The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed
forbes.com
forbes.com
This isn't just planes, this seems to be everything nowadays. Fission was discovered in 1938/1939 and we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. No chance we could do something like that in this toxic environment of today.
I know Peter Thiel is not popular here, but his conversations about technological progress seem to be spot on: we just cant build cool shit anymore. I really did want a flying car, and all I have is 140 characters and promises of AI that never come true.
Maybe, you could say there are some exceptions like CRISPR, but that is TBD.
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.
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
We can build cool shit, but our government and most companies don't optimize for that.
But I believe that one of the things that happened to the military aviation industrial complex was that in the WW2, early Cold War era, planes and military development programs were very much driven by individuals or very small teams responsible for designing the requirements, overseeing the planning, and the outcome of new aircraft. That was how you got such distinctive (and long lasting designs) that served well the needs of the military, even in use up to today. Let's call it (using today's fashionable term, "passion" about the aircraft, and unwillingness to put out a piece of crap.) You could name who was responsible for an aircraft design.
But in the 1970s, 1980s, something happened where the size of projects or the professionalization of military projects caused them to have distributed (read, lack of) ownership by very critical people, and instead by an anonymous/dispersed "committee style" management. Also, the experts within the military often left for better pastures at the contractors (NG, LM, etc).
Add to that the requirement (by Congress, regulation) that you couldn't just use your expert / private connections to other experts to "get things done" and bring in contractors who had expertise, and instead had to farm out RFPs to every company, get their bland input, and fill out a heat map of who did what best, and cobble together a solution "mutually acceptable to all stakeholders".
So no longer was an aircraft project owned by someone who had very certain opinions about what was needed, and not needed, and who something should be designed for. But instead, projects follow a certain recipe, hoping that form produces function, yet not actually produce useful output because of what happens when you lack ownership. You cannot today name who is responsible for an aircraft design (I would say). It is the metaphorical side project among many, of a large dispersed group of people.
It seems to me something was missed in the migration to this new method of working.
But as I said, I would love to hear corroborating observations about whether this was a major factor.
Not to mention the F-16 itself, which the F-35 was meant to replace:
1972: RFP for prototypes
1974: Maiden flight of the first prototype
1975: Production begins
1980: The aircraft officially enters service
It’s a modern remix to the Kelly Johnson and Ben Rich days of developing legendary aircraft at Lockheed’s Skunkworks that you lamented the loss of.
People in the know confirm it’s legit and shocking, in a good way. Especially compared to the failures of the F-35 and even the F-22’s development.
[0] https://www.airforcemag.com/article/ropers-ngad-bombshell/
For a humorous take on the U.S. military platform problem, look for a movie called The Pentagon Wars [1] starring Kelsey Grammar and Cary Elwes. It came out in 1998, and very little has changed since then.
We do everything opposite these days: no thinking about requirements, huge teams, no budget, off-the-shelf everything, over-think everything, OK with failure (because golden parachutes, team churn, and "blameless" culture), and wait 5 months for the bulldozers to get shipped here.
The SR-71 was designed to do one thing. Go fast and take pictures. It didn't carry bombs. They eventually tried to put a drone on it and it didn't work and was abandoned.
You don't even have to look back as far as the SR-71 though, the F-22 was a reasonably successful program - bumpy, expensive, but it produced what is the world's preeminent air-superiority fighter. It is not a bomb truck, it does not land on carriers. It does one thing well.
Others are not wrong about the fact that the F-35's merit to Congress was as a jobs program, either. This is in fact what a lot of military spending really is. We build tanks only to drive them into the desert and store them, all to keep those production lines running and keep people employed. They could be building trains or something else equally well.
The underlying problem there is that the US political system has become byzantine and cumbersome. When "played" adversarially with all "players" using the maximum extent of their political powers, it takes supermajority control of all three branches of government to govern. This has promoted a byzantine system on top of that to try and come up with mechanisms to fix a broken, unfair, and non-representative process. Massive over-spending on military as opposed to other types of government-sponsored research, production, etc are only one side effect of that.
And yeah do all this while being cheap and maintainable. It’s basically a unicorn.
JPL just landed Perseverance, and we have had weekly SpaceX launches with successful stage recoveries (thought to be impossible), Falcon Heavy sent a 1st Gen Tesla Roadster which is orbiting Mars as we speak... Thiel's windmill powered Bitcoin operation in Texas, which likely froze last week, is another example of how absurd his statement is. I think Thiel is not liked because he uses hyperbole to make blanket statements that are clearly not true. And his business acumen much like his actual tech skills, are dubious at best despite being immensely wealthy.
The US will always be a leader in innovation in the World, I'd argue this is the larges concentration of talent the World has ever seen, including Florence during the enlightenment.
What we have a problem with is an absurd amount of useless bureaucrats, politicians, lobbyists, Industries that get in the way and all want their slice of the pie for nothing more than being a middleman and ultimately pay no taxes to re-invest in the education of said future talent, all while the entrepreneurs and talented labour take all the risk and get little to no reward for their efforts due to a depreciating fiat currency and ever increasing taxes and more and more diminishing social mobility due the aforementioned concentration of wealth.
CRISPR is not going to solve much if any of your problems, maybe your kid's but not yours. If you think the US cannot build amazing things, and is somehow not a leader in this the problem is with you and, I guess Thiel.
As opposed to the other PayPal dude that is building spacecraft. It's more about what Peter Thiel can't do.
I'm actually quite tired of it and I'm looking elsewhere.
I think that I am misunderstanding this paragraph. You mean the speed at which a new inventions was put into production, right?
It could be my English failing me but putting it through a translator did not help.
Science continues on and incredible discoveries are made all the time. But when it comes to building incredible things... there just isn’t any push for it right now.
Not an affiliate link: https://www.amazon.com/Kelly-More-Than-Share-All/dp/08747449...
You think that's bad? In Canada my government funded the F-35 program but we're not buying any F-35 jets. Spending a bit less than $1 billion for nothing.
We take the miraculous for granted when it’s frequent, sigh about the things we don’t have, and declare its all terrible.
The first is that all the "cool shit" we built in the first half of the century was the low-hanging fruit of new scientific understandings and materials.
It's not that we were smarter, it's nothing to do with toxicity, it's just that we exhausted most of what you can easily do with nuclear, steel, engines, etc.
The second misunderstanding is that we're not still building amazing things. Being able to access Wikipedia or Google through speech recognition, or talk to anyone in the world from a cheap videophone in your pocket, is astonishing.
And the third is that flying cars somehow respresent the future. But flying car enthusiasts only focus on the "cool" aspect of it, rather than nuts-and-bolts issues like how they could be fuel efficient, how an average driver will avoid fatal crashes, if we really want urban skies filled with visual, noise and emissions pollution, etc. Flying cars exist. But they don't make any economic or practical sense to use.
If you think we're still not accomplishing astonishing things today, you're not paying attention. Did you notice, for example, how multiple companies put together COVID vaccines in record time? How is that not amazing?
Well actually we've had 280 characters since 2017. Talk about progress!
The main point is the classification: Flying Cars vs 140 Characters or Bits vs Atoms. FB is worth almost $1trn. No real technical achievements or advancement. If fb didn't exist, something else would be the friendster. Tesla, Apple, MSFT, Google, etc. are closer to the flying cars end of that spectral dichotomy. We could debate where.
Thiel attracts antagonists in the same way like leftists do. Paypal, Palantir, his capital allocation theories & such are not very performant on his own flying cars VS 140 characters test. It's a hazard of being an idealist. The traditional question a leftist authors get (chomsky, etc) is about selling his books on amazon.
But yes. There certainly is a lot of failure in western economies, especially in the "public-private" realm. These aren't constructive failures, and this sort of stuff is deeply limiting. You know, cutting edge aerospace engineering is risky. Let's take easier examples. Why can't we procure buildings or do basic infrastructure without scandals and runaway costs?
Ancient civilizations managed to build incredible aqueduct systems, public buildings, etc. We've regressed.
This is a strategic approach that both jacks up the price and gives you plenty of powerful allies who will fight to keep the program afloat.
They could very put such an aircraft together at half the cost and time if cost and time were targets for the people deciding to fund this.
The lobbyists destroyed those types of programs.
We used to have a pipeline for PhD candidates to these government programs, but that doesn't seem to exist anymore.
Speaking of unpopular guys, Musk's Tesla and SpaceX are very much "skunkworks" companies. Maybe the US could, say, incubate more companies like that? The irrational hate of Musk reflects America's deep and strong anti-intellectual anti-nerd anti-engineering popular culture bias. Sure Musk isn't a boy scout, but the list of evil noxious business executive that are objectively worse than Musk in the last 50 years is probably about 10,000 to 20,000 longer than anything Musk has done. Possibly 100,000. Huge numbers of healthcare insurance, petroleum, defense, mining, and manufacturing executives. Microsoft and Intel's run of market manipulation and monopoly. Cable/Telephone companies sitting on their monopolies.
The 50s and 60s still had the overarching group achievement and patriotism from WWII. But our modern era has steadily fallen more and more to greed, apathy, laziness, and especially narcissism.
Excellent!
IMO AI progress in the last 10 years has drastically exceeded reasonable expectations.
You can buy a helicopter any time you want.
I think it is more likely for everyone involved, team, management, project, product, client, end user etc, to understand & accept that you have to make tradeoffs when you are on a tight time frame and/or budget. You solve one thing, not a hundred different things, even though they can be equally as important in the grand scheme of things.
F-35 tried to replace fighters in three different branches (Air force, Navy and Marine) and be multirole and also do close ground support, all with a long time frame and huge budget.
Some tradeoffs can be solved with a bigger budget, but many tradeoffs can't. If you want your bombs to be stored inside the fuselage to be more stealthy like the F-35, then of course the fuselage will become bigger, thus creating more drag. No amount of money will change that.
F-35 seems from the outside like a project that didn't understand & accept tradeoffs.
I think you bring up great points. This could be a case of low hanging fruit being picked. We are at the point where everything being added is just bells and whistles since the foundation has already been built.
If you're a defense contractor, none of it. If you're a tax-payer, all of it...
What about the long term? Fuck the long term. It is all about quarters, and short term bonuses.
Add to this the office politics, corruption and big players crushing any hint of competition and you have general stagnation.
I have read about the eventual failure of the F35 for years now. The naysayers had solid arguments but were ostracized by people with conflict of interest.
I sadly agree. Unis spend so much time teaching CAD software, processes, etc, you wonder how much understanding engineering grads actually have. I just think we've stagnated as a technological society. We rely so much on computers to do everything, that we can't innovate in the same way anymore. Unless our new x has an onboard super-computer, we just can't get it to do anything.
Recognizing that is a big assumption of truth, would anyone here be willing to posit an explanation?
Also, well
"Fission was discovered in 1938/1939 and we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. No chance we could do something like that in this toxic environment of today"
I believe some people consider WW2 and the nuclear wipeout of 2 cities of common people to be "toxic environment", too.
And btw the advancements in batteries and EV is exactly what is needed actually do flying cars, if that is even a good idea in the first place.
Government programs are often massively badly managed, politically captured, this is not new. But it doesn't mean nobody is inventing anything new anymore.
Alas, building machines of destruction seems to the prerogative.
> Fission was discovered in 1938/1939 and we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. No chance we could do something like that in this toxic environment of today.
Are you for real? It is hard to find any more toxic place in resent history then during the horrors of World War 2.
This time saw a holocaust with forced labor and mass killings of religious and ethnic minorities in multiple countries accross at least 3 continents. It saw indiscriminate bombing of heavy civilian population centers in densely populated centers in Asia and Europe. It saw mass famine and starvation in several regions of the world. About 3% of the entire world population died in these horrors, and many more lost their homes and livelihoods.
And you mention the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as some kind of an achievement. Between 129,000–226,000 people died in that terror, and two whole cities were leveled to the ground, with the mass homelessness and medical and social emergencies that follows.
Perhaps it is not your intention to devalue these horrors and you are simply trying emphasize what was possible when the political climate was more unified. But please be careful with your words. Don’t describe our time as toxic while glorifying the most toxic times ever witnessed in our recent history.
Imo, it is cool shit.
In general I don't think that we've forgotten how to build cool shit. It's just that in a lot ways we don't have the incentive to do so anymore. When we DO have the incentive (like with COVID) we are capable of feats of engineering an innovation that are amazing. More to the point, the incentives now seem to work against rapid innovation. We tend to think of infrastructure projects and defense projects as jobs programs so nobody wants it to be done quickly.
But it is true that when there is no particular urgency, the multiplication of bureaucracy and regulations compounded with the complexity of modern technologies makes it difficult to deliver cheap and fast.
The year over year progress on computing power/efficiency/size is beyond impressive. Modern computer hardware is an amazing feat of engineering.
The first complete sequences of the Human Genome was completed in 2003, as part of the Human Genome Project which started in 1990. Total cost of $100,000,000. That's actually not so expensive given the payoff is literally a complete copy of our own genetic code. Today, less than 20 years later, the cost of sequencing that same genome is about $1,000.
The LHC? Super fucking cool.
We do build cool shit. Incredibly cool shit. WAY cooler than dumb ass killing machines like fission bombs and space-age fighter jets. And BTW, going from fission in theory to something actually useful for doing something other than killing people did take a couple decades (first nuke power plant turned on in 1954).
We can build all that cool shit you want, too. Flying cars? We've been able to do that for decades. You don't have a flying car because you'd almost certainly end up killing yourself or someone else and probably couldn't afford the fuel to operate it on the daily. There's a reason you can't just rent a Cessna and go out for a joy ride without any training.
The "no cool shit" thesis always uses killing machines and rich person toys as examples. I don't want stupid rich person toys that even rich people don't actually use when they get them (flying cars). I want to be able to Zoom with my parents during a pandemic.
Want an example of crazy cool shit we just accomplished? Covid vaccine. Creating a vaccine/testing in less than a year and now distributing it at such a massive scale will likely go down in history as an event akin to the Manhattan Project.
The first thing that springs to mind is the fact that the covid-19 vaccine was imagined, developed and started to be synthesized over the course of a single weekend.
Tik Tok stars and Twitch bros and ethots are making multi million dollars playing games.
This country can’t build a functioning high speed rail system, that other countries built 30 years ago. How can we build an airplane now?
Public school teachers and teachers unions are opposed to opening schools. They never cared about kids and education.
US is at bread and circuses stage of decline. Time to accept reality and deal with it appropriately.
Do things 10x better he says, and then you will have so much network effect that you can do things 10x worse and people still have a hard time getting rid of you.
The Covid bailout last year was about $60,000 per tax payer (https://www.covidmoneytracker.org/). How much of your $60,000 did you see?
I'm not arguing for or against these programs; I'm arguing for expressing them in comprehensible terms. $6,000,000,000,000 societal total; or $60,000 for you. Do you expect to receive $15,000 of value from the F35 program? I'm not sure I won't: perhaps it'll keep oil/energy prices stable and I spent well more than $300/year on energy...
I am not saying Federal Reserve actions don't have a cost, but comparing that to defense spending is apples to oranges. The federal reserve buys securities and created SPVs. You could say that is a cost but by some measures the money the Federal Reserve "spent" made money in the 2009 crises. If that were true this time your cost per tax payer is way, way off.
Or to put it in more plain language, you are comparing the cost to tax payers if the US government bought $60,000 of Lockheed martin stock as opposed to paying Lockheed Martin $15,000 for a fighter that doesn't seem to work well. It's more complicated than that even, but still it is a terrible and biased comparison that you are making.
For that, you need to calculate the cost of every US govt program and calculate usage costs. Very complicated.
However, this statement is confusing to me. Do you agree to a bailout, as a society, to eventually get all of it back?
And, I also take issue with 100M tax payers. Are these Individual Income Tax payers? If so, what about all the non income tax payers and companiss that pay taxes? For every item you buy, some amount goes to the government in the form of sales tax.
And ultimately, what does the govt spend money on? You and your fellow citizens. Sure, now you are in a position to say you pay more taxes than the govt provides services, but if your kid turns out to be poor and homeless, the govt ought to take care of them, and they pay no taxes while enjoying govt services. So if you compute what you get back, would it be fair to say you have to take multi generational values?
Also, the $60,000/tax-payer Covid ticket price (though I find that source questionable) is missing averaging out over multiple years as you said yourself. Needs to be consistent with the other number.
Sure, it's $60k per tax payer by just dividing the total paid by the tax payer cardinality. And in that sense, that much of the federal budget that you have a voice for was allocated in that way.
However, comparing that number to how much tax you're paying in a given year is wildly inaccurate. The mean income tax paid in the US last year was ~$15k, but the median is closer to ~$5k [0] The ultra wealthy pay very disproportionately more of the total income tax and skew the mean upward significantly.
Therefore, the average US tax payer would have contributed likely far less than $300/year at something more like <$100/year.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/average-fed...
But from the article
> The Air Force alone wanted nearly 1,800 F-35s to replace aging F-16s and A-10s and constitute the low end of a low-high fighter mix, with 180 twin-engine F-22s making up the high end.
> Fifteen years after the F-35’s first flight, the Air Force has just 250 of the jets.
I'd say it's just as valid of an argument to make in this case that I'm not sure I won't see more than $60,000 of value out of efforts to prevent the economic infrastructure of the U.S. from crumbling, especially amortized over 50 years ($1,200/yr in preserved income or purchasing power).
I don't disagree that it's a decent frame of reference to use when looking at government programs...but it's important to apply the same level of rigor to measuring output value.
If you have a decent amount, then yeah, the asset price inflation came from a fire hose none other.
Also, the Federal Reserve spending is not backed by taxes.
what's wrong with just using the jets we already have. I mean we have like a gazillion of those things. what percentage of the military/armed forces is currently being used or has been used over the last 10 years. I'm guessing it's a very small percentage.
Simple as that.
My stonks went up by way more than $60k (that figure is completely wrong and inflated anyway), so I saw plenty of it.
I'm sorry, were you fishing for a different answer?
Do those things even matter?
I’m not defending the F-35 but anyone deeply and intimately familiar with the platform knows and understands that it is a Ferrari. You don’t bring your Acura TSX to a Formula 1 race track to win a race. Just like you don’t bring your Ferrari to the farm to haul material (not anymore anyways).
The F-35 may be a Ferrari; but the thing about Ferraris is that their technology trickles down. Now we have electric cars with carbon fiber shells. The same is true for the F-35. The technology inside it has and will lead to the resurrection and long standing use of older planes like the B1 and U2. Where the airframe is solid but the tech and stealth is not. It will also lead to revolutionary new planes which are cheaper to make and build.
Through the F35s use of distributed computing and treating hardware components and their software as services, we’re not going to be doomed to the same fate as the F16 where we can’t find hardware. Instead, we’ll have more component oriented aircraft systems where each aircraft is no bespoke and can use from a menu of technologies.
So did the F35 fail because we spent too much? Depends on how much it saves us later.
Did it fail because it didn’t replace the F16? What if it makes the F16 viable again? Did it still fail?
Some may see this as a slippery slope. What matters is the objective outcome that comes from this project. Not the success criteria some folks have perpetuated or thrust upon the project.
That's not a friendly restatement, no. "Might" does not make right.
Although personally I think that in the event the US military needs to scramble a bunch of F35s to serve as in legitimate air to air combat we'll have bigger problems than a costly jobs program not producing something useful.
This isn't an art project where interpretation is in the eye of the beholder. This is a taxpayer-funded set of contracts; the success criteria are defined as part of said contracts, they're not "thrust upon" the project by "some folks".
Your trickle down benefits would come from any innovative project, whether it were a success or a failure. They'd just be more generally beneficial due to more extensive application in a successful project (and probably more cheaply usable by other areas of industry). Either way they would exist in either scenario: if their existence is what defines success, then failure is impossible.
Compare that to the cold war fighters. High numbers, used by the majority of US allies and even comparable cheap. Desiged to be usable under cold war circumstances. And modernized to this very day.
The biggest issue I see, also with stuff like the FCAS (French and German Eurofghter / Rafale replacement) is cost. Just imagine you loose, say, 50 of them in a war against Russia or China. How many you can reasonably replace? At that price tag? All other enemies, you hardly loose legacy fighters against those. And that is not even taking training into account.
Well, the B-52 is still flying. Maybe it will reach 100 years of service.
So many people seem to still buy into the Cold War mindset that we just need the latest bleeding edge platforms or the Soviets are going to invade and we'll all be reading Trotsky.
The US and NATO militaries are so far ahead of the Russians and China it's comical to claim another 1.7 trillion dollars for a "ferrari" is a prudent use of taxpayer dollars.
China can't even field a blue-water navy yet. I guess they're only about a century behind the US there lol
The F-35 however was made to do everything, but excels at seemingly none of them.
The vibe I’m getting from this thread haha.
Basically F-35 is the fighter of tomorrow fighting threats of yesterday.
Spending a trillion dollars on a program may lead to some good coming out of it, but it's about as disingenuous as saying that spending $3000 on a shitty computer that crashes all the time is OK because the cat got a box out of the deal. Yes, it's technically true, but completely unrelated.
Wait a second. The F35 was supposed to be the trickled-down thing from the F22.
As in, it hasn't evolved into a complete product that can wholesale replace its predecessors, but its innovations will be incorporated into them over time.
Yes, because lots and lots of F-16s have been replaced with something that isn't what it was bought as. So unless you count it as a win that allies now have worse capabilities than they should have had and paid for because it might make them also buy F-16 parts, I would say it is a huge fail.
Improved stealth etc is useful, but F-35’s are only slightly better than 40+ year old jets. Thus hardly worth the price vs cheaply manufacturing a minor update of an older design.
Or as the saying goes “quantity has a quality all it’s own.”
It might not be a lot. The concept of flying Corvettes is strong, culturally and industrially, but it might be on the verge of becoming like cavalry with the advent of drone swarms.
You see it all the time in projects. People look busy and seem like they're building things, so some progress must be happening. Or is it?
Blink an eye, and in a couple years you unwittingly accumulated a platform that served to fulfill every random team's desire to load on requirements, systems, electronics, sensors ("go find out what people want!"), with very few people making the countervailing decision to trade off / cut things for an overall desired outcome ("what do they actually demonstrate -- not say -- they need?").
Well, they didn't have to pay for it, so there was no harm in giving their requirements. And if the actual willing payor (Congress) had little incentive (or technical chops) to be ruthless about costs or actual useful output, well then there's few checks on that happening. Until some top level general says, "why aren't these hugely expensive planes being used like we thought they would be?" Too late.
I guess it kept people employed in the meantime. How can you cut 10% of the workforce in Huntsville when the representative sits on the Armed Services committee? (I don't know that, but just for example...) Which, sometimes, is a national goal in itself for strategic purposes.
It might be good though, to have a more deliberate plan about these kinds of things, if that's the goal.
Close. Alabama Senator Shelby is the Chairman of the Committee on Appropriations and the Chairman of its Defense Subcommittee.
Edit: My apologies. Was the chairman. See nobody's comment below.
Yes. After a while was it about building the plane or keeping the aerospace industry employed and engaged? The design tried to do everything for everyone and fulfill every Colonel's dream feature and mission. Its the ultimate story of feature creep.
Brazil bought 36 JAS-39E for $5.8 billion. [1]
Taiwan ordered 66 F-16V for $8.1 billion. [2]
Korea is going to get 20 F-35A for $3.3 billion. [3]
[1] https://www.flightglobal.com/saab-brazil-finalise-gripen-ng-...
[2] https://nationalinterest.org/feature/taiwans-f-16v-fighter-j...
[3] https://www.defensenews.com/global/asia-pacific/2019/10/10/s...
Posting countries and dollar figures is part of the picture, but does not tell the whole story.
The United States bid on this contract with the F/A-18E. I can't imagine the U.S. approving the sale of F-35 technology to Brazil at any reasonable price.
> Instead of ordering fresh F-16s, he said, the Air Force should initiate a “clean-sheet design” for a new low-end fighter. Brown’s comments are a tacit admission that the F-35 has failed.
(Emphasis mine. Tacit means "implied without being stated".)
It became a Ferrari due to feature creep and an enormously complex and expensive technology stack. The F-16 is not a Ferrari and NATO needs a multirole single-seat fighter that is affordable to purchase and fly.
My most charitable view is the F-35 became a jobs program for Lockheed Martin and subcontractors. People were trained and (allegedly) useful technology was developed. But the price tag appears unreasonable by an order of magnitude, and this puts no accountability on the program management or people signing the checks.
As for arguments about technology trickling down from the F-35:
* The argument needs evidence. I've seen no attempt to identify the value of the technologies developed against the time and money spent.
* Too much time was surely spent on integration and one-off details specific to the F-35 platform, and this is sunk cost unlikely to be recovered in future platforms designed by new teams.
It was cheap to buy, cheap to run (like really cheap for the capability which in the case of the F20 matched F16’s of the era) but because the USAF didn’t want to buy them it got cut off at the knees.
Damn thing has a thrust to weight ratio of 1.16 to 1 (it could accelerate in a vertical climb) and do Mach 2, largely because they shoved a single F18 engine in to replace the two much older engines the F5 had.
Just because you can replace those 10 fighters faster doesn't mean you can replace the pilots with equivalently good ones as quickly.
Great power wars in the modern era will have some of the most decisive action happen far sooner than you can get into production capacity battles. At which point one side will lob several hypersonic missiles into the shipyards, factories, and fabs of their opponents and the ability to replace lost platforms will have been neutralized.
High level requirements: Dog fighting, close in air support, stealth, long range, automatic weapon systems, VTOL variant.
It was said many times over the decade but this plane has no specialization, so it sucks at everything. F-16's can beat it in a dogfight, A-10's are better close support, etc etc.
The Space Shuttle was rightfully cancelled (Still, I was sad) because it was a bucket of requirements that had huge reliability and cost problems.
Don't worry, this will repeat itself. A bunch of specialized tools exist and then someone says "I can build you a swiss army knife" and someone high up gets sold the dream of the multi-function tool. "It's gonna solve all our problems, you'll see..."
The multi-function tool looks f'ing fantastic on paper. It does everything! Until you put it up against actual specialized hardware and then decision makers say "ohhhhh yeah that's why we did it like that..."
As an example - the flyover at Super Bowl 55. Terrifying air power that could wipe out a civilization, but those bombers don't stop some rogue idiots from storming the Capitol, or any number of foreign and domestic hacking threats.
It’s fashionable to hate on the F-35, but let’s face it: if the allies have to establish air superiority somewhere in the world, they will be using F-35s to do so, and I’m not aware that anyone has the platform to stop them.
At the very least, N drones can't be destroyed at once (unless stored really carelessly) and can be individually specialized in a way that provides wider spectrum of capabilities.
A massive bonus: pilotless aircraft can perform manoeuvres unsurvivable for humans, and the ability to maneuver was always a strong point in the air.
The whole article is about the history of the program, why it costs so much and what the options are going forward. If you squint you can make it seem like failure but the article does not make that claim.
It does actually. Here are a couple of excerpts from the article that explicitly refer to it as a failure:
> Brown’s comments are a tacit admission that the F-35 has failed.
> ...
> But the Air Force and Lockheed baked failure into the F-35’s very concept.
[0] https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a34030586...
So, it's reasonable to say that NGAD may not be possible if it weren't for the F-35. I'd argue this is less about the F-35's shortcomings and more about the fact that we're seeing a dramatic change in air war-machine design, development, and theory.
In defense news below, you can see them speak (in meta) about how the NGAD Prototype was built. Some of those things were pioneered on the F-35.
https://www.defensenews.com/breaking-news/2020/09/15/the-us-...
A device that's faster and slicker than everything else. That has a version that can fly vertically.
If you're in the sf bay area, go take a tour of the SS Jeremiah O'Brien when things reopen. It's a WWII Liberty Ship freighter. They built well over 2000 of these things, fast, and cheap, to haul military stuff from continent to continent. They had to be fast to build: many were needed. They had to be reasonably cheap: the enemy sank many of them.
And, look at the design of this here Hacker News web app. Functional. High capacity. Simple.
Why can't US weapons factories build stuff like liberty ships and simple web sites, that work and are serviceable?
Too many committees? Too many senators? Unwillingness to tell some branch of the service (the Marines) to use helicopters? Another branch (the Navy's aircraft-carrier service) to use purpose-built planes?
I wonder if engineering and business schools should reintroduce this thing I was taught in college. "Any clod can build something heavy for a dollar. It takes skill and dedication to build something light for a quarter."
Grumble.
Now, I understand that is oversimplifying things, bending the truth a little, and omitting crucial details... but it's not that wrong.
I get how the F-35 has raised the cost of air war for the NATO countries which have bought into the F-35 program.
But how has the F-35 program raised the cost of air war for other countries?
Edit: None of you, including me, have enough understanding of this topic to even begin to discuss it in a serious manner. Have you ever heard some technically illiterate family members debate Apple vs Microsoft vs Dell computers? That's what you all sound like right now.
-- Dick Jones, Robocop.
At the implementation level, we tend to underestimate the cost of making a system extensible and "future-proof", and underestimate the value of implementing a narrowly focused system from scratch.
At the specification level, product managers too often are willing to add every feature that big customers request.
I lived and worked very close to Eglin Air Force base where all the initial F35's went. Many Air Force people thought the primary design decisions were to spend money and little else.
Won't happen, but it seems like they should just buy fighters from allies where the F-35 isn't a good fit.
If there is no specific credible enemy to fight, there are no strict reguirements that MUST be met, so one makes the plane do everething, because you dont really know what you need.
Investing money in drones over fighter jets seems like the cost effective move here. Flying the jet yourself is definitely cooler than doing it by remote control, but I don’t think it will make much sense in warfare in 20 years time. We have to skate to where the puck is going.
I think something US should take out of this is consider what Russia do with their monkey model strategy. Basically with something like tank/jet they do 2 models, one with all the bells and whistles and the other is a simple version.
This has 2 main uses;
1) Export market so they can sell simpler/cheaper and not share all tech. America does this somewhat but more on the tech protection side I believe.
2) Manufacturing output potential, so in a war countries win in the either the first strike or attrition. If you hit the attrition stage you want simplified options so factories can output faster vs the multiples the premium version take in time and resource.
If they had this, it might have given a low cost daily driver option while not forgoing the top end capability.
The other thing I thing Russia does I feel countries like mine (Australia) and other western nations should do more of is work out how to expand military into absorbing civilians. This way you can scale down the size generally whilst having solid plans on how to scale up quickly beyond the usual reserves. I've raised this before but people say military tech is too advanced. But I feel humans are smart and adaptable, I've little doubt if they look into this they would realise maybe women in their 60's (example/guess as far from normal military recruits) might make great radio operators with minimal training or drive supply lorries. Having this knowledge would give a huge force multiplier to armies if they want to scale fast and ideally help reduce the need for as large standing forces.
You mean like they did with the F15 and the F16?
It's not even a cost-benefit thing, because the benefit is there... But you don't want that cost on every plane.
Tim Krieder said it best: "we have radar-invisible planes and our enemies don't have radar".
For the Al Qaedas and Isises of the world that the US seems to fight so much, the F-35 is absurdly overspecced.
If that was the goal, then the moment the price tag on the F-35 was set, failure was admitted.
According to this: https://www.investors.com/research/f35-fighter/
the price of an F-35 is about 80 Million USD.
An F-16 goes for 30 Million USD: https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/08/24/lockheed-martin-sc...
Although it seems you can buy it used for 8.5 Million USD?? : https://www.planeandpilotmag.com/news/the-latest/2020/07/24/...
The first number in the article is Taiwan purchases 66 F-16 for 8 billions, which gives it 121 mln price tag.
The desire for commonality between the A/B/C variants (notionally to reduce cost) is the big driver, but the B (STOVL) variant probably has the most difficult individual requirements.
Unless the Forbes author has inside information, the airforcemag article in no shape or fashion says the F35 is a failure. The airforcemag article quoted Gen Brown saying the combat commanders are using the F35 too much. And wearing out the available ENGINES. With a limited budget and the mission he he has to fulfill he wants a cheaper alternative that he can sends into low threat theaters. And preserve the F35 if and when the US must fight near peer enemies. Eg Russia and China.
Not entirely but like 15% of the force
My opinion here is the Air Force recognizes the cost overruns from the program mean they need to make sure the USA's "near peer rivals" (their words) are lulled into a false sense of security, As they won't be able to spend this money again for a good 20 years. China is 12-15 years behind, Russia maybe 3-5.
An incredible amount of risk was undertaken in the project. Hopefully the lessons learned make future development much cheaper, as nothing like the aircraft has ever taken to the skies.
You may end up with something that can not fly far, can not fly high, can not carry a big payload, can not dog-fight, has an insane maintenance requirement and may, or may not be invisible. No plane can be invisible by definition. It may or may not be invisible on specific radars. The F-35 was not build to fight Iraq or Iran. I was build to fight China or Russia. This makes it a big bet.
As far as I know "Superiority" is required reading in MIT Engineering programs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superiority_(short_story)
A lot of people are mentioning Skunkworks planes like SR-71 and U-2. I don’t think that’s a fair comparison. Skunkworks basically built highly specialized prototypes that performed well within their intended use but were super expensive to maintain and couldn’t be deployed on a larger scale. I would compare them more to an F1 team that can build great cars quickly but need 20 people just to get them ready for a lap.
Building impressive prototypes is way easier than building something on large scale in an efficient way.
Again, I don’t know much about the F-35 but Skunkworks is not the model.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Johnson_(engineer)#Kelly...
It was a trillion dollar stimulus package (or welfare) directed at the good old military industrial complex, plus it helps placate the chicken hawks in Congress who wanted pork for their district. Like most weapon systems developed in peacetime with unclear use cases, it’s kind of just an expensive tech demo.
Why say including the engine? Do they sell them without the engine?
The F35 is supposed to have amazing networked situational awareness (idk the military terms) which seems like a great platform to control a fleet of slave drones?
Kind of like an aircraft carrier, surrounded by a lot of support.
Like, this is the fundamental reason why ground-based missiles don't rule the skies. Aircraft can go high enough and travel fast enough that any intercept solution has you firing well before they've committed to flying into the effective range of the missile.
Any new aircraft they develop to be cheaper will suffer the same scope and budget creep that the F-35 did.
We won't send pilots out in planes that are known to have low survivability, so when the new aircraft is insufficiently stealthy/fast/survivable, more money will be spent to make it even worse than the F-35.
His and the rest of the fighter mafia's extreme views are not popular within the defense community.
What exactly is a "low-end fight" when it comes to the USAF?
Seems to me like the real problem is the F-35 was built to be a do-it-all plane when it would make far more sense to have a more varied fleet of more cost-effective, purpose-built aircraft.
Purpose built aircraft are indeed better, and flexible cheap and reliable aircraft like Tucanos are the ideal solution for many scenarios.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_Attack/Armed_Reconnaissa...
The Tucano several other comments have mentioned was a strong contender. The Scorpion also looked pretty great, and went from concept to first flight in just over two years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textron_AirLand_Scorpion
I don't know why it was disqualified.
I wonder, in light of a shifting geopolitical situation, if the next generation of fighter might be a stab at something the west can build completely independently on it's own materials?
So, Israel flies lots of pilot hours and seems to think that the plane is a good deal.
The F-35 failed in its original goal of being lightweight, but is perhaps fine in the new goal of being a modern fancy fighter that dominate the sky. In which case, it has pivoted to become a success.
To extend their analogy, if you live near the Autobahn you would use your Ferrari daily?
Plus I don't think being "lightweight" was a goal of the JSF (or its predecessor JAST) program. Being more affordable than the F-22? Definitely.
There are 331 million Americans.
= every American paid around $1000 for this failure.
These funds could have gone into schools, roads, social programmes, ... Instead they served to enrich the small crowd owning the defense industry, with little to show for it all.
This approach is very typical of the UK MoD as well. Buy fewer than planned of an item to "save money" without understanding that the R&D cost is the same and will be spread over however many of them you buy. Then fatigue them to death because they are too few to meet the commitment, driving up maintenance costs and bringing forwards the date at which they will need to be replaced. Rinse and repeat.
The UK looks to be cutting its order from 138 to 48 F35s, but who knows what will be in next month's defence review...
Its just sad how the B52 was abused by the CIA in LAOS.
The A-10 is just a robust vehicle, hence the namesake Wharthog
As an actual fighter-plane, it is fine.
In other industries, you would look for ways to cost-down the product. We often keep the same basic structure or components, but figure out less expensive ways to accomplish the same goals. Often, the revised product can be more durable and reliable too.
It is a shame that the incentives in weapons system development / purchase don't seem to help with this at all. It seems all the incentive is to make the product more and more expensive, and requiring more service.
He ran the "Fighter Mafia" which was responsible for the F-15 and F-16 aircraft.
https://www.amazon.com/Boyd-Fighter-Pilot-Who-Changed/dp/031...
It's sad that the F-35 is in this state. The whole "sensor fusion" (no doubt, overhyped) sounded interesting. I am curious as to how well implemented the same system is on the SAAB Gripens.
It's more difficult to upgrade the F-16 systems than to design a whole new aircraft? I mean, maybe there are other reasons to design a new aircraft, but this doesn't sound like the whole story.
(Currently on the short list are: F/A-18 EF Super Hornet, F-35A Lightning II, Dassault Rafale, Eurofighter Typhoon and JAS 39E/F Gripen.)
I'm sure Lockheed will give us a great deal on it though...
Plus because the length of development is longer than pharma's, nobody involved in kicking off the project will be around to deal with the deployment problems.
Make hay while the sun shines.
(EDIT) Accidentally hit 'comment' before finishing.
On the other side, we have the entire Apollo program that cost $156 billion (2018)[²], was stopped because too expensive. And we never have been able to go on the Moon since because "cost".
Decisions that lead to the usage of public money by governments is definitively a mystery.
I wish the Lobbyists of the Army/Lockheed Martin/Military complex could do a bit of training for NASA and the research sector. Something tell me humankind could benefit a lot from it.
[¹]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...
China is not going to send fighters over to Bomb the us mainland, this thing is totally unnecessary.
I'm pretty sure no one is going to do that and yes we way overspend on the MIC but really sending militaries over to other countries was the status quo for almost as long as countries have existed.
There is no real reason to expect that will not happen again just because we are going on 80 years since anyone made a serious effort to do it. You could also argue that it has been 80 years because it was made so expensive to wage war that money/resources is no longer a reason to do it. There just isn't an ROI.
Maybe the money printer can go brrrr a little bit faster.
I think that before a brand new manned fighter design leaves the assembly line and takes its first flight, unmanned drones will rule the air.
It has been clear that it wasn't going to be a useful platform for USAF for years.
There's plenty to criticize about the F-35, particularly about the procurement strategy and development cycle. But we are starting to see real results. The F-35 has performed very well in exercises like Red Flag. And I don't think you can understate the importance of the F-35B. Yes, it has markedly worse availability rates and maintenance issues than the other variants, but that's pretty common for STOVL aircraft, like the Harrier it is replacing. And not only is the F-35B the only stealth STOVL, it's also the first production STOVL aircraft capable of supersonic speed.
I also think it's weird to imply the reason the F-35 has failed (and I don't belive it has) because it's been made in three different variants. That really isn't the reason for all of these delays. There are several examples of aircraft being able to work in multiple roles, like the F-4 and the French Rafale. The fundamental issue is in avionics and logistics. All of these sensors and systems are very complex and difficult to integrate together. Any aircraft with a modern, full-featured AESA radar and IRST sensors sees a protracted development time.
In terms of purchasing new, lower-end aircraft, I do think that's a good idea. Depending on where you want that to fit in in terms of doctrine, you've got a couple of options. The USAF is already starting to purchase some F-15EX planes. It's got decent range, good performance in air-to-air and air-to-ground engagements, and it's based on a mature platform which should reduce costs and improve availability. But it's a fairly big beast, and operational costs will still be higher than legacy F-16s. The other option is to go with a genuine light fighter like the JAS-39 Gripen. Cheaper, much lower operational costs, and capable of operating from short, rudimentary runways, but shorter range and less payload capacity. I also think there's space for a "featherweight" plane, like the A-29. When we're engaging Taliban targets that don't have anti-aircraft defenses beyond small arms fire, a simple turboprop will get the job done efficiently and cheaply, and that frees up jets to be used in other theaters.
Today's drones are sitting ducks and they've just started to outfit them with air to air missiles.
48 x 90 = 4320 mil.$
I don't know the sales figures, but it may have been a success using those metrics.