3 ms·
> There's a lot about what's wrong with aircraft procurement in this book So for those of us not interested enough to actually go read that book, what is the s
by jabl 6y ago
> There's a lot about what's wrong with aircraft procurement in this book
So for those of us not interested enough to actually go read that book, what is the solution for such insanely expensive military programs?
- bluGill 6y agoFirst, are the programs insanely expensive is a question that needs to be asked. I have no doubt there is waste to cut, but overall, a modern fighter much be complex. A WWI fighter will lose against the more complex fighter every-time, which will lose to the 1950s fighter (The jet engine was just becoming workable at the end of WWII, if the war had gone longer what I'm calling a 1950s fighter would be late WWII). And so on. A modern fighter must have high R&D, and overall we hope to only need a relatively small number of them, which makes it really easy to do division on a per fighter basis and get a really big number. The incremental cost of a F35 once you have designed it isn't too bad (and it could be made a lot better if it was worth a larger assembly line to make more).