Comment by hga | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hga | Hacker News Reader

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The F-35 is becoming the definitive example of how scope creep destroys a project

Or an example of how we don't learn from history, for the same exact thing happened with the '60s TFX, except the F-35 substitutes S/VTOL for air superiority. 5 models of it were planned, two for the Navy, all but what ended up as the F-111 were canceled, and we resumed building focused planes like the F-14 through F-16, and the A-10 I think. Read the relevant section in Possony, Pournelle, and Kane's classic The Strategy of Technology https://www.jerrypournelle.com/slowchange/Strat.html for lots more details.

ADDED: And I've now recalled that there was stiff criticism of the F-111 as it starting flying and was fielded in the hot war of Vietnam. By and large the bugs were worked out, and e.g. surviving pilots were convinced that they should not turn off the terrain following radar and auto pilot system so they wouldn't follow their predecessors in immediately flying it into a hill. Which didn't happen with the following similar in that way B-1, come to think of it.

That I remember mostly from contemporaneous reports, the frequently poor prosecution of the Vietnam war was a big issue in the heartland.

My dad was a fighter pilot in the USAF at the time the F-111 was supposed to come out. It was late, so he ended up flying the F-100.

McNamara was the genius pushing the F-111. Also the genius behind the Ford Edsel. When he came to visit the base one time, one of the NCOs who was near retirement had an Edsel painted in the camo pattern specified for the F-111. It was parked within clear view so that McNamara could see it when he disembarked from his plane. He was pretty steamed.

That's about what airmen thought of the F-111 and McNamara at the time.

From my reading of the excellent book Clashes: Air Combat over North Vietnam, 1965-1972 (http://www.amazon.com/Clashes-Combat-North-Vietnam-1965-1972...) that would imply your father was fighting over South Vietnam (or perhaps to the west), but, hmmm, it didn't mention F-111 missions at all. For the big operations up north, the Air Force used up its F-105 inventory, and had to switch to their own version of the Navy's (spit) F-4.

Ah, per Wikipedia the F-111 was employed, but I can see why it wasn't covered in book, it was ideally employed as a low level terrain following penetrator, so it would not be a part of the big daytime flocks of birds that the NVA were be able to follow and vector their Migs to for one pass attacks. So not relevant to a book focused on air combat per se.

Heh, love the anecdote about the Edsel. The Official Story, on Wikipedia at least, is that he saved Ford not by pushing it, but by killing it, but I have my doubts, everything he touched after that turned to shit, including his disastrous tenure at the World Bank where he destroyed untold agricultural systems in the Third World....

I haven't read anything, but certainly killing the Edsel could have been his predecessor's idea, but it was too late and the task was saved to give some shine to McNamara. That happens (or seems to) in exec pushouts all the time.

"It was late, so he ended up flying the F-100."

From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_F-100_Super_Sab...):

Adapted as a fighter bomber, the F-100 was supplanted by the Mach two class F-105 Thunderchief for strike missions over North Vietnam. The F-100 flew extensively over South Vietnam as the air force's primary close air support jet until being replaced by the more efficient subsonic LTV A-7 Corsair II.

And this was mentioned in passing in Clashes.

>>Or an example of how we don't learn from history

Of course we learn from history. The thing you have to understand is that everything is working as intended. F-35, and programs like it, are a way to use public money to create private sector jobs. They aren't meant to be efficient or even effective means to develop and manufacture military hardware.

You can see a direct analogy of this in the space sector, where SpaceX came along and severely disrupted the incumbents by doing things efficiently.

The thing you have to understand is that your initial statement has literally no foundation to it. There isn't any solid proof that program failures like this are direct means to keeping workers employed (where it is implied that they otherwise wouldn't be). I am also not really sure how some crazy guy (I am being hyperbolic) betting hundreds of millions of dollars (some of it his own funds) somehow becomes analogous with a purposefully obtuse military industrial complex scheme to keep people employed.

There are certainly cases where the government soaks up funding, gives it to a company, for absolutely no other reason that we can tell other than to just funnel money along into their little corner of the country (and thus their constituents).

But I have a really hard time believing that is the case here.

It's hard to say with any certainty, to be sure. But I wouldn't be so skeptical -- Nixon did after all announce the Space Shuttle program in part to help secure his re-election. That too in California in a naked attempt to win SoCal.

Source: https://books.google.com/books?id=kje_BAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA12&ots=...

NASA was always a jobs program as well as what it ostensibly was for, it was officially tasked with industrially uplifting the South, which became an even bigger thing when LBJ became president. The area to the immediate northeast of MIT was still mostly a wasteland when I showed up in 1979 because NASA all of a sudden decided that Houston was the ideal place to put the Mission Control Center....

After Apollo, that became many times more what it was for.

You beat me to it. I was going to add something along lines of expanding existing corruption where military people authorizing it get cushy jobs in return over time. The "revolving door." So consistent that it should be our first hypothesis for every program like this.

It is an extremely inefficient jobs program, an extremely inefficient research program, and an extremely inefficient aircraft. As he said: do one thing, and do it well.

It /is/ a pretty good wealth distribution program, though. If you count dollars distributed, not number of recipients.

>>It is an extremely inefficient jobs program, an extremely inefficient research program, and an extremely inefficient aircraft.

Yep. Just like the aircraft: tries to do too many things, ends up sucking at all of them.

I agree, except the problem is that it's sold to the public as defense, not as a jobs program. Part of the sales job is involves having American pilots fly those airplanes into combat.

Decades ago there was the Boeing/Airbus fight over government spending in the aerospace industry.

Boeing was angry that Airbus got cheap credi backed by or from the government, Airbus was angry because Boeing got all the military money from the government.

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