That's nearly 20 years to develop a single airframe. Yes, it's the most sophisticated airframe to date, but 20 years is not trivial.
The F-35 had many issues during trials and early deployment - some are excusable for a new airframe and some were not. I suspect the issue wasn't "move fast, break things" but rather massive layers of bureaucracy and committees that paralyzed the development pipeline.
The F-22 was part of the Advanced Tactical Fighter (ATF) program which dates back to 1981. It's prototype, the YF-22 first flew in 1990, and the F-22 itself first flew in 1997. It entered production in 2005. Again, 20+ years to field a new airframe.
Something is very wrong if it takes 20+ years to field new military technologies. By the time these technologies are fielded, a whole generation of employees have retired and leadership has turned over multiple times.
Wartime is more agile, you quickly close the loop but downside is sometimes does not work and when it does not work, there might be a people cost. US has done it with fighters before, F-4U Corsair was disaster initially in carrier landings and killed some pilots in training. However, this was considered acceptable cost to get what was clearly very capable fighter out there.
At the end of the day it's all people cost. Just because it's fractional lives wasted in the form of man hours worked to pay the taxes to pay for unnecessary paper pushing labor instead of whole lives doesn't actually make the waste less (I suspect it's actually more in a lot of cases).
If your second sentence is correct, then let’s allocate taxes to digging holes and filling them in? Ad absurdum but I think it applies? Like it seems reasonable to have an opinion on whether a function should continue to be funded by tax dollars. In a properly operating economy this would open up skilled labor to work somewhere more useful. Unless they weren’t actually skilled, in which case yes you have a problem hmm…
No. They mean killing as in ordering a pilot to fly an airplane with less cautious testing resulting in a crash and the death of the crew.
> I don’t see anywhere that mentioned “killing”.
It is there. This is what stackskipton said “Your primary concern is not spending a ton of money and not getting a bunch of people killed.” They even use the example of the F-4U Corsairs mentioning how during the program pilots died.
This is the comment potato3732842 replied to and this is the context their message should be interpreted in. They compared “fractional lives wasted” which they define as “man hours worked to pay the taxes to pay for unnecessary paper pushing labor” with “whole lives”. They don’t define what they mean by whole lives lost, but since they wrote it as a response to stackskipton‘s comment from context i think they mean pilot deaths.
To me it seems they are arguing that if we accept more mangled pilot bodies pulled out of burning wreckages then we can do the program cheaper. And to understand where they stand on the question they call the work needed to prevent those pilot deaths “unnecessary paper pushing”. Is your reading of the comment different?
I withdraw my comment, I don’t feel that way, sorry everyone.
This is like asking what good do reserves do if you spend them down in a crisis.
The bureaucracy aims to keep waste and corruption to a minimum during peacetime. In war, the aims change--you're now not only ramping up production, but the penalties for fucking with a war are typically more drastic than lining one's pockets during peacetime.
You can absolutely make an argument about accepting reduced efficiency to dilute concentrated harms (e.g. keep a test pilot from dying), but none of the peddlers of process dare even make that argument so I suspect the math is questionable without hand waving or subjective valuation (e.g. face saved avoiding errors).
In peacetime, everything is different. You don’t know who your next opponent is going to be, so you need to keep options open. You don’t know if you’ll have a war before the equipment you just bought rots away. You don’t want wartime production levels and stifling your wider economy. You also don’t want a Russia situation where you ignore value for money estimates and audits only to find the money you spent on missiles went in the back pocket of a random colonel.
Everyone keeps saying this yet it seems to be the opposite, results for dollars tradeoffs are better in wartime.
If anything it seems like the difference is that during wartime it's easier for the end users to tell the bureaucracy to get out of the way and as a result value for money is unchanged or even improved.
>You also don’t want a Russia situation where you ignore value for money estimates and audits only to find the money you spent on missiles went in the back pocket of a random colonel.
There is no difference to the taxpayer or the soldier in the trench whether the money went into one specific colonel's back pocket or got pissed away on running organizational process. The money is gone and the missile isn't there.
At you can least throw colonel in jail (or out a window, because Russia). Imagine if instead of a colonel's pocket the money was spent pushing papers around to no end? It would be the Spiderman pointing at Spiderman meme and nobody would be held responsible except perhaps an unlucky scapegoat.
Do you understand what economies of scale are? Of course some production costs go down because you're producing far more. You're producing at this high level because the enemy is busy blowing up your equipment!
This is also why it's easy to show results: you have live test subjects in the form of the enemy you're trying to blow up and who's trying to blow you up.
Hell, the article also makes clear that this "low-bureaucracy nirvina" that you seem to believe in was costing the US taxpayer huge sums of money in waste and inefficiency.
> At you can least throw colonel in jail (or out a window, because Russia).
What planet are you on? Russia only found out because their tanks ran out of diesel and got towed away by Ukrainian farmers! Are you seriously suggesting the optimal result is for NATO forces to find out our equipment never got manufactured right when we need it?
Every comment I've seen from you has been "bureaucracy bad!" without any clear knowledge beyond some handwaving, usually ignoring the topic at hand.
Do you understand what results are? Not having something because people lied and took money is no different to the guy in the foxhole or the guy ordering those guys around than not having something because nobody lied and the money got spent paying people to do work that did nothing to get that something closer to being actually available.
>Hell, the article also makes clear that this "low-bureaucracy nirvina" that you seem to believe in was costing the US taxpayer huge sums of money in waste and inefficiency.
The article literally spends approximately 1/3 of its scroll bar talking about the problems with the system and how all the steps, all the process, all the tangential work that must per the rules be done despite not being part of the critical path of fielding systems prevents said systems from being delivered on time or on budget.
>Are you seriously suggesting the optimal result is for NATO forces to find out our equipment never got manufactured right when we need it?
It speaks volumes that your responses are constantly attempting toward strawmen and false dichotomies rather than assess what the right amount of procurement process is.
In peacetime, the American in the foxhole doesn’t die nor does the American or Brit across from him. Everyone merely has simulated results.
You ever heard the phrase "you fight how you train"? We're training our suppliers to be crap.
How do we fix it? Treat hurricane season as a test run for manufacturing relief shelters?
So I take it, no, you don't understand. You're comparing costs and processes that exist outside of wartime to costs and processes that exist during wartime and haven't considered why, despite being told.
> It speaks volumes that your responses are constantly attempting toward strawmen and false dichotomies
I find it hilarious that you state this after your first 2 paragraphs.
> the right amount of procurement process is.
This childish fixation on a flat number is why you don't seem able to understand the problem.
Let's go back to the top, where you said:
> If we toss the process when effective expenditure of resources toward results matter and consequences are the most serious then the process must be less efficient at producing good results for the expenditure than the corruption (or whatever else the process is replacing). So then why are we running it at all?
This was in the context of comparing wartime to peacetime procurement processes. My entire comment addressed the difference between those environments, which you completely ignored to have a childish rant about "too much process." This isn't the first time you've responded to my comments by ignoring the substance and instead trying to (badly) strawman it.
Okay, let's think about what risks might be associated with making a fighter plane. The plane could blow up. The plane could be hard to maintain. The plane could get fighter pilots killed.
In a war, death is already on the table and soldiers are, more or less, expendable. In peacetime, this is not the case.
It's not that when we are in war, everything goes lovey dovey and great. No. Shit goes wrong constantly.
But we don't have time to care, we have bigger fish to fry: war.
It is way easier to scam someone when your major output is just blueprints that everyone acknowledges aren't even ready to be used.
This thread is discussing bureaucracy as the cause of waste and corruption during peacetime.
This is the problem though - the bureaucracy is guaranteed to add a lot of cost, both in its own personnel, the personnel in the companies employed to deal with the bureaucracy, and the additional time taken for all bids to be evaluated. This is guaranteed to slow down everything, with the promise that it will try to prevent issues. Which, if the bureaucracy is badly run, weaponised, or captured, is a terrible trade.
Sorry, but is this sarcasm ? Pity that HN doesn't alow limited emojis to convey intent.
They decided to make one airframe in three variants for three different branches. They were trying to spend money they didn't have and thought this corner cutting would save it.
> Something is very wrong if it takes 20+ years to field next-generation military technologies.
It's the funding. The American appetite for new "war fighters" is exceptionally low when there's no exigent conflict facing us. They're simply building the _wrong thing_.
That puts the US on good footing, ready to face peer and near-peer, next-generation warfare.
If Ukraine has taught us anything, it's off-the-shelf - ready today - weapons are needed in significant quantity. Drone warfare has changed almost everything - we're seeing $300 off-the-shelf drones kill millions of dollars of equipment and personnel. If the military needs anti-drone capabilities, it can't wait 20+ years to field them.
We don't just need to pick on new/next-generation military technologies either. The US currently produces between 30,000-40,000 155mm artillery shells a month, but Ukraine (at peak) expended 10,000 per day[1]. The loop is far too long...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/ukraine-...
Wars are incredibly expensive, and the US should not be producing weapons, in peacetime, at the rate they would be expended during an active war. What we should have the ability to rapidly scale production.
The best and cheapest weapons are the ones never used, but making no weapons at all is the most expensive choice in the end.
There's a ton of work going on in this area, and has been for a while (check out DARPA's AVM project for some of it).
That's a joke, of course, but even if they were demilitarised variants there'd probably still be a market for it.
http://www.exarmyvehicles.com/offer/tracked-vehicles/tanks
https://mortarinvestments.eu/ArmouredVehicles
https://miltrade.com/pages/military-vehicles-for-sale-in-eur...
https://tanksales.co.uk/sales/
Ten or fifteen years back, I had an ambition to buy such a vehicle and drive it around at Burning Man. I eventually settled for a deuce-and-a-half, which caused enough struggle and frustration that I'm glad I never actually bought a tank.
I think there is a much smaller market for people wanting to pay the new price
In his final case, which he also snitched during, he argued that a law he had been charged under (a firearms regulation law) was unconstitutional. The judge who heard his case was very much in favor of the gun control law and had made numerous public statements as such, but he also likely knew that the law was on very shaky constitutional ground, and had been fishing for a test case to advance it. And he found that in Miller.
So he concurred with Miller about the law's unconstitutionality! That resulted in the case being appealed up to the Supreme Court. Conveniently for the state, neither Miller or his defense representation appeared. So it was argued with no defense whatsoever. And Miller was found shot to death shortly thereafter, which wasn't seen as particularly suspicious given his snitching habits. And that case set the ultimate standard that's still appealed to, to this very day.
This is made even more ironic by the fact that the weapon he was being charged for possession of as being 'dangerous and unusual' was just a short barrel shotgun, which was regularly used in the military.
[1] - https://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/ECM_PRO_060964.p...
Probably because if people could buy tanks to protect themselves, then the police would also need tanks to deconflict a situation where someone with a tank is upset and the damages are a bit higher when tank rounds start flying around. Imagine two neighbors getting into it in a a town, not to mention a city.
Even portable nukes are a stretch in the logic of "I need to protect my home" from intruders, not to mention the hundred kiloton yield ones.
As far as nuclear bombs go... there are restrictions on owning fissile material in general that would preclude owning enough to have a working bomb.
More tanks on Ukraine's side wouldn't change current battlefield massively, drones limit how much use from tanks you can get. If you can scale your production to 10-50x within weeks then all is fine but thats almost impossible practically.
If anybody thinks we are heading for a peaceful stable decade without need of such items in massive numbers must have had head buried in the sand pretty deep.
Our scaling is human oriented - add more shifts. Maybe we can adapt new manufacturing methods like screw extrusion mentioned in the article
As a big part of Europe is learning at great cost.
How should the US make the manufacture of, say, the primers for artillery shells "rapidly scalable" in a way that is different from building a large stockpile? Be specific. Would you nationalize factories but leave them idle? You certainly won't have time to build or retool factories and staff them during a peer conflict. How would you present this to Congress vs. running those factories in peacetime as a jobs program?
Yes. Historically, these would be the national armories, Navy Yards, and Air Force plants. You know, Springfield Armory (of .30-06 Springfield fame, now a museum), Watertown Arsenal (now a fucking Home Depot, among other things), Charlestown Navy Yard(Boston, now largely a museum), Philadelphia Navy Yard (redeveloped? not my area), Air Force Plant 42 (near LA, still in use by Skunk Works among others), and others.
Having the capital idle/underutilized but maintained and a core group of people with the institutional knowledge ready to pass on during that rapid scaling up is what would make the factories able to scale up. Gun barrels (of all sizes) are relatively specialized from a manufacturing standpoint. Nobody is seriously arguing for having capacity to scale up to build 16" guns for battleships, but 5" guns are extremely common in naval use and 155mm guns are common for artillery. Being able to surge production of those without having to go through a learning curve would be a really great ability to have.
Interestingly, Goex, maker of black powder, is located on a military facility (Camp Minden) because that process remains both hazardous and surprisingly relevant to modern military use.
Side note, if you're ever in central Mass, the Springfield Armory is a great tour.
Agile, vertically-integrated weapons manufacturing... in 1820.
They've got an original wooden copying lathe: traces a finished master rifle stock with a contacting friction wheel, then carves the same shape onto a blank. https://www.nps.gov/spar/learn/historyculture/thomas-blancha...
It was finally closed in 1968.
Of course then people would complain about all the money wasted not utilizing the equipment/space enough.
I think this is why the USA, UK and France are all big exporters in the defence sector.
I was working on one when we got shut down due to a political squabble resulting in sequestrations. Reminds me of our recent shutdown in many ways.
This is, of course, a hard problem to solve, but solving it would be quite valuable for the US even without any wars.
https://www.abundanthousingvancouver.com/vancouver_s_rocky_s...
> The response from Vancouver council was swift. Less than a year after the introduction of Order 200, council ordered a bylaw amendment expressly designed to constrain the order as much as possible. The city was still bound by the terms of the order for existing homes, but they could use a legal loophole to ensure that it did not apply to new homes. The city’s chief lawyer Donald McTaggart was incredulous:
The corporation counsel told the committee that the amendment it suggests will be quite legal, but he expressed the opinion that the idea of Order 200 is “being lost sight of.” ... “The government,” he reminded aldermen, “said ‘forget zoning bylaws’ for the sake of getting on with the war.”
Given that the actual peer conflict that matters to the US will almost certainly be decided by air and sea power, this all seems very much like pointless distraction.
But evidently it can be done, because it is being done. I suppose we are now more ready for some weird anti-matter goldilocks outcome where the PRC can somehow land and supply forces in Taiwan, while still somehow also being incapable of preventing the US from sending forces and supplies to the island. Seems like a weird fixation, but hey, it doesn't cost that many billions of dollars to accommodate Elbridge Colby.
Of course, our ally who actually needs artillery shells for counter battery fire, South Korea, can produce them in vast quantities. They are also conveniently located in the Pacific. It is one thing for them to be wary about doing too much help Ukraine. Russian can complicate their life quite a bit.It would be quite another thing if the US actually asked for shells in the middle of a war with China.
And the US does not have enough missiles for a war with China or even Russia realistically.
It's why there's a panic for artillery shells. They realize any real symmetrical with an enemy that isn't some guys in caves would become a war of attrition through numbers fast.
Lobbing billion dollar missiles as a strategy fails when you run out of money for them.
The thing is that size matters in wars of attrition, but experience almost always wins.
China's problem is that they lack the experience the US Navy gained over decades of pretty much non-stop war even if they did not go up any significant adversary since the Vietnam war.
The administration claims that it isn't distracted by Ukraine and Europe, and wants to focus on threat from China, but the strategic imperative for increasing shell production is Ukraine and the threat from Russia to Europe. Let the Europeans sort that out. And, if the Israelis want lots of shells, let them sort it out, or better yet do without.
Or acknowledge that you are doing something that is apart from your main strategic focus. It is possible to walk and chew bubblegum. Bubblegum doesn't cost all that that much.
But the pretense that artillery shells are desperately needed for deterrence in the South China Sea is rather tiresome. There are far more important munitions supply gaps. Just because a couple of conservative think tanks wanted to make hay about about sending shells to Ukraine a couple of years ago is political drama, not something actually important.
1. It's difficult to manufacture competitively when a local living wage is in the upper echelons of global wages.
2. It's often cheaper to manufacture something semi-manually (e.g. 80% automated) than invest in buying and maintaining full automation.
If corporations could not have moved operations offshore to exploit workers and the environment in other countries for lower cost, then they would not have. They were permitted to.
Where the old "labor costs did killed it" canard really falls over is when you look at primary industry and things that physically can't be packed up and moved off shore in western countries. Mining, farming, forestry, fishing, things like that. Traditionally a lot of those industries have had high labor input costs too. They miraculously didn't all fall over like manufacturing though.
Labor costs are a cost, same as compliance with other workplace regulations and environmental laws of course. They are not the reason manufacturing was offshored though, they are the reason that corporations bribed treasonous politicians to allow this offshoring to occur with no penalty. As I said.
Mining has been dropping since the 80s [0].
Farming, forestry, fishing are estimated to decline by 3% in the next 10 years [1]. After having fallen from ~50% of the US population in 1870 already.
It's cheaper to do things where labor is cheaper, then ship them around the world by sea.
[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPUBN212W200000000#:~:tex...
[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/Farming-Fishing-and-Forestry/Agricul...
> Farming, forestry, fishing are estimated to decline by 3% in the next 10 years [1]. After having fallen from ~50% of the US population in 1870 already.
You're linking to employment. Like manufacturing, these industries have been significantly automated and mechanized. So yes they have been employing fewer people. Corporations can't move the land and minerals and oil and gas offshore though, so those industries have not been killed. The cost of labor didn't kill them. That's despite all these minerals and petrochemicals and farmland available all around the global south too.
I'm having a hard time parsing this. Also, source?
> The cheapest labor in the world is found in Africa and yet Western industrial manufacturing has largely ignored the continent. The price of labor isn't the most important factor here.
... Yeah this seems fair. I think a lot of Africa has an infrastructure problem - it doesn't matter how cheaply you can manufacture if you can't move large volumes of raw materials/parts to the factory and finished goods from the factory. Plus many areas in Africa have security issues which make them less attractive places to do business. Geographically, a lot of the continent is cursed with hard to navigate rivers as well (the upper Nile being an exception), so only coastal shipping is really viable.
Mexican autoworker wages came up during the GM UAW negotiations. Those range from about $9/day (~3k USD) up. Higher paying positions tend to go to Americans crossing the border.
Vinfast pays about 100M dong (4k USD with bonus) to their factory workers in Vietnam, which is quite a decent wage locally from what I understand.
I think the cost of labour now is kind of irrelevant. It was the cost of labour (and China being a stable country with favourable rule of law) that drove offshoring in the 90s and 2000s. The Chinese manufacturers chose to invest in process improvement and automation rather than just chasing the cheapest labour - and so now they've got a massive technical advantage.
The flippant commentaries about drones help no one: they're a significant change in the intel environment, but nobody carefully inspects assumptions about cost efficiency or on the ground conditions.
Expensive drones are being used to fulfill roles which artillery fires could fulfill far more effectively, except both sides of the conflict don't have enough artillery but for vastly different reasons (whereas significant amounts of supplies are coming from a party which is more or less arming both of them: China's factories).
It should be noted that Ukraine has invested significant effort attempting to acquire US spec long range weapons like ATACMS and Tomahawk, and F-16 and HIMARS were both a big deal which took significant effort to get. Drones have created a new warfare dimension, but I find the way they're often discussed lacks of a lot of rigor or bearing on how they're actually being used.
Isn’t this a self-fulfilling prophecy? Who would want to get into a conflict with someone who has guaranteed air supremacy?
1. the most expensive space station program in history, and
2. severely underfunded compared to the desired deliverable.
That’s a problem easily solved.
We have the menace of the Red Maple Leaf people to the north, and perhaps a buffer zone south of the Rio Grand would stave off the caravans, give Texans some breathing room, and make more room for real Americans. Remember, the anti-Christ may show up at any time.
Mexico is another story, but even then I don't think there's much in the way of public support for a ground invasion.
Nothing like that exists for Canada. Proposals to invade Canada aren't taken seriously by the public. Those who pretend to support it are just trying to piss people off with how stupid they can be.
For anyone who can stand behind that, a bunch of foreigners in another country won't even register as someone to have any empathy towards.
90% of the genuine public couldn't find Iraq on the map on September 12 of 2001, but that didn't stop half of them from becoming utterly convinced that going on an imperial adventure on the other side of the world was integral to preserving their freedumbs.
Media literacy in the US is a complete and utter shitshow, and public support for inflicting incredible violence on other people is trivial to manufacture.
Hell, half the country is currently cheer-leading soldiers and goon squads deployed against it's own cities. They don't even think their own neighbours are entitled to be treated as human beings.
You mean the ICP that's already been updated as part of TR3 to support Block 4 features? https://militaryembedded.com/avionics/computers/f-35-program...
For that you got an update to...
>2900 DMIPS, 1MB L2 Cache 512MB DRAM, 256MB Flash 128KB NOVRAM
So you got to upgrade from an 80486 level to something the equivalent of an early-2000s Pentium II.
Is it? By what criteria? IMHO the point is to get new tech out quickly enough that you aren't falling behind other major powers in the international arms race. The F35 seems to be ahead of the competition because countries around the world are lining up to buy it over much cheaper alternatives from Russia (Su57) and China (J35).
Not to mention that the Su57 also had about a 20 year development cycle. Maybe that's just how long takes to develop a new stealth fighter?
Hell F-35B does vertical takeoff and still mostly uses the same systems as the other designs, that should tell you something.
And without the F-35B, what would be flown by the US Marines, and by most other countries' aircraft carriers, all of which require vertical take-off and landing?
Reality is that VTOL model is ultimately a niche variant whose mandated commonality with air force and CATOBAR carrier variants impacted negatively both non- and VTOL options.
However, slapping supersonic VTOL requirement on what was supposed to be F-16 replacement in the given timeframe meant Lockheed would automatically get ahead as every other vendor had to scramble nearly from scratch while L-M had fresh supersonic VTOL data from both their own lab work and experimental work on Yak-141
> -B meant delays and issues
The -B was the first of the three variants to become operational.
And the delays were on the whole project due to forced commonality (in addition to L-M being L-M)
Do you really think anyone would be so stupid as to leave hard evidince? That's the magic of the whole process, they can do those things fully within the bounds of the process. They decide (or don't), often at the urging of lobbyists, or non-lobbyists parties who themselves typically aren't completely impartial, what they want. And often they have a specific product in mind that they want, but they can't say that so they write the requirement to all but say it.
Often times this is very reasonable and comes as the result of the end user having used multiple products or having used multiple contractors and knowing from experience with near certainty what or who they want.
In the alternate case where it's pork, this is often how upstarts get their start. Whoever the prime is doesn't wanna pay out the ass for someone else's pork that's been inserted into the requirements so connections get leveraged and several dominoes later a subcontractor to someone is under contract + NDA to buy a controlling stake in an idling paper mill and refit as necessary the small town's wastewater plant it dumps into because that is how they are going to provide the filter media meeting the performance specified in the requirements without being forced to pay out the ass for the product the lobbyists ghost wrote into it. The prime has basically entered into contract to create a company making a competing product out of thin air. There are many funny stories like this kicking around the beltway.
Conflicts between requirements of -A/-C and -B, among other reasons due to weight, were discussed as far and wide as GAO reports, because like with F-111, there was strong political push for maximum commonality, which resulted in cascading issues - for example, -B added 18 months around 2004 to -A and -C when the fuselage ended up too heavy for -B to operate with any equipment, and extensive rework had to be done on all models to shave ~1200kg. By 2010 there was discussion to cancel -B altogether.
On a topic closer to typical fare on HN, ALIS (IIRC now renamed to ODIN, but awarded back to the same team...), the ground support system critical to even running the airplane, was close to useless in 2015. Something that anyone with experience with that part of Lockheed probably expected and were not listened to.
Ultimately the aircraft is probably pretty good (I am saying probably because some crankiness isn't much talked unless you're actually embedded with users of such hardware, and is secret - there I have only my suspicions), but the road there was more painful than it should be - and ofc I would not trust it if I was foreign buyer for reasons of not just software black boxes but also dependency on US-located labs to provide mission data updates - at least I have not heard of that aspect changing. We used to joke it was first aircraft with "phone home" license system...
> the road there was more painful than it should be
See above - it's so hard to say. The conception was such an enormous project: build a bleeding edge system, higher performance than anything to be built for decades, even a new concept of fighter planes (as a sensor node on a network built around situational awareness, more than anything, as I understand it), that satisfies the requirements of not only the Navy, Air Force, and Marines, but a dozen militaries in other countries - and for all, critical to existential survival.
If you've ever had a project with more than one boss who are independent of each other, you know the pain of trying to choose even specifications. Imagine the F-35 meetings.
Was it worth the pain? It did allow an enormous economy of scale, a trillion dollars over its lifetime. They payoff is now, when it's the best fighter plane in the world that everyone wants, and a Dutch jet can land in Italy or Okinawa and get parts and maintenance.
But that doesn't answer the original question of whether the VTOL (really STOL) -B model was included mostly to give Lockheed the contract. In all those countries, there was too much demand for S/VTOL to just skip it, and there were and are zero alternatives. Something else could have been designed - but why when you can leverage all this massive development of the F-35?
> ALIS (IIRC now renamed to ODIN, but awarded back to the same team...), the ground support system critical to even running the airplane, was close to useless in 2015.
Also, I think ALIS was controlled and operated by Lockheed - it was essentially a service from Lockheed. The US military was limited in its ability to do its own inventory, maintenance, etc. Now the military insists on controlling the IP for its acquisition, to a large extent. I don't know what the IP status of ODIN is.
The entire pathway of F-35 in fact starts with Lockheed lobbying that their VTOL project could be stripped of some VTOL parts and serve as cheaper "addendum" to F-22, followed with merging the USMC-driven CALF with USAF/USNavy JAST.
As for ODIN, it's still done by the same people at Lockheed. And who used products from that division of Lockheed, does not laugh in the circus, as the polish saying goes.
Design iteration cycle-times should be decreasing due to CAD, experimental cycles-times reduced due to the proliferation of rapid-turn 5-axis CNC mills, experimental cycles reduced due to simulation, business processes streamlined due to advancements in JIT manufacturing and six-sigma/kaizen/etc, and so on and so forth. That this isn't occurring is a giant blinking red light that something is wrong, and that we are going to get our lunch eaten by someone who researches, designs, and manufactures with a modicum of competence. Ostensibly China.
New technologies should make iteration time on this stuff faster not shorter... even for complex things like fighter aircraft.
The fact that there are over a dozen Chinese humanoid robotics companies that have shipped working products in the past 12 months should be a big red flag.
I will say though that during WW2 and the Cold War, the amount of tolerance for killing test pilots was much greater given the number of people dying during active military conflicts at the time.
- DoD / DoW is a chaotic project owner, trying to squeeze in colossal and sometimes self-contradictory lists of requirements, which it wants to change often.
- The US government is a poor customer, which runs out of money from time to time.
- The US Congress is a cantankerous financier, which haggles for the money every year, and demands the production to be distributed all over the place, to bring jobs to the constituencies which voted for the congresspersons.
- The companies that produce this stuff are few and mostly cannot be easily replaced, and they know it. This is because in the late 1980s the US government decided that it has won the Cold War and will not need the many competing manufacturers of military gear any more. That proved to be a bit shortsighted, but now it's a bit late.
I think that mostly means money is cheap in China. In America, if you try to start a humanoid robot company you'll immediately run into the "Why though?" question when you try to get money for it. The case for the economic relevance of humanoid robots is dubious at best, so to proceed with such a development program you need your own money or at least good friends with connections who don't care about money.
Just the software for the helmet alone provides a huge technical advantage that has little to do with how the aircraft is manufactured other than having the appropriate sensors, communication systems, and computing power. Yet through all that bureaucracy what would normally be 3 different airframes all get to leverage the same systems without the need for retrofits etc. It’s inherently a two step process to figure out what you need before you can finalize the design.
By comparison vs the F-35, the B-2 spirit was vastly more expensive and far more limited. The F-35 also costs less than the more specialized F-22, but that versatility takes time.
That said, we could have made more than 195 of the them, but even at 750 it would have still been significantly more expensive per aircraft than the F-35 and it wouldn’t have let us cancel the F-35 program.
It would cost an insane amount of money.... but... It already does cost an insane amount of money, and then we have to run three separate military aviation programs for different regimes.
As to cost, in many ways a cruise ship is a better comparison than a cargo ship. The giant crew needed to maintain and operate a large aircraft fleet themselves need support staff, supplies, housing, etc. Carriers are expensive because of the people and systems onboard not the size of the ship.
Even just moving aircraft up and down from the flight deck requires a massive and thus expensive system. Civilian nuclear reactor are hideously expensive to build and operate let alone a system designed to ramp up and down more quickly, operate on a moving ship etc. Close in weapon systems have limited field of fire when you want a clear flight deck etc.
So sure, in theory you could just say we want a larger flight deck and are going to just have a number of empty components to pad out the ship but it’s not so simple.
Now that we do have the Third Locks, I think it would be reasonable to replace the bridges and make the alterations, a rounding error in the CVN budget.
The much smaller Wasp-class amphibious assault ship on the other hand can carry as many as 20 F-35B’s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasp-class_amphibious_assault_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America-class_amphibious_assau...
Up until WW1, the US were not a global military power, and because of their location, they had little reason do become one. Additionally they were not involved directly in ww1, so they had little reason to develop quickly a military industry that was at the level of western europe
Experts generally expected that there would be effective COVID vaccines by the end of 2020, because vaccine development is not magic. There are several known approaches to creating vaccines, and it was reasonable to expect that some of them would work.
What set COVID vaccines apart was government commitment. Governments around the world bought large quantities of vaccines before it was known whether that particular vaccine would be effective. (Regulatory approval was also expedited, but that it business as usual during serious disease outbreaks.)
The equivalent with fighter jets would be the government committing to buy 200 fighter jets, with an option for many more, from everyone who made a good enough proposal. And paying for the first 200 in advance, even if it later turns out that the proposal was fundamentally flawed and the jets will not be delivered.
Conversely, the Navy's first SSBN went start to finish in something like 4 years.
And unlike the F-35, which could easily have been an evolution of the existing F-22 design, the Navy had to develop 4 major new pieces of technology, simultaneously, and get them all integrated and working.
1. A reduced-size nuclear warhead (the missile would need to fit inside the submarine for any of this to matter) 2. A way to launch the nuclear missile while submerged 3. A way to reliably provide the nuclear missile with its initial navigation fix at launch 4. A way to fuel the nuclear missile with a safe-enough propellant to be usable on a submerged submarine without significant risk to the crew
The USAF's Century series of fighters were turned around quick. So was the B-52.
Having been involved in defense innovation efforts during my time in uniform, I cannot overemphasize how much the existing acquisition system is counter-productive to the nation's defense, despite 10+ years of earnest efforts dating back to before Trump's first term.
Most of the aspects to it are well-intentioned and all, but as they say the purpose of the system is what it does, and what America's defense acquisition system does is burn up tax dollars just to get us a warmed-over version of something grandma and granddad's generation cooked up during the Cold War.
Its turned into a death spiral because as these programs get more onerous the cost goes up, and who in their right mind thinks it's a good idea to just let people go off on a $1B effort with less oversight?
Until it's even possible to deliver things cheaply through the DAS (or WAS or whatever it will be now) we'll never be able to tackle the rest of the improvements. I look forward to reviewing the upcoming changes but Hegseth isn't the first one to push on this, it's a huge rat's nest of problems.
I'm sure it's been done elsewhere, look at Iran-Contra, but it just wouldn't be done for something like a defense contractor building planes. It would be completely unnecessary and likely illegal.
Obviously this will have to change if war breaks out for real, but in theory they won't be scrambling to hire people and will have at least some production capability. They will be scrambling to expand the production lines, but they won't be starting from 0.
A lot of people see defense contractors as an enormous waste of money, but to the government it is a strategic investment.
Maybe there could be something like a weekend warriors but for machinists? One weekend a month, one week a year you build fighter jets. This does mean there needs to be private sector demand for those skillsets so the reservists have relevant day jobs.
Not really the point, but an idea that springs to mind is selling fighter jets to allied countries.
Is this an official goal, or at attempt to handwave away the fact that we seem to waste trillions and decades to get anything done?
https://www.csis.org/analysis/why-us-defense-industrial-base...
Americans love saying stuff like this about safety regulations because it makes them sound savvy and civilized, which creates a market for new safety regulations so they can say this about them too, which means there isn't actually any pressure for making them reasonable.
As a result the building code is full of stuff that someone once had a bad dream about and so was instantly banned with no cost-benefit analysis. Among other things, elevators are much stricter and so less frequent than any other country, single-stair buildings are allowed in Seattle (and most of the rest of the world) but nowhere else, and they're about to ban windowless bedrooms which will make office-to-housing conversions impossible.
At no point during this did anyone think about it at all, and if you ever ask if it should be reconsidered they'll look at you like you're crazy.
Where is this not banned?
And it’s not like offices don’t have windows or you can’t cut them. The ban on windowless bedrooms is supposed to prevent renting out a utility closet as a “rustic studio”.
https://bsky.app/profile/stephenjacobsmith.com/post/3m3xpe3n...
Yes they are, and I say this as someone who lived in a shithole apartment that had a fire scare and needed the Fire Dept to help out. Egress windows and fire trucks with ladders exist for a reason.
Sure, fire safety in homes is a good thing to have. But is it so good that we can't economically build buildings to meet them, and people end up with no home at all?
The problem is you can't easily convert office buildings to housing without these, because the floor plates are too different.
Do we have cases of Japan or China converting industrial or office spaces into residences?
Since 2013, it's been classed as "permitted development" (so, automatically allowed as long as the building isn't listed as architecturally or historically important), and liberalised further in the early 2020s.
House prices have outstripped commercial rents for most of this century, and change of use is cheaper than demolish-and-rebuild, so I'd expect to see the trend continue.
The issue with unsuitable floor plates is real, though, particularly in larger buildings. One solution is to cut chunks out of the curtain wall, turning part of each floor into an open-air terrace which functions as a light well. The reduction in useable floor area means that's only really viable at the premium end of the market, though - a prominent (albeit mixed-use) example is https://www.constructionenquirer.com/2024/07/18/striking-new...
There is a lot of space inside buildings and blocks that must be kept open to permit windows in every bedroom.
When I first moved to New York, I illegally subletted a windowless bedroom. That let me save enough money to (a) enjoy my twenties and (b) launch a start-up. When I got a windowed bedroom, I wound up putting sound-absorbing black-out curtains on them for years.
> The actual problem is high land prices, slow permit approval processes, and restrictive zoning codes
These are bigger problems. But the the blind window requirement is a part of the second two. On its own, it isn't prohibitive. Tied together with a million other petty requirements and your minimum costs balloon.
New York City's fire engines can't reach its skyscrapers' top floors. Not saying you can achieve similar resuls with office-to-residential conversions. But windowless bedrooms aren't a non-starter because of fire safety, they're a non-starter because they make wealthier residents uncomfortable.
Speaking from experience with elevators in various countries: Let's keep the part where, for instance, elevators need a door. (And I'm sure I haven't experienced anywhere close to the long tail of bad elevators.) Some regulations make sense.
But if there are ways to make elevators substantially faster without being unsafe, that'd be lovely. What do US elevators fail to do that they could be doing?
Also, in some/all places the elevator union got basically all manufacturing processes banned so they have to be assembled on site by union workers.
And in the US, nobody in the relevant unions or regulators cares about cities - elevator workers and firefighters are all suburbanite pickup-truck-Americans. So they're rarely personally interested in anything that isn't about driving a big car around really fast. This has a big impact on road layouts and the outside of buildings, because of course everyone listens to firefighters, but all they want to is drive a big red truck everywhere with nothing stopping them.
The top American fighter pilot of WW2, Richard Bong was killed test piloting the Lockheed P80 jet fighter.
He had a list of rules for managing the design of aircraft. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Johnson_(engineer)#Kelly....
There's an unwritten 15th rule (from the above-mentioned webpage):
"Starve before doing business with the damned Navy. They don't know what the hell they want and will drive you up a wall before they break either your heart or a more exposed part of your anatomy."https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...
https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/air-force-blames-oxygen-depri...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Andersen_Air_Force_Base_B...
https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/2017/07/21/f-35b-helmets-ni...
(etc)
The reality is that developing bespoke solutions with bleeding edge technology is going to result in brand new jets crashing, no matter how much bureaucrats and processes slow down the process. Nothing can substitute for using it.
> Federal Acquisition rules are written in misuse of money, sometimes criminally.
Where "misuse of money" means money not being spent a manner convenient to those who wrote the rules. Which means starting illegal wars, cost-plus contracts, lies about WMDs, no-bid contracts, arms trafficking to dictatorships, pork barreling, and *nudge* *wink* 7 figure do-nothing "consulting" gigs for bureaucrats and generals after they leave the government. Nothing is going to solve that, but if you threw out the whole rule book and started again, it would require a monumental effort to do worse than things have been.
Time has already told us. Historically it means it was more expensive. If it wasn't, it would be such a rare an interesting case, that it would deserve a documentary on the surprising result.
This already started. "Trump Jr.-Linked Unusual Machines Lands Major Pentagon Drone Contract Amid Ethics Concerns"[1] It's for drone motors for FPV drones, which are usually cheap. The terms of the contract are undisclosed "due to the shutdown".
[1] https://dronexl.co/2025/10/25/trump-jr-unusual-machines-pent...
I used to work for a defense contractor. My former coworkers are probably cheering right now.
They just "know things" like which basically free tweaks ought to be made as a result of knowledge gained from the assembly being in the field. They don't stand to gain from the product being crap. Most of the fixes are basically free BOM tweaks that don't really matter but provide incremental improvements/refinements if made and the cumulative nickels and dimes really do add up.
The paper pushers on both sides that will do many rounds in order to make that happen are the only people benefitting from the make-work here as does anyone who skims their existence off of the paper pushers.
From my experience there are very few BOM tweaks that don’t need a whole lot of validation, there’s no free lunch here
Either works. One lasts longer. The "wrong" one was chosen originally because the default assumption at the time was Fulda and not Fallujah.
I'm also convinced this is a primary driver of "emergency/urgency culture".
Everything is hyped as an emergency to justify bureaucratic meetings/rule writing
In the timescales of some of our military planes, cars have gone from metal dashboards to collision avoidance in cars with cocoons of safety with 10 airbags.
I think moving faster might also move faster with safety equipment.
The future isn't in pilot-in-seat aircraft at all.
Hence recent projects like X-BAT and YFQ-44A. Sure, YFQ-44A says the mission now is to support crewed fighters, but I don't expect that to last.
But the key feature making this a horrible decision is that the people responsible for getting our people killed will not be discoverable, and they will never face the consequences. Heck: they might not even know, because they're doing good by their standards.
That's exactly how you make a broken but persistent and entrenched system: incentives without consequences for exported costs.
If people think Boeing has been a shit show over the last 10 years, they ain't seen nothing yet.
The thing is, we waste so much money it's better to crash 15 jets but build 2000 of them than waste the same amount of money and build 5 jets.
Even us SWEs out in the wild, we sometimes... disable tests (gasp heard everywhere) so that a refactor can work.
I mean it's why we have the expression "sometimes you have to crack a few eggs".
It's why WWII vets did what they did knowing not every bomb, aircraft or handheld weapon was perfect but still ran in to stop Hitler. I would say that put a high price on human life. These last few generations won't get it until it gets its WW.
There is a reason why USA is currently seen as the biggest threat to stability - because USA is intentionally trying to make the world unstable.
There is literally no one that can bomb the US into nothingness. Even if the US decided to stop develop new weapons, they cannot be invaded. They are too big, too rich and too protected by the ocean and weak neighbors for that
Idiocracy vs kleptocracy.
Is this truly the case or are the criminals and other people who misuse money dragging people towards this position?
Your options are corrupt procurement or corrupt procurement with a 15% administrative surcharge of make-work patronage jobs for someone’s mistress or friends. I think that we’re in the “let’s pay our centurions in salt because the treasury is empty” stage of administrative innovations to allow the dead empire to linger. Personally, my hope is the next thousand year dark age we are stepping into comes with a knightly aesthetic.
No, the only impression I had was from the earlier post, which is light on details, which is why I was asking for clarification.
Your options are corrupt procurement or corrupt procurement with a 15% administrative surcharge of make-work patronage jobs for someone’s mistress or friends.
This is an obvious false dichotomy.
And the solution to date has been to "start another program". That program promises to move fast, and often does, but it will eventually metastasize with process and review.
I just don't think we can add any more "same but faster" programs. It is time to cut back a lot of process, and thereby bring these programs back to parity so we can then cut down the number of programs.
Yes, we have swung too much towards the bureaucrats but I'm not sure throwing out everything is solution to the issue.
Move fast works great when it's B2B software and failures means stock price does not go up. It's not so great when brand new jet acts up and results in crashes.
Oh yea, F-35 was built with move fast, they rolled models off the production line quickly, so Lockheed could get more money, but it looks like whole "We will fix busted models later" might have been more expensive. Time will tell.