America's F-35s Can't Fly 22% of the Time, Repair Facilities Six Years Behind Schedule (indiatimes.com) 304
"[N]early 200 F-35s might permanently remain unready for combat because the Pentagon would rather buy new aircraft than upgrade the ones the American people have already paid for," according to one defense news site. And now Bloomberg reports:
The Pentagon is accelerating production of Lockheed Martin Corp.'s F-35 jet even though the planes already delivered are facing "significantly longer repair times" than planned because maintenance facilities are six years behind schedule, according to a draft audit. The time to repair a part has averaged 172 days -- "twice the program's objective" -- the Government Accountability Office, Congress's watchdog agency, found. The shortages are "degrading readiness" because the fighter jets "were unable to fly about 22 percent of the time" from January through August for lack of needed parts.
The Pentagon has said soaring costs to develop and produce the F-35, the costliest U.S. weapons system, have been brought under control, with the price tag now projected at $406.5 billion. But the GAO report raises new doubts about the official estimate that maintaining and operating them will cost an additional $1.12 trillion over their 60-year lifetime.
Slashdot reader schwit1 writes, "This is akin to buying an exotic car you can barely afford, without also budgeting for insurance, repairs, and tuneups."
The Pentagon has said soaring costs to develop and produce the F-35, the costliest U.S. weapons system, have been brought under control, with the price tag now projected at $406.5 billion. But the GAO report raises new doubts about the official estimate that maintaining and operating them will cost an additional $1.12 trillion over their 60-year lifetime.
Slashdot reader schwit1 writes, "This is akin to buying an exotic car you can barely afford, without also budgeting for insurance, repairs, and tuneups."
Is the F-22 production line still up? (Score:3)
At this rate the US could just pour money into buying perfectly capable, top-of-the-line fighters and write them off as losses in the F-35 program.
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IIRC the tooling to build new parts went "missing" some time ago (probably stolen, I would guess), and would be extremely costly to replace (possibly on the order of developing a new fighter). So not only can they not build F-22's, their ability to repair and maintain the ones they currently have is limited. Worse yet, they cut the budget significantly so they have considerably fewer than they had originally planned.
I have not heard anything to this effect, but it wouldn't surprise me if one of the reason
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IIRC the tooling to build new parts went "missing" some time ago (probably stolen, I would guess), and would be extremely costly to replace (possibly on the order of developing a new fighter). So not only can they not build F-22's, their ability to repair and maintain the ones they currently have is limited. Worse yet, they cut the budget significantly so they have considerably fewer than they had originally planned.
I have not heard anything to this effect, but it wouldn't surprise me if one of the reasons we're stuck with the F-35 is that the F-22's would be so very hard to replace, and there just aren't that many of them.
He wasn't talking about the F22, he was talking about something like the Rafael or even lower profile Grippen, which have as much lower IR profile and would likely shoot down an F35 and possibly even F22 before they even realised there was contact.
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Yeah. The fact that it says "Is the P-51 production line still up?" in the subject is a dead giveaway.
Re: Is the F-22 production line still up? (Score:2, Interesting)
The F-35 is not a good fighter in a dogfight. The F-22 is better than the F-35 at that, and the Gripen C is even better than the F-22; the Gripen E is even better and the F-35s stealth capabilities are no match for modern radar.
The F-35 simply tries to do everything but fails at it. It was obsolete before it was completed. Just buy a license to produce Gripen E from Saab and save your defence budget.
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Well, sure, they could also just buy a bunch of magic ponies on no-bid contracts if they really wanted.
What you seem to miss is that you're being a weird sort of sheep and just repeating anything negative that sounds vaguely cromulent.
This is one of the stupidest stories on this topic in awhile; production and maintenance happen in different places and are done by different people; why would being behind schedule building the maintenance facilities mean delaying production? That would only increase the cost
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By the way, "top of the line" fighters would be the F-22, which is way more expensive than the F-35.
Um, no. The F-35 program cost is estimated to be at least 7x the F-22, and it has already blown way over its initial budget. Per shipped aircraft the F-22 is cheaper.
Now, the F-22 is quite expensive to fly (about 2x the hourly cost of a F-35) but that mean very little if the alternative cannot take off or does it in a crippled capacity.
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That's a shame. I figure the F-22 was scrapped as being too expensive, but it is still very likely the most technologically advanced fighter out there and, in retrospective, it would've probably been cheaper for the US to keep it around.
Re:Is the F-22 production line still up? (Score:5, Interesting)
The Air Force does not scrap a plane for being expensive, as the F-35 demonstrates. The F-22 was shut down over politics and to fund, and justify, the F-35, as were the A-10 and a few other planes.
Take the A-10 Thunderbolt for instance. Preferred dedicated ground support aircraft of the Army. So to help nudge along the F-35, the AF killed the A-10 so they could claim that they needed a replacement ground support craft, and aha! the F-35 could fill the roll. Pay no attention to the facts that the F-35 is not armored like the A-10, probably couldn't handle the weight if they tried, and carries a pitiful amount of ammunition for its pitiful little gun.
Re:Is the F-22 production line still up? (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly, the AF should get it over with and give the A10s to the fucking Marines, who actually know and could use a badass CAS airframe that's cheap, reliable, and deadly.
See also: C-130s. Best workhorse cargo plane for the kind of missions the Marines need to support (short takeoff, heavy load, etc).
I would also put in a recommendation for the kind of missions we fly against ISIS and the like a return to high loiter time support aircraft like Broncos, etc. ISIS knows jets can only fly around for 20-30 minutes before they have to heat to the base and then they can resume their asshole activities. It changes when you can put bullets in the sky for 4-5 hours, cheaply, and with multiples/shift changes...
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Honestly, the AF should get it over with and give the A10s to the fucking Marines, who actually know and could use a badass CAS airframe that's cheap, reliable, and deadly.
I recall reading somewhere that the USAF tried giving the aircraft to the Army and Marines but neither of them wanted to take on the expense of supporting such an old air frame to fill a role that the Air Force is mandated to provide. The A-10 needs to be replaced and that replacement is not the F-35. I see a few options for a resolution.
The first, and perhaps most likely, option I see is the Air Force putting the A-10 in a kind of "semi-retirement" and send the remaining air frames to Guard and reserve u
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The Air Force still is flying the A-10 and has over 280 in service. Unfortunately many need new wings and may be grounded before that happens. The Air Force would like to kill it, but surprisingly enough Congress has seen through their b.s. and kept it alive so far.
Re:Is the F-22 production line still up? (Score:4, Informative)
The really funny part is how far the reality is from what the fanbois on the internet keep repeating to each other; the A-10 is primarily used as a missile platform. It does still do a little bit of close air support, duties it shares with the F-16, but it does it from high altitude as a generic missile launch platform.
People like to repeat that they're really reliable, and it is true they can survive a lot of AAA damage, but the threat in modern combat isn't AAA it is RPGs and MANPADs. And the A-10 is a sitting duck for those. Sure, the pilot is protected by armor, but the engines aren't; they're very vulnerable. They can't loiter at low altitude over infantry to do the type of close air support that the fanbois are picturing! They get shot down doing that. So yeah, they're still stuck using them, but they don't use them differently from the way they use an F-16 for that; flying in circles high overhead, dropping shit on coordinates.
Why do they need new wings? Because the enemy weapons can reach it more easily.
Re:Is the F-22 production line still up? (Score:4, Informative)
Actually the main reason why everyone on the ground wants A-10s as support, is because they are slow enough to be able to get a good picture of what's going on on the ground. That enables pilots to provide air support even when belligerents are very close to friendlies. In this regard, it doesn't matter what weapons this aircraft carries. It can operate low enough and slow enough when needed, and that is what matters. In this role, it has no real fixed wing competitors other than AC-130. And that aircraft is actually severely vulnerable to ground fire, unlike A-10.
The rest of your points are exactly what you accuse "fanboys" of. Opinionated ignorance. A-10 like all low and slow aircraft is indeed threatened by shoulder launched guided missiles. It's also extremely resilient against such threats and more than capable to take multiple hits without suffering fatal damage, which is why it can and does operate as it does - low and slow. Its gun is an excellent tool to engage soft targets like technicals and supply trucks, conserving heavier missiles and bombs for hardened targets. It provides a unique niche just like Su-25 does. It's a faster and more resilient platform than an attack helicopter with greater payload and ability to loiter, mixed with greater survivability due to design than a gunship like AC-130. Yet it can and does operate "low and slow" when needed, able to accurately view the battlefield from close by and still have time to provide accurate fire support based on this information and not already have passed the target area like other fixed wing attack platforms.
And wings? They go because of metal fatigue as well as ground fire. The fact that they can easily take the ground fire and continue to operate needing just wing replacements every once in a while shows you just how well this particular platform is designed for its role.
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The Army went to Congress to try to take over the A-10 program. The grunts love the flying beast that's an aircraft built around a 30mm Cannon that spits depleted uranium rounds that shred takes. Who can blame them? The Air Force is stuck with the A-10 until it's no longer supportable.
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I heard quite the opposite, that the Air Force tried to give the A-10 to the Army but the Army refused.
I suppose both can have some truth to it, the Army and Air Force are big organizations with little factions fighting with each other on doctrine and assets needed to meet that doctrine. I'm quite certain that the Army soldiers on the ground don't much care who is flying the A-10 over their heads so long as they have an American flag on the shoulder of their uniform.
There's been a long held doctrine that t
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The Air Force did object to it. They are death on the Army flying fixed wing attack craft. The Army would of course treat the A-10 much as they do helicopters with Warrant Officers piloting them. The Army troops love things that save their lives and the close support of the A-10 in Iraq made it a legend to them.
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If the Army starts flying fixed wing aircraft, the Air Force has no reason to exist. They started as the Army Air Corps and split off as their own service in 1947.
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If the Army starts flying fixed wing aircraft, the Air Force has no reason to exist.
The Air Force would still have strategic bombers, ICBMs, and air superiority fighters. The Army would only take over close air support.
The Marines have their own fixed wing close air support, but the Navy still has their own aviation for fleet defense, etc.
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We've got C-130 gun ships for those. Nice stable platform loaded with weapons that can circle for hours over a target and obliterate goat herders.
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The F-22 wasn't "scrapped," they built the number that they needed as the top end fighters, and used the lessons learned to design the F-35.
This was the plan all along; build two new stealth fighters, one super-high-tech, the other one cheaper and more suitable for mass production.
The main role of the F-22 is to intercept surface to air missiles (SAMs). The idea is that you have a bunch of F-35s and F-22s, and most air defenses can't see either one, but even when they can and they fire a SAM, or when they s
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A lot of people commenting on these stories don't realize that F-35 is already in use. Last month when some F-35s, B-1s, and an F-22s flew near to North Korea, there was no response at all; until the US announced that it had happened so that the North Koreans could freak out. They hadn't even seen them! Try that with an F-16. ;)
An F-16 might not be able to do that but a modern variant of the F-15 and F-18 might, and they are newer than the F-16 by only a couple years. The F-117 and B-2 were contemporary with the F-16 and are considered "stealth" aircraft. If you mean to compare these aircraft by age then this is not much to crow about. If you mean by something as inexpensive as the F-16 then you might have something. It seems to me that the expense of a lot of these stealth aircraft was in large part to many non-stealth aspect
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Some genius came up with the F-35 as a way to save money. It was supposed to be able to multipurpose and replace everything out there. What a fucking joke. Air superiority, ground support carrier and STOL all in on. Like all compromises it does none well.
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Rumor has it that many of the infantry units have to have rest periods, too, but not everybody in the command structure agrees.
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Or use the money to pay the other side to go back home. Or contract out the killing to the Russians, or Israel, or ISIS. Or... well, just about anything has got to be better value for money than this ongoing boondoggle.
A side benefit of outsource-to-ISIS is that that'll keep them busy doing other stuff, and hopefully a pile of them will get killed in the process.
Maintenance? We don't need no steeking maintenance (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot reader schwit1 writes, "This is akin to buying an exotic car you can barely afford, without also budgeting for insurance, repairs, and tuneups."
Actually it's like buying a new exotic car every three months so you don't have to do schedule maintenance on any of the others.
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Actually it's more like buying expensive exotic cars to keep your local dealer from going bankrupt... and paying for them with everyone else's money ... so you can be re-elected dogcatcher.
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you're omitting the part where you commit to use the exotic car for everything, including getting a packet of sigarettes. Which means with its cost per driven mile(which includes maintenance) it becomes a very expensive way to get a packet of sigarettes.
Re: Maintenance? We don't need no steeking mainten (Score:2)
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Slashdot reader schwit1 writes, "This is akin to buying an exotic car you can barely afford, without also budgeting for insurance, repairs, and tuneups."
Actually it's like buying a new exotic car every three months so you don't have to do schedule maintenance on any of the others.
...at taxpayer expense, to keep your budget going and to continue requesting budget increases every year
Sorry, I ran out of analogies, but this if they were spending their own money (e.g., I hear Steve Jobs did something like that), that'd be ok.
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Slashdot reader schwit1 writes, "This is akin to buying an exotic car you can barely afford, without also budgeting for insurance, repairs, and tuneups."
Actually it's like buying a new exotic car every three months so you don't have to do schedule maintenance on any of the others.
(because you can afford it) ;)
Why are there people in the world that still don't know the US military really does have a big budget, they're not just talking themselves up?
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They must be almost as good at geography as you are, then.
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Drones are a daily tool for our armed forces and will be taking on more complex roles. Hordes of low-cost drones sent into a combat zone using onboard AI and cross communication to identify, track and destroy targets both on the ground and in the air. This is not an if, it's a when and when is right around the corner. There will always be a role for manned combat aircraft but their drone counterparts will be taking on a larger and larger percentage of the mission.
The F-35 looks awesome on paper and when all
Thanks for the analogy.. (Score:5, Funny)
I couldn't possibly relate to paying for uber expensive fighter jets that I couldn't budget repairs for..
Thanks for the far more relatable scenario of buying exotic cars I can't budget repairs for...
Re:Thanks for the analogy.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not budgeting for maintenance is how this country can "afford" nice things. It's a Ponzi scheme [strongtowns.org]..
Then instead of repairing old bridges, we build new ones right next to the old ones and let the old ones crumble. Or we raid other budgets, or we raise massive infrastructure bonds, or we simply build new neighborhoods for the rich and let the poor live with potholes, broken sidewalks, and the occasional water main break. Because keeping the poor segregated from the wealthy is the American Way! (Try to build apartments in a middle- or upper-class neighborhood and you'll quickly see what I mean.)
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What if they did budget for maintenance, they just didn't explain their maintenance schedule to the public? What then?! lol durrrrrrr
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I couldn't possibly relate to paying for uber expensive fighter jets that I couldn't budget repairs for..
Thanks for the far more relatable scenario of buying exotic cars I can't budget repairs for...
I recently bought the Library of Congress. It was extremely expensive and now I find I don't have any extra money to repair and/or update it.
Happy now?
It seems like a good idea. (Score:2)
It seems like a good idea not to upgrade/fix planes if they are going to be replaced, as long as the planes that need repairs can be fixed on short notice if needed and that a minimum number of planes are always kept available.
Anyone remember? (Score:3)
Anyone remember when they were selling the F-35 as a better alternative to the F-22? Saying that it wouldn't be so costly and bogged down in final development with persistent issues.
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It's supposed to cost half as much in the end. It only has one engine and it's much simpler at that. It has a lot less parts than an F-22.
Problem is the airplane design isn't actually finished get. The whole idea about concurrency (i.e. starting production before the airplane design was finished) was the problem. The DoD got like a hundred planes at least which can't be upgraded to a combat ready version without tremendous upgrade costs.
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You can talk about it not being finished yet, but other people are talking about how it is in active deployment by multiple countries and flying important missions in Korea.
It makes no sense to talk about the costs of a production strategy without comparing the costs of the alternative, which you don't have. It may be that they saved more (because of scale) by starting the production line at a higher rate than they would have saved by starting slower. This plane has different modularity requirements than mo
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No, I do remember them saying that the F-22 was going to be the super-awesome one that was really expensive and they'd only make a few, and that the F-35 would be the one that had all the fancy stealth combined with maximum mission flexibility for general use and would be manufactured in large numbers.
The role of the F-22 is actually to be an escort for F-35s, with the F-35s providing the mission flexibility and the F-22 suppressing SAMs.
F-35 program is just a smoke screen (Score:4, Informative)
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I think they are BC-304. Anyway, here is what a F-304 seems to look like:
http://www.aesteiron.com/stain... [aesteiron.com]
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The Chinese already put the J-20 into service. Only problem they have is they have no decent engines for it yet. It's kinda like the F-14 when it came out. Nice plane, shame about the engines.
Slight correction.... (Score:2)
Slashdot reader schwit1 writes, "This is akin to buying an exotic car that doesn't work, that you can barely afford, without also budgeting for insurance, repairs, and tuneups."
There, fixed that for you.
Full of Vintage Tech: Firewire 400, PowerPC G4s (Score:4, Interesting)
Er, "IEEE 1394 and Power ISA v.2.03".
Working in automotive I understand how "vintage" tech makes it into "current" production: Timelines, budgets, work with what is known to work. That said, it is entertaining to read press releases from last decade surrounding what is going into the F35.
The 'high speed data bus' is IEEE 1394b [militaryaerospace.com]. It's running on Freescale/NXP/Qualcomm PowerPC embedded processors designed off of the PowerPC G4 (in triplicate) built by the GreenHills compiler [ghs.com]. I haven't found any info on it but I'd hate to see what version of Matlab/Simulink they're stuck with as well. Likely 6.5 or R13.
The problem with that was it was pitched as a "COTS" system to save cost. None of those products are "commercial off the shelf" solutions anymore. The hayday of the G4 in mass quantities is gone. I wonder how much money Freescale is guaranteed to keep fab lines up and running for a chip designed in the 90s. I also want to know how the NXP acquisition went through.
End of the day the feds would have probably been better off just making their own CPU and fab lines.
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The requirements for something like this is different from connecting your laptop to peripherals.
Firewire is a peer to peer bus that supports data transfer via DMA, minimizing interrupts. Since response time consistency isn't a big deal for your laptop, and it has CPU bandwidth sitting unused most of the time, something like USB 3 is just as good if not better.
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Token ring is time division multiplexed and Ethernet is stastically multiplexed. Neither is fundamentally better than the other, it depends on your requirements.
It's not just marketing in that case; Ethernet really does perform better when overall network segment use is less than 30%. But it's moot now because everyone uses hubs.
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few crates of G4s in a couple warehouses.
These aren't *actual* G4s. They're not going to be scavenging old Macs to keep fighters flying. They're just the same architecture at the silicon level.
In the same way Intel really hasn't changed much of anything in their last N releases other than the socket.
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Freescale, much like Intel, keeps a lot of inventory and old product production up for these purposes. I don't expect that to be a problem. OTOH, I seem to remember the F-22 actually used DEC Alpha CPUs. Good luck getting those now.
Oh please (Score:5, Insightful)
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The total plane contract is signed. They are going to be built. Bringing the cost of each plane down is dependent on production increasing.
Shouldn't they also work on making the planes effective? This was a dubious one size fits all plane that turns out to be the fighter version of the Honda Ridgeline. Sucks as a truck, as a SUV.
If you want the best of anything, it has to be purpose built. The F-35 is often compared to the A-10. The A-10 is the very definition of purpose built, and old Brrrrrrrt! has become a legend in the process. The F-35 is a plane designed by a committee, and it shows it. I
Many good planes have had birthing issues. Th
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It isn't exactly one size fits all. The Navy has their carrier version, the Marines has theirs (it goes up and down as well as forward), and the Air Force has their version (probably more than one). If the Army was allowed planes of this calibre, they'd have their own version for their "special" circumstances.
The amt of time necessary to design, build prototypes, and test is so long now that it is guaranteed to be using out of date technology, which again increases costs because the older tech is no longer
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And they can damn well shrink their ego-inflated pilot corps.
First, whether the person is in a chair at 30,000 feet and going 0.9 mach, or in a chair on the ground going nowhere fast, if they are flying a plane then they are a pilot.
Second, I don't care how fancy of a communications infrastructure you have, the speed of light will dictate the response time of the pilot. If you want rapid response between neurons firing and weapons firing then you need the pilot inside the air frame. I want pilots in the air and I'm not going to blame the USAF for wanting them too.
U
Re:Oh please (Score:4, Insightful)
It depends on whether you goal is to have a certain number plains, or whether you want to be able to use them.
If having the plane in inventory is the only thing you care about, then you're right: the quickest and cheapest route is to concentrate on production rather than maintenance. If your goal is to have planes ready to use, your production rate cannot outstrip your repair capabilities, because something as complex as a modern fighter aircraft is constantly breaking down.
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Well, I"m not sure that they aren't doing both. For instance I'm uncertain of what a quote like this means: "The time to repair a part has averaged 172 days -- "twice the program's objective" -- the Government Accountability Office, Congress's watchdog agency, found."
Twice the program's objective... for now or for long term operations? It's a bit like Trump taking credit for cutting the unit cost of F-35s when all the contractor did was update their numbers to the latest ones which take into account the
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Basically if you need a part of a plane that plane is grounded for half a year. If that's only *twice* the "program's objective" I have to believe they mean "the program's objective for this point in time."
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You want to slow that down and increase line costs so you can spend money on upgrades for planes that could be replaced by new planes coming off the production line?
Yes. The solution to buying 100 lemons that you only realised were lemons after the first 20 were delivered is not to try and get all 100 lemons as quickly as possible, but to stop and attempt to find out what needs to be done so you get at least the 80 oranges you originally wanted.
Contract management and production 101, if something is not as expected stop and think.
The public just has no idea how bad it is (Score:5, Interesting)
The public wonders why we could get stuff done so effectively in the past. I can tell you why: the government didn't have the level of red tape it has today in the name of "accountability." Your "accountability" was "do the damn job effectively or go to the private sector." I have much older relatives who used to be in the federal civil service. They hate what they see it has become today. They hate the red tape that lets people shrug off responsibility for thinking and puts a committee of 10 people in charge of a $2M budget that is a rounding error in the agency's budget.
It is just rampant, out of control legalism at its worst. Laws and regulations choke everything and ensure no one just assumes authority and gets stuff done (because that would Fascist, since wanting the trains to run on time means you are a natural Fascist who doesn't respect dissent and demands submission to arbitrary authority).
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Speaking of which, i always loved Kelly Johnson's 14 rules he enforced while running Skunk Works: https://www.lockheedmartin.com... [lockheedmartin.com]
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Do not underestimate the complexity in modern fighter aircraft. These are not A-10s. And the red tape wasn't the driving force causing delays, it was complicated aircraft, the military always wanting the latest shiny gizmo, the length of time for production which only gave the military more time to consider the new gizmos the industry was offering in the meantime.
Re:The public just has no idea how bad it is (Score:4, Insightful)
The public wonders why we could get stuff done so effectively in the past.
The reason stuff (government stuff) costs what it does is because that is the amount of money available to spend on it.
The other factor is the extended time periods for development. The longer you spend designing something, the more scope-creep there is. The more opportunity for plans to get changed in the light of technological advancement or the obsolescence of what you were planning to use.
So with the F35 - the article says it will have a service life of 60 years. I kinda doubt that. I reckon that long before 2077 pretty much every aircraft - starting with military jets - will be pilotless. They will be smaller, cheaper, faster, more agile and will whip this thing's arse in any battle scenario. I doubt these will be used operationally for even half their planned service time.
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How the mighty have fallen (Score:5, Insightful)
The same nation that built the SR-71, the A-10 and the F-15 serves up this lemon and tries to pretend it can still build great military aircraft?
The swamp that needs cleaning is the unholy triumvirate of US weapons manufacturers, government procurers and military brass, all sucking on the US taxpayer like a bunch of bloated leeches.
The rest of the country is going to hell while these parasites get fat providing garbage like this trailer queen. When I heard an F-35 completed a trans-Atlantic flight, I had to ask if they'd cut it up and sent it as luggage.
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But it does look great on a GDP point of view.
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True. Sad, but true.
Cherry picking FTW~ (Score:3)
It's easy to "prove" something when you cherry pick on the winners as examples.
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You're missing the point.
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This triumvirate has been around since Eisenhower. I think the issue is that (systems) management has not kept pace with complexity. A symptom is that there's a rush to build/sell hardware before adequate development and testing has been performed. We're also seeing this with GMD [wikipedia.org].
Oh America (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh America, a land where the government thinks a trillion dollars for a fighter jet it can't use much of the time is a good investment, but universal health care like the rest of the developed world has would be considered a waste of money.
Plan B (Score:5, Insightful)
At what point would it be cheaper to start being nice to all the other nations, so you don't need to spend more on defence than every other country combined?
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For that money it should be trivial to buy the enemy away.
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What a _novel_ idea, because buying your enemy off has worked _so_ well with North Korea...
Re:Plan B (Score:4, Interesting)
It worked with East Germany. In the 80s, Franz Josef Strauss (a conservative Bavarian politician that makes the average Republican look like a Pinko Commie) negotiated a billion Marks loan to the communist GDR with the (eventually revealed to be correct) expectation that this would make the GDR fully dependent on western money "like an addict to heroin", in his words.
Then all that had to be done is say "nope" when they needed more.
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You're (self?) delusional. The power that counted was not in East Berlin but in Moscow and any other USSR premier than Gorby would have made that bet a billion mark loss on his way to making 1989 1961 all over again by forcibly closing the iron curtain.
Chamberlain & Deladier were both as delusional in 1935 as you are now.
There is no doubt whatsoever in anyone's mind that Putin would have sent in the tanks & THATS who we have to contend with today.
India Times (Score:2)
I'm guessing that they are just stirring up FUD in the foreign markets in order to generate more interest in their domestic built Su-30.
Not that I think this is totally a bad idea. Someone needs to teach Lockheed that they didn't in fact lock up the foreign markets for fighters. They may have US markets tied up politically. But others can just wander over to the dealership across the street.
Working as designed (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's be honest here. Nobody needs the F35 as a military plane. The F35 is a pork barrel project. We could just have pumped the relevant tax moneys into the states involved without anything in return and it would be just as fine. But harder to justify.
Look at the F35. Then look at the current military requirements, the theaters the US military is fighting in, the enemies it is fighting, the equipment of the US troops and that of their enemies, the theaters of war they're deployed to and the (stated and real) military goals they pursue. Then tell me with a straight face that this plane makes in ANY way sense.
Re: (Score:2)
And you need a STOVL jet for what exactly?
May I remind you what the US is fighting right now?
Re: (Score:2)
The Marines and the Royal Navy (among others like Spain) both need them.
If your argument is that both are irrelevant, I'd love to see a video of you walking into a bar with any number of same and expressing your opinion of such as your subsequent education would be edifying (and probably not even violent). But naah you'll just remain hiding behind your keyboard.
Time to investigate (Score:2)
reviving the YF-23 program. That plane was the better machine.
Meanwhile Sukhoi Su-30 (Score:2)
Problem Solved (Score:2)
Slashdot reader schwit1 writes, "This is akin to buying an exotic car you can barely afford, without also budgeting for insurance, repairs, and tuneups.
I just get the Apple Care+ with the iPhone I can just barely afford. Problem Solved.
60 years lifetime? (Score:2)
Am I the only one that thinks in 10 years time any fighter aircraft stupid enough to fly over a war zone will be shot done by fully automated drones?
in b4 Rei tells us how great this is for the publi (Score:2)
Chop 'em in half (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
US military must deal with it (Score:2)
The US military has put all of its eggs into one basket. The military needs new planes [dodbuzz.com] and the only available new plane is the F-35. Therefore, there is only one reasonable course of action: deal with it. If the repair facilities are not up to snuff, then spend the money and do what needs to be done. There is no Plan B (or "Plane B" since we are talking about planes here).
I read both articles.
The first article makes the case that "concurrency" has been a disaster. "Concurrency" is the idea that the new
The US is too rich for its own good (Score:2)
My opinion is that if the US military were obliged to work with 1/2 the budget they have now overnight, they would actually do better because these pork projects would cease immediately. The savings could be used to fund universal healthcare.
US military expenditures (Score:2)
What's the problem again? (Score:2)
We have the US military buying a few dozen, perhaps even a couple hundred, of aircraft that are hobbled with early development troubles because of concurrent testing and production. Let's assume what might be worst case situation of 300 early air frames crippled by being effectively prototypes of the final product.
A quick look at current plans for the F-35 and I see the USAF has ordered nearly 2000 on it's own. The Navy and Marines combined has ordered more than 500, and likely to order many more in the f
Re:Great Britain (Score:5, Interesting)
The US Marines are screwed without the F35 too. They have 9 amphibious assault ships, each larger than a WW2 fleet carrier. Each of these ships are supposed to be able to debark highly mobile , self-contained "expeditionary units" of 2200 troops, each of which has a squadron of ground attack aircraft which have to operate from improvised air strips.
The thing is, the air component of that doesn't work against modern, mobile air defenses, like those possessed by Iraq unless you have a stealth aircraft that can take off and land vertically or nearly so. This will leave the Marine units tied to air support from carriers.
Re: (Score:2)
Now how does this employ people in the US and enable certain governors to get reelected for "attracting jobs"?
Re: (Score:2)
Beware of single number statistics. (Score:4, Interesting)
How a number is constructed is more important than how good they sound.
So 78% of F35s were able to *fly*. Doesn't mean they're ready to actually *do* anything other than fly, like use their weapons systems, or appear as small on enemy radars as they're supposed to. So that 78% may include aircraft that *could* fly, but which would be pointless to fly.
We should take any statitics on a too-big-to-fail project with a large grain of salt, because they can easily be affected by tweaking your success criteria.
Consider: for FY16, the F35 had a 56% availability rate, which for a plane so early in its deployment is quite impressively good. But because of the program's unique concurrency strategy, in which deliveries of aircraft started years before the design was finalized, 187 of the aircraft will never be capable of combat operations -- not unless they're sent back to the factory and re-manufactured.
As of March of this year, 231 F35s have been delivered, so if "available" meant "capable of flying a combat mission", the highest the FY '16 availability figure could possibly have been is 19% 81% of the fleet were semi-functioning prototypes.
So clearly "available" means "capable of flying the mission you planned for them"; and you can adjust the rate of availability by planning your missions accordingly. Gun not working? Plan a mission with no shooting and the plane is still available.
Without repair capabilities, availability for actual combat is probably zero; but it's probably zero anyway until the software improves.
Re: (Score:2)
So buy Grippen, universally considered superior to F-35,
For values of "universal" that are equal to "people on the internet who don't have access to technical performance information of either aircraft," sure.