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All military aircraft are maintenance nightmares. They're also extraordinarily loud and devour fuel. These are not intended to entire commercial service where t

All military aircraft are maintenance nightmares. They're also extraordinarily loud and devour fuel. These are not intended to entire commercial service where they need to turn a profit for the operators.

giancarlostoro 7mo ago
> They're also extraordinarily loud and devour fuel. Steal helicopters have entered the chat.
- greedo 7mo ago
  Comanche was cancelled, and even it was loud and gulped fuel. The "stealth" Blackhawk derivative used in the Bin Laden raid might be quieter, but it definitely gulped a ton of fuel. Fuel consumption is just an accepted issue with helicopter technology.
jjk166 7mo ago
Maintenance is an issue for more than just profitability. More maintenance means fewer sorties in a given time period, heavier reliance on and utilization of supply chains, and fewer platforms that can be serviced by a given set of mechanics and facilities. Just look at WW2: Germany had some fantastic equipment, but they couldn't field it because they didn't have the fuel, spare parts and the maintenance capabilities available. A tiger could kill 10 Shermans, but the Americans could always bring up an 11th Sherman. For decades we have been able to afford complacency - we strike when we're ready against people who mostly can't strike back. We can afford to be wasteful because we have so much more than anyone we would go up against. No one is seriously threatening our ability to keep our military going. But militaries need to be prepared for peer conflicts where someone could give us a run for our money.
- greedo 7mo ago
  The comparison in tech is apt, but the countervailing argument is that the discrepancy in economies doomed the Nazis in WW2. German was a little powerhouse considering the size of its population, but it only had half the GDP of the US, not to mention the other Allies. Combine this with a smaller population, and it really didn't matter what the Germans did in terms of equipment. They were destined to lose unless they struck gold with a wunderwaffe like the atomic bomb. In today's world, the US outspends the next 10 countries combined. In normal times, it values the lives of its servicemen, and is willing to spend quite a bit to ensure dominance. So it will often have boutique gear that other countries could never afford.
  - jjk166 7mo ago
    That's not a countervailing argument, that is the argument. The side able to apply more industrial power defeated the side with more capable but less useful equipment. The US outspends the next 10 countries combined in peace times. By comparison, Germany outspent the US on its military by a factor of 20 on the eve of WW2. Obviously once the war got going, the US' immense industrial capacity (along with the other Allies; the British Empire and the Soviet Union had the number 2 and 3 GDPs) was unstoppable. We no longer live in the age where the US represents half of the world GDP and the bulk of that is manufacturing. China's has a larger economy in terms of Purchasing Power Parity, it has extensive manufacturing capacity, and a vast population. If push came to shove, we wouldn't be able to simply outspend them. In that hypothetical conflict we are the germany with a bunch of questionably useful wunderwaffe.
    - 15155 7mo ago
      > we wouldn't be able to simply outspend them You're right: we would simply starve them (in addition to strategic bombing of all of these manufacturing centers.) They do not possess the food calorie production to sustain their population, nor do they have the arable land to magically begin to do so. > we are the germany with a bunch of questionably useful wunderwaffe. We have outstanding fast attack submarines which can't be stopped by ASBMs: exactly zero freighters carrying food from South America or crude oil would be permitted.
      - jjk166 7mo ago
        That was literally Nazi Germany's strategy for defeating Britain. Use advanced submarines to stop trade cutting off supplies of food and fuel from abroad. The Allies just made ships faster than they could be sunk. Today the US has 55 fast attack submarines, each of which can carry about 50 torpedos at a time. So with 100% of your subs deployed you can sink maybe 250 ships. The US has an inventory of about 1000 torpedos so you can do that about 4 times. Shanghai alone receives 230 ships per day. So The US submarine force is roughly capable of shutting down the equivalent of 1 chinese port for a few days. Realistically, your not even going to get anywhere near that. 30% of your subs are going to be out of service at any given time, more will be transiting between service bases and the war theater, only a portion of those can be spare for commerce raiding, it takes time to locate targets, and you will suffer attrition to ASW. After those first few days it becomes a race between US torpedo production and Chinese ship building. The US can produce 10 torpedos per month; China produces 15 ships per day. Of course China isn't an island - it can import food from its neighbors by land connections. Nor is it even deficient in domestic food production capability. It grows 700 million tons of grain per year which is enough to sustain 3.8 billion adults. It imports a lot of food in peacetime because people want more than bare subsistence, and certainly interdicting trade will piss them off quite a bit, but it's not going to bring them to their knees. The idea that in a peer war it will only be them suffering - their trade will be interdicted, their industrial centers will be bombed - and they won't have any means to strike back is exactly the complacency I was referring to. Maybe if war broke out tomorrow it would go that way, but that's merely an argument that China is not yet truly our peer. We must plan under the assumption that somebody, and it might not be China, will in the coming decades reach the point where they can tank a hit from us and hit back.
- KaiserPro 7mo ago
  > A tiger could kill 10 Shermans, but the Americans could always bring up an 11th Sherman. Supply is one part, being able to repair is another. The tiger was a massive pain in the dick to fix. It had a weak gearbox that took _hours_ to get to. Plus most of the parts were bespoke, which means lots more tooling needed to service everything. The other thing is that germany wasn't actually that mechanised compared to the french, or english
  - jjk166 7mo ago
    > The tiger was a massive pain in the dick to fix. It had a weak gearbox that took _hours_ to get to. Which is exactly the topic under discussion.
    - conorcleary 7mo ago
      Stopping war gets cheaper every day.
jcgrillo 7mo ago
The F-35s train over my house. When the business end of the engine points downward it rattles the windows and sounds like freedom.
- dylan604 7mo ago
  I was on a film shoot that was interrupted by a pair of F-18s going low and slow on burners that took forever for audio to give the all clear. The killer part was we were in a downtown park, and could not determine why in the world they would have been performing that maneuver there. There were more than windows shaking.

giancarlostoro 7mo ago

> They're also extraordinarily loud and devour fuel. Steal helicopters have entered the chat.

greedo 7mo ago
Comanche was cancelled, and even it was loud and gulped fuel. The "stealth" Blackhawk derivative used in the Bin Laden raid might be quieter, but it definitely gulped a ton of fuel. Fuel consumption is just an accepted issue with helicopter technology.

jjk166 7mo ago

Maintenance is an issue for more than just profitability. More maintenance means fewer sorties in a given time period, heavier reliance on and utilization of supply chains, and fewer platforms that can be serviced by a given set of mechanics and facilities. Just look at WW2: Germany had some fantastic equipment, but they couldn't field it because they didn't have the fuel, spare parts and the maintenance capabilities available. A tiger could kill 10 Shermans, but the Americans could always bring up an 11th Sherman. For decades we have been able to afford complacency - we strike when we're ready against people who mostly can't strike back. We can afford to be wasteful because we have so much more than anyone we would go up against. No one is seriously threatening our ability to keep our military going. But militaries need to be prepared for peer conflicts where someone could give us a run for our money.

greedo 7mo ago
The comparison in tech is apt, but the countervailing argument is that the discrepancy in economies doomed the Nazis in WW2. German was a little powerhouse considering the size of its population, but it only had half the GDP of the US, not to mention the other Allies. Combine this with a smaller population, and it really didn't matter what the Germans did in terms of equipment. They were destined to lose unless they struck gold with a wunderwaffe like the atomic bomb. In today's world, the US outspends the next 10 countries combined. In normal times, it values the lives of its servicemen, and is willing to spend quite a bit to ensure dominance. So it will often have boutique gear that other countries could never afford.
- jjk166 7mo ago
  That's not a countervailing argument, that is the argument. The side able to apply more industrial power defeated the side with more capable but less useful equipment. The US outspends the next 10 countries combined in peace times. By comparison, Germany outspent the US on its military by a factor of 20 on the eve of WW2. Obviously once the war got going, the US' immense industrial capacity (along with the other Allies; the British Empire and the Soviet Union had the number 2 and 3 GDPs) was unstoppable. We no longer live in the age where the US represents half of the world GDP and the bulk of that is manufacturing. China's has a larger economy in terms of Purchasing Power Parity, it has extensive manufacturing capacity, and a vast population. If push came to shove, we wouldn't be able to simply outspend them. In that hypothetical conflict we are the germany with a bunch of questionably useful wunderwaffe.
  - 15155 7mo ago
    > we wouldn't be able to simply outspend them You're right: we would simply starve them (in addition to strategic bombing of all of these manufacturing centers.) They do not possess the food calorie production to sustain their population, nor do they have the arable land to magically begin to do so. > we are the germany with a bunch of questionably useful wunderwaffe. We have outstanding fast attack submarines which can't be stopped by ASBMs: exactly zero freighters carrying food from South America or crude oil would be permitted.
    - jjk166 7mo ago
      That was literally Nazi Germany's strategy for defeating Britain. Use advanced submarines to stop trade cutting off supplies of food and fuel from abroad. The Allies just made ships faster than they could be sunk. Today the US has 55 fast attack submarines, each of which can carry about 50 torpedos at a time. So with 100% of your subs deployed you can sink maybe 250 ships. The US has an inventory of about 1000 torpedos so you can do that about 4 times. Shanghai alone receives 230 ships per day. So The US submarine force is roughly capable of shutting down the equivalent of 1 chinese port for a few days. Realistically, your not even going to get anywhere near that. 30% of your subs are going to be out of service at any given time, more will be transiting between service bases and the war theater, only a portion of those can be spare for commerce raiding, it takes time to locate targets, and you will suffer attrition to ASW. After those first few days it becomes a race between US torpedo production and Chinese ship building. The US can produce 10 torpedos per month; China produces 15 ships per day. Of course China isn't an island - it can import food from its neighbors by land connections. Nor is it even deficient in domestic food production capability. It grows 700 million tons of grain per year which is enough to sustain 3.8 billion adults. It imports a lot of food in peacetime because people want more than bare subsistence, and certainly interdicting trade will piss them off quite a bit, but it's not going to bring them to their knees. The idea that in a peer war it will only be them suffering - their trade will be interdicted, their industrial centers will be bombed - and they won't have any means to strike back is exactly the complacency I was referring to. Maybe if war broke out tomorrow it would go that way, but that's merely an argument that China is not yet truly our peer. We must plan under the assumption that somebody, and it might not be China, will in the coming decades reach the point where they can tank a hit from us and hit back.
KaiserPro 7mo ago
> A tiger could kill 10 Shermans, but the Americans could always bring up an 11th Sherman. Supply is one part, being able to repair is another. The tiger was a massive pain in the dick to fix. It had a weak gearbox that took _hours_ to get to. Plus most of the parts were bespoke, which means lots more tooling needed to service everything. The other thing is that germany wasn't actually that mechanised compared to the french, or english
- jjk166 7mo ago
  > The tiger was a massive pain in the dick to fix. It had a weak gearbox that took _hours_ to get to. Which is exactly the topic under discussion.
  - conorcleary 7mo ago
    Stopping war gets cheaper every day.

jcgrillo 7mo ago

The F-35s train over my house. When the business end of the engine points downward it rattles the windows and sounds like freedom.

dylan604 7mo ago
I was on a film shoot that was interrupted by a pair of F-18s going low and slow on burners that took forever for audio to give the all clear. The killer part was we were in a downtown park, and could not determine why in the world they would have been performing that maneuver there. There were more than windows shaking.