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The F-35 Story
New submitter phyzz writes "The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program aimed to replace several aircraft from three major military services with a fifth-generation model capable of short-takeoff and vertical-landing while maintaining the capability of sustained supersonic flight — all while staying affordable. The project has finally gotten some test points validated, but after a decade in development and numerous cost and schedule overruns, it faces an uphill fight against budget reductions. Bloomberg has an interesting story about the program's troubled past. Quoting: 'Ten years and $66 billion later, the aircraft is still in development, five years behind schedule and 64 percent over cost estimates. The Obama administration may cancel some models and also cut the Pentagon’s orders. The plane, envisioned as the affordable stealth fighter for the U.S. and allies, has turned into a budget target. "I’d blame the program’s setbacks on the fact that we lived in a rich man’s world," said Jacques Gansler, a former Pentagon chief weapons buyer in the Clinton administration and now a professor at the University of Maryland at College Park. "There has been less emphasis on cost over the past 10 years," he said.'"
I think the larger story isn't a troubled individual program, it's a federal government that outsources and contracts almost *everything* these days. Having grown up around military bases, I find the level of contracting with anything military to be very troubling these days. I remember back in the 80's when bases began contracting out things like food services. Okay, that seemed pretty reasonable. But I recently went back to an old base that I had once been stationed at back in the day and being shocked by how far this has really gone. Not only were food services, the PX, laundries, etc. run by civilians--but so was base *security*. Instead of MP's greeting me at the gate, it was a bunch of rent-a-cops. I'm not even sure the base *has* MP's anymore (never saw any of them). It would seem a handful of contractors and merc firms do pretty much everything now for the government.
Thanks to the lobbying money of the Lockheed Martins, Northrop Grummans, and Blackwaters (or whatever the fuck they're calling themselves these days), we have overpriced weapons/aircraft programs that function as little more than cash funnels, U.S. embassies guarded not by Marines but by mercs, and a NASA that can't even build a rocket anymore without a Lockheed or Boeing to do all the work for them.
So why should Lockheed Martin care if the F-35 goes over budget, or the MEADS system turns out to be a money sink, etc. etc. ? It's not like a Congress that they *own* is ever going to call them to task for it. And they'll get a hundred *new* contracts to replace them. So why should it surprise anyone to see stories like this pop up again and again on /.?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
"I’d blame the program’s setbacks on the fact that we lived in a rich man’s world,"
So, the development is five years behind schedule because the budget used to be too large?
F-35 was kept at F-22's expense because unlike F-22 (which is too awesome to share with anybody else for any reason) the F-35 is as much a diplomatic tool as it is military vehicle. The US obligated itself to its allies to produce this aircraft for mutual use, and not delivering it would cause a lot more international face loss than cancelling F-22.
It's really pathetic that we are more concerned with playing political games with our allies than fielding the best equipment for our armed forces.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
The difference is that Lockheed isn't a bankrupt company, financed with taxpayer funds, given under dubious circumstances. The contracts for the F-35 and F-22 are well known and derived from congressional authority. If you want congress to investigate the largess at Lockheed, contact your senator, but at least the F-35 contract was awarded openly. We don't know much about the loan that was given to Solyndra since the administration has refused a lawful congressional subpoena.
Uhm, who's that now? China is the only serious competitor out there that's in the jet building game nowadays, and while they may be eyeing their neighbors hungrily (and hell, they've been on a steady 1 conquest per decade rule for awhile now), they're pretty economically tied into the current relationship between the U.S., Eurozone and China. Their oil supplies are extra-national (ours are native) they're a net food importer (we're an exporter) and their entire economy is based on export fever. They may be aggressive, but "enemies" is a bit much.
-GiH
The JSF's biggest problem: it's a replacement for things the military already owns. No matter how much more cost-effective it might be, the planes it's intended to replace have already been paid for. The spare parts are already bought and paid for and in the warehouse. The pilots and ground crews are already trained. And everybody else uses those same planes too so wherever we go we can be assured of finding support facilities that'll accommodate the existing planes. No matter how affordable the JSF is, it's still going to cost more to bring into service than it'll cost to keep the existing planes flying.
And it isn't bringing anything to the table that the existing planes don't do. Sure it'll do in one package what you'd need several other models of aircraft to do, but it's not so incredibly more effective that you'd need fewer total planes and you still have to buy all new planes and spares and train crews on it. If you're tight on cash, you stick with what you've already got.
It's the VTOL/STOL version for the marines that bogged the whole program down. It was just too ambious and when this became obvious the "solution" was to put almost all the focus on the Marine version to push it through. They should have paused the Marine version instead, met all the objectives for the convential and carrier versions, then come back to the marines. In 5 or 10 years we'll be smarter about how to do it, where the airframe can be lightened, how to put more thrust in the engines, etc.
“A lot of design compromises were made especially to give the Marine Corps the STOVL capability which, by the way, they’ve never used in combat,” he said. “And who says the Marines need a fast jet in combat?” said McPeak, now chairman of Ethicspoint Inc., a consulting firm in Lake Oswego, Oregon.
Building vertical takeoff into the thing was the big mistake. Historically, VTOL aircraft have not been very successful, despite many attempts. However, the USMC has the Harrier, almost the only VTOL aircraft that works. So VTOL capability was specified for the F-35. This complicated the design enormously. (Look at the video, with all those hatches opening and huge nozzles deploying). I admire Lockheed-Martin for making that work at all. That's where the money went.
The best fighters have been clean, simple beasts, like the F-16. Trying to combine fighter, bomber, stealth, and VTOL guarantees an expensive aircraft. Usually something important is lost, like range, bomb load, or turn radius. Or, most importantly, number of aircraft. In an air war, the side that runs out of fighters first loses.
Warfare doesn't work like that. Remember thesis-counterthesis-synthesis from ROTC training? Combined arms? If you have only one way to get the job done, the enemy counters that single strategy before they even declare war, and roll right past your Maginot line. You always, always, need more than one way to reach your objectives, and more than one way to get the job done when you get there.
Good question, though! Not everybody has had military 101.
Remember the recent Tanker fiasco... Boeing and Airbus fighting over pork with gravy while the KC-135 fleet gets older and older. And the new tanker is still YEARS away.
This was again mostly the fault of the DoD. They ran the worst acquisition program ever. They basically issued requirements which Boeing and Airbus had no trouble meeting. However, they didn't really nail down the desired capacity for the new tanker. Boeing was told (by DoD personnel) that they preferred a smaller tanker; Airbus was told (by different DoD personnel) that they desired a larger tanker. Airbus easily could have offered a smaller tanker to meet the requirements; Boeing easily could have offered a larger. But because the Air Force's requirements were so poorly put together, it wasn't really clear what they wanted. The first round of the selection, which Airbus won, was decided largely because the Airbus solution offered greater fuel capacity. Boeing objected to the selection because Airbus received bonus points in the evaluation for offering more capacity - which Boeing also could have offered had it been clear that the Air Force was going to give bonus points for it.
Not the only issue by far in the tanker competition, but it could have been avoided if the DoD had just spent a little more time figuring out exactly what they wanted before calling for bids. Just as with civilian airliners, I really don't think there is much to choose between a Boeing-based platform and an Airbus-based platform, and a purely cost vs. capability evaluation would probably depend on easily-fudgeable (or difficult to predict, depending on your mood) analyses of lifetime costs; adding in slightly different requirements for each just makes it impossible to have a fair evaluation.