s, a target the F-35 is slated to hit by 2025. However, it must also be remembered, as the F-35 pilot’s above comment highlights, far fewer F-35s can accomplish far more with fewer aircraft than legacy aircraft types. It does not require a math major to understand this yields far lower real-world total costs to achieve a particular mission result. [3] [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/italian-pilots-raved-about-first-red-flag-exercise-with-us-made-f-35-2019-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/italian-pilots-raved-about-f... [2] https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2019/5/24/international-market-for-f-35-heats-up https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2019/5/24/i... [3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davedeptula/2020/07/20/f-35-problem-child-or-on-track-for-success/?sh=524a454315d1 https://www.forbes.com/sites/davedeptula/2020/07/20/f-35-pro...

dehrmann 6y ago
Wow, the F-14, F-15, F-16, and F-18 were all first flown in the 70's. The F-35 was 2006. It's easy to see some of the motivation for the F-35: there were a silly number of fighter models built in that decade.
maxerickson 6y ago
My recollection is that the only aspect of the F-22 people screamed about was the price.

Pxtl 6y ago

Here in Canada a major issue of the 2015 elections was whether to buy in on the F-35 project. The liberals wanted open procurement and specifically said they wanted the to avoid the F-35. The conservatives wanted to continue with the process that was basically designed to justify procuring F-35s. In the meantime, Canada's F-18s are absurdly old, and we have a tradition of screwing up open procurement by sandbagging it for decades. So the Conservatives looked quite reasonable in wanting to buy in on this internationally supported plane made by our closest allies. I think the liberals are vindicated at this point.

zepearl 6y ago
I just did a search => this article (Dec 2020) sounds funny: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/f18-fighter-jets-canada-australia-1.5836504 https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/f18-fighter-jets-canada-aus... > Only three of seven F-18 fighter jets purchased from Australia by the Canadian government have been integrated into the air force so far, and the Department of National Defence says key upgrades to as much as one-third of Canada's fighter force will take up to five years, according to documents recently tabled in the House of Commons. > The slow introduction of the used warplanes — meant to bolster Canada's existing CF-18s squadrons — and the long timeline for radar refurbishment have the opposition Conservatives questioning the value of the interim fleet. > When it first announced the plan three years ago, the government said it expected to keep most of the existing CF-18 fleet flying until 2032. Is the article correct? Anyway I'm not laughing because here in Switzerland we have as well to replace our relatively old F-18 which might generate a huge debate with the potential result of nothing happening (F-35 is as well one of the candidates, but I've personally always been against it for various reasons).
- Pxtl 6y ago
  Yup. Canada's F-18Cs (aka CF-18s) are ancient and were so bashed up that we ended up buying used Australian leftovers for parts and repair as a stopgap until we can decide what we're doing for our next-gen fighters. Basically we're procrastinating on the decision because the F-35 is at once the best and worst option - our closest allies are heavily standardized on it. But it's also a boondoggle. For a while Canada looked to be moving up to the modernized version of the F-18 platform, the F/A-18 Super Hornet. But then Boeing started a fight with Bombardier, a company that the Canadian Liberal government is very protective of. So the plans to invest in F/A-18 planes was scrapped. So Canada is basically endlessly procrastinating on what new jet to buy because of the F-35 boondoggle.

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jabl 6y ago

Seems a lot of the problems are due to how the government develops and acquires military hardware, with incentives for the various players massively misaligned with the interests of the country as a whole. I wonder what would a sane acquisition program look like? A company developing a product and then offering the more or less completed product to the military worked during WWII, but a cutting-edge fighter (or many other pieces of cutting-edge military hardware) development project is such an expensive and risky project that a company can't do it alone and hope that the government then comes and buys the finished product. So going back to how things were done back in the day isn't an option. Likewise the government taking the main design responsibility and using the companies only for building the products the government has designed probably won't work either, as the government doesn't have the expertise. So what would a sane strategy look like?

jeffreyrogers 6y ago
I'm not sure what a sane system would look like, but the main problems you have to address are: 1. In the current system requirements come from the military to the contractors (I'm simplifying a bit here). The people on the military side generally don't have much knowledge of technological capabilities, so they are limited in what they can conceive of. It dissuades outside-the-box thinking. 2. The military generally looks to existing contractors. I'm not even sure how you would sell to the military unless you hired some executives away from an existing contractor. 3. The way security clearances work and the length of time it takes to get them makes it hard to rapidly develop products. At this point I think the big companies are too big and slow, they need to find a way to get smaller companies involved.
- GcVmvNhBsU 6y ago
  I’m going to disagree with all three points. 1. To think that the military does not know what they need shows a very narrow understanding of the people fighting a war. If you ask a pilot “What do you need to accomplish your mission”, they will tell you. They may not know how to necessarily do sensor fusion or “cyber” things or the math/physics involved, but the way they will describe the problem and what their solution would be will show that they are thinking outside the box. Now, I will be fair and say that there is probably a disconnect between the end user and Air Force Materiel Command and it’s therefore up to the program management office to solicit feedback and requirements from the expert users. 2. The military follows the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement. There may be instances where contracting officers prefer and write requests for proposal that target specific contractors, but that should be an edge case and not the standard. I’d argue the real challenge is the scale of federal acquisitions and consolidation of industry players. In order to meet certain contractual obligations, you have to be large enough, which brings us to... 3. Security clearances take a long time to adjudicate, but it does not follow that that causes the inability to rapidly develop products. Going back to size, the problem is DOTMLPF - you cannot just design and purchase one thing, you need to build the entire logistics support chain for the next XX years. Maybe you squeeze a JUONS out that gets a capability “rapidly” developed but there’s still the expectation that you re-evaluate and create that long supply chain at a certain point.

greedo 6y ago

Yet another anti F-35 article that really doesn't bring anything new to the table.

albanread 6y ago

Any chance the UK can get a refund then? "Before the end of this decade, the F-35 Lightning will provide the ultimate punch of the Royal Navy’s Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers. The F-35 is an Anglo-American joint effort, designed by the best and brightest in the two nations’ aircraft industries."

arethuza 6y ago
For anyone wondering the UK's new carriers explicitly rejected the traditional CATOBAR approach to take-offs and landings in favour of a design that pretty much requires the F35B STOVL variant.
- Pxtl 6y ago
  Such carriers could still be used for the UK's Harrier jump-jets, couldn't it?
  - Someone1234 6y ago
    The UK doesn't own any Harrier jump-jets. They sold them all to the US Marines.

anewaccount2021 6y ago

Pilots love it. Pundits hate it. It isn't going away or being "cancelled"...the US already has hundreds, will receive hundreds more. I don't know why these articles continue discussing the F35 like it is a proposal...its in service and will be in service in 2060.

stanfordkid 6y ago

I think there is room in the market for an Elon Musk style entrepreneur to completely re-define the industry as was done by Space-X. I think defense filters out a lot of potential founders due to it's inherently bloody nature -- at the end of the day these are machines are designed to kill people efficiently, whatever the reason may be.

greedo 6y ago
Bert Rutan tried to do that. Selling aircraft to the US military is a tough sell unless you're one of the big boys.
- sneak 6y ago
  This is a kind way of saying that the defense industry and their sole customer are vertically integrated and serve as a way of transferring HUGE amounts of tax money into private hands without any accountability or real market forces at work of any kind. The whole thing is a criminal enterprise designed to rob public funds and enrich a small group. It's been widely known for decades and everyone who thinks this is a bad thing is powerless to stop it. It teaches one a lot about the true nature of the USA.
  - greedo 6y ago
    Well, part of this integration is inevitable. Defense materiel is so complicated, leading to high expenses that the DoD is required to manage vendors. Much of the aerospace consolidation that has happened in the past 30 years has been "encouraged" by the Pentagon as they think a smaller vendor can't really compete. At the same time, they want to preserve the industrial capacity so that they have flexibility when the military equivalent of the 737MAX strikes. That's why ULA is still around despite SpaceX kicking its butt.
chasd00 6y ago
With Space anyone can try to get there and prove their technology. There's even an event held once a year out in Nevada where you can show up with whatever rocket you want and try for it. War fighting isn't the same, you can't prove your plane is good in combat on your own. You need a war and a side willing and able to fly it in combat.

Rochus 6y ago

Does anyone have first hand information on how big of an impact the decision to use C++ instead of Ada had on the "staggering array of persistent issues"?

angry_octet 6y ago
The coupling between systems is insane, and it's all super rigid, with legal contracts specifying what, when and how often something can communicate. Many millions of dollars ride on these contracts. Basically it's a big jumbled big of Lego that's covered in Kraggle. With those constraints, lots of bugs are mis-design. IDK bug counts, or if that is even meaningful as it depends on thoroughness of testing, but a huge emphasises was placed on coding standards, static and dynamic analysis. They could well be the biggest single customer of Coverity. Overall I'd say it hasn't been a critical issue, given the larger architectural problems. The use of something like Ada SPARK in particular components might have focused attention on proving rather then testing, i.e. a completely different philosophy.

polytely 6y ago

>There has also been significant investment in the program by North Atlantic Treaty Organization members and other allies. A lot of the time with these investments it seems like it is mostly a signal of investment in the alliance with the US and that getting the planes is a sort of side effect.

steve76 6y ago

The J-20 copied the F-35. Now the international marxists are trying to junk it with their bought and paid for media. Bold move. A few dirty secrets about war. Really powerful people do start them over petty arguments at home. They loose power, and then make life as worst as possible for everyone until they are back in power. Some have a heart and things just gets out of hand. Some view other people's lives like poachers view deer in the wild or oil from a well. Mine it till it runs dry, move on. They are convinced of their immortality. Part of me sometimes question my doubt, like if they have some state secret medicine. A cockpit is not a pretty place to be. It kills you just the same as anything. Fumes, oil, vomit, sunlight, stressful long hours. Replace it with drones all you want. People will find out what really kills drone operators too, and it will probably be generational. Increasing the knowledge requirements so you only study, don't have a family, and your city is filled with junkies. Sap them across decades and centuries. War is killing first. How you do it comes next. Cold calculated killing, weaponizing everything we know. It's best to avoid it. And if you think about what provokes, and what soothes violent people. Materialism and moral license, with their drunkenness, boredom, search for meaning tend to provoke. It's then you have the street fights. Lofty moral standards, such as I just built a gravity application with the new black hole imagining data, something that will kill everything EVER, tends to calm things down, mystify and give them something to achieve.

xnx 6y ago

With advances in drones and remote imaging, is there still a role for manned jets like this? I similarly wonder about manned spaceflight.

sneak 6y ago
The USAF/USSF seems to have already made the switch to unmanned spaceflight (the x37b).
bluGill 6y ago
Yes, at least for now human at the controls is better than AI or remote control. This is quickly changing, but as things stand today you need a human for some operations. Soon though humans won't stand a chance.
- nickik 6y ago
  And the major reason for it is that no program as expensive as the F-35 has been done to attempt to develop such a thing. Or rather multiple different drones depending on what thing you actually wanted to do.

29athrowaway 6y ago

How many times have you heard the cliche phrase: the US spends more money in its armed forces than the top K other countries combined? Well, spending and results not always go hand in hand. And in the case of aerospace contractors, they can be rewarded for being inefficient at the expense of the taxpayer.

sneak 6y ago

The amount of money spent on this weapon of war could have been used to build a $700k house for every one of the 550,000 homeless people in the USA. If you taxed Jeff Bezos at 100% of his wealth and simply confiscated all of his US$183 billion of assets and liquidated them, you would have to find another 1.3 of him to do the same to to cover the cost of this program, which is 2.3x his net worth. Even if you tacked on Elon Musk's US$164B, you wouldn't have enough to pay for this.

WarOnPrivacy 6y ago

Although it has an extraordinarily poor track record, killing off the JSF entirely will prove difficult. According to a map showing the economic impact across the country... I'm not a fan of maintaining bad/harmful industries to prevent job loss. If we're that concerned, redirect those trillions into beneficial jobs - like oh, say, badly needed infrastructure repair.

redis_mlc 6y ago
> I'm not a fan of maintaining bad/harmful industries US defense is not a bad or harmful industry - it protects the free world. WW2 wouldn't have happened if the US wasn't isolationist. We've had 75 years of relative peace thanks to being a superpower.

blackrock 6y ago

I’ve heard it said that stealth is a lie. That radar technology from World War 2 era is able to detect stealth aircraft. The Russians just built up more of that kind of radar band to detect current stealth planes. This is how the F-117 got shot down in Yugoslavia. It was supposed to have the radar cross section of a small bird. Can anyone provide insight to this?

redis_mlc 6y ago
> This is how the F-117 got shot down in Yugoslavia. It was supposed to have the radar cross section of a small bird. The US got complacent and was flying the same route at the same time daily. I think in this case the pilot also did a maneuver and the angle reflected radar. So it was incompetence.
jabl 6y ago
> I’ve heard it said that stealth is a lie. The pop culture version of stealth providing perfect invisibility was always a lie. But it does provide decreased detection range. If your radar detects a traditional plane at 300 nm but a stealth plane at 30 nm, you're effectively blind as a bat. > That radar technology from World War 2 era is able to detect stealth aircraft. The Russians just built up more of that kind of radar band to detect current stealth planes. > This is how the F-117 got shot down in Yugoslavia. It was supposed to have the radar cross section of a small bird. Stealth technology apparently isn't that good for old school low frequency radars, so yes, there's a grain of truth there. But such radars provide poor resolution (which is why modern radars tend to use higher frequencies) so they are not that useful for targeting. That F-117 case was AFAIU a combination of poor operational planning (flying the same routes over and over again), as well as a 'lucky' shot. There's of course a lot of research into 'stealth-defeating' technologies. IR guided missiles, multistatic radar etc.

cyberge99 6y ago

If this is a headline, it means that everything behind the scenes is happening as expected. US Gov doesn’t leak. This is a distraction from current MILOPs capability.

zaptrem 6y ago
Source? I’d be interested to hear about this.

g42gregory 6y ago

I remember when F-35 was just coming out, it was cast as a significantly cheaper alternative to F-22s. I think it was in the documentary “Battle of X-Planes” (not sure of exact title)? I am amazed how this turned out. Should we have kept producing F-22s?

booi 6y ago
Probably not, air superiority isn't a big focus anymore with the advent of drones, missiles and planes like the F-35

nickik 6y ago

Another service update, nuclear weapons exist. Any situation that involves high tech piloted planes fighting each other in the sky is almost impossible to happen. Dropping insane amounts of resources into piloted figher plane is bordering on insanity. The same money could have literally created a Mars, doing far more for US politically and done wonders for its global credibility. Or you know, become global leader in electric mobility or many other things that would have been useful to both the US government and its people. Bombing the shit out of pure Arab, Africans and peoples from central Asia without a government can be done with planes from the 90s just fine.

bendbro 6y ago
> Another service update, nuclear weapons exist. Any situation that involves high tech piloted planes fighting each other in the sky is almost impossible to happen. This is falsified by the Vietnam war. We had apex US fighters fighting apex soviet fighters in a period where nuclear weapons existed. And I'm sure you are aware of this common trope, but it is claimed (and I think supported) that countries will not use nuclear weapons against another nuclear power due to the risk of nuclear war. And further, I think apex air and land vehicles would be required whether nukes are used or not. After the nuke has been deployed, land forces would need to be deployed to take the area cleared by the nuke, and air forces would be required to support those land forces.
- nickik 6y ago
  Sure, if you engage in strategically idiotic wars in places where there is tacit agreement with the other super power that it is ok, that might happen. But it was not actually relevant. The reason the US never invaded the North was because of nuclear weapons. And the reason these wars were thought in strategically irrelevant places like Vietnam and Afghanistan is because of this tacit agreement between nuclear powers. If you are designing an overall grand strategy where you are willing to send 10s of citizens to their death for marginal strategic value, then such a situation might happen. There are however other strategies you can follow. > After the nuke has been deployed, land forces would need to be deployed to take the area cleared by the nuke, and air forces would be required to support those land forces. Great plan to have your infantry walk into the nuclear wasteland.

roody15 6y ago

The F-35 makes me wonder if US military superiority is as great as it appears on paper. For example our military budget is 10 times that of russia. However does 1$ russia spends vs 1$ the US spends on equipment equate? Think it may be very likely that Russia (and China) are getting more bang for their buck and the gap between forces isn’t quite as extreme. No question the US has the most powerful military in the world and it’s Navy presence is unmatched. However moving forward is this sustainable ? Russia and China catching up?

randomopining 6y ago
Yeah that's the BS that I don't buy from the pacifists... "we spend 10x Russia!!" But yeah, Russia has a nuke deterrent and could use that to force a land war in Europe at the same time that China launches an attack on Taiwan and North Korea launches an attack on South Korea and Iran attacks Saudi Arabia. How could the US military respond effectively to all of those at once? Each of those countries wants to carve out their sphere of influence. Once a short term victory is in the pocket for each of them, there is diplomatic negotiations to end fighting and then the new facts on the ground materialize and now 1/2+ the world is under autocrats again.
- YinLuck- 6y ago
  Let's assume your worst case scenario -- China attacks Taiwan, North Korea attacks South Korea, and Iran attacks Saudi Arabia. None of that would require or even warrant an American response. Both morally and practically. It would just leave the USA in a stronger position when all those factions lose some of their military capacity in those conflicts.

JohnTHaller 6y ago

On a related note, an F-35 shot itself a couple weeks ago on a training run in Arizona causing over $2.5m in damage: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjp7nq/one-of-americas-dollar1358-million-fighter-jets-shot-itself https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjp7nq/one-of-americas-dolla...

booi 6y ago
I didn't know the F-35 was also designed to be poetic

randomopining 6y ago

The BS that I don't buy from the pacifists... "we spend 10x Russia!!" But yeah, Russia has a nuke deterrent and could use that to force a land war in Europe at the same time that China launches an attack on Taiwan and North Korea launches an attack on South Korea and Iran attacks Saudi Arabia. How could the US military respond effectively to all of those at once? Each of those countries wants to carve out their sphere of influence. Once a short term victory is in the pocket for each of them, there is diplomatic negotiations to end fighting and then the new facts on the ground materialize and now 1/2+ the world is under autocrats again.

crocodiletears 6y ago
Europe could be… Europe's responsibility. South Korea is plenty rich and advanced enough to field a modern military, and outclass its neighbor. Beyond TSMC, why is Taiwan's defense America's responsibility? I'm fine with having a big military budget, but 'because how else is the US supposed to shovel its children on top multiple grenades simultanaeously for the good of every other developed nation' is a poor sales job.
- randomopining 6y ago
  I agree Europe and SK can field their own stuff. But if the US abdicates its role, China and Russia are going to carve out their own spheres and soon you’ll feel the effects of having to do business (or none at all) with autocratic states controlled by them.
CyanBird 6y ago
What a poor quality comment > How could the US military respond effectively to all of those at once? 1st, why does it have to be able to "respond" anywhere in the world, this is not a capability any other nation has, all nations armies are inherently defensive 2nd, Russia has a Gdp lower than Italy with an ever decreasing military age population. They are not the Red Army and jingoistic toybox wanna be Internet Generals ought stop concern trolling they are 3rd, Spheres of influence are the natural state of Geopolitics, tell me, why is the unipolar hegemonic power policing bilateral relations between overseas sovereign nation states? What legitimacy does it invoke to do this? Other than "might makes right" which International Relations has thanks to rationalism been moving away of for the last 300 years

davmar 6y ago

"Weapons, not food, not homes, not shoes Not need, just feed the war, cannibal animal" -Rage Against the Machine, Bulls on Parade

dirtyid 6y ago

A lot of recent f35 is trash reporting is mixed up in lockmart competitors trying to to make clean sheet f16 proposal a thing. f16 also lockheed, so conceivably lockheed gains even if f35 failures need to be plugged by f16s.

therealbilly 6y ago

The F35 is a strange aircraft. It has a very powerful single engine but the airframe is still too heavy. So the plane performs poorly and lacks the potential energy to exploit any particular edge case. So they are pushing it as a "networked" platform that supposedly allows commanders to control the battlefield, because everything is connected in real time. It sounds fanciful and kind of made up.