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America's F-35s Can't Fly 22% of the Time, Repair Facilities Six Years Behind Schedule (indiatimes.com)
"[N]early 200 F-35s might permanently remain unready for combat because the Pentagon would rather buy new aircraft than upgrade the ones the American people have already paid for," according to one defense news site. And now Bloomberg reports:
The Pentagon is accelerating production of Lockheed Martin Corp.'s F-35 jet even though the planes already delivered are facing "significantly longer repair times" than planned because maintenance facilities are six years behind schedule, according to a draft audit. The time to repair a part has averaged 172 days -- "twice the program's objective" -- the Government Accountability Office, Congress's watchdog agency, found. The shortages are "degrading readiness" because the fighter jets "were unable to fly about 22 percent of the time" from January through August for lack of needed parts.
The Pentagon has said soaring costs to develop and produce the F-35, the costliest U.S. weapons system, have been brought under control, with the price tag now projected at $406.5 billion. But the GAO report raises new doubts about the official estimate that maintaining and operating them will cost an additional $1.12 trillion over their 60-year lifetime.
Slashdot reader schwit1 writes, "This is akin to buying an exotic car you can barely afford, without also budgeting for insurance, repairs, and tuneups."
The Pentagon has said soaring costs to develop and produce the F-35, the costliest U.S. weapons system, have been brought under control, with the price tag now projected at $406.5 billion. But the GAO report raises new doubts about the official estimate that maintaining and operating them will cost an additional $1.12 trillion over their 60-year lifetime.
Slashdot reader schwit1 writes, "This is akin to buying an exotic car you can barely afford, without also budgeting for insurance, repairs, and tuneups."
At this rate the US could just pour money into buying perfectly capable, top-of-the-line fighters and write them off as losses in the F-35 program.
Slashdot reader schwit1 writes, "This is akin to buying an exotic car you can barely afford, without also budgeting for insurance, repairs, and tuneups."
Actually it's like buying a new exotic car every three months so you don't have to do schedule maintenance on any of the others.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
It's infringement of the contracts because of lower MTBF and longer repairing time compared to those of older fighters.
...for parts
I couldn't possibly relate to paying for uber expensive fighter jets that I couldn't budget repairs for..
Thanks for the far more relatable scenario of buying exotic cars I can't budget repairs for...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
It would be nice to have detailed account on the philosophy, execution and politics around the project. Is this an example of project responsibility avoidance, big upfront design over another big upfront design, a requirements creep or something else? What made the single air-frame such an attractive proposition over multiple frames with modular systems?
It seems like a good idea not to upgrade/fix planes if they are going to be replaced, as long as the planes that need repairs can be fixed on short notice if needed and that a minimum number of planes are always kept available.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Europe bought many fighter planes to U.S.
Why can not Europe sell their Eurofighters to U.S.?
Anyone remember when they were selling the F-35 as a better alternative to the F-22? Saying that it wouldn't be so costly and bogged down in final development with persistent issues.
Most of the money is being funneled into the Stargate program to build more F-304s.
"To face death, that's nothing much. But to feel really stupid when you die, well, that would be insufferable."
Slashdot reader schwit1 writes, "This is akin to buying an exotic car that doesn't work, that you can barely afford, without also budgeting for insurance, repairs, and tuneups."
There, fixed that for you.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
No, it's more like being Jay Leno and buying your 24th model of Ferrari, being told that maintenance and downtime would be about the same as other models and then finding that it's much, much worse. This isn't an example of the government ordering the wrong thing - it's an example of the government sticking with the order after it has been proven to be a terrible purchase.
Actually it's more like buying expensive exotic cars to keep your local dealer from going bankrupt... and paying for them with everyone else's money ... so you can be re-elected dogcatcher.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
I'm pretty sure Germany et al would be delighted to sell fighters to the US. Will never happen though.
I wonder if they are regretting choosing the F35B for use on their brand spanking-new aircraft carriers (which are not full CATOBAR). Although I wonder if they had any choice for STOL (or STOVL) aircraft. They may end up with two white elephants in the Queen Elizabeth-class carriers.
Er, "IEEE 1394 and Power ISA v.2.03".
Working in automotive I understand how "vintage" tech makes it into "current" production: Timelines, budgets, work with what is known to work. That said, it is entertaining to read press releases from last decade surrounding what is going into the F35.
The 'high speed data bus' is IEEE 1394b. It's running on Freescale/NXP/Qualcomm PowerPC embedded processors designed off of the PowerPC G4 (in triplicate) built by the GreenHills compiler. I haven't found any info on it but I'd hate to see what version of Matlab/Simulink they're stuck with as well. Likely 6.5 or R13.
The problem with that was it was pitched as a "COTS" system to save cost. None of those products are "commercial off the shelf" solutions anymore. The hayday of the G4 in mass quantities is gone. I wonder how much money Freescale is guaranteed to keep fab lines up and running for a chip designed in the 90s. I also want to know how the NXP acquisition went through.
End of the day the feds would have probably been better off just making their own CPU and fab lines.
The total plane contract is signed. They are going to be built. Bringing the cost of each plane down is dependent on production increasing. You want to slow that down and increase line costs so you can spend money on upgrades for planes that could be replaced by new planes coming off the production line? Look, I'm not saying the program isn't a mess at every level of the contractor. As a subcontractor for not only this but just about every major defense/NASA contractor I see it every day and its infuriating. But this is just a FUD hit piece.
Are downtime and maintenance as bad with the other countries who have bought the F35?
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
The public wonders why we could get stuff done so effectively in the past. I can tell you why: the government didn't have the level of red tape it has today in the name of "accountability." Your "accountability" was "do the damn job effectively or go to the private sector." I have much older relatives who used to be in the federal civil service. They hate what they see it has become today. They hate the red tape that lets people shrug off responsibility for thinking and puts a committee of 10 people in charge of a $2M budget that is a rounding error in the agency's budget.
It is just rampant, out of control legalism at its worst. Laws and regulations choke everything and ensure no one just assumes authority and gets stuff done (because that would Fascist, since wanting the trains to run on time means you are a natural Fascist who doesn't respect dissent and demands submission to arbitrary authority).
LOL! No one else has any fighters yet! The entire program is borderline criminal.
When Lockheed won, I knew it was going to be a maintenance nightmare. It's a very complex design and it will not last very long in desert conditions.
Boeings was simpler but they couldn't get it to work in time.
Never the less, the future is drones. yes, I've heard all the arguments against that but the trouble is, people are stuck in the traditional mindset of air warfare.
We let the Chinese steal the plans so they could waste their military budget trying to make copies of fundamentally flawed aircraft.
It has reached the critical point of no new-newness.
Basically, there is nothing really new that can be built; understand that first.
There are remaining bugs in the existing systems, they just don't talk about them.
The issue is that nobody wants to go back and fix the old stuff, you would think that would be job opportunity but the fact is that they are already so rich they don't care about it and it is a game to them.
So what happens is that the manufacturers understand this, and just keep selling.
That's why.
They should, regarding jets, at least set then up on autopilot to crash into each other for a good show and share it with everyone. It probably isn't worth the energy required to melt them down.
Now the fact that this trickle's down into all aspects of business and products and even software does not mean that the jet model should be applied to all (you fascists). Face it there are a lot of people who would love to be paid to fix that fence post, it's not a 1000 parts deep.
There's a lot of people who would love to be paid to fix Pandora and Carplay for example, there's no need to destroy the cars just to fix that.
They really need to get a grip.
Why would they do that? Much better to let the redneck world police believe they have the best equipment when they in fact have overly expensive toys that don't deliver. For when push comes to shove, you don't need the most expensive toys, you need the most effective tools. And the US doesn't have them.
In fact, many of its allies are forced to pay through the nose for those shitty toys and have very little money left to pay for the rest of their military. Trump complained that the rest of NATO wasn't pulling its weight, and in that he is right, it isn't. But they could do much better if they didn't have to pay the overpriced crap, instead being free to buy working kit for less than half the price. The F35 is but one thing with that problem, but nearly every bit of "made in USA" military spending has the same problem.
So yeah, Trump better get on with draining that military-industrial complex swamp.
The same nation that built the SR-71, the A-10 and the F-15 serves up this lemon and tries to pretend it can still build great military aircraft?
The swamp that needs cleaning is the unholy triumvirate of US weapons manufacturers, government procurers and military brass, all sucking on the US taxpayer like a bunch of bloated leeches.
The rest of the country is going to hell while these parasites get fat providing garbage like this trailer queen. When I heard an F-35 completed a trans-Atlantic flight, I had to ask if they'd cut it up and sent it as luggage.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
A serviceability 78% rate is fairly high, AFAIK.
If command can scrap entire lines of proven aircraft what makes you think they will ever embrace drones? Cost, capabilities, efficiency, etc. do not weigh as heavily as we would like to think.
Worse. Here in the UK we're going to have to ship ours of to be serviced in Turkey, a country we aren't even guaranteed to still be on trading terms with by the time the planes actually get delivered to us.
Oh America, a land where the government thinks a trillion dollars for a fighter jet it can't use much of the time is a good investment, but universal health care like the rest of the developed world has would be considered a waste of money.
Eurofighter is quite old design now. Their radar signature is probably too big for the US customers who like to keep up with the Chinese.
At what point would it be cheaper to start being nice to all the other nations, so you don't need to spend more on defence than every other country combined?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
It sounds more like the Bradley fiasco.
I'm guessing that they are just stirring up FUD in the foreign markets in order to generate more interest in their domestic built Su-30.
Not that I think this is totally a bad idea. Someone needs to teach Lockheed that they didn't in fact lock up the foreign markets for fighters. They may have US markets tied up politically. But others can just wander over to the dealership across the street.
Have gnu, will travel.
but the true is that a certain percentage of all machines are unavailable due to needing repairs. This is from cars, buses, and even airplanes. To get an accurate picture you have to compare rates with similar kind of machines, stealth fighters like the F-22.
That money could have bought a shiteload of better performing, more maneuverable, cheaper Grippens with the new counter-stealth radars that would eat F-35 for breakfasts any way...
Don't be proud... spend your money where effective not to maximize porks.
This is exactly what happens when you try to integrate a whole bunch of groups (eg. all US force branches, EU branches, etc). You get a shit product that wastes taxpayers money and can't do shit.
If there is any argument for capitalism/free market/commercial entities, then this is it. Although I disagree with all of those principles (commercial entities, if left to their own devices, will grind you in to food).
So buy Grippen, universally considered superior to F-35, cheaper, better in dogfighting, and come with counter-stealth radar to detect stealth planes from great distance.
More effective for less money.
Let's be honest here. Nobody needs the F35 as a military plane. The F35 is a pork barrel project. We could just have pumped the relevant tax moneys into the states involved without anything in return and it would be just as fine. But harder to justify.
Look at the F35. Then look at the current military requirements, the theaters the US military is fighting in, the enemies it is fighting, the equipment of the US troops and that of their enemies, the theaters of war they're deployed to and the (stated and real) military goals they pursue. Then tell me with a straight face that this plane makes in ANY way sense.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
reviving the YF-23 program. That plane was the better machine.
Mostly random stuff.
> The Pentagon has said soaring costs to develop and produce the F-35, the costliest U.S. weapons system, have been brought under control,
In other news, the check is in the mail, and Donald Trump's interns have been ordered to carry Tic-Tacs at all time.
Yesterday the Ministry of Defense published a short video https://youtu.be/hcP-6lHn3fQ where the SU-30 capabilities are demonstrated. I did not even know that a fixed-wing aircraft can perform such a maneuvers.
How a number is constructed is more important than how good they sound.
So 78% of F35s were able to *fly*. Doesn't mean they're ready to actually *do* anything other than fly, like use their weapons systems, or appear as small on enemy radars as they're supposed to. So that 78% may include aircraft that *could* fly, but which would be pointless to fly.
We should take any statitics on a too-big-to-fail project with a large grain of salt, because they can easily be affected by tweaking your success criteria.
Consider: for FY16, the F35 had a 56% availability rate, which for a plane so early in its deployment is quite impressively good. But because of the program's unique concurrency strategy, in which deliveries of aircraft started years before the design was finalized, 187 of the aircraft will never be capable of combat operations -- not unless they're sent back to the factory and re-manufactured.
As of March of this year, 231 F35s have been delivered, so if "available" meant "capable of flying a combat mission", the highest the FY '16 availability figure could possibly have been is 19% 81% of the fleet were semi-functioning prototypes.
So clearly "available" means "capable of flying the mission you planned for them"; and you can adjust the rate of availability by planning your missions accordingly. Gun not working? Plan a mission with no shooting and the plane is still available.
Without repair capabilities, availability for actual combat is probably zero; but it's probably zero anyway until the software improves.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Slashdot reader schwit1 writes, "This is akin to buying an exotic car you can barely afford, without also budgeting for insurance, repairs, and tuneups.
I just get the Apple Care+ with the iPhone I can just barely afford. Problem Solved.
Looking at a picture of a Gripen, I see that it carries its bombs and missiles externally, and has giant radar reflecting canards.
This thing must have a radar cross section larger than a school bus being towed through the air by a 737...
Thanks, but no thanks. A giant radar cross section is not equivalent to a small stealthy radar evading plane.
Maybe it is time to start using 3D printing? I know it is not easy, we have bombs made to order, why not parts made to order?
Am I the only one that thinks in 10 years time any fighter aircraft stupid enough to fly over a war zone will be shot done by fully automated drones?
Drones are a daily tool for our armed forces and will be taking on more complex roles. Hordes of low-cost drones sent into a combat zone using onboard AI and cross communication to identify, track and destroy targets both on the ground and in the air. This is not an if, it's a when and when is right around the corner. There will always be a role for manned combat aircraft but their drone counterparts will be taking on a larger and larger percentage of the mission.
The F-35 looks awesome on paper and when all the moons are in alignment it is amazing. But it is seriously suffering from ill-conceived complexity bloat.
Sig?! Sig?! We don't need no stinking sig!!
It's easy to "prove" something when you cherry pick on the winners as examples.
no one ever has their picture taken beside a pile of spare parts. much sexier to stand in front of a pointy airplane!
Heh. That sounds like an outcome of European insistence on European depots. And Brexit was a British idea, so it hardly seems like a problem that you can lay at the feet of an American company.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Remember it's the Military Industrial CONGRESSIONAL Complex.
Defense is a tremendous gravy train.
And it keeps America strong, fuck yeah.
Absolute statements are never true
there couldn't be a blank check too big for the military industrial complex as far as that guy's concerned.
The Chinese already put the J-20 into service. Only problem they have is they have no decent engines for it yet. It's kinda like the F-14 when it came out. Nice plane, shame about the engines.
Slashdot reader schwit1 writes, "This is akin to buying an exotic car you can barely afford, without also budgeting for insurance, repairs, and tuneups."
Actually it's like buying a new exotic car every three months so you don't have to do schedule maintenance on any of the others.
...at taxpayer expense, to keep your budget going and to continue requesting budget increases every year
Sorry, I ran out of analogies, but this if they were spending their own money (e.g., I hear Steve Jobs did something like that), that'd be ok.
and bolt them back together as half the number of higher-spec twin-engine planes. That would be kinda cool. This whole game has been one of the loveliest examples of 'sunk cost fallacy' as implemented by any entity, within the bounds of my own lifetime.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
Slashdot reader schwit1 writes, "This is akin to buying an exotic car you can barely afford, without also budgeting for insurance, repairs, and tuneups."
Actually it's like buying a new exotic car every three months so you don't have to do schedule maintenance on any of the others.
(because you can afford it) ;)
Why are there people in the world that still don't know the US military really does have a big budget, they're not just talking themselves up?
So buy Grippen, universally considered superior to F-35,
For values of "universal" that are equal to "people on the internet who don't have access to technical performance information of either aircraft," sure.
Throw them away and buy new ones.
Back in the late 1980s after the (then) Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the US (specifically the CIA) was funding a secret war code named "operation cyclone". It cost about $1Billion per year (matched by Saudi Arabia). It involved back stopping Anti-Soviet Afghan fighters with Stinger missiles, Milan anti-tank rockets, spread-spectrum frequency hopping radios, plastic mines, wire mines, bicycle bombs, etc. They even had middle eastern license-built manufacturers building and supplying AK-47s so that if an Afghan got caught with a gun, there was reasonable doubt about whether it had been captured from the Soviets. One of the really big draws was when a Stinger brought down a Mig, the Stinger costs between 40-50 thousand, the Mig costs 30-40 Million, so for the cost of one Mig you can buy 1000 Stingers (and 60% of all Stingers fired hit their targets). The cost per value was a real easy sell. Now if someone with a carefully configured slingshot downs an F22 or an F35, the loss on one side is really minimal, and the loss on the other side is massive. Considering the way the US Air force puts every man on deck looking for FOD (foreign object damage) to prevent anything from being sucked into the engines of their "Hot House Flowers", it sounds like any half-pointed shotgun shell could bring down one or two engines. Spending billions more per plane might not be the best idea. Worse if maintenance and parts almost cost more than buying new. Where are the days when an airplane could be serviced completely by a crew of two in under two hours, where major structural components could be replaced in under half a day? What is the survivability of an air force that is not able to rapidly replace aircraft, repair aircraft, or even afford aircraft?
The US military has put all of its eggs into one basket. The military needs new planes and the only available new plane is the F-35. Therefore, there is only one reasonable course of action: deal with it. If the repair facilities are not up to snuff, then spend the money and do what needs to be done. There is no Plan B (or "Plane B" since we are talking about planes here).
I read both articles.
The first article makes the case that "concurrency" has been a disaster. "Concurrency" is the idea that the new plane was delivered in generations. The first F-35 planes delivered are much less capable than the final generation (the "Block 3F" plane, which is scheduled for release now, over a decade after the first F-35 flew). The first article's main outrage is that several hundred early-gen F-35 planes may never be upgraded to Block 3F; the military is seriously considering leaving them unfit for any other use than as trainers, and using the money thus freed up to just buy more newer-gen F35s.
I am not an expert on military stuff or on government procurement, so please take my opinions with a grain of salt. That said: I am not convinced that "concurrency" has been a disaster. The F-35 is truly a quantum leap in the state of the art of military aircraft; its "sensor fusion" features are dramatically more advanced than the F-22. We are just now getting the Block 3F features. Would we really have been better served by the plane remaining vaporware until 2017? Didn't the early flight hours with the F-35 give us useful information? Is there no value to having pilots training on the real aircraft? Hasn't it been useful to fly the F-35 in training exercises to see how well it actually does? I am not competent to put a price tag estimate on how much value there is in all of the above. But I did find a recent article from Forbes where someone makes the case that "concurrency" has been a net win for the F-35 program, so please read this and decide whether you buy his arguments:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2017/09/29/how-concurrency-in-building-the-f-35-fighter-has-proven-to-be-a-big-plus/#7cd2b7bc7147
By the way, I would not be in favor of a new fighter jet program being run the same way as the F-35 program was run... I think that now that the F-35 has (with great pain) demonstrated the quantum leap in fighter performance, a follow-on program should be able to be run as more of an incremental development, with less risk and drama.
The second article is about how several branches of the military are behind schedule on building maintenance facilities for the F-35, and how that is impacting readiness numbers. As I said above, my only comment on this: we have no choice but the F-35, so we just need to spend the money and fix the problem.
Also, one thing to keep in mind about the F-35: because of its unique combination of stealth, sensors, and flight range, it can do missions with fewer aircraft than 3rd-generation fighters:
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/f-35b-stealth-fighter-how-the-us-marine-corps-could-dominate-17198
So even if it turns
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Or forego "full" stealth and get the Rafale, a proven effective twin engine multi role fighter that is incredibly economical. Actually, it does have reduced radar cross section.
Compare the price: EUR 80 million fly away or USD 223 million for an F-35 once the engines have been added!
I've long maintained that the US could have done much better buying an off-the-shelf aircraft (like the Rafale) and making it autonomous, a "drone" if you will.
These must be Italian cars. Scheduled maintenance is total replacement.
you're omitting the part where you commit to use the exotic car for everything, including getting a packet of sigarettes. Which means with its cost per driven mile(which includes maintenance) it becomes a very expensive way to get a packet of sigarettes.
My opinion is that if the US military were obliged to work with 1/2 the budget they have now overnight, they would actually do better because these pork projects would cease immediately. The savings could be used to fund universal healthcare.
In battle the shittiest plane in the air is always going to be better than the best plane on the ground.
I don't think you know what AI means
If the f-35 is available 78% of the time you'll find that it is higher than many other jets. Some in the 50% range.
They must be almost as good at geography as you are, then.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I guess that helps understanding how US manages to spend 36% of worldwide military expenditures on its own (Russia, which is supposed to be a threat, spends 4%)
We have the US military buying a few dozen, perhaps even a couple hundred, of aircraft that are hobbled with early development troubles because of concurrent testing and production. Let's assume what might be worst case situation of 300 early air frames crippled by being effectively prototypes of the final product.
A quick look at current plans for the F-35 and I see the USAF has ordered nearly 2000 on it's own. The Navy and Marines combined has ordered more than 500, and likely to order many more in the future. Then there are the many US allies buying them by the dozens, and perhaps hundreds. Just right now, today, there is an expectation of over 3000 being built. Taking my worst case of 300 early air frames being "very expensive trainers" since they would not meet combat specifications does not appear to be much of a problem.
A new fighter pilot will go through a number of air frames on their way to flying the operational fighters like the F-35. They'll start out on something real simple and cheap, like a common single engine Cessna. A more well funded air force might skip the Cessna and move directly to a single engine propeller trainer like a Texan II. Some pilots might even stop right there as the Texan II is a very nice light duty fighter and recon plane but we'll assume that the pilots still move on to something more advanced. This will almost always be a two seat jet, often a retired fighter or special purpose trainer. At this point the F-35 might even fill in if the powers that be want to do a trainer conversion for these "unworthy" air frames. Once the pilot is past the phase of needing someone in the back seat then they move on to the "real" planes they will be flying. This is where the early production F-35 air frames are likely to end up. This role alone could eat up all, or at least most, of these early F-35 air frames. The people in these aircraft don't need them to be combat worthy. If there are restrictions on the air frames, like weapon and fuel load, then the difference between this kind of trainer and combat worthy air frames will be a non-issue. Again, the USAF is buying up 2000 F-35 air frames, and the US Navy and Marines will buy another 500 or more. The training squadrons in the USAF and USN/USMC will need dozens of "very expensive trainers" for their pilots.
It's not like these aircraft are "worthless". They are likely to end up as trainers, test platforms, spare parts, and (if things really get bad) they can be quickly fitted out for combat with a reduced performance over main production F-35 air frames.
I'm old enough to remember the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The kind of fighting the airplanes flying over there don't need quality. I do remember quantity being an issue. These planes where flying often on bombing runs in uncontested air space. There was nothing, or next to nothing, to oppose them. The military got so used to these bomb runs on second and third tier air frames that they got to be called "bomb trucks". It was about as exciting as delivering the mail. It was always on time and to the correct address, much like any competent postal service, but it doesn't take anything real fancy to deliver the mail. They had to use these older air frames because maintaining such a pace became problematic for even the latest and greatest of aircraft. They didn't have the time to change the oil and pump up the tires so they pulled some older aircraft out of mothballs.
In the grand scheme of things even a few hundred out of the thousands of these F-35 air frames being non-combat capable does not appear to be a problem. While the testing and development continues on the F-35 we can see functional aircraft to train pilots with, and spare aircraft available if an all out war breaks out, among other advantages. If the F-35 meets it's promise of being the replacement for the F-16, F-18, A-10, and other aircraft then we'll need close to 10,000 of these. The few dozen or even a few hundred "worthless" air frames start to look like a non-issue at that point, especially since they are certainly not "worthless".
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
... sucking off the teat of the taxpayer. I remember a Lockheed Martin division leader coming to my business to pitch that our DoD funded contracts should use their computer modules. They only did custom designs to specific requirements, and the cost of their module was going to be $5K or 50% of our system cost. And our system had a lot more shit than just a computer. We politely asked them to buzz off and selected an off the shelf module in an industry-standard form factor instead. The COTS module has gone obsolete three times, but each time the replacement one costs less, consumes less power and performs better. We have been able to offer software upgrades to the military that had not even been conceived when we first designed our product, and the military is delighted at the new capabilities they get for only paying for the software development and validation. They do not have to pay for the hardware development of the next gen processor because we just buy the next gen off the shelf. We also guarantee them dual-source because two different vendors manufacture them, one Israeli and one German. One of them uses AMD chips and another uses Intel.
All the people complaining about the government bureaucracy don't understand where most of the bureaucracy is: government contractors that influence the requirements so that only they can win the business. In our case, Lockheed when to our parent contractor, BAE and try to convince them to convince us to use their super expensive custom modules and give them a piece of the pie, so to speak. John McCain was right - a large chunk of the military needs to move to commercial contracts, where even if the full system can't be developed and purchased via standard industry practices, many of the components can. But he's going to die and someone like him would not even win a GOP primary today.
Many in Washington DC they would not even agree that anything bad has happened. Politicians are getting campaign cash, executives and investors are getting wealthy, and workers are cycling back and forth through the revolving doors between DC and the corporate workforce.
The federal government allowed alll the defense companies to go crazy on "mergers and aquisitions" which were fabulous for investors and management at corporate headquarters. Those companies spent huge piles of money on bribes (oh, they and the recipients called these payments "campaign contributions"). Those lawmakers who rarely actually write any laws, preferring to let the lobbyists write the actual laws, use all sorts of bogus arguments for why those mergers were good for the taxpayers even though they themselves knew these to be lies; what happened was completely predictable: fewer competitors == less competition == crap products at higher prices.
Lockheed used to be a fantastic company whose "skunkworks" did some of the most famous aircraft (the Constellation, the L-1011, the SR-71, the U2, the F-117, etc) but they have merged and become Lockheed-Martin while North American and McDonnel Douglas were absorbed into Boeing. LockMart now only has Boeing and Northrop-Grumman as competitors and have dropped out of the civil aviation space so they are totally-dependent upon military contracts. LockMart's business model now includes:
1. Buying congressmen and Senators
2. Warning congress and the pentagon that if LockMart does not get enough contracts it will go away and leave the Pentagon with only Boeing and Grumman as vendors.
3. Under-bidding (claiming projects will cost less than they are actually going to bill)
4. Over-promising
5. Delivering defective products late and then demanding more contracts and money to fix the problems.
Personally, I'd like to see a bunch of corporate boardroom flunkies who get wealthy selling junk to the military, and their civilian counterparts in government procurement who keep awarding them the contracts all get drafted and sent into combat.
Pay less taxes!
Oh, wait...
If actually being able to fly is one of your requirements, then we know the F35 is inferior already. Don't even have to look at any of the other specs.
It is gross misconception to assume that spending more money reduces the over all cost. It is a decision tainted by the emotional investment accumulated in the system making it harder. It is a failure to make rational decisions on the future spending based on historical spending. The more invested in something the harder it becomes to abandon this lemon.
The UK has ordered this aircraft for our new Queen Elizabeth Carriers. The first was completed and 'in service' but has no aircraft. The second is due next year. The lack of aircraft will not be resolved until '2023 at the earliest' according to our Ministry of Defence. The avionics will not complete until at least 2022, given this software is already 5 years late, that seems like an optimistic prediction. The F35 is a lemon; with airframe cracking problems, engine reliability problems, leaking fuel systems and late avionics.
Learn to fly low...
The F-35 has nothing to do with national defense. The whole thing was a big pile-on of graft and money laundering and getting NATO generals rich. Whatever actually worked was going to be sold to the Chinese to use against us. End the Fed. End the F-35 too. Watch George Webb.
I've long maintained that the US could have done much better buying an off-the-shelf aircraft (like the Rafale) and making it autonomous, a "drone" if you will.
Retro-fitting a piloted aircraft to make it into a UAV or a true drone is flat out retarded on every single aspect you can think of except, perhaps, short term cost.
I recently saw an 'advert' that suggested some agency was trying that with the Tornado over here and I practically choked on my cup of tea.
Without a pilot manoeuvres become limited by the resilience of the air frame, rather than fragile humanity. Existing air frames assume human fragility, with the smallest amount of extra tolerance the engineers and designers thought they could get away with. Hence a retro-fit doesn't magically gain you anything except a plane with virtually the same capabilities (and flaws).
My prediction is that the most effective drones will be those 'designed for purpose', not those 'designed for convenience' or those 'designed by politics'. In addition, for the most part, stealth will increasingly become an expensive and limiting irrelevance.
I understand your point, but you're assuming that the airframe will be the limiting factor - and sure, in the far future once we communicate by unicorn farts and pixie dust it may well be.
However, right now, the main limitation is much more likely to be on-board processing power to drive the AI, and/or the real-time link to the command station. I believe that to be more significant than how many Gs the plane can pull in a turn, and needs to be addressed before autonomous aircraft really come into their own on the battlefield.
"stealth will increasingly become an expensive and limiting irrelevance."
PS: I definitely agree with this.
At first I thought it was an innocent mental mix-up. Then you did it again.
In the vase of the new British carriers, that's cart-before-the-horse. Now they have the embarrassment of an expensive shiny new carrier with no planes. Even Max Hastings is calling it a blunder.
Name one nation that picked the Grippen vs the F-35.
A quick scan of wikipedia shows it regularly loses to the F-16.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
That doesn't mean the Gripen isn't the better choice.
Because nations like Norway are sure to pick worse American hardware over their neighbors superior product...OK not the best example, Swedes are assholes and all of Norway knows it.
Anything is possible.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It's an attempt at an all-purpose jack-of-all-trades which ends up doing nothing particularly well. How sad that we learned nothing from our former mistakes.
India or Pakistan
Casteism
Different people have different objectives.
The important objectives of the people who matter are met: re-election.
There is no such thing as "waste" if a pol can claim it "creates jobs".
If it weren't so conspicuously ludicrous, politicians would pay for people to dig holes and for other people to fill them in.
This aircraft problem is inconspicuously ludicrous. No problem -- for the people who matter.
And term limits for the members of the Congress would be treating a symptom.
But sometimes, that's enough, at least for the short term. Or very short term. (Internal bleeding, transfusion.)
And, as Michael Crichton reminds us in _The Andromeda Strain_, using the example of cholera, sometimes treating the symptoms long enough to for the patient to survive is about as good as a cure.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
I do plenty of repeat mental mixups. You'll have to be clearer or you'll just have to be funny. Is it the car metaphor? The spelling error in cigarettes? Language mixup.