Advanced military toys are always good for nerd sniping, recommender algorithms know this, and they will eagerly amplify a small amount of demonstrated interest into a deluge of recommendations. I'm pretty sure that's what's happening here.
So yes, it's certainly a bought and paid for PR effort, but I wouldn't conclude that it's localized in time, just that HN recently wandered into it. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll take my leave to go read about the fabulous toys my tax dollars are paying for.
That and active measures. Eroding public support for your enemy's shiny new military hardware is a cheap way to destroy morale and increase the chances it'll get cancelled.
1) Once you've noticed something, you tend to notice it more often.
2) Novel (or uncommon) articles on HN that get to the front page tend to attract other articles on the same topic. I can imagine this along the lines of:
Human 1: Hey apparently there's an audience on HN for topic X that I enjoy! I wonder if HN is also interested in this related article on topic X.
Or Human 2: Hey here's this interesting related article I discovered while looking at front-page article Y on topic X.
The summary of all of this is to say that my guess is that like attracts like and uncommon topics die down fairly quickly in time. I imagine that it is less of a concerted effort by stakeholders to push and direct topic X than just the effects of a curious and diverse group.
For an article that came out before this recent press rollout began, try this one: "The F-35 Is a $1.4T National Disaster"
article: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-f-35-14-trill...
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16869679
While at it also found some stories about F-35 helmet targeting systems, if it's anything like BAE Striker II for Eurofighter [3]
1. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/navys-version-f-35-ha...
2. https://militarymachine.com/f-35-helmet
3. http://home.bt.com/tech-gadgets/future-tech/inside-baes-stri...
Could also be a paid PR campaign if you're the cynical type. 50/50
Most likely a bit of both, you are not alone in noticing the pattern.
A trillion dollar plane that's cutting edge probably has a pretty decent opposition market budget behind it from adversarial nations, and it's not very difficult to assume that these articles are part of that somehow.
One addition you have a lot of readers hitting one story, google or someone notices and ... someone(s) is going to be exposed to that topic more even if only because Google decides to push it on some of those folks.
I don't need a foreign actor to explain why people in America today are unsympathetic to a new technologically advanced fighter jet. Even the foreign threats of today aren't the type where air superiority would help at all.
In the case of domestic extremism the theatre gets pushed to surveillance + communication monitoring.
The F-35 is designed to be more expensive but cheaper to maintain. Fleet maintenance, especially in the US eats up a massive, massive chunk of the budget. So while the F/A 18 might be 1/3rd the price, once you count in maintenance, it might not be much cheaper...and it's last generation. There is a complex math behind it. There is absolutely waste, fraud and abuse in the military...but it's probably not as much as you think since the majority of military spending in the US is actually on pensions, healthcare, housing, salaries and maintenance of aging equipment. Things that in other countries are much cheaper or just not given to soldiers. Comparing the US to China and Russian (at least their public spending numbers) is so misleading. New research and projects is a drop in the bucket.
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms in not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
Address by President Dwight D. Eisenhower "The Chance for Peace" delivered before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16,1953.
If they had any sense they would have cancelled the F-35 program long ago and rerun a set of competition trials for each of the three separate roles.
Gun violence has little connection to budget. That’s a straw man. Dangerous water is a failure of local governments (such as Flint;) the vast majority of American water is perfectly fine. As far as government workers being “paycheck to paycheck” — that’s a problem with financial literacy. Government jobs generally have great benefits and aren’t minimum wage. Americans need more Dave Ramsey and not necessarily more Bernie Sanders.
Quiet the opposite. I would not be surprised if discrediting the f35 is a US physiological warfare
People are more likely to submit what they're reading if a similar post has already proven to be popular.
Overall JSF program aside, this is a fairly interesting and in depth (at least for this audience, this is probably just a high level overview to someone who works on electronic warfare technology) article on a particular subsystem so why wouldn't it be popular here?
Most of the negative coverage is more around that such very expensive aircraft (and program) may not be that useful, for example, to fight terrorism or low-tech nations (and like another person mentioned in this thread, there may be more pressing matters in the US).
In the longer term however, it can be argued that maintaining that kind of advanced aerial capability may be paramount to keep balance vs countries like China.
And if you think the F-35 is too expensive, check out the F-22 which was purely air superiority!
Now that the thing is actually flying, and we're starting to hear from pilots and people have gotten to see it at airshows, etc., naturally it's getting better press. This is the payoff, it's what the thing is designed to do. So it better damn well fly well and look good doing it.
There's still an open question and a debate to be had about whether the aircraft is WORTH the insane cost, and WHY the damn thing cost so much to begin with, though. I suspect it's like most things American at the moment -- we pay far too much, and get far too little for our money, compared to literally anyone else on the planet who might choose to build the same thing. (See also: healthcare, education, public transportation, physical infrastructure... we pay more and get less. Military equipment is no exception.)
But yeah, I'd expect to see better press now than when the thing was all but vaporware and a big bill.
There's no question about why it costs so much. The cost is including ~3,000 planes and covers up to 2070 in maintenance costs. That's a ridiculous number of planes to be maintained for decades. We'll never come close to building 3,000 however, the program will end long before that.
Russia's new Su-57 planes are at least $50 million each. Their GDP per capita is 1/6th that of the US. Imagine paying for that if you're them. Equivalent to $300 million in the US economy, except Russia is a very poor nation and can't rationally afford anything close to spending even $50m per plane.
Let's go with Russia's $50m number however. 3,000 planes at $50m = $150 billion just to get them built. Russia would probably spend another $600 billion maintaining those planes over four decades. The F35 unit cost is around $80 to $110 million depending on the version.
The US is getting a stellar deal in scope to its economy compared to what the Russians are spending on their latest planes.
The MiG-35 will cost at least double what the last MiG-29 variation did, or around $40 million. $240 million when adjusted to US per capita output figures.
For Russia it's even worse if we look at the absolute scale of their economy (from which the cost of those planes must come out of), a mere $1.6 trillion, or nearly 1/13th the size of the US economy. If you adjust the cost on that basis, it's like the US spending $650 million per F35. Nobody would think that's a deal. Russia isn't even remotely close to matching the US in adjusted terms on its new jet costs, their wild spending is on another planet entirely.
The Chengdu J-20 looks to cost $50 million per unit or more. That's in China, where they should be able to do everything radically cheaper than the US, and where they also have a GDP per capita 1/6th that of the US. $50 million is an astronomical sum for them to be spending per plane based on their economy. Or if we adjust based on the absolute size of their economy (the US economy is roughly 47-50% larger), it still pushes that unit cost up near the cheapest F35 variant.
The Eurofighter Typhoon, an older plane, costs as much per unit as the F35.
I'm not seeing any evidence that the F35 is expensive compared to other jets in the latest generation when you adjust for the US economic output level.
In all seriousness, this article is pretty interesting and kinda stands on its own.
Once I saw drunken Chinese soldiers spinning circles in the middle of a small town with a stolen tractor. Super weird scene. The locals were not happy about it.
I had the sense that mainland China IS pretty safe from petty theft because all the police. However, what is up with all the open prostitution when is it supposed to be illegal?
What were we talking about?