Is the $400 Billion F-35's 'Brain' Broken? (cnn.com) 175
Zachary Cohen, reporting for CNN News: Almost 2,500 of the world's most advanced warplanes, with a total price tag of $400 billion, and they may not have a "brain" in the bunch? That's the fear of federal watchdogs who say problems with the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter's complex logistics software system could lead to a grounding of the entire fleet, not to mention future cost increases and schedule delays. Documenting risks to the F-35's Autonomic Logistics Information System, which Department of Defense officials have described as the "brains" of the fifth-generation fighter, an April 14 Government Accountability Office report says a failure "could take the entire fleet offline," (PDF) in part, due to the lack of a backup system. The report also outlines concerns related to the lack of testing done to ensure the software will work properly by the time the Air Force plans to declare its version of the aircraft ready for deployment this August and the Navy reaches that milestone in 2018. The Marine Corps declared the first squadron of its F-35 variant ready for combat in July 2015, with the intention of upgrading and resolving the software issues before its first planned deployment in 2017.
giant boondoggle is giant boondoggle (Score:5, Insightful)
Amazing how that isn't clear to everyone by now.
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Answer to headline: No, it's just way too damned expensive. With enough time and money, anything can be fixed.
Next?
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With enough time and money, anything can be fixed.
Next?
As for what's "next", may I suggest you reflect upon the tale of Humpty Dumpty? You seem to have missed the point.
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There's literally no reason for a super-advanced brand-new logistics software for the fighter.
You're just demonstrating your ignorance. Luckily, its the dumb preaching to the dumb.
Software on a weapons system is used to improve the weapons system's performance. It automates tasks which once required a human to do. It also determines whether a component of the plane is not working properly, which means it improves maintenance, thus effectiveness and longevity of the plane. Just like sensors do in your car now. In a $25K car, it would be stupid to do some of the things that being done in the F-35
Re:giant boondoggle is giant boondoggle (Score:4, Interesting)
You're just demonstrating your ignorance... Software on a weapons system is used to improve the weapons system's performance. It automates tasks which once required a human to do. It also determines whether a component of the plane is not working properly, which means it improves maintenance, thus effectiveness and longevity of the plane. Just like sensors do in your car now.
Ironic that you write about the parent "demonstrating ignorance", when you haven't taken the trouble to understand that the topic is *logistics* software. This software is NOT part of the aircraft at all; it is basically doing the job that an experienced store-room manager used to do back in the days when weapons systems were simple enough to be understood by human beings. From TFA:
"Unlike the airframe and engine, however, the software is not built into the plane itself. Instead, it runs on ground computers to support operations, mission planning, maintenance and sustainability".
Reality Check (Score:5, Interesting)
Estimated to cost approximately $16.7 billion over the aircraft's 56-year lifespan, the logistics software system is considered one of the three major components that make up the F-35, along with the airframe and engine.
Unlike the airframe and engine, however, the software is not built into the plane itself. Instead, it runs on ground computers to support operations, mission planning, maintenance and sustainability.
So...
1. Unlike when you take your car to the shop, they won't be able to have the plane tell them what's wrong.
2. If CSC updates the servers and breaks it (like the usually do to ours), there are no backups.
The "Brain" is actually the pilot and the software that displays threats, targets and kills them is apparently working correctly.
1 trillion dollar boondoggle (Score:2)
which is closer to the actual TOC. It will be remembered as what destroyed the American Empire.
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Ah, no. The primary purpose what obviously to get a gigantic pile of money to certain companies and people and that goal has been accomplished. Or do you think they will have to take back their defective product?
Re: giant boondoggle is giant boondoggle (Score:2)
Re:giant boondoggle is giant boondoggle (Score:5, Insightful)
Eisenhower warned about the dangers of the military-industrial complex [msu.edu], and he was right. The national debt is a greater threat to the country than any foreign foe.
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Not only could you cut US military spending in half, you could cut that half in half. Right at this moment the US military industrial complex via the corporate control of NATO is purposefully wasting money creating enemies, in order to generate more funding. Cut funding in half and they no longer will be able to fund that. With fewer enemies the military funding can be halved again. The bulk of spending is currently horrendous waste. Replacing what does not need to be replaced. Creating new and ever more e
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Trade one boondoggle for another? No thanks. You want to fund space, contribute to The Space Society, or whatever. Vote with your dollars, instead of trying to take mine for the things which interest you.
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Disingenuous bullshit.
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I am trying to fathom what you think I would gain, why your personal greed somehow defines my opinion and seeking ways to redirect those industries focus to less harmful objectives. Don't not equate you greed to my gaining nothing but reduced risk of war.
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The national debt *is* a foreign foe; the greatest, in fact. Ironically, most of the debt is due to the corporate welfare known as Permanent War (TM).
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The US could cut their military budget in half if it didn't have to provide protection for Europe and all the other free loaders in SE Asia.
But it doesn't have to, and that's the point. The US is nothing more that a sociopathic bully, who says to the kids on the block, "you need my protection", and every once in a while goes off on some unpopular twat. The US has to stop volunteering to do Team America: World Police. If Europe can't get around Germany, and facedown Russia, then its Europe's own fucking fault. They have it easier than being a neighbor of China.
The F-35 is the most economically mismanaged weapons development program in US his
Re:giant boondoggle is giant boondoggle (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, we bullied 54 nations into signing defense pacts, and we bullied Europe into sticking us with a huge bill for NATO. We bullied every other Nato country except for Poland and Britain into not paying the 2% of their GDP on defense that the treaty requires, so we could sociopathically pay for the gaps in their budgets, in addition to providing such a huge military force, that Germany, for instance, only needs to have available one light brigade of combat troops for NATO operations. Oh, and they can't legally fight on foreign soil. We also bullied them into using things like our Satellites for navigation and such.
It never ever happens that when shit goes down, any number of other nations look to us for help, because they were all bullied into an agreement they didn't want. Oh, and of course, other countries don't do their own bullying or have complex bundles of purposes guiding how they interact with us.
We're just thugs doing everything entirely for our benefit, because were sociopaths.
I also want to seriously commend you on the brilliant insight that military contractors, being businesses, are focused on making profits. If only we could be like the Norwegians or the French and have our missiles hand-rolled in the laps of our mothers at home!
And yes, all we have to do is "fire" politicians who supported bad ideas. I mean, it's not like the political class is powerful and resilient or that actual information on the specifics of what they do are hard to come by. I mean, if the average citizen only spent 20 hours every week digging up information on government contracts, lobbying, and a few thousand pages of legislation, it would be easy.
In other words, you are one seriously obtuse motherfucker.
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Sure, we bullied 54 nations into signing defense pacts, and we bullied Europe into sticking us with a huge bill for NATO. We bullied every other Nato country except for Poland and Britain into not paying the 2% of their GDP on defense that the treaty requires, so we could sociopathically pay for the gaps in their budgets, in addition to providing such a huge military force, that Germany, for instance, only needs to have available one light brigade of combat troops for NATO operations...
As a non-American in an allied country I can attest that America more than just a bully. Sometimes a bully, yes, but often a great help and friend.
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We are past that point by a couple of years.
The reason it's still around is all the pork.
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It's gotta be close to the point where pulling the plug is the better path.
Ha! My "sunk cost" fallacy beats your logic and rationality!
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It's the fact that there's a bunch of functioning F-35s, and these stories are controversial so they run. If it bleeds, it leads. The F-35 has a whole bunch of versions, for different military branches, different countries, etc. All these stories make it sound like it's some alpha project instead of a functioning jet.
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F-35's being configured for different countries is bullshit. The F-35's were advertised to take care of specific foreign buyers requirements, and that's what those buyers sunk their money into. The UK's requirements were not different than the US Marine Corps'. The same goes for every country, excepting Australia and Canada (and the US Navy) that wanted two engines in the F-35. They were told (very politely) to go fuck themselves, and if they didn't like it, they could go buy someone else's stealth warp
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What happens when you jam a drone's signal? Expensive flying bricks that eventually crash in enemy territory.
What happens when you develop autonomous computer systems to take control of the drone when it loses the ability to signal its controllers? Skynet.
Its extremely unlikely that drones will ever fully replace humans in the air. When they are capable of doing so, that's when you'll have to worry about your weapons being used against you.
The problem is that its (probably) past the point of pulling the
Tell me this isn't a government operation... (Score:2)
[...] due to the lack of a backup system.
Feature creep missed this one.
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They had a backup but that dago twerp deleted it.
The end of manned aerial combat (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes it's broken. It's broken in a dozen ways, but most of all it's broken on the most basic measure: Performance.
The inevitable end of the F-35 won't happen due to budget, and it won't happen due to tests, wargames or software testing. It will happen in combat where it will underperform and rapidly go extinct.
Which is a good thing. The subsequent generations of unmanned aircraft will outperform at levels that human piloted aircraft never could. They will be smaller, more agile, capable of higher-G maneuvers
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Which is a good thing. The subsequent generations of unmanned aircraft will outperform at levels that human piloted aircraft never could. They will be smaller, more agile, capable of higher-G maneuvers, and vastly cheaper. They will have vastly superior response times and less susceptible to pilot-error.
They also won't be able to make judgement-calls to not engage a target.
Remember, while humans have the capacity to do terrible things to each other, humans also have the capacity to defy orders to to terrible things to each other. Removing a layer of humanity further concentrates terrible lethal power in fewer and fewer hands.
Re:The end of manned aerial combat (Score:5, Informative)
Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) is the 'maintenance' software system, stuff like parts inventories, maintenance and airframe systems status, scheduling, blah.
Unnecessarily complex. It does not do targeting, battle communications, flight control, or pilot extension, something that is described as handled by 'sensor fusion software'. However, it is issuing false alarms for radar system capability, which occurs during flight, including combat. This impacts the pilot...
Also, the parts management system misorders parts, which seems inexcusable. Your Chevy dealer does better, by all accounts.
Since 2014 this software has been described as having so many problems and being so complex that "it needs to be treated “like its own weapon system.”"
Maintainers have said 80 percent of issues identified by ALIS are "false positives."
And then this tidbit:
"The ALIS system is currently computer racks totaling about 1,000 pounds, and was too big to be used during carrier testing. The program is developing a deployable, two-man portable version of the system that will be ready in July."
Woot. I thought 70s era systems were big.
Sheesh.
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Must be written in Java...
Re: The end of manned aerial combat (Score:2)
Imagine it's a beowulf cluster...
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There's difference between unmanned and autonomous. Drones are unmanned, not autonomous; there is still a human issuing orders. The next generation of fighters will be drones.
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Which is a good thing. The subsequent generations of unmanned aircraft will outperform at levels that human piloted aircraft never could. They will be smaller, more agile, capable of higher-G maneuvers, and vastly cheaper. They will have vastly superior response times and less susceptible to pilot-error.
And chances are that they couldn't be built at all without the F-35 technology and experience.
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it's broken on the most basic measure: Performance.
I'm pretty sure the most basic measure is funnelling money to contractors. So far that seems to be the *only* thing it can do successfully. *Everything* has been compromise for the sake of that objective.
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Isn't this the plot of Gundam Wing; Mobile Suits being replaced by Mobile Dolls? At least they had colonized space for nearly 200 years...
Back in the 20th century when it began (Score:5, Informative)
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Another massive waste of resources. You don't need the same level of training to pilot a drone that you need to sit in and pilot a fast jet. The Army uses enlisted men/women to fly drones, while the Air Force uses officers.
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The Army uses enlisted men/women to fly drones, while the Air Force uses officers.
come to think of it does Army still use NCOs or warrant officers (if they still exist) to fly helicopters? about AF, I remember in 1980s talking with a non-pilot USAF captain when he expects to become a general. He said no, "to get stars here [pointing to shoulder], you need wings here [pointing to chest]." This guy also wore glasses so zero chance to be a pilot. I wonder with less flying officers in AF will we see more non-pilot generals in this age of drones?
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Its more like will there be a US Air Force in a hundred years. The Air Force may have come about because of military politics, but air resources were ill suited to be managed by less technical services like the Army. That is just not the case today. The question is which service disappears first, the Air Force or the Marines.
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Re:Back in the 20th century when it began (Score:5, Informative)
Drones are perfect for asymmetric warfare. The US pounding ISIS is the perfect example of this. The drones have a clear flight path, limited interference and nothing that is going to shoot them down.
Now lets start are conflict with a first world military power, but assume it doesn't go nuclear. ASATS take out your communication birds, high powered jammers lower your radios range by at least a magnitude, advanced AA systems come on line & missile strikes start hitting your home base drone control systems. Right now how well do you think your drones are performing.
A manned aircraft allows you to bring weapons to bare with an advanced intelligence system (the pilot) having full autonomy of when to fire and when not to.
You need to change your thinking about aircraft. Aircraft are weapons platforms, they bring weapons into effective range of a target. At one end of the spectrum the b52 brings a load of weapons to the table, but its radar signature and flight characteristics means its a sitting duck. The f-35 is meant to be able to get close to the target under fire, drop a small but significant load of weapons and get out.
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It's too slow and its range is too small to be an effective incursor. Its only strength really is stealth, but pray you don't end up in a dogfight with it.
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It has a longer range than the f-16 and a higher speed. The f-16 out ranges it when it has drop tanks.
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Fighter aircraft have always seen criticism until they've had chance to prove themselves, and the F-35 is no different.
Your criticisms of the F-35 are the exact same criticisms that were made of the harrier jump jet - people said it was too hard to fly, it's range was dire, it was overly complex and VTOL/STOVL were a waste, and that it wasn't fast enough, but it has gone on to be one of the most succesful fighter aircraft of all time proving itself both in carrier launched air-to-air combat downing sometime
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There's no defending the design of this Homer-mobile of fighter jets. It was designed specifically to replace a wide variety of planes in multiple services -- knowing that it would be a jack of all trades, master of none. This was done specifically to reduce maintenance costs by having one basic design to service across multiple services for multiple purposes. Instead of multiple crafts tailor-made for specific purposes, they chose to make one that will do everything, yet poorly. No other fighter jet in
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"Instead of multiple crafts tailor-made for specific purposes, they chose to make one that will do everything, yet poorly. No other fighter jet in history had this as a constraint."
At least they designed for it from the outset, there are countless aircraft out there that have ended up in this role despite never being designed for it. The Eurofighter was designed as an air superiority fighter, then we ran out of money for our harriers and realised we needed to drop bombs on people in pickups with DSHKs mount
* where small means ten missiles and bombs (Score:2)
> drop a small but significant load of weapons and get out.
More specifically, armament can include:
eight AIM-120s and two AIM-9s (air-to-air load)
six 2,000 lb (910 kg) bombs, two AIM-120s and two AIM-9s (air-to-ground)
Each 2,000 USAF bomb can penetrate up to 15 inches of metal or 11 ft of concrete, depending on the height from which it is dropped, and cause lethal fragmentation to a radius of 1200 feet.
Small by USAF standards, but sufficient for each plane to take out several hardened structures on each
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By small I meant compared to the weapons load out of a b-52. In an ideal world you would be able to put the load out of a b52 in position over the enemy fast and stealthy. Of course the stratofortress is anything but fast or stealthy. So you need to make compromises on carrying capacity to get it into position. Hence the f-35.
70,000 pounds of weapons AND hit records (Score:2)
No doubt, the B-52's ability to deliver 70,000 pounds of munitions AND hit singles and is quite a bit more bulk firepower than the F-35.
I just wanted to point out that it's capability IS enough to be pretty devastating- I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end. The problems the program has had, which are real, are also grossly over-hyped, imho. Therefore it's worth pointing out that it is a capable platform (albeit expensive) .
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I agree. But then I have always seen fighter craft in a similar light to aircraft carriers. In and off themselves they are not particularly potent. But they allow you to project force an incredible distance. The aircraft carrier needs its group to keep it alive, the F-35 uses stealth, speed and an onboard human to keep it alive. People seem to look at the F-35 like it was a gun or a missile rather than seeing it as a way to get a gun or missile on target.
Re:where small means 0 missiles and 2 small bombs (Score:2)
If you want to run in stealth mode, you can only use the internal weapons bays ==> F-35 can only carry two 1,000 lb bombs but without any missiles to defend itself. Or it can carry a single 1,000 lb bomb and two (2) missiles. Is that significant?
If you use the full weapons load like you propose: there goes your stealth. There goes your 'clean airframe' that makes the F-35 perform at least somewhat like the current generation.and make it even slower than it already is and will increase drag, reducing spe
Stealth cruise missiles are launched from planes (Score:2)
If a cruise missile is the best choice for a particular stealth strike mission, you'd probably use the AGM-158 JASSM. The AGM-158 can be delivered by:
B-1 Lancer
B-2 Spirit
B-52 Stratofortress
F-15E Strike Eagle
F-16 Fighting Falcon
F/A-18 Hornet
F-35 block future
Most of would negate the missile's low-observable advantage, of course. For stealth, there are far fewer options.
Something like the Tomahawk is well-suited to smaller unoccupied structures or ships that are within range of a naval vessel, where it's okay
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I'm sorry, but this is the Internet.
Your reasonable position and comprehension is not welcome here. We are all armchair commanders whose personal military experience tops out with a few battles in one war, and our understanding of tactics is based on a few thousand hours in Modern Warfare. In our opinion, all wars are like the last one, which we're pretty sure we won... or would have, if not for that one big mistake by that one guy.
Obviously, this new plane is expensive and complicated, and we never saw th
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high powered jammers lower your radios range by at least a magnitude
Uhuh. With wide band frequency hopping and directional communication, those would have to be some serious jammers.
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They are. Have a look at the Borisoglebsk 2. Not only will it severely degrade your communication, it will pinpoint where your drone command structure is.
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Re:Back in the 20th century when it began (Score:4, Insightful)
I work with USAF pilots, and in fact am sitting right now in the Current Ops of a major AF base. Fact: no officer coming out of pilot school wants drones. None.
You're either lying, or we're in one hell of a state of insecurity. When I was in the Navy, in our secret and above areas we weren't allowed to have cell phones or even pagers, and there sure as hell wasn't internet access in there. If you are sitting in a Current Ops center accessing the internet, thanks for possibly helping breach our national security.
Re:Back in the 20th century when it began (Score:5, Insightful)
Shhhh. His basement is whatever he wants it to be.
Don't mess up his day.
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At the secret level that many operations teams work at the security levels are lower. SECRET and Unclassified networked machines will be found sitting side by side o
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They need the unclassified access as well as the classified. Precautions are in place to limit air-gapping data between the two networks, but in large part they do rely on simply trusting those we've chosen to trust to work with classified information. Of course such machines are supposed to be separated to Tempest standards but
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That's true, but that's partially because we have faced a competent air adversary since at least the early '60s. Fifty years of owning the skies breeds a bit of complacency - there's enough danger to make it fun, but not enough to make it truly dangerous.
Beyond that, being a drone pilot is bad for your career, and when you get out airlines don't want to hear about your hours as a drone controller.
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Owning the sky?
Ruskies buzzing your destroyers and even carriers, chasing other planes...
Iranian shooting rockets across your bows, shooting down your stealth UAV
North Koreans shooting missiles left and right
A10 going out of production. Oh wai. No. back in. Oh wait, maybe not.
F22 being cancelled. Oh wait, maybe not
The US military is getting owned all over the map because the real assholes out there know they can push your buttons because the command chain is so slow to react, everything goes and is never re
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Just because we have ROE in place to avoid international incidents with intentionally provocative nations does not mean we are owned. You can be sure those Russkies were lit up with the air defense systems and had they tried to act they would have been shot down in a heartbeat.
Ditto with the Iranians shooting rockets, the flight paths were analyzed and determined to be intentional misses and so we did not respond. Again to avoid creating an international incident p
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The closest to being owned is the Russian fly-bys
maybe they gave those guys a favor or a gift so when those pilots file their periodic officer evaluation reports they can include, "Flew 326 hours since last OER, buzzed a US ship," Hey, that's a promotion and good boost in payment that can be used for down payment for a 500 sq foot apartment.
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Honestly, your comment makes no sense whatsoever. None of it addresses the point.
Good Grief (Score:1)
Pfffffft.
It's new technology, you think there will not be glitches and growing pains? It's like the Dreamliner, everyone is saying that Boing will NEVER make money on it. But who thought they would? IT'S BRAND FUCKING NEW TECHNOLOGY.
Re:Good Grief (Score:5, Funny)
Aren't you the guy who was arguing with me a year or so ago about what a great plane this is, while I said it was a giant turd squeezed out onto the taxpayers of the USA and its clients?
The argument ended, if I recall correctly, when you vanished in the wake of a story that one of these pathetic trailer queens burned down to the landing gear while sitting on a runway, and they had to ground the whole fleet.
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Perhaps the account I read was a bit...overheated. Nevertheless, it was pretty funny, because the guy who was arguing that the F-35 is the greatest thing since sex just vanished like the last cold beer at a tailgate party when I posted a link to the story.
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Let Me Fly One And I Will Tell You. (Score:2)
No, but.. (Score:2)
The tax payers rectums sure are sore!
Ground Support (Score:2, Insightful)
Brains? ALIS is ground support diagnostics software for use by maintenance techs. It's not even needed to fly the aircraft. This is the least of the F-35's problems.
Armchair pilot says it's a questionless answer (Score:4, Interesting)
I say it's the answer to a question never asked.
It can't really replace the A-10, because it can't be Low, Slow and Ugly. In fact the USAF is shopping around for a real A-10 replacement, that project is just getting put together now. I wonder what a new real ground-pounder will look like.
F-35 is a shitload of money, when an F-16 will do the job quite nicely albeit not as stealthily.
It is a shitload of money, when an F22 - currently the most unfair airplane in history - will do the job better
It is a shitload of money, when even the F15 - the former most unfair airplane in history - will do the job better, albeit not nearly as stealthily. The Eagle is still formidable, the Mudhen has proven to be just as good.
It's a shitload of money, when the brutal truth is it, and the F-22, are likely the last two manned fighters we make. =o( Drones this, drone that, those who have tasted flight cannot be content driving a drone. I wouldn't.
This thing is an El Camino, it doesn't know if it's a muscle car or pickup truck.
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the most unfair airplane in history
By what measure of fairness, exactly?
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How to define unfair? If it can turn inside others to get a gun or short-range missile firing position, if it can't be readily seen on radar, if it can track and kill multiple targets at once, if it has enough power to streak away and come back quickly, that makes it unfair. That's why that breed of airplane is called "air superiority fighter." Their mission is to sweep the skies clear as fast as they can.
Other "unfair" airplanes have been the F-15, the mig 29, the Super Hornet, and I'm sure I'm forgett
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Is it just me, or is low, slow, and ugly now a drone job?
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A-10. Low, slow
That is why those are CAS.
The fighter plane must be slow and low when your troops and an enemy troops are so closed, and by advantage of CAS you could attack the enemy right after the airstrikes.
At low speed, the CAS airplane could turn around and repeatedly harass the enemy.
That is why when India to choose between Mikoyan and Rafale for their multirole fighters, they choose Rafale because they could flight at slower speed and lower. So, India doesn't need another CAS fighters. (Russians have Su-25 for t
Nothing but a scam. (Score:2)
The F-35 is not wanted by the military, it's being pushed on them by Congress. It has never worked as ordered, and needed to be scrapped years ago. This flaw, and all others, needs to be fixed on the industries dime, not with even more of my tax dollars going into the coffers of the rich CEO's. It was their ineptitude and cost cutting that created this mess in the first place.
I think it's time we cleaned House and Congress and got rid of all those money grubbing corrupt puppets.
Re:Nothing but a scam. (Score:5, Insightful)
The industry is simply bidding on the contracts that Congress is making. And in this case, then dealing with all the feature creep that Congress has caused by telling the Air Force, Navy, and Marines that they all need to use this one plane to replace all their existing needs.... There was a reason we had specialized planes for specialized purposes. A plane that is carrying several tons of bombs will not do so well when having to dog fight against other planes. A plane that has VTOL capability will have a lot of space taken up by all the extra power plant requirements needed for having enough thrust to lift straight off the ground and/or hover for landing. A plane that has short, foldable wings to be able to fit more onto an aircraft carrier will have more structural drawbacks than airframes that do not have foldable wings.
It is all the feature creep to make a single plane that does everything which is the problem. Don't blame the industry. The industry didn't invent these requirements. Someone who has zero technical ability said to someone else wouldn't it be great if all our planes were the same because then we could save on maintenance and training costs because it is all the same platform, and a bunch of other people which no technical ability looked at the numbers for projected cost savings over the lifetime of the airplanes and said yes, that would save money. But none of those people looked at the technical challenges and costs involved in engineering a single plane that could do everything that 5-6 existing planes do when they said replace all those existing planes with just a single one which does all the same roles that those other planes could do, only better...
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Actually you were more right the first time when saying the problem was created by Congress. It isn't the industry's fault at all and certainly isn't the CEO's faults. Congress said thou shalt build one plane to rule them all. One plane to find them, one plane to bring them all in and in the darkness bind them.
The way the US gets new weapon systems is a straight-forward, three step process.
Step one: Congress announces the defense budget for the fiscal year.
Step two: The DoD announces the requirements for new weapons systems.
Step three: The DoD reviews bids and awards the contract.
The US defense industry spends tens of millions of dollars ($74M in 2015) [opensecrets.org] making sure that they have somebody in a position to influence every step in this process. You are definitely right about the pathological requirements,
It's working perfectly (Score:2)
It's fleecing the supporting governments for all the money they can provide at an amazing rate.
Oh, as a plane? No, it's an utter failure so far. Lucky the thing flies.
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Lucky the thing flies.
Actually that part is bad. It won't crash if it doesn't leave the ground.
Here, use mine (Score:5, Interesting)
400 billion (Score:3)
For 400 billion dollars they could have bought about 1,330 F-15 Strike Eagles.
Yes, yes, I know the F-35 is supposed to be more advanced, blah blah blah. Except it's a piece of shit that can't fly, can't turn, can't fight, and won't do half the shit it's supposed to do. It won't start in hot weather and apparently doesn't worko well in the rain either.
On the other hand, if you fill the sky with 1000 F-15 Strike Eagles, there ain't gonna be a goddamn thing that lives through that onslaught (and you'd still have 400 waiting in the hangars). Hell, probably just 100 F-15 Strike Eagles acting in concert would solve any conceivable airborne opposition, even today.
Shit, for 400 billion dollars you could buy 1000 F-15 Strike Eagles and the fucking airfield to launch them from, with enough left over for a few mil-spec hammers or toilet seats.
The F-35 has the distinction of being the most expensive boondoggle in recorded history. In comparison, Bernie Madoff only bilked his clients out of $65 billion or so.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, the "expensive" part is correct. But claiming it "can't fly, can't fight" is just not true.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, the "expensive" part is correct. But claiming it "can't fly, can't fight" is just not true.
A lot of people disagree:
Pentagon’s big budget F-35 fighter ‘can’t turn, can’t climb, can’t run’
http://blogs.reuters.com/great... [reuters.com]
The F-35 may have big problems fighting at long range
http://www.businessinsider.com... [businessinsider.com]
The $400 Billion Military Jet That Can't Fly in Cloudy Weather
http://www.alternet.org/fail-4... [alternet.org]
RAND Corp: F35 Can’t Turn, Can’t Climb, Can’t Run
http://www.stopthef35.com/rand... [stopthef35.com]
Air Force Admits: Our New Stealth Fighter Can’t Fight
http:// [thedailybeast.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Your first and fourth links are both really derived from the same 2008 computer simulation. A fuller discussion is here:
https://zbigniewmazurak.wordpr... [wordpress.com]
I think the fifth link falls into this bucket as well.
You second link ALSO refers to the same 2008 RAND corporation one, and it also simply waves away stealth by assuming that the F -35 would be detected by ground based radar, or that the infrared signature on it would automatically betray it.
The third article has a sensational headline, and doubles down w
Re: (Score:2)
RIP F-35 (Score:2)
Even if it WORKED, the software, hardware, and design techs in the F-35 are so completely compromised by Russian and likely Chinese espionage that the only thing delaying their rollout of a comparable craft is money (Russians) and some of the fundamental building techs (China).
It doesn't matter, we're nearing the end of the manned fighter aircraft anyway.
Getting Desperate (Score:5, Insightful)
They call it the "brains" of the plane. It isn't. The brains are the sensor fusion computers. This is the Autonomic Logistics Information System. Key word: Logistics. It's a maintenance system. They say the whole program is a failure because the fancy maintenance system could ground the fleet. Except most of the USAF flies just fine without this type of system. Oh, and the problem isn't that it doesn't work, it is working. It's that it hasn't been thoroughly tested. Why? Because it's still in testing. Then they complain that there is no backup system if it doesn't work.
So they cry that the program is too expensive. Then cry some more because there is no redundant replacement for a non-critical system. Of course if there were a backup system they would be complaining that the program spent millions on duplicated efforts. It's just stupid.
The one that got away... (Score:2)
Boeing X-32 [bizjournals.com]
More $$ to fix it now (Score:2)
Typical of many weapons programs, the contractors underbid and then "happened to have" massive cost overruns and exceeded the budget by billions, and now, the defective planes they made for all that extra dollars will now need even more fixes and repairs and upgrades to make them actually work at all, which is even MORE dollars.
Somebody at Lockheed just got a raise and promotion out of this.
Agile? (Score:2)
I'm guessing some mid-level manager somewhere decided that Agile is the hot new thing and that their team better use it for everything. They just didn't explain it to top brass properly. :-)
Re: (Score:2)
Not if, when. All servers fail a lot more than you'd expect.