7 ms·

The Pentagon's $399 Billion Plane to Nowhere

103 points by mcalmels 12y ago

danso 12y ago
> "An upfront question with any program now is: How many congressional districts is it in?" said Thomas Christie, a former senior Pentagon acquisitions official. The military-industrial complex runs deep...and it goes to show how little we can rely on politicians to confront it. If you were a Representative from the few regions that still has an industrial base, it would be easy to justify just another "Yes" vote, for something that brings 50-500 well-paying jobs and is ostensibly there to "help America"...and hard to justify why you were one of the few to say "No" when ultimately, your share of the pork is small. But spread that attitude across dozens of representatives...and then you have a pork train that's too hard to stop, even if it is subpar in meeting its objectives. Maybe most projects are like this, it's just that this one kept going for a few hundred billion too far.
- couchand 12y ago
  Most military projects, at least. Witness the nightmare of the armed forces' camo wars [0]. [0]: http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21600700-expense-and-stupidity-too-big-camouflage-out-sight http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21600700-expense...
- gavanwoolery 12y ago
  The problem with this type of spending, whether or not it does create jobs, is that it is inherently wasteful. If it were a good plane, and not a political show pony, I'd let it off the hook. But billions are being poured into this fancy paperweight, when that money could more readily benefit programs like NASA (I am a fan of private space enterprise, but if we are going to go nuts with the political budget, might as well be on things that are useful). This type of spending creates a false economy that is not a meritocracy but (for lack of better words) a porkocracy.
  - hyperliner 12y ago
    I don't know if these programs necessarily need to be inherently wasteful. We need a military to wage war, the military needs planes, it needs to renew its fleet, and then projects need to get started to design these planes. Now, this project seems like a disaster. But it appears to be run under the old rules of Pentagon procurement (cost plus) instead of performance based budgets. Let's just consider this $trillion just another boost to the economy, this time not through the banking industry, but through the military. We need a military, and sometimes the redistribution of wealth needs to reach them too if we want to keep them around for when we need them to build space ships, bombs and other necessary war products.
  - themartorana 12y ago
    It's true, but the same people voting yes "because jobs" vote no on infrastructure repair and improvement projects - desperately needed work that would also create jobs and have a huge, noticeable positive impact on the general citizenry. Govn't spending to create jobs is always welfare, no matter where we put the money. Why not put it somewhere that will create the same number of jobs, and have something other than a flaming war plane to show for it?
    - Thriptic 12y ago
      New defense projects are sexy; bringing this type of work to a district makes politicians seem "innovative", and it's the type of thing that plays well in a campaign speech. Maintaining and expanding infrastructure isn't sexy. It won't keep politicians elected.
    - timbre 12y ago
      Defense job creation is appealing because it's an easy way to use federal money for local benefit. If you want to fix bridges or something, you have to deal with people saying it's your state's or city's responsibility, but everyone agrees that defense is the feds' job.
  - bilbo0s 12y ago
    This sort of boondoggle happens in all corners of our society though. I mean... you like NASA... so I'll use them as an example. The Challenger blew up because of O-Ring failures. Devices that were needed to seal the different cylindrical sections of an SRB together. Why not simply make the SRB from one big cylinder ? Because it wouldn't fit on a semi truck for shipment to KSC. Why do we need to ship these cylinders, can't we just build them right next to the pad ? Because we needed the jobs in the state they were manufactured in. Sound familiar ? This really is just how things work. It shouldn't be. And this project gets all the attention because of the spectacular nature of the failure... but it really does happen everywhere. It is the kind of public spending folly to be expected from a democratic republic where each region has its own representatives.
marktangotango 12y ago
Seems like I remember (back in 2005-6) taht the JSF/F-35 was well within budget and on time BEFORE the F-22 was cancelled because of the explosion in costs that now confronts the F-35. Can anyone corroborate that or am I totally off? It really seems that once the F-22 was cancelled the F-35 became the new 'cash cow' so to speak.
- Tloewald 12y ago
  The irony of the F22 being cancelled in favor of the F35 is pretty rich.
allthatisgold 12y ago
After reading the Wikipedia page on this plane, you'd have to be crazy to buy it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning_II http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning_... Note: it's a long article
spodek 12y ago
It would appear this nation's military is a fat, bloated welfare recipient, feeling entitled and too powerful for anyone to do anything about it, impoverishing the nation. We all know it has many brilliant and capable individuals and teams in it who can do great work, but the system is anything but. The money ultimately goes to people, meaning we are paying people to do unproductive work, though I'm sure plenty of it goes to executives extracting rents without working productively. Weapons are not the only way to make a nation secure. Collaborative relations with other countries and less disparity of wealth help too. Imagine the security that money could create if used to help others instead of threaten them, or invested into entrepreneurship or helping keep the government accountable. History shows what happens to cultures where the people can't rein in its powerful who look for more power. I hope we figure out how to.
- rickdale 12y ago
  All the money we spend on the fighting the wars, yet we can't over spend on treating the veterans. It's really pathetic.
  - lostgame 12y ago
    Veterans, yes. But how about all the people who lost their jobs in the US over the last 20 years because of the obvious incompetence of the government to budget in any way that makes sense. Priorities. If you have a ton of starving and jobless people in your country, you do not spend a quarter of a TRILLION dollars on killing more people. I'm sorry, you just don't.
    - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      Getting people to work means more people paid, more jobs. How does a large govt project reduce available jobs? Not following.
      - karmajunkie 12y ago
        It doesn't. The point is not that it reduces available jobs, but that nearly half a trillion dollars could have been spent more directly on any number of options which A) don't involve blowing up people in foreign countries; and B) produce a substantially better quality of life in this country. Basic income, healthcare, even jobs just standing around that paid a living wage. It boggles the mind.
cipher0 12y ago
Pierre Sprey (F-16's designer) on the F-35 "The F-35 was born of an exceptionally dumb piece of airforce PR spin" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxDSiwqM2nw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxDSiwqM2nw
- sz4kerto 12y ago
  Good interview. Problems he's mentioning is basically true for any complex engineering problem: - stakeholders with different agendas building a common product does not work well - one size does not fit all Same is true for software, etc.
  - mercurial 12y ago
    Also known as "design by committee".
- coldcode 12y ago
  He's right about so many things. Especially what is the F-35 good at: "spending money". The whole idea of multi service multi mission fighters is laughable, like saying you only need one programming language to write everything imaginable. Having worked on the F-16 I still think it's an amazing plane with a great track record of doing exactly what it was designed to do.
- commandar 12y ago
  A lot of what's made the F-35 such a disaster is the Marines' obsession with VTOL/STOVL capability. That requirement and the desire for commonality between the A/B/C models meant that all F-35s had to be designed around a fuselage wide enough to accommodate the lifting fan of the F-35B. That had a direct impact on the reduced maneuverability of the aircraft, pilot visibility, etc. War is Boring over at Medium has a lot of great coverage of the F-35 program and all the huge missteps and disasters along the way. https://medium.com/war-is-boring https://medium.com/war-is-boring (When I've recommended them before, I've had someone point out that their coverage is quite biased against the F-35. This is true. That bias does not mean, however, that they're wrong).
CalRobert 12y ago
Eh. You get what you vote for.
lostgame 12y ago
... $399 billion could virtually end hunger in America. ... Or, you know, we could kill more innocent people halfway across the world. Yeah, let's do that. America!!!
- Maakuth 12y ago
  Oh, that money doesn't include any killing, it's just for designing and building this single tool for it. Actual war fighting is rather more expensive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War
- Someone1234 12y ago
  This isn't Reddit. I don't come to HK to read memes or "jokes." Please contribute something more substantive. You could have made your point about hunger and priorities without it turning into an "America!!!" gag. Then maybe someone else would have replied and the conversation would have moved forward.
  - Zigurd 12y ago
    Meh. We need a bucket of cold water poured on us. How much of our highly touted "manufacturing renaissance" was in this boondoggle? It's a situation that deserves ridicule.
  - lostgame 12y ago
    I'm not going to apologize for my use of a little bit of internet-flavoured comedy to make light of an otherwise absolutely horrifying situation. As a dual US/CDN citizen myself, I really have to look at this and say 'Whoa. A country that I have pledged my allegiance to is, even as I type this, actively choosing to spend money on killing people outside of their country as well as it's own citizens, instead of helping the people inside of it's own country that are unfortunate bi-products of it's government and banking system's poor decision making over the last century.' I work in theatre as well as software development, and in theatre we have two faces, a laughing face and a crying face. Because everything is a tragedy or a comedy, depending on how you look at it. I'm just choosing to use the smiley face. :O)
joelgrus 12y ago
We're just lucky that this sort of boondoggle only happens in the military. Imagine how much trouble we'd be in if the rest of our government were engaged in this kind of corruption and/or ineptitude!
- chrisbennet 12y ago
  I see what you did there. ;-)
- altcognito 12y ago
  It happens in most institutions of size where the goal is to control as many people as possible and the incentive is to create even more layers because then you've got "more people underneath you". GM had/has an amazing number of levels of mismanagement. Go after multiple solutions. Sure, cut spending, eliminate bureaucracy, but improve the process of improvement as well: Figure out how to make government changes on a smaller and more agile level. Figure out how to make flatten the legal landscape and make it more accessible.
aburan28 12y ago
I would not be surprised if this cash cow gets cancelled after this recent grounding. This scheme is hardly going unnoticed.
cdr 12y ago
Previous F-35 stories on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7989659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7989659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7906501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7906501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7111843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7111843
01Michael10 12y ago
War, the military industrial complex, and homeland security are our biggest money black holes our tax dollars go into and not things like food stamps. People need to start to get clued in... I would like to make sure Lockheed Martin gets mentioned as the incompetent manufacturer in this debacle.
- wuliwong 12y ago
  I believe you are wrong about that. While defense spending is big, it's not the highest. Health and Human Services and Social Security are both significantly higher portions of the budget. Unless there's a bunch of "off the books" spending? You can easily see here in this extremely user-friendly document http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2014/assets/budget.pdf http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2... :-p
  - 01Michael10 12y ago
    Well, the wars were off the books until Obama put them on but they are "over" now so that is money mostly already spent (like 1 trillion). When I say black hole I mean money that is wasted. Health and Human Services and Social Security are things that benefit us while wars, our military, and homeland security not so much. Social Security for example is an entitlement that everyone pays into that has always run a surplus so it's paid for... Politicians raiding the fund is a different story. Our bad foreign policy decisions of the last century are bleeding us dry. Wake up people! Ready for round three in Iraq?
  - drzaiusapelord 12y ago
    Food stamps =! social security. Also SS isn't an entitlement, I fucking paid into it, i should get something back.
    - 01Michael10 12y ago
      No one said food stamps = social security but they both are social programs that benefit people. Social Security is in fact an entitlement as in workers are "entitled" to their benefits by paying into the system. Republicans later smeared the word entitlement because it now also refers to welfare programs (entitled by law) so people get confused. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entitlement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entitlement
datahipster 12y ago
$399B is enough to have funded NASA from 1980-2012. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Annual_budget.2C_1958-2012 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Annual_budget.2C...
- gus_massa 12y ago
  To be fair, almost a half of that NASA budget was used to pay for the Space Shuttle, that was a plane with many technical problems that use suppliers from almost the 50 states to gain political support in the congress. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program#Budget http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program#Budget
- Someone1234 12y ago
  Untrue according to your own source. It was $513b from 1980-12, and that's in 2007 inflation adjusted USD. If you used 2014 adjusted USD for both NASA would have come out worse.
justinpaulson 12y ago
Did anyone else get overloaded by the foreignpolicy.com design? Yikes!
dotcoma 12y ago
Do they say $399 Billion because it looks cheaper than $400 Billion? ;-)
- washadjeffmad 12y ago
  They're worried that if they charged $400bil and the government paid with a 400 billion dollar bill, someone could just pocket it. This way, they'd have to make change for $1 billion from the till.
  - stronglikedan 12y ago
    I think it's so the people will say "Oh well, at least it's not $400 million.", and go on with their day. But, it could be your theory too, or may both! :-)
carlosft 12y ago
I recently called my senators and congressman about this issue. None of the staffers were able to provide me with their public opinions on the project. Two mentioned that they haven't received any calls on the matter. If you care about this issue, and are a US citizen, call (http://www.contactingthecongress.org/ http://www.contactingthecongress.org/) your elected officials.
- JPKab 12y ago
  This is by design. Lockheed first learned how to game congress with the B1B (another useless plane). Here's the recipe: Talk to the military, see what's giving them a hard-on these days. Get them to start coming up with a project to put on contract. Military issues Request for Information/Request for Proposal based on requirements you told them to use Contact any and all congressman. Let them know that you intend to make widget X for Aircraft Z in their respective District. Ensure that virtually every congressional district in the country contains a business that is making at least one or two parts for the aircraft. A new general comes in who is honest, realizes the weapons system is useless, wants to can it. Congress says no, we need it. Who wants to be the guy who threw away jobs in his district? Critical general leaves, is replaced by politically minded General who wants to be in charge of a "successful" program, drinks the kook-aid and pretends its not a giant boondoggle. Profit.
  - commandar 12y ago
    >Lockheed first learned how to game congress with the B1B (another useless plane). Well, except that the B1B was manufactured by Rockwell who have since been absorbed by Boeing.
    - JPKab 12y ago
      ah, I stand corrected. What I should've said was the defense contracting industry learned how to game congress.
pinaceae 12y ago
oh yeah, all military spending is just soooo stupid ... say people writing comments on something originally funded by the very same military-industrial complex, living in an area largely funded through said complex after ww2. but we like drones and robots, right? boston dynamics, the darpa challenge, ... oh what a WASTE. and the technology invented and developed for this plane will appear nowhere else, ever. that's how tech innovation works, all dead ends.
jebblue 12y ago
Obama runs the Whitehouse and has for 6 years, so is he responsible? It didn't take him long after signing on to fire the NASA administrator.
- Someone1234 12y ago
  Obama is definitely partly responsible. This isn't a party political issue anyway, both the Democrats AND Republicans support this program and have for quite a while. As the article says contractors exist in 45 states, so that's 45 senators who have a vested interest in its future. This 10,000 pound gorilla has been around for quite a few years before Obama and while it would have been political suicide to try and kill it, it would be interesting to see if Obama could have killed it (since he is in command of the military, but congress actually makes a lot of the acquisition decisions). I'm sure Obama could have ordered the US military to not buy the F-35 anymore but then what? The contracts still exist and the military's budget is based around those purchases (i.e. the money likely cannot be used for alternatives without approval).
  - rstupek 12y ago
    You mean 90 senators (out of 100)
claudiusd 12y ago
FWIW defense spending during the WWII and the Cold War did wonders to spur technical innovation. Silicon Valley in fact was a product of WWII defense activities (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley). While I don't necessarily agree with the end product and how it will be used, I say defense spending like this is ultimately good for the tech sector. It's funding innovation that wouldn't otherwise get funded and creates lots of attractive jobs in technology that will hopefully bring more people to the field. We may not have even had the microwave oven today if it wasn't for defense spending on radar technology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_oven#Discovery http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_oven#Discovery).
Gravityloss 12y ago
It seems to be expensive, but what would have been the alternative to JSF or to the F-35? The trillion dollar budget was postulated by some already long beforehand. Bill Sweetman wrote that into his book ten years ago already: http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Fighter-Lockheed-Martin-Strike/dp/0760317925 http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Fighter-Lockheed-Martin-Strik... Unfortunately, with this being what it is, nobody believes the companies' presented combat aircraft prices. Just a while ago, the French Dassault Rafale doubled in price, some time after winning a huge fighter order competition in India, and it's a plane that's been operational already for fourteen years!: http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-dna-exclusive-100-price-escalation-on-rafale-fighter-aircraft-to-rs-175-lakh-crore-likely-to-dent-iaf-s-strike-capability-1957107 http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-dna-exclusive-100-price... Maybe two or three different aircraft could have been developed, and it would have been faster and cheaper in total - since each design could have been more straightforward, more specialized for its mission. Who knows? This is far from obvious to me. Pierre Sprey advocated this line. But even his favorite optimized light weight fighters were adapted to multiple roles and replaced many more specialized aircraft. Another alternative would have been to develop nothing really new, just keep operating old airframes, maybe manufacture some minor updates (F-15, F-16 and Super Hornet are being manufactured). They don't have stealth, though some versions have some minor stealthiness. Russia and China are developing at least reasonably stealthy aircraft (PAK-FA, J-20, J-31). The F-22 is not manufactured but AFAIK the tooling is preserved. But it's a more specialized aircraft anyway. I think doing nothing would not have been a politically possible path. Everybody complains but there aren't that many better directions. Some countries could at least buy European or Russian generation 4.5 fighters if they want to avoid JSF, but that's mostly it.
- commandar 12y ago
  The problem isn't just that the F-35 is multirole but is trying to cater to the various quirks of multiple services. I mentioned it upthread, but an example of this is the very shape of the aircraft was determined in large part due to the Marines' vertical take off requirement. This necessitated a huge lifting fan in the fuselage, which had major ramifications on the maneuverability of the aircraft and the pilot's visibility out of the cockpit. Then there are all the modifications made to the C variant to accommodate carrier landings for the Navy. The end result is that you have an airframe that was meant to save money by being common between all three services which has ended up with a parts commonality of only 25-30%[1] and whose performance has suffered because of the requisite compromises made to chase that goal. I think one of the other big things that gets lost in these conversations is that the F-35 was meant to be cheap and widely fielded. The problem is that the program's bloating to the point that they're getting too expensive to field in numbers that would replace the existing force. The response is usually that the high tech gadgetry in these planes will save the day. That's problematic. This is going back to the F-22, but RAND ran a widely-circulated simulated conflict in the Straight of Taiwan a few years back[2]. The result was that the F-22s held their own... until they ran out of missiles and were overwhelmed by the sheer number of opposition planes that were being thrown at them. So, basically, my answer to your question would be forget the super planes and focus on cheaper, more, and good enough. Accept that fighter, bomb truck, and stealth is a pick two proposition. Design something light, cheap, and modernized to fill the multirole capability of the F-16 today; it's very difficult to replace a $40M jet in the same kind of numbers with a $150M one. Supplement the F-22 with new production F-15SEs. Look into things like the Textron AirLand Scorpion to fill the permissive environment CAS role that the A-10C fills today. KISS. [1] http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/lightning-rod-f-35-fighter-family-capabilities-and-controversies-021922/ http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/lightning-rod-f-35-fight... [2] http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2009/RAND_MG888.pdf http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2009/RA...

103 points by mcalmels 12y ago

danso 12y ago

> "An upfront question with any program now is: How many congressional districts is it in?" said Thomas Christie, a former senior Pentagon acquisitions official. The military-industrial complex runs deep...and it goes to show how little we can rely on politicians to confront it. If you were a Representative from the few regions that still has an industrial base, it would be easy to justify just another "Yes" vote, for something that brings 50-500 well-paying jobs and is ostensibly there to "help America"...and hard to justify why you were one of the few to say "No" when ultimately, your share of the pork is small. But spread that attitude across dozens of representatives...and then you have a pork train that's too hard to stop, even if it is subpar in meeting its objectives. Maybe most projects are like this, it's just that this one kept going for a few hundred billion too far.

couchand 12y ago
Most military projects, at least. Witness the nightmare of the armed forces' camo wars [0]. [0]: http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21600700-expense-and-stupidity-too-big-camouflage-out-sight http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21600700-expense...
gavanwoolery 12y ago
The problem with this type of spending, whether or not it does create jobs, is that it is inherently wasteful. If it were a good plane, and not a political show pony, I'd let it off the hook. But billions are being poured into this fancy paperweight, when that money could more readily benefit programs like NASA (I am a fan of private space enterprise, but if we are going to go nuts with the political budget, might as well be on things that are useful). This type of spending creates a false economy that is not a meritocracy but (for lack of better words) a porkocracy.
- hyperliner 12y ago
  I don't know if these programs necessarily need to be inherently wasteful. We need a military to wage war, the military needs planes, it needs to renew its fleet, and then projects need to get started to design these planes. Now, this project seems like a disaster. But it appears to be run under the old rules of Pentagon procurement (cost plus) instead of performance based budgets. Let's just consider this $trillion just another boost to the economy, this time not through the banking industry, but through the military. We need a military, and sometimes the redistribution of wealth needs to reach them too if we want to keep them around for when we need them to build space ships, bombs and other necessary war products.
- themartorana 12y ago
  It's true, but the same people voting yes "because jobs" vote no on infrastructure repair and improvement projects - desperately needed work that would also create jobs and have a huge, noticeable positive impact on the general citizenry. Govn't spending to create jobs is always welfare, no matter where we put the money. Why not put it somewhere that will create the same number of jobs, and have something other than a flaming war plane to show for it?
  - Thriptic 12y ago
    New defense projects are sexy; bringing this type of work to a district makes politicians seem "innovative", and it's the type of thing that plays well in a campaign speech. Maintaining and expanding infrastructure isn't sexy. It won't keep politicians elected.
  - timbre 12y ago
    Defense job creation is appealing because it's an easy way to use federal money for local benefit. If you want to fix bridges or something, you have to deal with people saying it's your state's or city's responsibility, but everyone agrees that defense is the feds' job.
- bilbo0s 12y ago
  This sort of boondoggle happens in all corners of our society though. I mean... you like NASA... so I'll use them as an example. The Challenger blew up because of O-Ring failures. Devices that were needed to seal the different cylindrical sections of an SRB together. Why not simply make the SRB from one big cylinder ? Because it wouldn't fit on a semi truck for shipment to KSC. Why do we need to ship these cylinders, can't we just build them right next to the pad ? Because we needed the jobs in the state they were manufactured in. Sound familiar ? This really is just how things work. It shouldn't be. And this project gets all the attention because of the spectacular nature of the failure... but it really does happen everywhere. It is the kind of public spending folly to be expected from a democratic republic where each region has its own representatives.

marktangotango 12y ago

Seems like I remember (back in 2005-6) taht the JSF/F-35 was well within budget and on time BEFORE the F-22 was cancelled because of the explosion in costs that now confronts the F-35. Can anyone corroborate that or am I totally off? It really seems that once the F-22 was cancelled the F-35 became the new 'cash cow' so to speak.

Tloewald 12y ago
The irony of the F22 being cancelled in favor of the F35 is pretty rich.

allthatisgold 12y ago

After reading the Wikipedia page on this plane, you'd have to be crazy to buy it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning_II http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning_... Note: it's a long article

spodek 12y ago

It would appear this nation's military is a fat, bloated welfare recipient, feeling entitled and too powerful for anyone to do anything about it, impoverishing the nation. We all know it has many brilliant and capable individuals and teams in it who can do great work, but the system is anything but. The money ultimately goes to people, meaning we are paying people to do unproductive work, though I'm sure plenty of it goes to executives extracting rents without working productively. Weapons are not the only way to make a nation secure. Collaborative relations with other countries and less disparity of wealth help too. Imagine the security that money could create if used to help others instead of threaten them, or invested into entrepreneurship or helping keep the government accountable. History shows what happens to cultures where the people can't rein in its powerful who look for more power. I hope we figure out how to.

rickdale 12y ago
All the money we spend on the fighting the wars, yet we can't over spend on treating the veterans. It's really pathetic.
- lostgame 12y ago
  Veterans, yes. But how about all the people who lost their jobs in the US over the last 20 years because of the obvious incompetence of the government to budget in any way that makes sense. Priorities. If you have a ton of starving and jobless people in your country, you do not spend a quarter of a TRILLION dollars on killing more people. I'm sorry, you just don't.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Getting people to work means more people paid, more jobs. How does a large govt project reduce available jobs? Not following.
    - karmajunkie 12y ago
      It doesn't. The point is not that it reduces available jobs, but that nearly half a trillion dollars could have been spent more directly on any number of options which A) don't involve blowing up people in foreign countries; and B) produce a substantially better quality of life in this country. Basic income, healthcare, even jobs just standing around that paid a living wage. It boggles the mind.

cipher0 12y ago

Pierre Sprey (F-16's designer) on the F-35 "The F-35 was born of an exceptionally dumb piece of airforce PR spin" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxDSiwqM2nw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxDSiwqM2nw

sz4kerto 12y ago
Good interview. Problems he's mentioning is basically true for any complex engineering problem: - stakeholders with different agendas building a common product does not work well - one size does not fit all Same is true for software, etc.
- mercurial 12y ago
  Also known as "design by committee".
coldcode 12y ago
He's right about so many things. Especially what is the F-35 good at: "spending money". The whole idea of multi service multi mission fighters is laughable, like saying you only need one programming language to write everything imaginable. Having worked on the F-16 I still think it's an amazing plane with a great track record of doing exactly what it was designed to do.
commandar 12y ago
A lot of what's made the F-35 such a disaster is the Marines' obsession with VTOL/STOVL capability. That requirement and the desire for commonality between the A/B/C models meant that all F-35s had to be designed around a fuselage wide enough to accommodate the lifting fan of the F-35B. That had a direct impact on the reduced maneuverability of the aircraft, pilot visibility, etc. War is Boring over at Medium has a lot of great coverage of the F-35 program and all the huge missteps and disasters along the way. https://medium.com/war-is-boring https://medium.com/war-is-boring (When I've recommended them before, I've had someone point out that their coverage is quite biased against the F-35. This is true. That bias does not mean, however, that they're wrong).

CalRobert 12y ago

Eh. You get what you vote for.

lostgame 12y ago

... $399 billion could virtually end hunger in America. ... Or, you know, we could kill more innocent people halfway across the world. Yeah, let's do that. America!!!

Maakuth 12y ago
Oh, that money doesn't include any killing, it's just for designing and building this single tool for it. Actual war fighting is rather more expensive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War
Someone1234 12y ago
This isn't Reddit. I don't come to HK to read memes or "jokes." Please contribute something more substantive. You could have made your point about hunger and priorities without it turning into an "America!!!" gag. Then maybe someone else would have replied and the conversation would have moved forward.
- Zigurd 12y ago
  Meh. We need a bucket of cold water poured on us. How much of our highly touted "manufacturing renaissance" was in this boondoggle? It's a situation that deserves ridicule.
- lostgame 12y ago
  I'm not going to apologize for my use of a little bit of internet-flavoured comedy to make light of an otherwise absolutely horrifying situation. As a dual US/CDN citizen myself, I really have to look at this and say 'Whoa. A country that I have pledged my allegiance to is, even as I type this, actively choosing to spend money on killing people outside of their country as well as it's own citizens, instead of helping the people inside of it's own country that are unfortunate bi-products of it's government and banking system's poor decision making over the last century.' I work in theatre as well as software development, and in theatre we have two faces, a laughing face and a crying face. Because everything is a tragedy or a comedy, depending on how you look at it. I'm just choosing to use the smiley face. :O)

joelgrus 12y ago

We're just lucky that this sort of boondoggle only happens in the military. Imagine how much trouble we'd be in if the rest of our government were engaged in this kind of corruption and/or ineptitude!

chrisbennet 12y ago
I see what you did there. ;-)
altcognito 12y ago
It happens in most institutions of size where the goal is to control as many people as possible and the incentive is to create even more layers because then you've got "more people underneath you". GM had/has an amazing number of levels of mismanagement. Go after multiple solutions. Sure, cut spending, eliminate bureaucracy, but improve the process of improvement as well: Figure out how to make government changes on a smaller and more agile level. Figure out how to make flatten the legal landscape and make it more accessible.

aburan28 12y ago

I would not be surprised if this cash cow gets cancelled after this recent grounding. This scheme is hardly going unnoticed.

cdr 12y ago

Previous F-35 stories on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7989659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7989659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7906501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7906501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7111843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7111843

01Michael10 12y ago

War, the military industrial complex, and homeland security are our biggest money black holes our tax dollars go into and not things like food stamps. People need to start to get clued in... I would like to make sure Lockheed Martin gets mentioned as the incompetent manufacturer in this debacle.

wuliwong 12y ago
I believe you are wrong about that. While defense spending is big, it's not the highest. Health and Human Services and Social Security are both significantly higher portions of the budget. Unless there's a bunch of "off the books" spending? You can easily see here in this extremely user-friendly document http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2014/assets/budget.pdf http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2... :-p
- 01Michael10 12y ago
  Well, the wars were off the books until Obama put them on but they are "over" now so that is money mostly already spent (like 1 trillion). When I say black hole I mean money that is wasted. Health and Human Services and Social Security are things that benefit us while wars, our military, and homeland security not so much. Social Security for example is an entitlement that everyone pays into that has always run a surplus so it's paid for... Politicians raiding the fund is a different story. Our bad foreign policy decisions of the last century are bleeding us dry. Wake up people! Ready for round three in Iraq?
- drzaiusapelord 12y ago
  Food stamps =! social security. Also SS isn't an entitlement, I fucking paid into it, i should get something back.
  - 01Michael10 12y ago
    No one said food stamps = social security but they both are social programs that benefit people. Social Security is in fact an entitlement as in workers are "entitled" to their benefits by paying into the system. Republicans later smeared the word entitlement because it now also refers to welfare programs (entitled by law) so people get confused. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entitlement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entitlement

datahipster 12y ago

$399B is enough to have funded NASA from 1980-2012. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Annual_budget.2C_1958-2012 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Annual_budget.2C...

gus_massa 12y ago
To be fair, almost a half of that NASA budget was used to pay for the Space Shuttle, that was a plane with many technical problems that use suppliers from almost the 50 states to gain political support in the congress. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program#Budget http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program#Budget
Someone1234 12y ago
Untrue according to your own source. It was $513b from 1980-12, and that's in 2007 inflation adjusted USD. If you used 2014 adjusted USD for both NASA would have come out worse.

justinpaulson 12y ago

Did anyone else get overloaded by the foreignpolicy.com design? Yikes!

dotcoma 12y ago

Do they say $399 Billion because it looks cheaper than $400 Billion? ;-)

washadjeffmad 12y ago
They're worried that if they charged $400bil and the government paid with a 400 billion dollar bill, someone could just pocket it. This way, they'd have to make change for $1 billion from the till.
- stronglikedan 12y ago
  I think it's so the people will say "Oh well, at least it's not $400 million.", and go on with their day. But, it could be your theory too, or may both! :-)

carlosft 12y ago

I recently called my senators and congressman about this issue. None of the staffers were able to provide me with their public opinions on the project. Two mentioned that they haven't received any calls on the matter. If you care about this issue, and are a US citizen, call (http://www.contactingthecongress.org/ http://www.contactingthecongress.org/) your elected officials.

JPKab 12y ago
This is by design. Lockheed first learned how to game congress with the B1B (another useless plane). Here's the recipe: Talk to the military, see what's giving them a hard-on these days. Get them to start coming up with a project to put on contract. Military issues Request for Information/Request for Proposal based on requirements you told them to use Contact any and all congressman. Let them know that you intend to make widget X for Aircraft Z in their respective District. Ensure that virtually every congressional district in the country contains a business that is making at least one or two parts for the aircraft. A new general comes in who is honest, realizes the weapons system is useless, wants to can it. Congress says no, we need it. Who wants to be the guy who threw away jobs in his district? Critical general leaves, is replaced by politically minded General who wants to be in charge of a "successful" program, drinks the kook-aid and pretends its not a giant boondoggle. Profit.
- commandar 12y ago
  >Lockheed first learned how to game congress with the B1B (another useless plane). Well, except that the B1B was manufactured by Rockwell who have since been absorbed by Boeing.
  - JPKab 12y ago
    ah, I stand corrected. What I should've said was the defense contracting industry learned how to game congress.

pinaceae 12y ago

oh yeah, all military spending is just soooo stupid ... say people writing comments on something originally funded by the very same military-industrial complex, living in an area largely funded through said complex after ww2. but we like drones and robots, right? boston dynamics, the darpa challenge, ... oh what a WASTE. and the technology invented and developed for this plane will appear nowhere else, ever. that's how tech innovation works, all dead ends.

jebblue 12y ago

Obama runs the Whitehouse and has for 6 years, so is he responsible? It didn't take him long after signing on to fire the NASA administrator.

Someone1234 12y ago
Obama is definitely partly responsible. This isn't a party political issue anyway, both the Democrats AND Republicans support this program and have for quite a while. As the article says contractors exist in 45 states, so that's 45 senators who have a vested interest in its future. This 10,000 pound gorilla has been around for quite a few years before Obama and while it would have been political suicide to try and kill it, it would be interesting to see if Obama could have killed it (since he is in command of the military, but congress actually makes a lot of the acquisition decisions). I'm sure Obama could have ordered the US military to not buy the F-35 anymore but then what? The contracts still exist and the military's budget is based around those purchases (i.e. the money likely cannot be used for alternatives without approval).
- rstupek 12y ago
  You mean 90 senators (out of 100)

claudiusd 12y ago

FWIW defense spending during the WWII and the Cold War did wonders to spur technical innovation. Silicon Valley in fact was a product of WWII defense activities (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley). While I don't necessarily agree with the end product and how it will be used, I say defense spending like this is ultimately good for the tech sector. It's funding innovation that wouldn't otherwise get funded and creates lots of attractive jobs in technology that will hopefully bring more people to the field. We may not have even had the microwave oven today if it wasn't for defense spending on radar technology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_oven#Discovery http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_oven#Discovery).

Gravityloss 12y ago

It seems to be expensive, but what would have been the alternative to JSF or to the F-35? The trillion dollar budget was postulated by some already long beforehand. Bill Sweetman wrote that into his book ten years ago already: http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Fighter-Lockheed-Martin-Strike/dp/0760317925 http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Fighter-Lockheed-Martin-Strik... Unfortunately, with this being what it is, nobody believes the companies' presented combat aircraft prices. Just a while ago, the French Dassault Rafale doubled in price, some time after winning a huge fighter order competition in India, and it's a plane that's been operational already for fourteen years!: http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-dna-exclusive-100-price-escalation-on-rafale-fighter-aircraft-to-rs-175-lakh-crore-likely-to-dent-iaf-s-strike-capability-1957107 http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-dna-exclusive-100-price... Maybe two or three different aircraft could have been developed, and it would have been faster and cheaper in total - since each design could have been more straightforward, more specialized for its mission. Who knows? This is far from obvious to me. Pierre Sprey advocated this line. But even his favorite optimized light weight fighters were adapted to multiple roles and replaced many more specialized aircraft. Another alternative would have been to develop nothing really new, just keep operating old airframes, maybe manufacture some minor updates (F-15, F-16 and Super Hornet are being manufactured). They don't have stealth, though some versions have some minor stealthiness. Russia and China are developing at least reasonably stealthy aircraft (PAK-FA, J-20, J-31). The F-22 is not manufactured but AFAIK the tooling is preserved. But it's a more specialized aircraft anyway. I think doing nothing would not have been a politically possible path. Everybody complains but there aren't that many better directions. Some countries could at least buy European or Russian generation 4.5 fighters if they want to avoid JSF, but that's mostly it.

commandar 12y ago
The problem isn't just that the F-35 is multirole but is trying to cater to the various quirks of multiple services. I mentioned it upthread, but an example of this is the very shape of the aircraft was determined in large part due to the Marines' vertical take off requirement. This necessitated a huge lifting fan in the fuselage, which had major ramifications on the maneuverability of the aircraft and the pilot's visibility out of the cockpit. Then there are all the modifications made to the C variant to accommodate carrier landings for the Navy. The end result is that you have an airframe that was meant to save money by being common between all three services which has ended up with a parts commonality of only 25-30%[1] and whose performance has suffered because of the requisite compromises made to chase that goal. I think one of the other big things that gets lost in these conversations is that the F-35 was meant to be cheap and widely fielded. The problem is that the program's bloating to the point that they're getting too expensive to field in numbers that would replace the existing force. The response is usually that the high tech gadgetry in these planes will save the day. That's problematic. This is going back to the F-22, but RAND ran a widely-circulated simulated conflict in the Straight of Taiwan a few years back[2]. The result was that the F-22s held their own... until they ran out of missiles and were overwhelmed by the sheer number of opposition planes that were being thrown at them. So, basically, my answer to your question would be forget the super planes and focus on cheaper, more, and good enough. Accept that fighter, bomb truck, and stealth is a pick two proposition. Design something light, cheap, and modernized to fill the multirole capability of the F-16 today; it's very difficult to replace a $40M jet in the same kind of numbers with a $150M one. Supplement the F-22 with new production F-15SEs. Look into things like the Textron AirLand Scorpion to fill the permissive environment CAS role that the A-10C fills today. KISS. [1] http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/lightning-rod-f-35-fighter-family-capabilities-and-controversies-021922/ http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/lightning-rod-f-35-fight... [2] http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2009/RAND_MG888.pdf http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2009/RA...