I’m fond of the saying “once you understand people’s incentives, you understand everything” as it applies to contracting.
I will add, however, that fixed price contracts have their own problems as it relates to cutting corners. E.g., it can put downward pressure on retaining talent and performing best practices because it incentivizes under-bidding and then cutting corners to make a profit. E.g., “you cobbled together some VBA in a spreadsheet once 20 years ago and will work for pennies? Congratulations, you’re our new head of software development!”
A lot of the problems can be attributed to poor contract/spec management and poor oversight. Part of the key is having good requirements and also the contractual teeth/intestinal fortitude to hold contractors feet to the fire
I was NOT directly involved in F-35, so I can't speak to the exact amount of sleaze that occurred with the prime contractor.
I'd love to see a real competition! (new contractors, new ideas, new teams, new airframe ideas). And two engines, yeesh.
Anyways, cost plus is great at moving risk to the government. FFP is at the other end of the spectrum, moving all risk to the contractor.
[Unnecessary edit: I'm a fan of the textron scorpion-as a light attack fighter we could modify]
This is why R&D projects can't be treated in the same way as delivery of well understood tech that simply needs to be mass produced well and efficiently.
Of course, the contractors probably skim a little bit off the top of the 20 million back to themselves. They might for example bill for machine team on the CNC or charge $200/hr per an employee and only pay $60 (note that they have expenses for training, downtime, office space, equipment and management which that 200/hour needs to account for so the employee isn't getting screwed that badly.
Less moral contractors might build projects which intentionally fail but meet the specifications so that the gov't needs to execute a change order at which point they would get additional fee as part of the change order, however with the DOD you can get your company put on a blacklist which will mean you cannot win any more DOD contracts. But I have heard of a California construction company doing that repeatedly over the course of 30 years successfully. In the dod world, most companies try to propose improvements to the original contract. Typically they will have yearly goals associated with submitting and winning change orders as its an easier source of revenue than bidding and winning new contracts which typically have a 30% win rate.
I agree with your overall opinion but I do think the govt has a lot of residual risk in cost-plus. When a contractor is incentivized to cut corners, the mitigation is govt oversight. Meaning the contractor can keep cutting corners until caught. Since the govt ultimately owns these systems they can be left holding the bag (particularly when requirement specs are weak)
I ran across an interesting one earlier, understanding Maslow's Needs by negative example: We usually say that, when someone has food and shelter and safety, when they have friends and feel a sense of belonging, they can pursue higher stuff. And we know at some level that if someone is starving, they will do anything to find food -- civilized behavior goes out the window in that mode. But we forget that if someone has no friends and doesn't feel a sense of belonging, they will also stop at nothing to rectify THAT.
Suddenly so much conspiracy stuff makes sense.
Those are usually called “hygiene factors” in the literature.
"Hygiene" for the record has nothing to do with deodorant, at least not per se, but instead the willingness to remove negative traits. However, just because you remove negative traits doesn't mean you have any positives. Just cuz you took a shower this morning, wear clean clothes, and trim your fingernails doesn't mean you're not an asshole, and that we should friends with you.
Same deal with jobs, cultures, etc. The work may be risky and dangerous, but if there are enough positives to outweigh those negatives, people might stick around. But even if you strip out the negatives, people will eventually float away from jobs that aren't fulfilling or that don't offer any positives.
https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2018/10/02/no-its-not-the-in...
There’s a distinction to be made between excusing bad behavior, but rather they explaining it. The article seems focused on the former, I’m more interested in the latter.
There are intrinsic and extrinsic incentives. I think the important part not touched upon is that for those actors extrinsically motivated (e.g., status, money, etc.) the system incentive will influence behavior much more than those more affected by intrinsic motivations.
The article is right that extrinsic motivations don’t excuse immoral behavior but when morals are lacking external controls are still needed. Developing the right extrinsic incentives provides guardrails for those who tend to lack intrinsic motivation that align. The article seems to think the solution is to “just act morally” which works at the individual level but that’s not really a policy at a system level (especially once we acknowledge everyone doesn’t share the same goals/motivations/morals)
I.e. if you aren't willing to stand up in court and talk about why Tootie is better than Tito, despite Tito being 10% cheaper, you better be selecting Tito or looking for another job.
https://blog.theodorewatson.com/understanding-the-federal-go...
I’ve found people are very risk adverse in this regard and would prefer to select the lowest bid instead of potentially defending their decision during a protest.
select the best solution to meet your needs, mostly irregardless of cost, but be sure you can articulate why you are buying from A.
I.e. You can pick whatever vendor you want, provided you are happy to stand up, under oath, in court and talk about WHY you selected vendor A over vendors B, C and D.
So far so I have no experience in court defending our choices.
Does anyone have any views on what constitutes canonical reading on incentives? Some of the classic game theory works? Would love to hear opinions on this.
In fact, I will go a step further - most incentives are chosen by well meaning people. There is neither malice nor incompetence going on. What happens is that every incentive can be perverted, and will be perverted over time. Over time, then that incentive, that was once chosen with good intentions, becomes perverse.
> When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
In my experience, it might actually be a useful approximation of reality.
Take the requirements for example. If they aren’t airtight, you’ll get into a wordsmithing scenario where the contractor claims they met the requirement and it becomes a game where the team with the best lawyer wins. Write the requirements too explicitly and contractors will push back saying “tell us what you want, not how we’re supposed to do it.”
A somewhat silly example is if you specify you want unit testing on all safety critical code paths a contractor may claim they define running a compiler as “unit testing”. A contracting officer may not be technically savvy enough to push back and when the subject matter experts try to leave negative contract comments (that get reviewed when awarding future contracts) they get scrubbed because its not worth the fight in the eyes of the contracting officer.
Unfortunately, just saying “do good work” just doesn’t...work
With DoD you have to add in various accountability steps, political footballs, public opinion, etc.
If you've spent time around the DC area you'd be shocked at the number of adverts for things like the F-22 that you see. One time I took the metro from NoVA to MD, with a stop off downtown, and counted at least 6. They're not just bringing lawyers and playing contractor games, they're aggressively marketing to everyone.
Those kinds of purchases being swayed by subway ads... I really hope it's a joke.
The F-20 may have been the last time an aircraft company ever pitched an airplane developed on the company's money. Despite being highly praised by all who flew it (including Chuck Yeager), it's ugly demise at the hands of politics (it was less than half the price of the F-16) was an example to all to never do this again...
The problem with massive development efforts like this is that there aren't a lot of competitors. In this particular field, there are two, and not really even quite two exactly.
Lockheed, Boeing, Northrup, etc...
"Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence'
Human societies have become incredibly more complex over time, and development of communication has contributed to it.
The point I am trying to make here is that this is not cultural decline, but rather a society that has grown incredibly more complex, while we humans have not learnt how to deal with it.
It failed to replace existing fleet of fighters, like the F-16, and on ground support, like the A10. That is not excellence.
All of the engineering problems of the F-35 have been well known from the early days of the project, I know because I have studied closely ever since Norway decided to buy it. But the massive propaganda from the weapons industry has clouded this debate from the start.
F-35 is a huge fiasco on multiple levels - policy, contracting, diplomacy, engineering, warfare, etc
Reason why it is even bigger failure than the F-22 is that the US decided to sell the F-35 overseas. This exposed the project to more scrutiny and increased the stakes. Can’t be hidden away like the embarrassing F-22.
If US decide to build a new fighter aircraft I predict it will be a failure too.
You also might want to consider its extremely good flight record. Until recently there hadn’t been a single crash.
The software issue isn’t great (I blame C++ to an extent) but it’s also improving. The plane is now certified for many different weapons systems.
With stealth as great of a game-changer as it is, the incremental cost of the F-35 isn’t much. Developing a new fighter that pretty well duplicates the F-35 except for stealthy materials probably isn’t worth the cost. The F-35A cost keeps dropping...
As to not replacing “existing fleet of fighters”, that sure isn’t what the pilots are saying. So far it’s been well over 10-1 kill ratios against Gen 4 airframes at all Red Flag type competitions.
I love jets and the F-22 is both my favorite fighter and likely the best air superiority fighter in the world, so I get where you are coming from, but it is not an excellent aircraft for the current USAF mission when you look at it as a whole.
Not only is the procurement cost of an F-22 extremely high, operationally it has been plagued by issues that hare only partially elevated by a maintenance program that even by fighter jet standards is considered expensive and frequent. The stealth coating in particular is very finnicky and has to be worked up constantly. Approximately half of F-22 are non-op at any given time, even getting training time is extremely difficult.
The F-22 is like an exotic sportscar. Nobody denies that if it's in the air and functional, it's a great performer, but we would never make the bugatti veyron the standard patrol car for all police - not only would it be mindbogglingly expensive, durability and high maintenance would make it impractical, not to mention overkill in most situations. To make another car analogy, it would be like buying a Ford F350 for picking up your groceries once a week.
It's like some of the pocket battleships produced between WW1 and WW2. The technology was incredible, but expensive. And by the time war actually came, they were outdated. I think the F-22 will meet the same fate (and the B-2 as well). Silver bullets that were never really needed.
I also think many of your criticisms are due to the small amount actually produced. Spares were never produced in adequate volumes, and when a single accident reduces your aircraft inventory by almost 1% it makes you risk averse.
Also pocket battleship mostly refers to the heavy cruisers that Germany built during their rearmament program.
For the UK, five King George class battleships were commissioned after the start of Britain's declaration of war in 9/39. They all saw combat.
France's Richelieu was commissioned in 4/40, and saw limited combat in Dakar.
Even Japan's Yamato class battleships were commissioned before Japan invaded China.
Perhaps you meant that no battleships that weren't laid down prior to the start of WW2 saw combat?
For the clueless like me, NGAD doesn't stand for "Not Give A Damn", but for "Next-Generation Air Dominance"; or less pompously, a sixth-generation jet fighter.
Sec. David Norquist [1] was another Deputy SecDef who helped reign in DoD costs. He also served as Comptroller before DepSecDef. There was whispers that he did actually fire people for wasting DoD funds.
I have heard the opposite from a test pilot who has flown it. He fucking hates it.
https://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/f-35-faces-mos...
Chip Berke is an F22 and F35 test pilot, and the first F35 Squadron commander. He's probably the most qualified person on the planet to talk about fifth gen aircraft: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxK6O5--9Z0&t=203s
EDIT: Although to be fair, I wrote that before looking at your links, I feel like that context is important (although I stand by my statement).
The F35 has been badly politicized, but it has also been the victim of an absolute shitload of criticism from people who want it to be something it was never intended to be and are unhappy that the F22 was cancelled early.
If it were just that Colonel Berke liked the plane, it would be one thing. He really explains it in detail in the video. I'll admit I wasn't quite sold on the the plane years ago, but once I saw this video it pretty thoroughly changed my mind.
I realize the video is a bit long, and I almost never post links to videos -- but this one is well worth the watch.
What made his criticisms ironically stupid was he'd never even SEEN the jet up close, or spoken to an actual pilot, only reviewed documents and read memos, until the very end of his tenure as Director of OT&E. He was not retained when Gen. Mattis took over as SecDef.
I've heard nothing but praise for LtCol. Chip Berke. He is a great fighter pilot, although now retired from the USMC.
The man cannot criticize the project publicly. In fact, he and his squadron probably have real opinions that never leave their base locker rooms.
What Colonel Berke did in that video is quite the opposite of “not criticize”.
The concept of modularity is a sound one. Imagine this: You buy an F35 and it comes with 2 sets of wings. It has a empty bay just behind the pilot, and it also comes with a lift engine and a spare fuel tank, and a tailhook that can be easily slotted into place if you want it. A trained ground crew, in a couple of hours, can swap parts around and turn it into an A, B or C variant, and then into another one for its next mission.
The problem is that the materials needed to create such a F35 kit don't exist and won't for the foreseeable future. So what you end up with is 3 similar looking aircraft that happen to share the same name and have a vague resemblance but have surprisingly little in common, for triple the price.
The common bits are actually really useful to have in common. The radar is expensive to develop. The optical sensors are too. Engines are expensive, and the F135 engine is like 1/6 of the aircraft's cost.
Development is a bit more expensive, because you have 3 airframes with slightly different characteristics, but much of it the same between the three as far as systems that go inside.
It's definitely not 3x the price to develop the 3 different variants.
And they're buying new F-35s for cheaper than a new F-16.
I disagree, there have been cases where it could have been very useful. For example in the 1980s the RAF were operating the Harrier for the close support role (from austere forward airfields) and the RN were operating the Sea Harrier for air defence, but when the Falklands War kicked off, RAF aircraft were brought onto the carriers. The RAF were also operating the Tornado for long-range bombing and another variant of Tornado for air defence, plus the Jaguar. That's 4 different aircraft that could be merged into a "kit" F35 if it were possible to do so.
The F-35B is explicitly the replacement for the Harrier (Sea or regular). The F-35A is designed for both interdiction/strike (it is a "strike fighter"), as well as being able to swing role[0] into air defense. The F-35C is explicitly only for USN requirements. No one else is going to be buying them, because the only allied country that operates CATOBAR aircraft is France, who likes their Rafales.
For all of the F135 being literally the most powerful low bypass turbofan in the world, it's still not enough power to be able to adequetely lift the F-35B without the B being lightened compared to the A. It's not just parts they left off, like the arresting hook, but different parts to shave weight. For example, the weapons bays are smaller. Tails are smaller. Airframe structure is lighter, which reduces durability, and also limits the maximum g-load (22% lower! than the A model). They also had to make the attachment of the wings more difficult compared to earlier plans, because the easier wing attachments weighed too much. The left shoulder of the aircraft are different, because the A model has a gun there that the others don't. These limitations are baked in, and unbaking them would make it too heavy to be able to perform the required role.
[0]: Swing role is more than just being able to do more than one role, but being able to do both of them during the same flight.
Meanwhile F-35B exists pretty much only due to USMC to the point that I would be doubtful of any praise for the F-35 if it came from USMC crew. Then it got pushed as option for export, often seemingly presenting F-35B as being as capable as F-35A.
Meanwhile the ALIS without which F-35 is an expensive paperweight turned out to be a very expensive turd, that finally got renamed as ODIN after awarding the new contract to the same group that fscked up ALIS :/
The F-35B is obviously not going to be capable in the same way as the A. However it's significantly more capable than the Harrier, which is the important part for everyone buying it. There is no other current STOVL carrier fighter jet available. And the reduced capabilities may largely not matter to those users, in exchange for the increased capabilities for being able to launch them off ships/very limited area land strips. I think the only nation that is going to not be launching them off ships is Singapore, which is very restricted in land area.
You speak in the past tense but both are actually in the water now! One of them is working up for her first live deployment.
I personally don't believe that CATOBAR was ever an option on these ships, there are too many clues. One is that both cats and traps are enormous pieces of machinery that need to be integrated with the hull and dissipate enormous amounts of heat, they can't be pasted in afterwards, they have to be designed in from the start. The catapults require steam or electrical power for EMALS, the QE class can't do steam and can't generate that much power. Operating cats and traps needs lots of deck crew, there aren't enough people without growing the RN by a few thousand people all told. And finally keeping pilots current for arrested landings isn't feasible if you want the freedom to embark RAF crews at short notice, who have only used runways. Basically BAe said they could do it as a tickbox exercise in the planning stages, but when the government looked at doing it and switching to F35C, it would have cost as much as rebuilding them both from scratch.
Though AVM was killed by sequestrations, the work continued in other programs — and of course there was a lot of learning taken from various unclassified programs to behind the green door, so to speak.
I get this, but I also wonder if the same kind of bugs or unintended behavior in a software system aren't just as likely in the protocols, procedures, and chains of command we build for humans to deploy that weaponry. You've got AI doomsday (a la "War Games") on one hand, and bureaucratic doomsday ("Doctor Strangelove") on the other.
For example it's very possible that a "Should I launch the nukes?" algorithm would've come up with a different answer than Stanislav Petrov did[1]. There's a similar story about US missileers disregarding a glitch in their own command and control system on Okinawa but the authenticity is suspect.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_al...
Repeating the same old "lol quadrocopter go 2000g brrrrrt" meme just makes you look stupid.
It’s a strategic bomber, not a fighter.
(it's not like these bombers are built to sustain high G forces anyway)
A cost-plus contract is a contributor, but not the root of why the JSF program went astray.
The fundamental flaw of the F-35 is that they tried to make one air frame for 3 very different sets of requirements. By doing so they compromised all three variants yet failed to achieve the cost savings they thought they would get from that approach.
Equally as important is the fact that it was politically engineered to be almost uncancelable. The future of US and allied air power was staked on this one platform so all of the stakeholders had very high motivation to keep pushing on long after it wasn't prudent to do so.
Then there's the fact the DoD and Congress removed some of the normal procurement guard rails to try to shorten the timeline, but also made it more difficult to cancel. "Concurrent development" with the JSF meant that series production began before all testing and evaluation was done. This meant that when problems were found there were costly retrofits. It also means that the multitude of serious shortcomings were found after production had began, making it more difficult to justify stopping the program.
Then consider that production of parts for the F-35 is spread out across over 40 states (I wanna say it was 47). Then there's the part where the DoD allowed the contractor to write a significant portion of the requirements. It's no wonder things went sideways.
> The aircraft itself is apparently excellent at what it does, but that doesn't erase just how much grift was involved in this program for decades.
But that's the problem, it is not excellent at what it does. When you read the DOT&E reports about its mission capabilities there are numerous serious defects and limitations to what the aircraft can do. Granted, some of those issues are getting addressed, but the costs of the program makes it harder to justify.
Ultimately the whole reason for the F-35 to exist was that the high parts commonality and the very high production numbers would save big money on costs. It failed to do that.
I think in order to be successful, they probably have to implement some sort of "small teams" approach; I'd imagine a lot of tech developed for JSF/F-35 can be rapidly rolled into a 5th gen+ fighter without reinventing the wheel...but they'd need to firewall the project into small focused teams who really know what they'd want to build.
The root of the F-35 program's problems is a cost plus style contract that gave Lockheed every incentive to overrun on cost and time table. Ash Carter fixed that by telling Lockheed if they didn't agree to his new contract he'd kill the entire thing. And oh hey what a surprise suddenly the marginal cost of a new F-35 started hitting the target numbers.
The aircraft itself is apparently excellent at what it does, but that doesn't erase just how much grift was involved in this program for decades.
The other big thing driving the Air Force to heavily restructure it's approach is they know they just can't have these decades long development programs. They want to be able to iterate much faster. It's all still classified, but apparently the first few attempts at this more agile approach are in fact actually working, like with the NGAD program.