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Is the $400 Billion F-35's 'Brain' Broken? (cnn.com)
Zachary Cohen, reporting for CNN News: Almost 2,500 of the world's most advanced warplanes, with a total price tag of $400 billion, and they may not have a "brain" in the bunch? That's the fear of federal watchdogs who say problems with the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter's complex logistics software system could lead to a grounding of the entire fleet, not to mention future cost increases and schedule delays. Documenting risks to the F-35's Autonomic Logistics Information System, which Department of Defense officials have described as the "brains" of the fifth-generation fighter, an April 14 Government Accountability Office report says a failure "could take the entire fleet offline," (PDF) in part, due to the lack of a backup system. The report also outlines concerns related to the lack of testing done to ensure the software will work properly by the time the Air Force plans to declare its version of the aircraft ready for deployment this August and the Navy reaches that milestone in 2018. The Marine Corps declared the first squadron of its F-35 variant ready for combat in July 2015, with the intention of upgrading and resolving the software issues before its first planned deployment in 2017.
Estimated to cost approximately $16.7 billion over the aircraft's 56-year lifespan, the logistics software system is considered one of the three major components that make up the F-35, along with the airframe and engine.
Unlike the airframe and engine, however, the software is not built into the plane itself. Instead, it runs on ground computers to support operations, mission planning, maintenance and sustainability.
So...
1. Unlike when you take your car to the shop, they won't be able to have the plane tell them what's wrong.
2. If CSC updates the servers and breaks it (like the usually do to ours), there are no backups.
The "Brain" is actually the pilot and the software that displays threats, targets and kills them is apparently working correctly.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
http://obex.parallax.com/objec...
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
Sure, we bullied 54 nations into signing defense pacts, and we bullied Europe into sticking us with a huge bill for NATO. We bullied every other Nato country except for Poland and Britain into not paying the 2% of their GDP on defense that the treaty requires, so we could sociopathically pay for the gaps in their budgets, in addition to providing such a huge military force, that Germany, for instance, only needs to have available one light brigade of combat troops for NATO operations. Oh, and they can't legally fight on foreign soil. We also bullied them into using things like our Satellites for navigation and such.
It never ever happens that when shit goes down, any number of other nations look to us for help, because they were all bullied into an agreement they didn't want. Oh, and of course, other countries don't do their own bullying or have complex bundles of purposes guiding how they interact with us.
We're just thugs doing everything entirely for our benefit, because were sociopaths.
I also want to seriously commend you on the brilliant insight that military contractors, being businesses, are focused on making profits. If only we could be like the Norwegians or the French and have our missiles hand-rolled in the laps of our mothers at home!
And yes, all we have to do is "fire" politicians who supported bad ideas. I mean, it's not like the political class is powerful and resilient or that actual information on the specifics of what they do are hard to come by. I mean, if the average citizen only spent 20 hours every week digging up information on government contracts, lobbying, and a few thousand pages of legislation, it would be easy.
In other words, you are one seriously obtuse motherfucker.