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Comment by kevin_thibedeau | Hacker News Reader

The F35 is keeping far more people employed. That is its main purpose and it has been a resounding success. Its entire procurement process was designed to make it resistant to cancellation by farming everything out to a broad base of constituencies. It is now safely past that hurdle and can do its job as a money machine.

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This explanation comes up in every thread about the F-35. While it has good explanatory power, it doesn't explain why the US couldn't have a non-dysfunctional procurement process that actually delivered effective planes.

The people controlling the purse strings like the dysfunctional system as it is. Nobody has the power to stop it. There was zero reason for Trump to end the sequester except to funnel more money into the MIC.

The truly interesting question would be: How will countries without a broken procurement process compete? Will China be able to spend 0.1% on their new planes and get 1000% ROI?

Companies are run by businessmen and not people who want to build extraordinary aircraft.

That's awfully cynical, but maybe correct, though I have to believe that even the CEO of a giant defense contractor firm is proud of what they do.

You're so optimistic. The CEOs of large companies i know don't even pretend about having a higher purpose

Why do you have to believe that?

My best guess would be that the people in charge of the juggernaut realize if you equip it with a steering wheel, if you create a way to fix it with regard to quality of output, that same steering wheel could also be used to fix it with regard to cost. In other words, the dysfunctional planes are just collateral damage of the corporate welfare program.

Have you considered a disinformation side to the equation. How did the Cold War bankrupt ussr ? Was it the Star Wars disinformation;)

To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it's difficult to change a process when the salaries of the people who could change it depend upon the status quo.

Planes? For 1.5 trillion dollars and counting I expect nothing less than a working fusion generator, or a moon base, or a proper rotating space station with AT&T videophones.

For reference, 1.5 trillion is more than double the Apollo and Space Shuttle programs, combined.

I'm not terribly well-versed in defense contracts, but why don't these kind of massive things (that always go way over time) not have a clausul 'if you, as a developer, go X amount over time or X amount over budget, you foot the rest of the cost until delivery'. Would seem like a very prudent thing to do as a government, and there's still so much money in it I can't imagine defense contractors not going for it.

I would guess that it's not the contractors fault as much as the clients. Maybe this is my bias from doing contract work and having horrible clients.

Sure some defense contacts are firm fixed price with the vendor eating any cost overruns. But no rational defense contractor would ever agree to take on that level of risk for a program as complex as the F-35.

Look what happened to the Airbus A400M. They agreed to a fixed price, and then when the program ran away over budget they blackmailed the EU defense ministers into renegotiating by threatening to cancel the program, close factories, or even go bankrupt. It's just politically impossible to hold the line on these deals.

Would you sign a contract that looked like that?

I would find it very reasonable if entity X asks me to develop a fighter jet, X knows from experience that these programs always overrun, X asks me to make a realistic roadmap with some leeway built in, and then X says 'well, if you overshoot milestone 3 by more than one year you'll have to foot the rest of the cost until the next milestone'.

so you agree, then tell X you ran out of money and are closing down the program. faced with choosing to lose a decade plus of progress or letting you out of that clause is no choice at all

Why not? You can't shutter the program because you're contractually obliged for X to deliver. At that point you either eat the cost and deliver or your company is destroyed by fines and/or bankruptcy. And again: sure, those types of contracts would be harsher than the current situation, but they're still so juicy I can't imagine companies not going for them. Currently it seems to just be a huge money tap for whatever contractor gets them, without any amount of oversight or accountability/liability.

A bankruptcy would be costly to the bureaucrats just as much as to the companies and set you back to square 1 with time & money spent and little to show for it...

Then you couldn't change requirements. Or companies wouldn't bid. Or companies would go bankrupt.

But there have been some contracts (NASA commercial cargo to the space station) that have had fixed milestones for releasing money to contractor.

I've worked for government agencies who've done stuff like that... albeit at a much smaller scale.

Big .gov orgs have a lot of leverage, because they can make or break the sales force.

The end result is that the vendor prices in the risk and overhead. Depending on the political situation and project, it may be worth paying that premium to displace the blame to the vendor. But for something like the F35, the cost is astronomical.

They tried that in the '90s. A few contractors got into a bind, threw up their hands, and went bankrupt. From a budgetary standpoint that's fine, but when you're limping along with a platform you wanted to retire a decade ago or more (the marines have been stripping museum pieces for parts to keep Harriers in the air), you can't afford another twenty year development cycle.

IMO the F-35 is fine from a capability standpoint. It's just far too expensive.

whether or not its an effective use of money, i've always believed that it was a strategic interest to have all of these people at the ready.

frankly i'm sure that if it came to it, your average clip on tie beltway bandit employee would be more useless than 5 year old in time of war, but i think thats the thinking

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