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I wonder why lol. Although I will say that some of the issues that Lockheed Martin has had with the JSF and Littoral Combat Ships is that the military is asking

I wonder why lol. Although I will say that some of the issues that Lockheed Martin has had with the JSF and Littoral Combat Ships is that the military is asking them to build something far too complex. The whole module thing never worked out and that seems obvious. I think instead they should have tried for a couple of specific designs that served specific roles instead of building a single ship or plane that could do lots of things poorly while bleeding too much money. Disclaimer: I'm just guessing at all of this. I'm no expert. Not even an armchair.

XorNot 3y ago
That's a "fighter mafia" opinion that's not really grounded in reality (the language of "specific designs for specific roles" is from them). The JSF on a per unit basis is now cheaper then some 4th gen non-stealth fighters, and the idea that it does things "poorly" is not supported by reality.
- ramesh31 3y ago
  >and the idea that it does things "poorly" is not supported by reality. That remains to be seen. Ukraine has completely upended military doctrine of the last 30 years. Dog fights are happening regularly, and air defense has proven to be far more effective than we could have imagined. The F-35 has never been proven in combat, and it's an open question as to whether its' known weaknesses will matter in a high intensity near-peer conflict.
  - phkahler 3y ago
    So let's ship some to Ukraine and get them battle tested!
    - 7thaccount 3y ago
      They're too expensive to hand out I would guess (also Russia might start threatening nuclear war again) and it would be a disaster to have one get blown up easily. They're probably also still not fully combat ready.
  - ranger207 3y ago
    Dogfights are not happening regularly in Ukraine. They might have been a few in the first ~month, but not at all since then. Air defense being more effective is even more support for stealth, which directly reduces air defense's effectiveness.
    - ramesh31 3y ago
      >Dogfights are not happening regularly in Ukraine. They are happening far more regularly than US Air Force doctrine calls for, which is never. Posessing total air superiority is baked into nearly every decision.
- nostrademons 3y ago
  "Specific designs for specific roles" is a general engineering thing. Any engineer knows that it's easier to get good performance (in whatever dimension you're measuring performance) if you're designing for only one use case than if you're trying to be everything to everyone. Designs that try to do everything end up being overconstrained and then having to make (often irrational from the POV of any one user) compromises to fit reality. Software monopolies face this on a daily basis. Much of what we see as "enshittification" from a consumer standpoint comes from single products that need to serve the needs of 3B consumers. The idea of "unbundling" that was en vogue in startup circles from ~2013-2016 is just that startups which serve one use case for one customer base are able to eek out efficiencies that consumer tech giants cannot. I'm not in aerospace or military so I can't comment on whether the JSF itself performs poorly. How would that even be defined, though? It doesn't have a whole lot of competition to measure against. (Seems like a common thread in these discussions...)
  - 7thaccount 3y ago
    Yeah that was basically my thought that perhaps they need a dogfighter, a long range bomber, some kind of thing like an A-10 or C-130 gunship. Not sure if Ukraine is showing us that some of those are now useless or not. It must be difficult to design something like the JSF that has to have a vertical takeoff version and all this other junk to make 4 branches of the military happy. Part of me thinks that having two different planes would have made more sense and lifted a lot of design constraints.
m4rtink 3y ago
I wonder what went wrong woth the combat module concept. The Dutch who inspired this in the LCS are using similar modules just fine apparently on their ships.
fmajid 3y ago
One of the issues was wiring harnesses being too close together. The USAF has higher requirements in for redundancy and fault-tolerance in aircraft that may be shot at than civilian airliners do, go figure. Either way, it's not something that should be new for a company like Boeing that's done several generations of airliner to tanker conversions.
ranger207 3y ago
The LCS's mission modules were based on the Danish Stanflex system, which seems to be working pretty well. Since the modular mission packages have gone away, the remaining ones are going to be installed more permanently, making the LCS into more of a purpose built ship. This won't really help the LCS though because it was already purpose built to operate in the littorals, which was a role that never really made sense

XorNot 3y ago

That's a "fighter mafia" opinion that's not really grounded in reality (the language of "specific designs for specific roles" is from them). The JSF on a per unit basis is now cheaper then some 4th gen non-stealth fighters, and the idea that it does things "poorly" is not supported by reality.

ramesh31 3y ago
>and the idea that it does things "poorly" is not supported by reality. That remains to be seen. Ukraine has completely upended military doctrine of the last 30 years. Dog fights are happening regularly, and air defense has proven to be far more effective than we could have imagined. The F-35 has never been proven in combat, and it's an open question as to whether its' known weaknesses will matter in a high intensity near-peer conflict.
- phkahler 3y ago
  So let's ship some to Ukraine and get them battle tested!
  - 7thaccount 3y ago
    They're too expensive to hand out I would guess (also Russia might start threatening nuclear war again) and it would be a disaster to have one get blown up easily. They're probably also still not fully combat ready.
- ranger207 3y ago
  Dogfights are not happening regularly in Ukraine. They might have been a few in the first ~month, but not at all since then. Air defense being more effective is even more support for stealth, which directly reduces air defense's effectiveness.
  - ramesh31 3y ago
    >Dogfights are not happening regularly in Ukraine. They are happening far more regularly than US Air Force doctrine calls for, which is never. Posessing total air superiority is baked into nearly every decision.
nostrademons 3y ago
"Specific designs for specific roles" is a general engineering thing. Any engineer knows that it's easier to get good performance (in whatever dimension you're measuring performance) if you're designing for only one use case than if you're trying to be everything to everyone. Designs that try to do everything end up being overconstrained and then having to make (often irrational from the POV of any one user) compromises to fit reality. Software monopolies face this on a daily basis. Much of what we see as "enshittification" from a consumer standpoint comes from single products that need to serve the needs of 3B consumers. The idea of "unbundling" that was en vogue in startup circles from ~2013-2016 is just that startups which serve one use case for one customer base are able to eek out efficiencies that consumer tech giants cannot. I'm not in aerospace or military so I can't comment on whether the JSF itself performs poorly. How would that even be defined, though? It doesn't have a whole lot of competition to measure against. (Seems like a common thread in these discussions...)
- 7thaccount 3y ago
  Yeah that was basically my thought that perhaps they need a dogfighter, a long range bomber, some kind of thing like an A-10 or C-130 gunship. Not sure if Ukraine is showing us that some of those are now useless or not. It must be difficult to design something like the JSF that has to have a vertical takeoff version and all this other junk to make 4 branches of the military happy. Part of me thinks that having two different planes would have made more sense and lifted a lot of design constraints.

m4rtink 3y ago

I wonder what went wrong woth the combat module concept. The Dutch who inspired this in the LCS are using similar modules just fine apparently on their ships.

fmajid 3y ago

One of the issues was wiring harnesses being too close together. The USAF has higher requirements in for redundancy and fault-tolerance in aircraft that may be shot at than civilian airliners do, go figure. Either way, it's not something that should be new for a company like Boeing that's done several generations of airliner to tanker conversions.

ranger207 3y ago

The LCS's mission modules were based on the Danish Stanflex system, which seems to be working pretty well. Since the modular mission packages have gone away, the remaining ones are going to be installed more permanently, making the LCS into more of a purpose built ship. This won't really help the LCS though because it was already purpose built to operate in the littorals, which was a role that never really made sense