Why have we wasted so much money on the F-35?

Great Debates
42

Ok, not to respond to you only, but this is an example of the problem. We don’t need any large number of stealth fighters, or manned fighters at all. The future of heavy weaponry in war lies in drones. We should be preparing one million smart delivery vehicles as our defense. Should the need ever arise, and more to prevent the need from ever arising, we need the world to know that they cannot survive a war with the US. China, Russia, or any alliance that could form a credible threat could be destroyed in 24 hours, and with enough precision to focus on removing the capability to threaten us militarily.

We have advanced as far as we need now in manned military vehicles. We will retain some number of manned fighters and bombers for rapid low level actions, but our fighter planes in the future will be primary delivery vehicles for missile systems that protect the larger delivery systems carrying multiple smart secondary devices. Our concept of lifespan, range, and returnability of these planes will change greatly.

We have reached a turning point in technology. The development of the F-35 is justified to advance the technology, but as part of the continuation of the traditional expansion of manned warplanes would be a waste.

43

Because the F-35 is directly responsible for 32,500 jobs in 46 states. It also has an economic impact of over 100 million in 18 states. http://www.businessinsider.com/this-map-explains-the-f-35-fiasco-2014-8

It is political suicide to vote against it, just as Lockheed Martin planned.

44

F-22s have pretty limited ground attack capability and we don’t have many of them. We don’t have very many B-2s at all. For the next several decades at least, the F-35s are envisioned as a major part of the door-kickers (along with F-22s, B-2, and, eventually, LRS-B). Once those stealthy platforms have destroyed the enemy’s air defenses, then we can use our remaining 4th-generation platforms (or so goes the LockMart story) to bomb pickup trucks or whatever else we feel like. I’d say there’s a >1% chance that we need to dismantle a somewhat-serious IADS over the next few decades (Iran, Syria, North Korea, China, Russia) and the F-35 would be useful for that.

As for the $100M bit, the last round of LRIP jets had the A model at $95M (+ engines). They’re getting cheaper with every LRIP, and should get cheaper still once we reach full-rate production. But the reality is that modern fighter jets are very expensive. $100M is probably a pretty average cost for a really capable 4.5-gen Western fighter.

45

Political engineering has led to dispersal of war spending jobs throughout the country, in as many congressional districts as possible.

46

Drones are expensive too. A bare-bones MQ-9 is like $20M. Global Hawks are more than $100M. If you want to build something with fighter-like performance, it’s going to have fighter-like cost, whether the pilot is in the thing or not.

47

I didn’t say it would save money. It probably will on a per unit basis, but that doesn’t matter because we need many more drones than fighter planes as an effective deterrent or to counter attacks rapidly and successfully.

48

Lotta good answers so far. I’m sure we’ll be seeing the astounding cost benefits of modifying a single platform, right? :dubious:

Heck, I can appreciate the benefits in pursuing the highest tech. But I sure wish it didn’t come at the expense of dependable daily use weapons.

But I don’t get as upset at military spending as I used to. Instead, I simply think of it as jobs programs and economic stimulus (with a soupcon of income redistribution to the most wealthy!)

49

You don’t get it - your proposal to have thousands of autonomous drones is not only technologically impossible – or at least improbable – for probably decades into the future, and even if the technology existed, your massive systems-of-systems idea would be completely unaffordable.

People have this weird idea that drones are smart, expendable, and cheap. They aren’t really any of those. They aren’t smart because for many years to come, humans will fly them. They aren’t truly expendable because they are expensive (even without a human in them). And they aren’t cheap because they are expensive.

50

This I agree with. Sometimes a cutting edge program turns out to be a few steps beyond the cutting edge and out into “we can’t actually make it work reliably” territory.

51

Yet, even failures (which the F-35 isn’t) push the envelope and gives us data that might be (probably will be) useful down the road. And the other side of the coin is if you are always sticking to the tried and true and just retreading your old stuff, you pay the price when you try and use it in that it’s more exposed and less capable, and allows even lower tier military’s a shot at hurting you. The US pretty much depends on our military being pretty much at the technological peak in order to meet it’s (ridiculous) global military commitments and requirements, since the alternative would be to either give it up or to have a much, MUCH bigger military to make up for the capability.

52

I disagree. We have the technology now, guidance systems are not a problem. We’ll be advancing well beyond this point certainly, but we can’t build a million delivery systems overnight let alone prepare the infrastructure to utilize them. It takes time and why it has to be started now.

I don’t disagree about the cost, but it’s not unaffordable. Over time as the number of delivery systems increases the cost will come down rapidly. These systems don’t have to cost as much as drones designed for long range search and multiple strikes. Most of them will be the kind of smart missiles we already have. Those costs won’t become trivial but costs for existing systems will go down over time as the new one is phased in.

There is plenty to do and develop over time because we can’t stop the rest of the world from doing this also, and they’ll do the same things to counter our capability whether or not we concentrate on manned vehicles, those costs won’t change.

53

Yeah, but look at the cost and hours needed to ready so many of our most sophisticated planes/vehicles per mission. Not saying there isn’t a role for F35 (or B2 or F117), but those damned Warthogs did their job admirably at a fraction of the cost - a job that is likely still going to need to be done.

Unfortunately, it too often seems that when you pursue a single, all purpose weapon/vehicle, it ends up being an awfully pricey solution for the most common applications.

54

No, we do not have the technology now for drones to kill on their own initiative in a way that complies with the law of armed conflict.

Let’s just be clear here - to build 2,400 manned airplanes that are primarily intended to deliver missiles that already exist will cost $400 billion in acquisition costs. That $400 billion figure includes the savings in manufacturing learning that accompany building 2,400 aircraft.

Building a similar number of drones of the same capability to deliver missiles that already exist will cost $400 billion plus however many billions it will cost to develop autonomous systems that replace a human. That cost of developing AI will be very, very significant, and perhaps won’t even be possible for many years.

It’s like you’re saying that a Tesla with full autopilot capability will not cost any more than a Tesla car without autopilot capability. Except that even Tesla charges customers $2,500 more for a limited autopilot capability.

55

Well, IIRC the Warthog is actually scheduled to remain in deployment through the mid-20’s and the Air Force is at least going through the motions of developing a single, vertical mission replacement (as opposed to the F-35 which, as you noted, is more a jack of all trades type air craft).

The F-117 was retired years ago, btw.

56

[QUOTE=Ravenman]
No, we do not have the technology now for drones to kill on their own initiative in a way that complies with the law of armed conflict.
[/QUOTE]

Yeah, I don’t think people really grasp what they are saying whey they claim we have (or will have shortly) drones that can do everything our current manned air craft do. That’s a huge leap from where we are today. My guess is folks see something like a Predator drone with Hellfire missiles on board and make the leap to that being able to replace attack air craft in contested air space, while the reality is that these things aren’t capable of doing most of that mission…and are currently controlled directly wrt the firing part by humans in the loop. And that against a technologically capable enemy such a loop could and would be easily closed.

Even to get the air frame for a drone that could possibly do the mission it would cost pretty much what a manned air frame would cost…and this leaves aside either the technological or even ethical aspects of putting an AI in charge of making life and death decisions to fire, not to mention an AI that could actually react in a way to GET the air craft to the target, or leaving a security vulnerability and potential gaping hole in your attack plan by leaving a remote human in the loop. We are very far from having such systems, and when we do it won’t be cost that pushes them forward, it will be risk verse capability.

57

Well, it certainly is not a success.

Perhaps someday it will work and perhaps it will be an excellent fighting machine.

Perhaps. Even if it does though it is costing far too much for what we are getting and taking far too long to build working versions (remember the first test flight of one was in 2006 and it still isn’t ready ten years later…the SR-71, fastest plane in the world, went from design to flying in about 2.5 years for comparison and that was in the early 1960’s).

So far the F35 program has been a boondoggle in every sense of the word.

58

You a big fan of McCain? :stuck_out_tongue: I disagree with your assessment that ‘the F35 program has been a boondoggle in every sense of the word’ and am perfectly willing to trade cites if you really want to see alternatives. The F-35 program has certainly had issues, but then so have just about every other US weapons system program in the last 40 years. Similar things that you are saying here have been said about every system, and similar political football games have been played with them all as well. I recall people saying the same things about the F-14, F-15 and F-16, as well as the F-18 (and a multitude of US bombers). I’ve seen similar things about the Abrams and Bradley fighting vehicles, about the Apache, etc etc. And a big reason we don’t have more F-22’s is exactly the same arguments you are using here…which is ironic, since while we have very few of them, when we want to show the flag to bolster our allies, those are exactly the planes we transfer and shuffle around.

The F-35 is a bleeding edge design, so it’s kind of expected that it will have issues. Boondoggle though? :dubious:

59

Indeed; it is the same logic by which NASA selected the Space Transportation System (‘Shuttle’) based upon having suppliers in every state and especially in key Congressional districts.

Well, yes and no. Obviously an unmanned aerial vehicle with the capabilities of a 5th generation fighter/interceptor are going to be greater than those of a surveillance or anti-personnel drone, but because they don’t have to have a pilot you eliminate the most requirements-heavy and operationally complex part of a military aircraft; the proection and interface to the pilot (and RIO, if the vehicle has one). You also can accept lower survivability in exchange for cost, eliminate key safety items, et cetera. One estimate I’ve seen for a UAS with F-35 like capabilities is about 10% of the cost of the pre-inflation F-35, and also benefits from having a smaller profile and less mass in having greater range and lower radar cross section.

This also misses another point, which is the rationale behind building an all-in-one fighter/intercepter/bomber/ground attack aircraft: that we do this because it is too expensive to build aircraft and train pilots for each different of mission. In theory, one class of ‘modular’ aircraft only requires one logistics and parts system, one training program, common operational procedures, et cetera. But as *Ranger Jeff pointed out, we’ve been down that path before with the F-111 and later with the F/A-18, and while both aircraft eventually proved to be capable in a variety of roles, the cost savings and ease of logistics was not realized to any useful degree. Furthermore, by fielding a fighter aircraft that costs as much as a Kennedy-era aircraft carrier, we’ve essentially determined that we can no longer actually expose such weapons to any combat situation where they might be threatened lest we chance losing our investment, which is kind of pointless for a battlefield weapon. This is all withstanding that the F-35 is kind of a piece of shit from a reliability standpoint, and that costs are only going to continue to grow as the missions it is expected to perform expands and more reliability issues crop up.

But Norman Augustine said it best in his eponymous Augustine’s Laws:

Law Number XVI:
In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one aircraft. This aircraft will have to be shared by the Air Force and Navy 3-1/2 days each per week except for leap year, when it will be made available to the Marines for the extra day.

Except that its actually a pretty shitty jobs program that provides no real benefits to the public at large, nor improves our national security, nor genuinely advances commercializable technology, or is otherwise a good investment of either tax revenue or human capital. There are any number of pet projects from sustainable energy research and next generation transportation fuels, to space exploration and in-situ resource usage, planetary surveillance and defense, to recruiting and funding biotech materials and medical research. The last multi-billion dollar military program I can think of that provided a real benefit to the public (and that private industry would never have been able to develop on commercial funding) is the Global Positioning System. For what we’re going to pay to develop and field the F-35 of questionable capability we could have sent multiple exploration probes to every planet in the solar system, established an interplanetary communications and navigation solar-orbiting satellite array, and developed a new family of heavy lift vehicles, with enough left over to rebuild the crumbling civil infrastructure, increase cancer and neuroscience research by a factor of two or more, and had a good start on developing and deploying treatments and cures for many infectious diseases and parasites that may threaten to cause global pandemics and cost hundreds of billions of dollars in lost productivity.

Military spending on supposed cutting edge development of new weapon systems benefits a very tiny minority of high value investors and the Congresspeople beholden to them and the votes they can bring.

Stranger

60
  1. You appear to think that Turkey’s issues with extremists makes them a threat to the US. Please elaborate how this would play out.
  2. India were not pro-soviet, but quite clear on being a neutral country along with the rest of NAM. Please advise how their attempts to remain neutral during the cold war makes them a threat to the US now.
61

I suppose that depends on how you define “ready”. The Marines declared IOC last year. The Air Force will probably due so later this year.