7 ms·

the F-35 is one of the largest wastes of government money that is publicly known. by the time the aircraft has all the bugs ironed out, it will have cost USD 1

the F-35 is one of the largest wastes of government money that is publicly known. by the time the aircraft has all the bugs ironed out, it will have cost USD 1 tln and be easily destroyed by much cheaper drones. the entire contract should be converted into drone development, which will actually pay dividends. trying to argue that we need the F-35 or that it will provide any kind of strategic military value is absurd.

mparr4 13y ago
> the entire contract should be converted into drone development, which will actually pay dividends ...or, maybe, education?
- newnewnew 13y ago
  I don't understand. Is education good for killing your enemy? Why would that be the purview of the military?
  - TsiCClawOfLight 13y ago
    To be honest, if the US education stays the same, the military and it's contractors will crash and burn. Education is desperately needed there, or else both engineering and strategic capabilities will soon (1 generation) fall short of usefulness.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > Is education good for killing your enemy? Education is good for figuring out how to acheive your goals, including if those goals are "killing your enemy". > Why would that be the purview of the military? Because its a substantial force multiplier.
  - venomsnake 13y ago
    It's the educated people that make all the fun toys that enable modern warfare. And a insurgency with smart engineers and chemists will be one hell to contain.
    - lostlogin 13y ago
      I'd go so far as to say that it WAS one hell to contain. That wasn't a dumb insurgency, and I suspect it achieved a fair few of its aims.
  - mparr4 13y ago
    I'd rather not take it as a given that we are going to spend $1T on our nation's next war plane. That it is potentially ineffective further compounds what surely must be a disastrous waste of a considerable portion of our nation's financial resources. The $3k cost per person of a $1T plane makes me feel inclined to think about what else could be done with that kind of money. So, while drones might be a "better" way for the military to spend $1T, I think it's worth entertaining the idea that there might be a better way for a nation to spend that money. Like, say, on education.
  - lostlogin 13y ago
    Is this a joke? Some basic thought processes would probably have avoided some of the BS that the US has engaged in. Which recent wars have been fought that didn't involved US weapons being used against the US? Long term thinking is required. Less fixation on war, killing, rendering, torturing, interrogating dominating and conquering might, see something productive happen with the vast sums of wasted money and lives. Edit: Words and stuff.
- tsotha 13y ago
  No. We already spend too much on education. The one thing we've managed to conclusively prove in the last 30 years is you can't improve education by throwing money at it.
tptacek 13y ago
If your whole argument is that all manned air-ground mission planes should be replaced with drones, it's a stretch to call the parent "absurd". Your comment would be better without its first and last sentences.
ImprovedSilence 13y ago
Drones are great, but not failproof. what happens when you command links are taken down? (RF jamming, satellites destroyed, etc) You're gonna need a "human powered" "analog" fallback.
- EliRivers 13y ago
  Unless you tell the drone beforehand what you want it to do, so it knows what to do when comms go down.
  - mpyne 13y ago
    Even the military isn't yet on board with the idea of allowing drones to autonomously choose when to kill. In fact that's one of the big reasons the U.S. requires their pilots to be commissioned officers, is because they have to be cognizant of the laws of war, current Rules of Engagement that are in force, the effect of a given attack on the geopolitical framework, etc. and this has to happen in an environment where they are the only ones with an accurate (or semi-accurate) understanding of the actual picture on-the-ground.
    - donavanm 13y ago
      I do believe its your friendly neighborhood JTAC/ANGLICO/JFO/etc who has the picture "on the ground".
- shabble 13y ago
  I imagine it's not a novel idea, but taking something along the lines of an airliner/AWACS platform and stuffing it full of drone pilots in cubicles and using line-of-sight optical or tightbeam microwave comms direct to your drone herd[1] a few hundred km away would be pretty hard to block. Tightbeam comms also make it a lot harder to find than a radar emitting AWACS, and you can have multiple redundant controllers for your drones to avoid a SPoF if it does get found. Being closer to the action and avoiding satellite uplink means you don't have nearly the same latency issues as current drone controls do. The increased performance of unmanned vehicles, as well as the cost savings of the whole life-support system (and perhaps, reduced pilot risk = lower training/HR embodied costs as well) seem like they might make such a system practical. [1] Taking it a step further, you have a central control platform surrounded by defensive drone cloud responsible for point defence, active sensors (which you don't want to do personally since it tells enemies exactly where you are), and mesh/onion routed control links to your offensive drone swarm (so enemies can't infer the controller location from lines of sight intersections to the stuff they can see). Even even further down the line, distribute the human controllers into the defensive swarm, so they're hard/impossible to distinguish from the "dumb" drones, and less of a Single Big Target worth hitting.
mikegagnon 13y ago
The United States economy is based upon Military Keynesianism. The federal government does not analyze spending the same way we do because __spending benefits the economy__, which is part of the government's responsibility. They intentionally spend money to stimulate the economy. So when the military spends $1 trillion on planes, they are really trading $1 trillion for planes plus economic stimulus. In other words, the planes don't literally cost $1 trillion. Rather the cost of the planes = $1 trillion minus the economic benefit of spending. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Keynesianism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Keynesianism
- sshconnection 13y ago
  Not all spending is equal. If they want to pour money into projects, there is plenty of infrastructure that needs to be built here.
  - mikegagnon 13y ago
    I agree. I think Military Keynesianism is a bad economic policy. I have seen lots of articles that discuss wasteful DoD spending. But I see very few that discuss __why__ the DoD spends money this way. And why it continues. This type of spending is not a new phenomenon. To me these "why" questions are the most important and intellectually interesting aspects of these issues. But they are often ignored.
  - michaelt 13y ago
    Ah, but you forget the myriad other benefits: 1. If you don't believe in globalization, you can legitimately lock out foreign competition and insist on an all-American supply chain, keeping jobs and money in the US. 2. It allows you to bring home the pork. Military contractors have a proven willingness to situate assembly plants to deliver jobs in politically convenient locations. 3. It's compatible with Libertarian/Tea Party beliefs, as military spending tends to get a free pass from the balanced budget brigade. 4. People will call you "a hawk" and "strong on defense" and "supporting our troops". Or at least they won't call you the opposite of those things. 5. Spending on things like DARPA funds cool things like the internet and the DARPA Grand Challenge and robots and things. Pretty sciencey and cool. 6. $60 million in lobbying in 2012 https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indusclient.php?id=D01&year=2012 https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indusclient.php?id=D01&yea... with Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin all in the top 20 individual donors https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=s&showYear=2012 https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=s&showYe... Compare that to funding boring old schools and bridges and things which have none of these benefits.
demallien 13y ago
"easily destroyed by much cheaper drones" To a certain extent, this has been true for more than two decades. I used to work as a radar engineer for the RAAF, and every time we went on exercises against US forces (both teams flying F 18s, but with different missile payloads, we had AIM9s, the Americans had AMRAAM), we would see our aircraft swatted from the sky before we could even get the bogeys on weapons-system radar. Talk about dog-fighting maneuverability and visibility is just ridiculous - if you're using those characteristics, you've already lost the battle. In the control room we used to joke that the USN could have sent P51s equipped with AMRAAMs and AWACS support and they would still win. Modern fighter aircraft need to: a) not be seen b) be fast (time to target is still important!) c) carry a decent payload of weapons. Ideally target selection should be provided by AWACS, and missile-sensors provide the final kill guidance, allowing the fighter (AKA missile-launch platform) to remain stealthy. In the absence of AWACS, the fighter will need to carry it's own sensor suite. Modern air warfare is all about sensors, ECM and stealth. The airframe is almost inconsequential.
- AsymetricCom 13y ago
  A monumental fuckup of this magnitude makes me wish that this was some kind of smoke screen to cover the cost of some other kind of R&D of technology we can scarcely comprehend. $1,000,000,000,000 for a plane that doesn't work and has been outsourced to a dozen foreign contractors? I don't buy it.
  - gchpaco 13y ago
    Are you kidding? My father works in aerospace for firms doing subcontracting on non-black projects and every time he talks about work it would be about some new ridiculous boondoggle. I remember some idiots conducting testing managed to pick up and drop a piece of flight hardware the size of a car about six inches, which probably cost about $100K to realign and repair. The ISS went through I think three or four--or maybe five?--ground up redesigns requiring everybody throw everything they had already done completely out the window and start over. Many of us on the sidelines watching marveled quietly that it ever flew at all. Small teams with tight deadlines can do wonders. This is why Skunkworks stuck. But it's important to note that Kelly Johnson was behind a lot of the big successes there and he was an amazing man. Absent organizational genius, you can run into trouble. The JSF is pretty much the antithesis of "small teams with tight deadlines".

mparr4 13y ago

> the entire contract should be converted into drone development, which will actually pay dividends ...or, maybe, education?

newnewnew 13y ago
I don't understand. Is education good for killing your enemy? Why would that be the purview of the military?
- TsiCClawOfLight 13y ago
  To be honest, if the US education stays the same, the military and it's contractors will crash and burn. Education is desperately needed there, or else both engineering and strategic capabilities will soon (1 generation) fall short of usefulness.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > Is education good for killing your enemy? Education is good for figuring out how to acheive your goals, including if those goals are "killing your enemy". > Why would that be the purview of the military? Because its a substantial force multiplier.
- venomsnake 13y ago
  It's the educated people that make all the fun toys that enable modern warfare. And a insurgency with smart engineers and chemists will be one hell to contain.
  - lostlogin 13y ago
    I'd go so far as to say that it WAS one hell to contain. That wasn't a dumb insurgency, and I suspect it achieved a fair few of its aims.
- mparr4 13y ago
  I'd rather not take it as a given that we are going to spend $1T on our nation's next war plane. That it is potentially ineffective further compounds what surely must be a disastrous waste of a considerable portion of our nation's financial resources. The $3k cost per person of a $1T plane makes me feel inclined to think about what else could be done with that kind of money. So, while drones might be a "better" way for the military to spend $1T, I think it's worth entertaining the idea that there might be a better way for a nation to spend that money. Like, say, on education.
- lostlogin 13y ago
  Is this a joke? Some basic thought processes would probably have avoided some of the BS that the US has engaged in. Which recent wars have been fought that didn't involved US weapons being used against the US? Long term thinking is required. Less fixation on war, killing, rendering, torturing, interrogating dominating and conquering might, see something productive happen with the vast sums of wasted money and lives. Edit: Words and stuff.
tsotha 13y ago
No. We already spend too much on education. The one thing we've managed to conclusively prove in the last 30 years is you can't improve education by throwing money at it.

tptacek 13y ago

If your whole argument is that all manned air-ground mission planes should be replaced with drones, it's a stretch to call the parent "absurd". Your comment would be better without its first and last sentences.

ImprovedSilence 13y ago

Drones are great, but not failproof. what happens when you command links are taken down? (RF jamming, satellites destroyed, etc) You're gonna need a "human powered" "analog" fallback.

EliRivers 13y ago
Unless you tell the drone beforehand what you want it to do, so it knows what to do when comms go down.
- mpyne 13y ago
  Even the military isn't yet on board with the idea of allowing drones to autonomously choose when to kill. In fact that's one of the big reasons the U.S. requires their pilots to be commissioned officers, is because they have to be cognizant of the laws of war, current Rules of Engagement that are in force, the effect of a given attack on the geopolitical framework, etc. and this has to happen in an environment where they are the only ones with an accurate (or semi-accurate) understanding of the actual picture on-the-ground.
  - donavanm 13y ago
    I do believe its your friendly neighborhood JTAC/ANGLICO/JFO/etc who has the picture "on the ground".
shabble 13y ago
I imagine it's not a novel idea, but taking something along the lines of an airliner/AWACS platform and stuffing it full of drone pilots in cubicles and using line-of-sight optical or tightbeam microwave comms direct to your drone herd[1] a few hundred km away would be pretty hard to block. Tightbeam comms also make it a lot harder to find than a radar emitting AWACS, and you can have multiple redundant controllers for your drones to avoid a SPoF if it does get found. Being closer to the action and avoiding satellite uplink means you don't have nearly the same latency issues as current drone controls do. The increased performance of unmanned vehicles, as well as the cost savings of the whole life-support system (and perhaps, reduced pilot risk = lower training/HR embodied costs as well) seem like they might make such a system practical. [1] Taking it a step further, you have a central control platform surrounded by defensive drone cloud responsible for point defence, active sensors (which you don't want to do personally since it tells enemies exactly where you are), and mesh/onion routed control links to your offensive drone swarm (so enemies can't infer the controller location from lines of sight intersections to the stuff they can see). Even even further down the line, distribute the human controllers into the defensive swarm, so they're hard/impossible to distinguish from the "dumb" drones, and less of a Single Big Target worth hitting.

mikegagnon 13y ago

The United States economy is based upon Military Keynesianism. The federal government does not analyze spending the same way we do because __spending benefits the economy__, which is part of the government's responsibility. They intentionally spend money to stimulate the economy. So when the military spends $1 trillion on planes, they are really trading $1 trillion for planes plus economic stimulus. In other words, the planes don't literally cost $1 trillion. Rather the cost of the planes = $1 trillion minus the economic benefit of spending. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Keynesianism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Keynesianism

sshconnection 13y ago
Not all spending is equal. If they want to pour money into projects, there is plenty of infrastructure that needs to be built here.
- mikegagnon 13y ago
  I agree. I think Military Keynesianism is a bad economic policy. I have seen lots of articles that discuss wasteful DoD spending. But I see very few that discuss __why__ the DoD spends money this way. And why it continues. This type of spending is not a new phenomenon. To me these "why" questions are the most important and intellectually interesting aspects of these issues. But they are often ignored.
- michaelt 13y ago
  Ah, but you forget the myriad other benefits: 1. If you don't believe in globalization, you can legitimately lock out foreign competition and insist on an all-American supply chain, keeping jobs and money in the US. 2. It allows you to bring home the pork. Military contractors have a proven willingness to situate assembly plants to deliver jobs in politically convenient locations. 3. It's compatible with Libertarian/Tea Party beliefs, as military spending tends to get a free pass from the balanced budget brigade. 4. People will call you "a hawk" and "strong on defense" and "supporting our troops". Or at least they won't call you the opposite of those things. 5. Spending on things like DARPA funds cool things like the internet and the DARPA Grand Challenge and robots and things. Pretty sciencey and cool. 6. $60 million in lobbying in 2012 https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indusclient.php?id=D01&year=2012 https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indusclient.php?id=D01&yea... with Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin all in the top 20 individual donors https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=s&showYear=2012 https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=s&showYe... Compare that to funding boring old schools and bridges and things which have none of these benefits.

demallien 13y ago

"easily destroyed by much cheaper drones" To a certain extent, this has been true for more than two decades. I used to work as a radar engineer for the RAAF, and every time we went on exercises against US forces (both teams flying F 18s, but with different missile payloads, we had AIM9s, the Americans had AMRAAM), we would see our aircraft swatted from the sky before we could even get the bogeys on weapons-system radar. Talk about dog-fighting maneuverability and visibility is just ridiculous - if you're using those characteristics, you've already lost the battle. In the control room we used to joke that the USN could have sent P51s equipped with AMRAAMs and AWACS support and they would still win. Modern fighter aircraft need to: a) not be seen b) be fast (time to target is still important!) c) carry a decent payload of weapons. Ideally target selection should be provided by AWACS, and missile-sensors provide the final kill guidance, allowing the fighter (AKA missile-launch platform) to remain stealthy. In the absence of AWACS, the fighter will need to carry it's own sensor suite. Modern air warfare is all about sensors, ECM and stealth. The airframe is almost inconsequential.

AsymetricCom 13y ago
A monumental fuckup of this magnitude makes me wish that this was some kind of smoke screen to cover the cost of some other kind of R&D of technology we can scarcely comprehend. $1,000,000,000,000 for a plane that doesn't work and has been outsourced to a dozen foreign contractors? I don't buy it.
- gchpaco 13y ago
  Are you kidding? My father works in aerospace for firms doing subcontracting on non-black projects and every time he talks about work it would be about some new ridiculous boondoggle. I remember some idiots conducting testing managed to pick up and drop a piece of flight hardware the size of a car about six inches, which probably cost about $100K to realign and repair. The ISS went through I think three or four--or maybe five?--ground up redesigns requiring everybody throw everything they had already done completely out the window and start over. Many of us on the sidelines watching marveled quietly that it ever flew at all. Small teams with tight deadlines can do wonders. This is why Skunkworks stuck. But it's important to note that Kelly Johnson was behind a lot of the big successes there and he was an amazing man. Absent organizational genius, you can run into trouble. The JSF is pretty much the antithesis of "small teams with tight deadlines".