Preachin to the choir, man. Military spending is WAY down on my list of priorities. But - big surprise! - my priorities don’t seem to get reflected in a hell of a lot of spending decisions.
Last time I spend much energy on this topic was when Electric Boat was getting a contract for some sub that - as best I can remember, the navy didn’t even want. But that shop contributes greatly to the Conn economy, from the (relatively few) folk on the line, to the guys running the 7/11 outside the gates.
Yeah, I’d prefer a meaningful “workfare” system, investment in our infrastructure, etc. But as long as we are transferring more and more wealth to the wealthiest (what seems to be a PRIMARY goal of our government), at least we have a shiny toy at the end. Better than pouring it down a hole in the desert and covering it up with GI bodies, necessitating unending and unsupportable VA bills…
I didn’t say I support it. Just said it is relatively low on the ever-increasing list of things that outrage and confound me about our nation’s apparent priorities.
The rational definition of Initial Operatinal Capability doesn’t generally mean “sitting off the flight line for months at a time because of basic design flaws, untested software, and manufacturing problems preventing delivery of a complete aircraft”. This procurement made the infamous Bradley Fighting Vehicle development look like an efficient, streamlined, corruption-free development process.
Major General Partridge: Just because the tests didn’t turn out the way Colonel Burton thought they would, was no reason to suspect there was anything devious going on.
Madame Chairwoman: I ask you General, filling the fuel tanks with WATER before a test to check the combustibility of those tanks, that wasn’t devious?
Major General Partridge: If the tanks had been filled with fuel, there’s a good chance the vehicle would have exploded.
Congressman #1: Isn’t that the point?
Major General Partridge: If the vehicle had exploded, we wouldn’t be able to run additional tests[RIGHT]-- The Pentagon Wars[/RIGHT]
That estimate was wildly inaccurate. An F-35 costs us around $100-120 million today. Do you know what you can get with $10-$12 million? Half of a Reaper, which is nowhere near as capable as an F-35.
Huh? What are you calling a “Kennedy-era aircraft carrier”? USS Enterprise cost $451 million (according to Wikipedia). That’s about four times the cost of an F-35.
And where’d you get the idea that we don’t expose expensive weapon systems to risk? We routinely expose our most expensive aircraft (B-2 bombers) to risk by having them bomb dangerous places in Syria / Iraq / Afghanistan or fly near North Korea or China. Even relatively-cheap rotary-wing aircraft like the Apache, Chinook, Black Hawk, Pave Hawk, Osprey, etc cost tens of millions of dollars, and we expose them to risk all the time. Arleigh Burke destroyers cost something like $2 billion, and we sailed one of those near one of China’s man-made islands recently.
I work at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, where the Navy and Marine Corps are testing their variants of the F-35, and from what I hear from people that are actually working on the project there are two major snags that are holding up production and driving up costs.
First there is the problem of component non-compatibility. Much of the savings were supposed to come from streamlined logistics due to compatibility of components across all three variants. This has been a complete failure, and I believe that compatibility is now under 20% of components. Whoever thought that a V/STOL and a conventional aircraft could be compatible was probably high. And if it wooshed anyone, the F-111 references upthread were only brought up to show that we have been down this road before, and it didn’t work then either.
The second roadblock is the $17 billion ALIS (Autonomic Logistics Information System) which does not work. While the Aircraft can fly without it, it was also supposed to keep costs down by making maintenance troubleshooting easy, since the Aircraft not only is supposed to be able to tell you what has broken, it can also tell you what is about to fail. There is no backup. The maintenance database that we use for all other Naval/Marine Corps Aircraft (NALCOMIS) cannot be used at all. I was just checking in my NALCOMIS system last week to see if they had added capability, and I found that they had not. It is impossible to enter an F-35 aircraft into the system. I don’t know for sure, but I can only assume that all maintenance records must be kept on paper for now. While we do have procedures to do that, no one has had to do it on a day to day basis since the early 90’s. You cannot deploy a squadron like that. There are very few people left on active duty who have had to use paper for a squadron for more than a week. I would not want to see what would happen if they tried to deploy for 9 months like that. This also leads to the problem that the maintenance Manuals are all written assuming that ALIS works, meaning that troubleshooting steps are almost non-existant. So far, the Marines have needed Lockheed personnel to help them with routine maintenance. That should not happen if it is operationally capable.
I was on a panel at a defense oriented conference on testing and diagnostics, which led to a committee (bottom up) in which those of us in the non-defense electronics sector could relate best practices, since there seemed to be a big problem. It never went anywhere since we could never find anyone willing to admit there was a problem.
There was a requirement that all failures be diagnosed to one or two components 100% of the time, which is quite a tall order. This requirement was in the contracts, and it appeared that contractors always were able to do this, which amazed me. Until I learned their qualification test. It was selecting two or three defects - the contractors’ choice - and showing they could be diagnosed.
In my area the defense industry is something like 20 year behind civilian electronic products. And you guys need better stuff than we do.
Having been on a bunch of conference calls about this nothing that you said surprises me at all.
Who on earth said that? Even the Navy’s UCLASS, which had flirted with requirements that were substantially less capable than an F-35C in every respect except endurance, was headed for a flyaway cost of $80-$100 million or perhaps more. The program has more or less been cancelled. (Or the be hyper-accurate, restructured beyond recognition.) That’s just a wee bit lower than the flyaway cost of an F-35C today.
We don’t need 4th generation fighters for counter insurgency operations either. How about $14 million for a Super Tucano, fit it out with some ECM to avoid shoulder mounted SAM’s and only send them in once a smaller fleet of stealth fighters have finished the SEAD and totally destroyed the opposing air force.
F16’s was the opposite of the F35. The performance of the prototypes and early production models was excellent throughout and it faced hostility from the services, the complete opposite of what has occured with the F35. Indeed as FASpoints out
The F16 was uncomfortably good in testing, the F35 has been uncomfortably bad.
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F16’s was the opposite of the F35. The performance of the prototypes and early production models was excellent throughout and it faced hostility from the services, the complete opposite of what has occured with the F35. Indeed as FAS points out
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Yet there were serious concerns with the F100 engine initially, and several air craft were lost. I don’t see where they brought any of that up. There were also bugs with the then cutting edge fly by wire system…again, they seem to have glossed over those.
Basically, it’s horseshit that there were no serious issues or concerns with the F-16 and that ‘The F16 was uncomfortably good in testing’…that’s hindsight and propaganda bullshit talking. ANY design that is cutting edge is going to have problems and issues, and any of them are going to have detractors both technical and political. And F-16 was no exception to this. I think a certain level of rose colored glasses are shading your memories of the past. Granted, F-35 has had more issues than F-16 did, but then F-35 is a much more cutting edge design with a lot more bleeding edge innovations and systems today than F-16 had in the past, but it hasn’t been ‘uncomfortably bad’, and it’s on par with several operational US weapons platforms that had issue in early testing or even production but eventually went on to give us great service. As this plane will. A decade from now people won’t even recall most of this…as they have seemingly forgotten the teething issues with weapons systems now considered great.
As others have already pointed out, all complex new weapon systems have bugs and glitches that need to be worked out. There was a time the F-22 was suffocating its pilots.
The F-35 isn’t particularly expensive for modern fighter jets, and it brings some great capabilities to us and our allies.
Yes it will eventually. But both the idea of concurrency and the idea of using the same airframe for both a vertical take off plane, a carrier capable plane and a conventional fighter have been dismal failures. And then there is the fact that the USAF is putting all their eggs in one basket, planning to use the F35 for everything from close air support to wild weasel / SEAD to ground strike to air superiority to counter insurgency.
Who wants to bet that that will be a pipe dream and the USAF will eventually have to go back to congress begging for more money for dedicated air craft for some of these roles?
The F-35 is not an air superiority fighter. Plus, the F-16 happens to already fill most of the roles that you mentioned, having taken them over from other retired platforms.
The eventual goal is to retire the F-16 completely and the F-35 is supposed to take over all of its roles, and to retire all the A-10’s, again with the F-35 doing CAS. Literally the F-35A/B/C and the F-22 will eventually be the only fighter / attack craft in the USAF, Navy and Marine inventory. Everything else except bombers and cargo planes is supposed to go.
The Navy will still have Super Hornets, the Air Force will still have Strike Eagles, and the Marines, well the Marines are sticking weapons on EVERYTHING