Trimming cost of military weapons but still getting same quality and quantity

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

Ravenman touched on one major area of inefficiency: defense procurement (at least with really advanced systems like fighters) takes place along decade-plus timelines. Governments will come and go during that period, and the government that greenlights your aircraft is guaranteed to be long gone by the time it is ready for induction. It would be one thing if the USAF could say, “we’ll buy 500 for eleventy billion dollars” in 1980 and keep its promise in 2005. But it can’t. By 2005, the new SecDec will have cut its order in half, if you’re lucky.

The reality is that evolutionary developments on The F/A-18 along the low observability and low cost/risk of UAVs pretty much offers the same capabiltiies as the F-22/F-35 at far less procurement and operating costs.

The F/A-18 (even the mooted advanced version) has no internal weapons stowage, and none is planned; it doesn’t supercruise, and GE’s engine upgrade won’t fix that; it’s not particularly maneuverable, and it’s not getting thrust vectoring or any other significant upgrades in that area.

It might be cheap enough to allow the Navy to buy so many that it can match G5 aircraft on a force-wide basis. It won’t be good enough to come close on a one for one basis.

[msmith537]

@XT

We already do this, pretty much. The B-52 has been in service longer than most 'dopers (including me) have been alive. Most of the current generation of US fighter jets were designed in the 70’s. As to your proposal, sounds like a recipe for us to get a lot of useless crap that is simply incremental updates to existing designs…if that. Basically, no aero-space company is going to respond to your RFP for a fixed cost, or if they do it will be with stuff they have off the shelf already, which means you might as well just keep retreading your old stuff.).

Isn’t that what they already sort of do? The modern B-52H is very different from the original B-52A from the 50s, but it’s still basically 60 years of incremental upgrades and retrofits. It seems like they don’t really go with a completely new airframe like the B-2 or the F-35 until they are ready to go with a bunch of completely new technologies.

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

Well, not really. The B-52’s length of service is really just luck. It’s huge and slow and lumbering, and can’t penetrate properly defended airspace. However, it can bomb the shit out of un- or lightly-defended areas, and it just so happens that we have been fighting assymmetric wars since the 50s.

[Ravenman]

It’s pretty clear that for some weapons platforms, you just need a truck to accomplish the mission, and for others, the type of platform is the test of whether the mission can be accomplished.

Tankers, cargo aircraft, and the B-52 are great examples of, for the most part, just needing a truck. Over time you may wish to make the truck better – like C-130Js are substantially improved over C-130Es and Hs – or just add things to the truck.

Fighter aircraft and submarines are two examples of platforms in which you can only do so much to improve them once they are built, so they are resigned every couple decades or so.