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What's Wrong With the US Defense R&D Budget?
Harperdog writes "Here's an in-depth analysis of what constitutes defense R&D spending and how some of those projects are classified. From the article: 'But much of what transpires in the name of military research and development is not research in the sense that it produces scientific and technical knowledge widely applicable inside and outside the Defense Department. A large part of defense R&D activity revolves around building very expensive gadgets that are often based on unsound technology and frequently fail to perform as required.'"
A large part of all R&D activity revolves around building very expensive gadgets that are often based on unsound technology and frequently fail to perform as required.
FTFY.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
I see this first hand every day. A big part is the government not having any engineers on it's staff and being led around by the nose by contractors every day (hence my sig).
Which is why we buy these expensive, unsound, unnecessary gadgets... it's congress idiots bringing money home to local defense contractors.
The DoD budget should be written by DoD administrative staff based on actual, military need, not by a bunch of congressional staffers trying to appease big donors.
Wow, You gave no actual examples of waste. There is a reason why a small percentage goes to universities. The universality system knows little about practicality. AS we all know.......In theory it should work....In practice it doesn't!
I WAS A MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX—article ARTHUR T. HADLEY
Playboy May 1979 Magazine
ISSN: 0032-1478
Volume 26 Issue # 5
more cowbell
The majority of the funding goes to ridiculous rules, regulations and policy's in the DoD. There's no incentive to be efficient but tons of politics to set rules. So to buy a computer mouse, it has to go through a 5 level approval process all the way back to DC and takes 2 months. I wish I was joking.
It's all about scamming up those DoD contracts. Who cares if they ever deliver a viable weapon system, they can make payroll with feasibility studies all day long. The most hillarious of the 'urban legend' proposals I ever heard of was a couple physicists talking at a party during the Ronny Ray-Gun years, when 'Star Wars' funding was damned near bottomless. Their idea was, develop a tachyon beam weapon, deployed in space, that would shoot down enemy missiles 20 minutes before they were launched.
Rumor has it, they copped a cool 50 mil for a feasibility study before somebody at the Five-Sided Funny Farm figured it out.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
At least try to come up with a true example. That space pen one is bullshit.
http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp
John
The graphite dust that writing with pencils gives off is tremendously bad for electronics and breathing in zero-G environments. An ink system actually makes quite a bit of sense in this regard. Furthermore, it was developed privately and then sold to NASA.
'But much of what transpires in the name of military research and development is not research in the sense that it produces scientific and technical knowledge widely applicable inside and outside the Defense Department. A large part of defense R&D activity revolves around building very expensive gadgets that are often based on unsound technology and frequently fail to perform as required.'
I thought that was the definition of practical research?
Copyright © 2011 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Oh no, it isn't research in the pure scientific sense. It's the damned military: they don't do research in the sense you want. In the practical field, a failure is a success, of a sort. You now know what doesn't work. I mention this because TFA specifically brings it up. The military did a missile test that failed, and called it a success because it was the first of it's kind, and now they know what went wrong and how to fix it. TFA criticizes them for it. Maybe the program is a waste: faulty arguments like that do little to convince me of it.
There is a crapload of waste in the defense department, but this doesn't exactly seem the most sound way of attacking it. And as producing little of value: well, I'm not exactly in a position to judge, but things like the Keyhole program, GPS advancements, UAVs, even the F-22 (as bloated as it was) seem like they are pretty valuable. And that is all we know about: the stealth helicopters that were supposedly used in assassinating Osama seem like, well, like a massive advantage.
I'm also aware that Mr. Subrata Ghoshroy is far more well informed than I am. This just seems like a really lousy argument.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
It has to be sexy and exciting projects.
I've brought home a contract for X F-xxs!
Saying "I've brought home a contract for repair parts and overhaul contracts!" Just doesn't sound so good.
Even with Congress at one it's lowest approval ratings in history, you will see most, if not all, of the incumbents be re-elected.
But, But, the corporations.
As someone who made one of those expensive gadgets for DoD on a research and production series of events, I can say even those things that work are not admitted to in a way one would say, good job sirs. I made an egress rocket motor that took its mil pilot and its involuntary high value passenger in a vertical trip to a chute ride to an egress point a couple of miles outside of the hot zone. I am not allowed to know how many were transported or what the success rate was, but the reorders indicate it in fact worked.
One cannot infer the success of classified programs from public info. That is done to confuse our enemies. get over it.
P.S. Buy more uber-proximate rockets!!!
JJ
On one hand, yeah, of course the stuff fails to perform. That's why it's research. That's why it's experimental. For every "Fat Man" there's a "Thin Man" that didn't work. On the other hand, just how much of this stuff is wasteful pork and how much of it is really needed even if it does work?
At least try to come up with a true example.
He not only gave a bogus example: he cited a site that debunks it...;-)
If you are going to link to an article as a means of making a point, it's often best to read the article. The one you link to shows that the space pen was developed by a private company at their own expense. There was never a government demand for one. Although, once one was available the government was happy to purchase them at a reasonable cost.
Support SETI@home
"...very expensive gadgets that are often based on unsound technology and frequently fail to perform as required..." Somehow this reminds me of the new TSA budget too.
So, how many times you recon can a manned mission to Mars move back and forth between Mars and Earth under a $76 billion per year budget?
That is seventy-six BILLION dollars, of which twelve BILLION are JUST for research. Per year.
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
The goal of every government agency in any given year is to need 10% more funds than their current budget. You always need more, and never less, because cuts to your budget will mean you are under greater scrutiny the next fiscal year.
So you throw money at every half-baked idea the lab coats present. If something works out, great. If not, that just clearly shows that you need a greater budget next year, since more money = better ideas.
If you are going to link to an article as a means of making a point, it's often best to read the article.
I think that statistically, this doesn't happen much here.
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
The sad thing is that the about.com link even states that it's false.
Description: Urban legend
Circulating since: 1997 (as Netlore)
Status: False
Bam! Scuttlebutt at the time was that the system used FORTRAN and int math and had a rounding error that caused it to get progressively worse over time. Other scuttlebutt was that the scuds were so badly designed that most of the time they were fired they wouldn't have hit anything anyway. So there's a two-fer, one on either side!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
What if we developed a catapult to hurl FLAMING GOAT HEADS at our enemies? You don't look very interested... Well what if that catapult were NUCLEAR POWERED! Ahh... Ahhh... now we're getting somewhere! Testing can start as soon as I can find a source for thousands of goat heads!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
This reminds me about the billions that were spent on the so called space pen. The Soviets showed us common sense, (and sadly continue to do so despite their economic troubles), by employing the time tested and proven hard black (HB) pencil.
Your own link debunks you:
"Be that as it may, beginning with the Apollo program astronauts did begin using a specially-designed zero-gravity pen called the Fisher Space Pen. The nitrogen-pressurized space pen worked in "freezing cold, desert heat, underwater and upside down," as well as in the weightless conditions of outer space.
It was developed not by NASA, however, but by one enterprising individual, Paul C. Fisher, owner of the Fisher Space Pen Company. By his own account, Fisher spent "thousands of hours and millions of dollars" of his own money in research and development — not billions.
The Fisher Space Pen is still used by both American and Russian astronauts on every space flight, and you can even buy one yourself direct from the company for a measly 50 bucks."
From http://www.spack.org/wiki/SpacePen:
"I hate to spam you, but on your quotes page you've tripped one of my pet peeves. The Space Pen. There is a common email circulating that describes how much money NASA wasted on making a pen that writes upside down, in vacuum blah blah blah. You know how much it really cost the US Gov't? Nothing. Fisher developed it at TREMENDOUS cost, all of it absorbed by them. In return they got to be the sole provider. Normally this means that they would sell these pens to NASA at some obscene amount. They charged just a few dollars. Admittedly, a few dollars for a pen was a lot in the 60's, but 1/100th what they could have charged. Fischer did this out of True Faith, True Faith that knowledge and research is its' own reward. And since that day, they have sold so many of their pens to the private sector, that they have made their money back a ten times, and still never charged that much. I have one of these pens, you can buy them at any stationary store, even Hallmark stores carry them. I recommend them, they're damn good pens.
Oh, and the bit about the pencil is true, the russians did use pencils. Remember the space station fires that they had? At least one of these, I forget which, but it caused a fatality, at least one was caused by airborn pencil shavings mixing with sensitive electronics. Their solution? Mail order Fischer Space Pens."
I think one of Obama's best ideas was to have DoD do research on solar energy. Like many of his talking points, it was not implemented.
What does solar energy have to do with defense? Well, nothing. But you know what? We have a giant defense infrastructure and do you really think we can take it apart easily? No, we should just re-purpose it.
The US economy is based on Military Keynesianism. (Which is an economic policy based on the acknowledgement that the New Deal works, but Americans hate all that mushy helping people bullshit. The drawback of implementing Keynesianism through military spending is that it generally does not produce anything of value, so it is a policy based on the broken window fallacy. ) If they take apart military spending overnight, the whole world's economy will collapse, so they just need to shift it.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
The thing to attack in terms of defense spending is wasteful spending, or just over all spending levels. There are plenty of times when the military buys or develops things it doesn't need, or gets ripped off by contractors. Also you can make a very valid argument that we simply have more military than we need, that we should downsize it and spend less.
However that the R&D gadgets often fail? Well duh. The military is willing to do real, long term, R&D which often means a ton of failures before you have success. It can be very lengthy, expensive, have lots of false starts, and so. That is life when you are doing long term research.
However for all that, we get things that are often useful, and not just to the military. GPS and the Internet would be the two greatest recent examples. GPS in particular because it was the kind of thing no private enterprise would try. Massively expensive and hard to do, and yet now it is the navigation system used the world 'round, everything else is a fallback for if GPS fails. It is so important that Europe has recognized the need for one outside of US control and for all that the technical and monetary challenges have been enough they STILL haven't gotten theirs working. Yet the military did it, and back when nobody had done it before.
I don't mind failures in any R&D. They happen. All I mind is waste. If the military tries to develop something it needs, like say a better rifle, and fails, I'm ok with that. I'm ok with them continuing to try until they get it right. Where I get annoyed is if the military spends money on something they don't need, or more often if contractors rip them off on the things they get.
In other words someone just discovered that R&D is not merely basic scientific research but also engineering.
Mr. Ghoshroy has a long record of disagreement with Defense contractors and programs. I am not saying that he is wrong on this one. However, other people do say that he is. To accept Mr. Ghoshroy's assertions without adequate rebuttal or background knowledge is, well, ignant. Note also that Mr. Ghoshroy has been very happy to allow some well known anti-defense agitators to exploit him in the name of making his case. This really has the smell of a personal vendetta. He may be right, but his approach does his credibility no good.
http://www.nriinternet.com/NRI_Sciectists/USA/A_Z/G/Subrata%20Ghoshroy/index.htm
http://openmediaboston.org/node/1084
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
-- Pablo Picasso
I WAS A MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX—article ARTHUR T. HADLEY Playboy May 1979 Magazine ISSN: 0032-1478 Volume 26 Issue # 5
A more practical citation would have just mentioned who was the centerfold.
Solar energy has everything to do w/defense. More self sufficiency means less stuff to bring.
Alternative energy such as solar power has a lot to do with defense. Nearly everything runs on oil and if something happened in the middle east and we lost our main oil supply it would only be a matter of time before our economy collapsed when gas prices go through the roof. This is why we are spending so much to keep peace in the middle east now, imagine if we took that money and put it towards R&D on other alternative sources of fuel and came up with something that worked just as well as oil. We wouldn't give a f*ck what happened in Iraq or Afghanistan or South America and would save all the money from all these wars.
Actually, the DoD uses solar energy every day. They have used solar panels in Afghanistan to power electrical devices in the field so they don't have to haul fuel to power generators. They still have to haul fuel, just not as much of it as before. The solar panels work, but come with their own set of problems (more routine maintenance, vulnerable, etc.).
The DoD is also spending a lot money on alternative energy sources like biofuels. Look it up. There was even a controversy about it in the MSM. Seems were spending $10s of dollars on biofuel rather than less on regular fuel. Some people wondered if that was an appropriate use of money.
Nearly everything runs on oil and if something happened in the middle east and we lost our main oil supply it would only be a matter of time before our economy collapsed when gas prices go through the roof.
Considering that country that America imports the most oil from is Canada, perhaps as an alternative you could just not prevent them from building new pipelines to supply more oil to you?
Just look at Lockheed Martin's F-22 and F-35 programs for sterling examples of why the U.S. is going broke buying weapons we really don't need, that don't work right, cost vastly more than Lockheed said they would when they won the contracts, and are years to decades late being delivered.
For those too young to remember. Those were *exactly* the same complaints made about the F-15 back in the day. You know the F-15, the fighter that has a 150 to zero win/loss aerial combat record.
I think its hard to define 'actual, military need' I would certainly support slashing the entire military spending by 65%, keeping us on top but not so over the god damned top.
I'm certainly against waste and fraud but 65% sounds like you may be trading blood for gold. Making it an unfair fight saves US lives, merely being on top may be too close to a fair fight.
Because acres of solar cells are more defendable than a small generator / reactor.
I am John Hurt.
FTA: Basic research funding is intended to support "fundamental" scientific research that has ostensibly no connection to developing a specific weapon system. This category is the principal source of Pentagon's largesse to universities. And whether the nation should continue to spend huge sums of money in defense R&D, especially at universities, is an issue worthy of debate.
So we should *not* spend defense R&D money at universities, where it has arguably the highest chance of benefitting the public? M'kay.
Shitty example. The Patriot system met the design requirements. If they had cared about continuous operation, they would have tested for it. Besides, it was, apparently, an easy patch.
I've never understood why people post links which refute the very point they're trying to make.
Wikipedia
NASA*
About
Spacepen
The Space Review
BBC History Magazin
If you've done the research provide an opposing source.
* NASA admits that they originally ordered pencils for over $100 each but backtracked. Latch on to that if you want to bash wasteful government spending, but remember they did respond to the public backlash.
Yeah it worked great, except that one time it didn't and everyone died.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The biggest problem is it's used to destroy stuff, not to build things up, heal or cure.
I don't mean this to troll or flame. It goes for any "defence" budget.
It's money I'd rather see spent on healthcare, education, science.
Hell. Even handing out food to those who really need it is a better use of that money.
Privacy is terrorism.
Yep, that's usually how technology works. Did you have a point to make?
Sadly, the Scud got through because the Patriot installation at the target hadn't been patched.
That's why it's called "research", fucktard.
Well... there was the time the ?? army I think ?? ordered one hammer, and the company quoted a price of, IIRC, $100,000. My impression is that the company *really* didn't want to handle the paperwork involved for one hammer, but wasn't going to turn down such a big customer. The contract went through...at least until it hit the news. They may have canceled it after that. That's hardly R&D, but that was the budget it came out of.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Study shows U.S. government is wasteful!!! Details at 11.
It's how much is funneled back into the DOD.
I worked at a government research center and ~40% of all our funding that was awarded to us for research went back to the DoD in the form of non-lab associated salaries and renting space.
How? Extremely high facilities payments (you wouldn't believe how much it costs for space in an 80 year old research facility), administration (you pay for secretaries, their supervisors, anyone within a mile of your lab, it doesn't matter if you need them or not), soldiers (you can request not to have a solider, but then you might not get all your funding - and while a soldier gets 22k a year, the government takes ~80k for their 22k)
"Tread softly because you tread on my dreams"
Full disclosure: I do public affairs for the Army Research, Development and Engineering Command.
I can't speak for the other services, but the Army created RDECOM about 8 years ago to make RD&E work better for Soldiers. One big task is having what they call a balanced portfolio that spans basic research through engineering work. The command has more than 16,000 people, more than 10,000 of them civilian engineers or scientists. A lot of smart people put a lot of thought into this. It is not transparent, even to me, for a lot of reasons. Some of it is secret, but some of it is just so particular to the military, or even one part of the Army. For example, under-body explosions. There's a lot of research into head-on collisions, etc., but who else would need to study how to protect people from an under-body explosion? And how transparent is that, and should that be, to people outside the military? And who else is going to work on a material that might be suitable for that kind of thing? And how, pre-Iraq/Afghanistan, do you see that coming as the next big threat or design a research program that can respond to something like that which no one sees coming?
Which is not to say none of our research transfers into the civilian economy, for example flexible display technology, robotics and nanotechnology. We're working on moving our basic overview onto the web, but it shows we have more than 1,000 partnerships of one kind or another with everything from universities and foreign defense agencies to individual researchers and at least one time two guys in a garage.
As it happens, the Army just finished another study on how RD&E should work. The results should be out soon and may mean some level of reorganization. Stay tuned if you're interested.
If you can't explain 6.1, 6.2,6.3, and 6.4 money, then you have no right to make a comment about military R&D
6.1 money is basic research. GUT, life the universe and everything. This pretty much doesn't exist anymore. The stuff we're building now is based on 6.1 research from the 70's to the 80's
6.2 money is to take basic research results and explore it further. Since 6.1 money is gone, 6.2 money isn't relevant.
6.3 money is to take stuff that turned up in 6.2 research and develop an exploitable application with it. Because there's stuff that was developed with 6.1 and 6.2 money 20 years ago, there is still some 6.3 money being spent.
6.4 money is to take results from a 6.3 exploration and build a prototype with some testing. This is still going on.
So if the author is saying we're spending on 'useless stuff', well that's true. Trust me, there's a lot of 'useless stuff' that you have to go through to find the 'useful stuff'. I've been in DoD R&D for 30 years. Don't blame the government for that, it's just the way R&D is.
The problem is, DoD stopped R&D 6.1 spending 20 years ago. They figured the contractors would do it. Instead, the contractors didn't see any purpose in R&D because it didn't pay off within two-5 years. Ten year payoff was out of the question. All that's left is 6.3 and 6.4 tasks. No one in the US is spending large money on 6.1 and 6.2 tasks. We're cannibalizing our future.
Research means working in unproven areas, and Development means just that - developing the findings of that research in areas that you are interested in. I remember prior to the first Gulf War the same nay-sayers were screaming the technology that destroyed a lot of the best the Russia had to offer, was worthless and unproven... Till it decimated that technology, and showed the Russians that in a real conflict they would be toast. That led directly to the fall of the Soviet Union.
I for one get tired of the morons screaming about things their pea-brains cannot comprehend. Military R&D is a heck of a lot more productive than feeding people who sit on their a** and complain. Let them starve if you want to save money - I've found that hunger is a very productive motivator. Want to balance the US budget - cut all of those worthless social programs and put the money into NASA and other areas of Research - that is a heck of a lot more productive than the so-called social programs which just produce more criminals and another generation of worthless dead-beats.
I suspect that such a system would be developed in a way that minimized single points of failure, much the way that the Internet was. While it is nigh impossible to protect every last panel and generator, it's unlikely that a non-nuclear power would be able to threaten more than a few percent of capability, even if intelligence and the police let them have their druthers.
This would be a large improvement over the current state of affairs, where large scale outages are quite possible without enemy intervention.
There have been no space station fatalities at all so far, let alone any that were the result of pencil shavings. In fact the only (human) fatalities "in space" were the crew of Soyuz 11.
Yeah. That last little bit in the second quote does not match what NASA says. That the US has been using "space pens" since 1967 and that the Russians have been using them since 1969, pre Salyut, Mir and International space stations.
... Pencils may not have been the best choice anyway. The tips flaked and broke off, drifting in microgravity where they could potentially harm an astronaut or equipment. And pencils are flammable--a quality NASA wanted to avoid in onboard objects after the Apollo 1 fire."
http://history.nasa.gov/spacepen.html
That said the hazards of broken pencil tips, graphite dust and wood shavings was a real concern with respect to electrical shorts, fires and physical hazards (ex: broken tip vs. eyes).
"Originally, NASA astronauts, like the Soviet cosmonauts, used pencils, according to NASA historians
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fact-or-fiction-nasa-spen
Just one example. There are others, but I'm not at work to have easy access to anything. Power and energy in general is a major push for the Army, and they've worked on hydrogen, solar, better batteries, etc. Full disclosure: I work for the Army R&D command in public affairs.
I recommend crayons. But noooooo, we can't have simple little things like crayons solving problems within a bureaucracy. :)
A lot of Department of Defense research is really being done by the Department of Energy.
This is also a handy way to make it seem like the Defense budget is smaller than it really is.
National defense is just a byproduct (hopefully) of a money-laundering scheme designed to benefit military contractors.
You are welcome on my lawn.
As a whole, every dollar spent on research in the USA has had ENORMOUS return on investment. The return was so high that it led us from the Great Depression in the 1930s into the driving force behind much of the world's advancement from 1950-present.
In fact, the thing that has hurt this nation the most over the last 2 decades has been the cutting of R&D budgets (especially space R&D), and the wholesale theft of R&D from the US by virtually every other country in the world. We've "lost" trillions in research. The upside is that even if the US loses out a bit monetarily, humanity as whole still benefits from the spread of knowledge. R&D could be a little more efficient, but we should also be doubling down on it right now.
I think he just made it. That WOOOSH sound wasn't a scud.
Those were *exactly* the same complaints
Citation needed
The F-22 contract award was in 1991, went into service in 2003 . 12 years
The F-15 contract award was 1969, first delivery was 1973, went into service 1976. 7 years on the high side.
The F-15 recorded its first combat kill in 1979 , only 10 years after the contract award.
The F-15 program has just been better overall and the F-22 is still sitting in the garage looking pretty.
Because the private sector is completely unwilling to dump research dollars into anything. They just sit on their hands waiting for government innovations to occur so they can step in and monetize. Witness where all the cutting edge cancer research is occurring: not at big pharma, but in public universities. And government research, masquerading as military spending, is what brought us the Internet, satellite communications (gps, direct tv, sat radio, say phones, sat imaging, and weather forecasting), cell phones, solar panels and so much more. Pretty much every tech item you have had its roots in military spending. Because private industry is both unwilling and incapable of devoting that much money to research. And in order to find advancements, you have to go through a lot of bad ideas first.
If you're wasting your time complaing, you're just unaware of reality.
Not just the F-15. The B-17 too. (Yes, that B-17, the Flying Fortress.) And the Fleet submarine. (Yes, that Fleet Submarine, the one that brought Japan to it's knee's.)
In fact, those complaints have been around ever since military procurement started - both against weapons that were stellar successes, and those that weren't.
The Air Force in partnership with Lockjeed has been on a parabolic trajectory of extravagent spending, waste and abuse. The F-15 was a little extravagant, the F-22 was really extravagent especially on per unit cost and the F-35 is insane primarily because some idiot decided to make every service use basically the same air frame for everything so the price tag would be at least $1 trillion though they are already starting to talk about slashing the numbers produced. If everyone is using one airplane what happens when it gets grounded like the F-22 has been reacently because of its oxygen problems.
Someone realized you don't actually need EVERY plane in your inventory to be an expensive 5th generation stealth model especially when most of the time they are bombing mud huts in Afghanistan.
The Israeli's are making contingency plans to buy used American F-15's because they are losing confidence in the F-35 being delivered in a reasonable time, in a functioning state and at a price anyone can afford. The F-15 is still good enough for air to air for just about everything short of an all out war between the U.S., China and or Russia which is fairly improbable in the nuclear age. The Navy is starting to look at a new version of the F-18 for the same reason.
@de_machina
A large part of defense R&D activity revolves around building very expensive gadgets that are often based on unsound technology and frequently fail to perform as required.
Clearly an infringement on their business model.
Have gnu, will travel.
Like a convoy of vehicles constantly carrying fuel is more defendable than a fixed position solar array. There are more variables to consider you know.
Monstar L
"Most of the US casualties in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been caused by improvised explosive devices, which require little in the way of technology beyond the mobile phones used to detonate them. The United States' high-technology, high-price, and high-maintenance weaponry is of relatively little value in such conflicts."
The author may have a lot of experience with the DOD R&D establishment, but statements like this make me question his judgement. Just at the level of basic logic, the fact that our enemies' weapons require little technology in no way implies that our own high-tech weapons are useless. Considering the actual examples of Iraq and Afghanistan, it was massive investment in technical means that defeated the IED. The protected vehicles, the mine detection sensors, the electronic warfare, the predictive analysis, the drones and the helicopters overhead, even the training back in the States, all absolutely oozed technology and all that tech was the result of huge amounts of research. This is just one off-hand comment that he makes, but it's a comment that's pretty obviously wrong and, well, dumb. So why should I believe some other broad statement such as, "the Pentagon spends only about 15 percent of its R&D budget, or about $12 billion, on what most reasonable observers might call productive research?"
I am a military scientist and there's plenty wrong with DoD RDT&E. There's a lot of wasted money and a lot of pointless projects. The point that the DoD FFRDCs are decaying while we spend lavishly on for-profit research centers is a dirty and very dangerous secret of DoD research.
That said, there are several areas totally off the mark here.
One is the comparison of basic research to other areas. The DoD is odd in the way they define this. Basic research is research which is unrelated to a defined military gap or program. That's it. You can do what most people would consider basic research using operational and management funds. I am doing that right now making new nanocomposite materials, but the program paying for it is already fielded. They're interested in maybe fixing some problems and are having me explore new materials just to see what might be out there. Going through budget definitions as these guys have, you need to know the silly and slightly odd military definitions for these terms.
There are a number of logical inconsistencies as well. Contractors don't do basic research? What are Universities then? I have several under contract to do basic research for me. Honestly, one of the major problems with DoD R&D is that so much of the research side has been university programs which either fail completely to tell us any of their failures, fail to tell us how to actually reproduce their results, or end up with key personnel graduating and moving away (sometimes out of the country). The culture of University research is not what I would call high quality right now.
Perhaps the biggest thing these guys are missing is that FFRDCs are legally barred from competing with industry and academia. The implosion of the DoD research budget in the 90s means very few centers are equipped with modern equipment capable of taking advantage of tools developed in the last 20 years. Lab automation is almost unheard of. Note that plenty of us get around this little legal issue by having professor positions, shell companies or corporate overlords "managing" the labs. "Non-profit national lab" is an anachronistic phrase. Yes, this is a huge conflict of interest, but it's ignored because Congress likes campaign donations. Legally, we're not supposed to lobby Congress, make public political statements or donate to election funds, but these arraignments also create a loophole there. The result is that some of the most well known national labs are really the epicenters of the ethics problem we have in R&D funding.
Then, they want to move technology demonstration and advanced development past the traditional "Milestone B" changeover to acquisitions. How is this going to help? As bad as the DoD research world is, acquisitions is even worse. There is NOT better oversight on that side, just more political bickering and backroom deals. Missile defense is the perfect example of this! They cite that as the poster child for bad DoD RDT&E, but that is a program where the R&D testing and demonstrations were the responsibility of the contractor (Boeing) who would sell the system during acquisitions. This was a program run for most of it's life out of an acquisitions office (2001-2010). Moving things over there isn't going to magically fix all our problems.
You want a basic research system that works? The DARPA programs which fund non-university research, and are managed by detailees from DoD FFRDCs or uniformed officers are almost universally worthwhile. Not all of them work out (it's research!), but they tend to avoid the conflicts of interest, unreproducible results and political favors so common elsewhere. Of course, now that the head of DARPA is funding her own company, they're not very good models for what we should be doing. That's what we get for putting a hedge fund manager in charge of DARPA.
The F-35 was and still is poised to be the best investment in fighter aircraft the US has ever made. It will simplify supply chains, parts management and the best part of all is that we are selling a boat load of them to every Tier1 ally we have thus spreading the immense R&D costs (which are already spent) out over thousands of planes.
The problem with the F-35 isn't Lockheed, the plane or cost, it's Congress. That's the story that everyone's missing. It's crap like Congress forcing the military to design and test a second engine (that DOD didn't want and repeatedly asked Congress to kill) for the F-35 because a well connected defense contractor didn't win the original engine contract. After spending 3 BILLION dollars they finally got Congress to kill it after it was revealed another 30 billion dollars would be needed to finish the design (which finally got the other congress critters to kill it over the objections of the ones pushing it). The worst part is that the second engine didn't just waste money, it delayed the whole project and increased costs because of the inflation and additional delays to the production line.
Yes there have been technical challenges that have increased costs, such as the Class C VTOL variant that was extremely difficult to design. But the cost escalations on the F-35 tie almost completely to Congress, such as scaling back the total number purchased (which spreads R&D over fewer planes increasing unit cost), the second engine and a dozen other areas where Congress has deliberately fucked with the procurement process. The F-35 will likely be the last major fighter aircraft the US ever designs and builds. That it will replace more than a dozen different and aging aircraft with a single airframe and parts chain and in addition will be shared among every branch was the smartest decision DOD ever made. Not only that but it puts the US and it's allies ahead of the international competition by a significant margin and the only nation with the funding and R&D to ever compete is China (and I consider that very debatable).
People forget that the F-15, F-16, F-18, F-117, B1-B and all the aircraft in the US arsenal were designed or produced more than 30 years ago (the first flights of the F-117 Stealth were in the 70's). Even with modern avionics the craft are showing their age, most have no stealth capability at all, little to no mach capability and massive fuel usage. The F-35 closes the gap, equalizes all the aircraft in the arsenal with equivalent capability, unifies the supply chain (greatly simplifying things were a major conflict ever to break out), provides stealth capabilities to the entire fleet, improved fuel usage, mach speed cruise, stand-off firepower and most importantly of all provides a modern airframe to every branch of the military and puts almost every Tier 1 ally into the same airframe.
Although the F-22 might not be needed, the unification of the air power of the US into a single (I'd like to see the A-10 retained as it's a very sturdy close combat airframe that's very effective against Armor) more powerful airframe used across all branches should NOT be squandered and it would be a terrible mistake to kill it. The defense department spends far to much money we don't have, the budget should be cut but those cuts should come from personal, not R&D and purchase of the new weapons system underway. The F-35 and New DDX Naval Ships are critical components of defense of the mainland US. Lets cut the ground troops and streamline the US fighting force, not squander the defense of the US itself. Consider that salary for active and reserve military members accounts for the vast majority of the DOD expenses. Clinton and the Republican Congress balanced the budget by cutting active military personal about 10%, something Bush Jr and his neoCon Congress immediately reversed.
The means are down to your conscience.
The American government spends so much money that even if every single income tax payer was paying 100% of their income in tax, there would still be a deficit. Most of that deficit is military spending.
Yet all it takes to kill a $4 million M1A1 is a $50 IED. To disable a $4 billion aircraft carrier, a $1 million missile.
Perhaps in a conventional confrontation the US military would win but nobody (apart from saddam) would be stupid enough to fight that fight. You don't fight your opponent's strengths, you fight their weaknesses. That is the last war you're gearing up for, not the next one.
And in the meantime, the debt climbs exponentially... Have you ever thought you might already be losing the next war? As I said, the end, defeating your opponent is what matters.
Deleted
IIRC, it was part of a larger contract. There were a bunch of items, and so they just split the bill up, so the company would get payed piece by piece. They were lazy with the accounting, and didn't put a higher price on the more expensive items, but weren't really ripped off.
You THINK you are selling them to your tier 1 ally's. But what you forget is that most of them are already looking at other planes due to the hughe increase in price and delivery time, if it ever gets done in the first place. Saab has been lobbying and undercutting the F-35 tremendously, and gues what their plane is ready for use.
The Patriots success is highly overstated, with accuracy and hit rate being heavily fudged during the first Gulf War by Raytheon and the US DoD - they stated figures from 80% upward, while actual figures as researched after the conflict was over (and after the Patriots moment in the lime light faded) put the success rate and accuracy at more like 10%.
Raytheon still got a significant budget to produce further versions of the Patriot however...
34.17 (at the momment) at amazon
ASIN: B0015ZP2AC
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
A large part of defense R&D activity revolves around building very expensive gadgets that are often based on unsound technology and frequently fail to perform as required.
Considering they make money for the defense contractor, I'd say they perform as required.
LOL yeah. we need a standing army and the most expensive enterprise on earth to survive this constant barrage of boogymen that are invisible to our satellites and nuclear weapons.
The military uses a lot of different technologies and in this complex world a lot of things can be connected to defense. And I do agree with your point that we would have less war with more alternative energy. But then you could also say that the Department of State has a lot to do with defense as well, because diplomacy keeps us safe.
However, I don't believe that solar cells are central to military technology or execution of war. And that was just an example. My main point is that DoD should do any research that helps the US and the rest of the world. If you want to say "X is important to defense because..." That is fine and you can say it about any large issue X. But I think we should drop the need to make that statement and just say the DoD is going to do whatever research America needs.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_impcus_a2_nus_ep00_im0_mbbl_m.htm
Not true. "A larger proportion of" is quite a different animal from "most of". The amount of oil imported from Canada is still less than half of all oil imports to the US.
The F-15 is still in production for other countries and will likely outlive the F-22.
Then there's arguably the most versatile jet fighter in history, whose mission variants and variety of weapons remain unmatched.
"On 25 July 1955, the Navy ordered two XF4H-1 test aircraft and five YF4H-1 pre-production fighters. The Phantom made its maiden flight on 27 May 1958 with Robert C. Little at the controls."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F-4_Phantom_II
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
There is a difference between "teething troubles" and, for example, fielding OBOGS and clinging to it despite proven and adequate alternatives being available.
If your engine bleed air quits, a conventional LOX bottle still works. If you want a larger capacity, use a larger diameter LOX sphere but have mounting ears for both sizes so you can use them in a pinch.
"Complaints" over specific tech issues are different than some non-tech whinging "dis ting is bwoken!" with no idea why.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
The three major philosophies: :D
(1) Capitalists think you can win.
(2) Socialists think you can break even.
(3) Mystics think you can quit the game.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
I hate to say it but the article makes a good point, at least from my own experience, I have worked with DARPA and the program managers got their ideas of what technology and systems to develop from movies, seriously, the programs they ran were very costly and anyone with a modicum of engineering or scientific expertise could tell they would fail. The managers all want the big win with some kind of star trek like technology but have no clue you have to play by the laws of physics and do years of research on basic priniciples in order to develop something radically different than what we have today.
From the #$@ citation: "...100% oxygen atmosphere..."
Space ships really have a 100% oxygen atmosphere. I'm not doctor or chemist, but it's that bad. Why wouldn't they be 70% nitrogen like Earth's atmosphere. Can you really breath 100% O2 for long and have no ill effects? Makes me wonder if we really did spend $1.5 on a space pen.
34.17 (at the momment) at amazon ASIN: B0015ZP2AC
I thought I saw them at an REI store for less than that, $10 - $25 depending on the model, still made in the USA too. Judging from the model names these may now be used by the military not just NASA.
http://www.rei.com/search?query=space+pen
You know if you want the results of "wasteful R&D spending" you might want to look at where you are.
How about a report outlining domestic entitlement spending? Never see it.
At least with R&D sometimes something good comes out of it.
My thoughts too. If someone thinks they could stand a chance of winning, they might actually try.
Being hopelessly unbalanced is a near-guarantee of lasting peace.
No. Being hopelessly unbalanced is a near-guarantee of lasting war. If the US didn't believe it could easily win the wars in Iraq and Afganistan it would never had started them.
The US didn't start the war in Afghanistan. The Afghan government supported a foreign but Afghan based group that attacked US civilians on US territory, an act of war. The Afghan government then gave shelter and protection to this group after the attack despite US demands to turn them over for criminal prosecution. The Afghan government thus made themselves an accomplice in the attack after the fact.
... the F-35 is insane primarily because some idiot decided to make every service use basically the same air frame for everything ... If everyone is using one airplane what happens when it gets grounded ...
One basic airframe for all services worked out pretty well for the F-4 Phantom II.
The F-15 is still good enough for air to air for just about everything short of an all out war between the U.S., China and or Russia which is fairly improbable in the nuclear age.
Not quite. The US fought against front line Chinese and Russian aircraft in Korea, Vietnam, Libya and Iraq. Those Chinese and Russian jets are not going to stay in China and Russia, both are desperate for exports and combat jets make good exports.
The maximum amount of energy that can be captured from a square meter has already been calculated (allowing for a theoretical 100% efficiency). What more, solar cells tend to be easily damaged, and need a direct line of sight to the sun in order to provide energy.
Would you have them inside, or outside of a base? If they inside a base, in order to power all the equipment, you would need to fill every nook and cranny. If they are outside the base, they are prone to sabotage.
I am John Hurt.
The Patriots success is highly understated, with accuracy and hit rate being heavily fudged after the first Gulf War by Teddy Postol.
Teddy still got a significant budget to produce further "reports" about the hopelessness of missile-defense, however...
FTFY.
It's not a perfect system for ballistic missile defense, by any means. I wouldn't expect it to be - it was designed primarily for shooting down aircraft, and only later given the role of missile interception. However, regardless of the actual shortcomings of the Patriot missile-system, taking Postol's report at face value is absurd.
Imagine a sealed box that has air in it, ok? Now suppose I can wave a magic wand and instantly remove all the nitrogen from the box. The amount of oxygen(concentration) hasn't changed since there's exactly the same number of oxygen particles in the box so from a chemistry view of the box when it comes to oxygen both boxes are the same. However the new box has nearly 100% oxygen in it. but it makes no difference, there's the same number of oxygen particles as before. However there is a notable difference, the pressure is much lower.(It would be between 3-5 lbs per square inch vs 14.7 for air.) So the new box has lower pressure and the air is just as breathable as before, the advantage if you're doing space flight is you don't have to make the box anywhere near as strong if you were using plain old air.(Oh and fires arn't any worse in the pure but low pressure environment.) Admittedly for awhile a person in that enviroment would be dumping nitrogen and could get the bends but if you had him in a pure oxygen environment before hand you could purge him and then put him in a lighter capsule.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
I'm far more bothered by his clueless belief that minor "wars" (Korea, Vietnam, Panama, Iraq 1 and 2, Afganistan, Libya, etc.) are all we need to worry about. With that attitude, we'll be fucked as soon as World War III starts. Think it won't? Maybe because you don't enjoy thinking about it? History shows that there will always be war. Sometime within the next 75 years or so, we'll be fighting a real war. Major western cities will be leveled, and many millions will die.
By the time you can see it coming, it'll be too late to design weapons.
They produce 100 missile factories. Then they actually assemble one and write down all the things that it takes to fix it (assuming they can fix the other 99). The issue comes as soon as someone does something clever (like flick a needed switch) without documenting it.
So they end up with 99 useless missile factories and a boxed up one that they don't have perfect documentation for, or staff trained to operate it.
No, you didn't "FTFY" - I really wish people would stop using that pathetic meme.
I'd rather take a report that was presented to a house committee as a starting point over the reports from those who are looking to secure billions of dollars of investment and purchase orders for a product which is questionable to say the least.
By all means, invest in R&D to make a better product, but don't use fraud to try and push that investment. Admit the shortcomings of a system, don't claim that its successful at something it really isn't and demand further investment...
The cost of the second engine is miniscule compared to the total cost of the F-35 program but it gets trotted out every time to deflect attention from all of the F-35's real problems.
You need to look no further than the A-10 to see that replacing it with an F-35 is completely nuts. The A-10 is slow moving, extremely durable, extremely cheap and a perfect for close air support for ground troops.
Replacing it with an extravagently expensive 5th generation stealth fighter is ⦠COMPLETELY NUTS.
Replacing the F-117 is probably one of the few places where the F-35 would make sense.
I think the B1-B has already been replaced by the B-52, the last B series the Air Force built that wasn't an extravagent waste of money. The B-1B and B-2 sure were. The B-52 is 60 years old, still flying, still seeing way more work than the B-1 or B-2. If you want a stealth bomber to penetrate heavily defended air space, use a drone, way cheaper.
@de_machina
Excepting the F-4's record as a fighter in Vietnam was horrible and since every service was using it it was horrible across the board, with no fallback when it turned out to be horrible.
I seriously think the Navy should return to building its own fighter. Yes it will add some costs, but the Air Force, especially the Air Force teamed with Lockheed, have thoroughly proven by now they can't be trusted to build fighters any more.
I'm thinking the Air Force's generals are more concerned with their future Lockheed funded second careers than they are with doing their jobs.
@de_machina
Excepting the F-4's record as a fighter in Vietnam was horrible and since every service was using it it was horrible across the board, with no fallback when it turned out to be horrible.
Not quite. What was horrible were the missiles loaded on the F-4, 90% failure on some. It wouldn't matter what aircraft launched those missiles. Fixing the missiles, and more importantly adding a gun to the F-4, did wonders. Plus getting back to the "basics" in pilot training and stressing air combat maneuvering once again. Naval aviators got the kill:loss ratio up to 10:1 again.
No, you didn't "FTFY"
Well, yeah, when YOU say it, it should be "FTFM".
I'd rather take a report that was presented to a house committee as a starting point over the reports from those who are looking to secure billions of dollars of investment and purchase orders for a product which is questionable to say the least.
Of course you would, which is why you fail. I'd rather take the facts, regardless of the source.
Actually you prove my point more than yours. As designed by the Pentagon and deployed in Vietnam the F-4 was a horrible fighter. Using that "Top Gun" line to try to explain away the F-4's problem is dubious at best. Just like the F-22 and the F-35 they bet everything on technology that wasn't combat proven, didn't hold up when the rubber hit the road, and they had no alternative.
The F-4 had to undergo a major redesign and it was still never very good. It was big, heavy and the smoky engines made it extremely easy to track visually. Unless you got long range missile kills it was at an extreme disadvantage in a close in dog fight.
The disasterous performance of the F-4 lead directly to the F-15 which was a very good fighter. They did learn from their mistakes with the F-15 a decade later.
Do you know what the actual kill ratio was between the F-4 and MiG-21 or MiG-17. I've never been able to find full statistics and have only seen references to the numbers being classifed. If they are classified that is because the Pentagon doesn't want to admit how badly its fighters were beaten by a relatively tiny Vietnamese air force flying some pretty old air planes, at least the MiG-17 was very old.
The only number I find online is:
"During one short period for which data are available, the summer of 1972, air-to-air combat resulted in the loss of 12 MiG-21s, 4 MiG-17/19s, and 11 F-4s, yielding a kill-ratio of about 1.5 MiGs for every Phantom shot down"
1972 was near the end of the war, long after the F-4E was deployed with an internal Vulcan gun. I think the F4-E was deployed in 1968. If the F-4 was, at the end of the war, barely managing a 1.5 kill ratio, and the Pentagon wont even publish the full statistics, that indicates it was probably a total failure. They were just lucky Vietnam didn't have a very big Air Force and air to air wasn't really pivotal to the war.
@de_machina
As an Aussie, I am of the belief that being involved in the F-35 program was a mistake. We should have bought existing aircraft instead and I think we should have considered all the available options (both in terms of the F-35 and the decision to retire the F-111 Aardvark and buy the F/A-18F Super Hornet) instead of just buying the Super Hornet and Lightning just because best mates Howard and Bush thought it was a good thing to do.
And the facts say that the Patrot is nowhere near as successful as it has ever been claimed.
Sorry, but your pet isn't as good as you think it is.
As designed by the Pentagon and deployed in Vietnam the F-4 was a horrible fighter.
As designed by the Pentagon (well, its predecessor) the P-51 Mustang was a horrible fighter using your logic. :-)
Using that "Top Gun" line to try to explain away the F-4's problem is dubious at best.
What "Top Gun" line? I learned about failed Sparrow missiles, the pure missile concept, ROE requirements for visual identification negating long range missiles, the lack of formal ACM training (and pilots doing off-the-books training), etc from far more serious sources than Hollywood. Note many of these problems are not aircraft specific.
The F-4 had to undergo a major redesign ...
"Major" is highly debatable.
Many Vietnam era F-4 pilots disagree.
It was big, heavy and the smoky engines made it extremely easy to track visually.
The smoke trails were an engine issue and that engine was not F-4 specific.
The disasterous performance of the F-4 lead directly to the F-15 which was a very good fighter. They did learn from their mistakes with the F-15 a decade later.
"Disasterous" is also highly debatable. And the F-4 was not the motivation behind the F-15, the true motivation was the rumored performance characteristics of the Mig-25. It was typical cold war era leapfrogging of aircraft designs, the F-4 being designed almost a decade earlier than the Mig-25.
...
If you want to discuss a team that learned the lessons of the history or aerial combat then the F-16 team would be a far better choice than the F-15, smaller, simpler, more maneuverable, less expensive
The only number I find online is: "During one short period for which data are available, the summer of 1972, air-to-air combat resulted in the loss of 12 MiG-21s, 4 MiG-17/19s, and 11 F-4s, yielding a kill-ratio of about 1.5 MiGs for every Phantom shot down". 1972 was near the end of the war, long after the F-4E was deployed with an internal Vulcan gun. I think the F4-E was deployed in 1968.
Those numbers may be including AAA kill. That 1.5:1 ratio post F-4E introduction is very suspicious given the stats for the entire war. 14% of AF kills were by gun.
US Navy: 40:7 = 5.7:1
US Air Force: 107:33 = 3.2:1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F-4_Phantom_II