Boeing Wins Bid To Build the Navy's Carrier-Launched Tanker Drone (arstechnica.com) 79
Boeing has been awarded an $805 million contract by the U.S. Navy to build four prototypes of its design for the MQ-25 "Stingray," an unmanned, carrier-based tanker aircraft. The drone "will help extend the range of the Navy's future carrier air wings and keep carriers themselves out of range of coastal defenses," reports Ars Technica. From the report: Boeing beat out Lockheed Martin and General Atomics for the contract. Northrop Grumman -- which built the Navy's first carrier-based drone prototype, the X-47B Unmanned Combat Air System-Demonstration (UCAS-D) -- dropped out of the competition last year. The prototype contract is the first step toward delivering "initial operating capability," a first production run of the drones, by 2024. The MQ-25's design requirements called for an aircraft capable of launching from a carrier deck and delivering 14,000 pounds (6,300kg) of fuel to aircraft 500 nautical miles (926km) away. That capacity and range, along with the low-observable shape of the drone, could essentially double the range of F/A-18 Super Hornet and F-35C Joint Strike Fighter attack missions. Eventually, Boeing could deliver up to 72 Stingrays at a cost of $13 billion.
$13 billion (Score:4, Insightful)
How much good could be done with $13 billion dollars?
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Militarism: building every larger weapons with no enemy targets.
$13 billion of work for the home districts (Score:1)
$13 billion of work for the home districts of congress critters.
So, you get smart people working for you instead of your enemies, which are looking for these people on LinkedIn.
Much of military and NASA expenditures are high-priced welfare, since corporations could definitely do these things much more economically, if there wasn't some General/Admiral setting stupid requirements without willing to compromise.
Sometimes a requirement can almost be met for 50% less, but the Admiral will say, X is the requireme
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The difference of that fraction of a percent is often the difference between military grade and civilian hardware. In civilian world, it's typically not an issue of life and death to have a failure. And in civilian life, even a catastrophic loss often means life goes on.
In military world, both are reversed, which is why military leaders are such sticklers for details.
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Indeed. Education, health, culture, etc. The waste is incredible. And if you consider that these things are primarily for killing people and destroying wealth, the price is even higher.
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"You need security, because without security, everything else will be taken from you".
Citation: pretty much every country which US decided to use warfare against.
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$13 billion dollars could do some good by amping up the US military's capability to fight longer, and more frequent "wars," that keep young men and women employed.
I put "wars" in quotes because there's no exit plan and no intent to actually "win," anything more than money.
Also at stake, is the manufacturer's market of countries outside American borders.
You know, like the painfully inadequate F-35 (Britain, Italy, The Netherlands, Australia, Turkey, Norway, Denmark, Israel, Japan, South Korea) and the M1 Abr
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You could provide welfare to U.S. farmers affected by ill advised tariffs.
Eisenhower's Farewell Address (Score:5, Informative)
There is nothing more salient that Eisenhower's warning about the Military Industrial Complex [youtube.com]. I wonder how much healthcare could be provided with the taxpayers $13 Billion?
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Exactly. Why are we even letting Trump bring Russia and Korea into the house?
Because you elected him as your president ?
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Money isn't worth a whole lot if the country is overrun by communist, sorry, islamist hordes.
I can't say I'm a friend of either or any other ism that trashes Human Rights by torturing people.
You have to be able to point at fundamental characteristics of these violations of human dignity, caused by these groups with their hordes, that go into someone else's country, declare war on the people, spread lasting invasive aggression against their culture and, declare that to be evil.
Thank God we've got the U.S to protect us against such violations.
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Ermmm...you are familiar with U.S. healthcare costs, yes? According to the numbers in 2017, the U.S. spent a bit over $3 trillion on healthcare.
The U.S. GDP for 2017 was about $18.5 Trillion. The Defense bill for that year was roughly $600 Billion. Of that $600, about half goes for military salaries and healthcare, another $150 for overhead on facilities (bases, etc.). That left about $150 - $200 Billion for procurement. But that procurement covers everything, not just new weapons. There is no swinging a $1
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BTW: The military-industrial complex died during Reagan years. Companies found that the U.S. military was small potatoes compared to the civilian economy and it shifted to it. Now, the Pentagon has to beg companies to produce for it since DoD's market is so small in comparison to the rest of the economy.
Do try to keep up, eh?
Here is a handy visual guide to US budget allocations [deviantart.com] from 2007.
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That "visual guide" is very misleading because it's only showing the discretionary budget, making it look like defense spending is by far the largest part of the total budget. Here's a more accurate, if less visually pleasing, set of charts.
2018:
https://www.usgovernmentspendi... [usgovernmentspending.com]
2007:
https://www.usgovernmentspendi... [usgovernmentspending.com]
TL;DR version: the budget for defense spending in 2018 was 21%, and in 2007 was 24%.
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That "visual guide" is very misleading because it's only showing the discretionary budget,
TL;DR version: the budget for defense spending in 2018 was 21%, and in 2007 was 24%.
It's very interesting, thank you. I note that the spending on Education is 4% in 2007 and 3% in 2018.
I seem to remember that a lot of people are chained to education debt, it would seem to me that there are a lot of opportunities to increase spending in that area. educating people is a good thing isn't it? It looks like that waste millitary budget would do a lot of people a lot of good there don't you think?
True but we also waste ridiculous amounts (Score:4, Informative)
But heck, lets say we take that $13 billion and just focus on the 45,000 that die every year of preventable illnesses due to lack of healthcare. I think that'd go a long way. It would also help stabilize our country's political situation.
Wages are declining, high paying work's being replaced with McJobs and healthcare and housing are becoming inaccessible. We're in a second gilded age. That's can't continue. Sooner or later it's going to blow up in our faces like it did for Germany in the late 30s/early 40s when the world put those damn reparations on them.
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The health care number you provide is not relevant to this discussion.
For analysis, we need to carve out all non-government expenditures.
Your value includes the private sector, while the tanker drone cost is taxpayer-supported.
A more realistic number [cbo.gov] for governmental health care expenditure is $1,040 billion.
PROJECTIONS FOR MAJOR HEALTH CARE PROGRAMS FOR FY 2018
(As of April 1, 2018 )
MEDICARE (Net of Offsetting Receipts)
583 Billion
MEDICAID
383 Billion
HEALTH INSURANCE SUBSIDIES AND RELATED SPENDING
$58 Billion
CHILDREN’S HEALTH INSURANCE PROGRAM
$16 Billion
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That's comparing apples to oranges. In US, government is the provider of security for all its citizens, but it's not provider of healthcare for all its citizens.
Your comparison would make sense in 100% socialized healthcare. I'm not aware of a single country where such healthcare exists.
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I'm not aware of a single country where such healthcare exists.
Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Cuba, and I'm pretty certain: China.
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I'm Finnish. We do not have 100% public healthcare. You're grossly misinformed on at least all of the Nordics and China. I do not have sufficient information on Cuba to argue the point.
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So you don't have healthcare included in the taxes like the danish and the other nordics?
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We do, just like US. Just like in US, the coverage offered by public healthcare isn't anywhere close to 100%.
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How do you mean that?
I don't understand it. If you pay taxes and don't need a health insurance, obviously it is 100% public.
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Depends on what you qualify as "need".
Do you need non-emergency surgery that destroys your quality of life without waiting for it for months and some cases years? You need insurance.
Do you want your child to get to GP in the morning when he feels ill, and not spend entire day being tossed around from receptionist to nurse to GP appointment at just past midday if you're lucky and "come back tomorrow or go wait five hours in queue at central hospital ER, who will just toss you back to us around 15:00 when you
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Interesting.
Never heard something like this from my friends in Denmark or Norway.
How much in relation to a wage would such a private insurance cost?
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Depends on wage. One of the less often stated reasons as to why children from poor families perform significantly worse is in the fact that they have to take significantly more sick days off on average due to inefficiency of the public system. It's something of a meme among the upper middle class in Helsinki that you must really hate your child if you don't get him private health insurance.
As for working people, as I noted above, private insurance system is literally written into law. When you provide someo
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When you provide someone with employment, you are required by law to provide them with "tyÃterveys", literally "work health".
Yeah, but that is what you claimed Finnland would not have: socialized healthcare. Obviously one has to pay, and in your case it is the company. That is not what we would call "private health insurance", it is still "public health insurance".
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So in your view, all private health care offered in the US by employers is "public" because [weird and utterly irrelevant spin on what "public" and "private" mean]. Ok. The private companies in question would deny your slanderous claims voraciously, and me not being a postmodernist crazy I'll just point at you and state "how about we don't redefine private as public because you desperately want it" but let's go with your daft redefinition for the sake of argument.
Do you now understand that no matter which w
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I don't really care how you define it.
I simply pointed out that the terms private and public are used different in the rest of europe.
If a company is forced by law to provide a health insurance (as it is in germany) it is PUBLIC!
It is up to any citizen to have an additional private one, or not.
On the other hand a car owner is forced to privately insure his car, so obviously the 'naming' is a bit arbitrary.
Why do you always seek an dispute, where we are onky discussing?
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Problem being that that's literally how everyone defines it. You're the only one so insane as to contest this, and your statement literally concluded that US worker insurance is public.
But then, you also call yourself and expert in power generation, while making statements like that Germany can control wind. So I guess whenever you go and do your rain dance and whatever in drug addled shamanic trance, words do indeed flip 180 degrees to mean their polar opposites.
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while making statements like that Germany can control wind
Are you retarded?
I never made a statement like this.
Considering thatwe talked in this thread about healthcare in Finnland, you now lost al credibility ... I guess I find one who is more sane.
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And btw, our public medical system, to my knowledge, is the most efficient in Nordics. Others have it worse, higher costs and/or worse outcomes. Things like birth tourism from Sweden are very real.
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Hmm, 330 megapeople, $13B....
That works out to about $40 per person. So, maybe one doctor's visit per person, at best?
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Sure, but that's only ONE item on the military budget.
Re:Eisenhower's Farewell Address (Score:5, Informative)
Hmm, 330 megapeople, $13B....
That works out to about $40 per person. So, maybe one doctor's visit per person, at best?
That's a lot of doctors visits. I know it's not a great deal of money however consider it also from another perspective, the amount of money the military wastes [cheatsheet.com] with The Washington post exposing $125 Billion in wasted Military spending [washingtonpost.com] . That's roughly 10 doctors visits per person, just from the waste spending alone.
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"Let's do the math." ~ Sheldon to Leonard's mother, The Big Bang Theory
MEDICARE (Net of Offsetting Receipts): 583
MEDICAID: 383
HEALTH INSURANCE SUBSIDIES AND RELATED SPENDING: 58
CHILDREN’S HEALTH INSURANCE PROGRAM: 16
Total: 1040 [cbo.gov]
13/1040=.0125 or 1.25%.
1.25% additional healthcare expenditure could be provided with the taxpayers $13 Billion slated for the Navy's Carrier-Launched Tanker Drone.
You've got to be fucking kidding (Score:2)
I wonder how many drones Burt Rutan could punch out for that kind of money....a lot more than 72 I'm guessing
The F/A-18 was a mistake (Score:4, Informative)
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The Navy wanted a dual purpose fighter-attack aircraft. To get it, the sacrificed range. The aircraft it replaced had far longer range, being designed for their task. Ever since, the Navy has been reliant on mid-air refueling to get anywhere. Planes launch with large bomb loads and nearly empty tanks, and have to mid-air refuel before they event start the mission.
That sounds like something that would be disastrous in anything other than uncontested airspace. One can only imagine what kind of havoc a few J-20 stealth fighters penetrating a Navy fighter CAP could do if they caught one of those strike packages still suckling fuel from their milker cows. All they'd have to do was burn into the area, hose of a ripple of medium range missiles and haul ass. I'm reminded of stories told by Luftwaffe veterans of flying into huge formations Lancaster/Halifax bombers getting t
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That is literally the point of aircraft like J-20. They're not fighters per se, so much as they are interceptors. Their mission profile appears to be "avoid detection, get to high value assets like tankers and AWACS aircraft, kill them, avoid defenders and come home".
Notably Soviets/Russians had the same idea, but they have better engine tech for both jets and missiles, so they do it at stand-off range. That's literally what MiG-31 is built for. Stand off range aerial interception of high value targets with
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Easy to imagine. Difficult to pull off.
Stealth fighters/bombers are mostly stealth from below or for other planes flying similar heights, depending on course ofc. That also means that long range radar guided air to air missiles have trouble to lock on a stealth fighter.
But: they are not so invisible from above, e.g. for an carrier based Hawk Eye or an Land based AWACS.
However I have no clue what range heat guided missiles have and how they lock on at a stealth plane (especially if fired over a long distance
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The Navy wanted a dual purpose fighter-attack aircraft. To get it, the sacrificed range. The aircraft it replaced had far longer range, being designed for their task. Ever since, the Navy has been reliant on mid-air refueling to get anywhere. Planes launch with large bomb loads and nearly empty tanks, and have to mid-air refuel before they event start the mission.
That sounds like something that would be disastrous in anything other than uncontested airspace.
With the demise of the Soviet Union, it was decided that the capabilities of the F-14 did not need to be replaced and that shorter range air defense would be sufficient.
I don't see how (Score:2)
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Well, first of all, there was plenty of mid-air refueling of the Navy's tactical aircraft before the F-18 came along. At introduction in the '80s, the F-18 initially replaced two carrier based aircraft -- the F-4 (on the small carriers not suitable for F-14s) and the A-7. It is a better fighter than the F-4 in almost every respect, including range, and vastly better as a close-in dogfighter for what that's worth. It is better than the A-7 as an attack aircraft in every respect except in range and it is fa
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The F-18 (and F-35) are compromised, multirole airplanes, but the Navy really likes that because the carriers don't have room for a bunch of specialized models.
The Midway and Nimitz class carriers typically had like 90 aircraft during the the cold war. Since then, carrier air wings have dropped to 60 aircraft or less so space is not a consideration although having fewer aircraft does make operations easier.
This becomes especially relevant considering that operating radius has decreased to half with the loss of longer range fighters and attack aircraft which explains the navy's desire for a dedicated tanker.
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The point of the Hornet was to reduce the number of planes needed for a sortie. In the first Gulf War a pair of Hornets on a bombing mission shot down two Iraqi fighters sent to intercept them and then continued on with their bombing mission. The planes it replaced could not have done that.
While mid-air refueling is a logistics challenge it's a common aspect of carrier operations. Hornets (or any attack plane) could launch with a full fuel load but it would necessitate a lighter combat load. It's better to
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You're going to love the F-35!
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No, that is untrue. [fool.com]. The F-35 price has been driven down to $89M each, putting it in the same range as MUCH MUCH less capable aircraft such as the F-18, Eurofighter, and F-15s. In combat exercises, the F-35 has suffered 0 losses to 8 F-15 losses [theaviationist.com].
Similar results are obtained against the venerable F-16, itself a first-rate 4th generation fighter, and the EuroFighter. One F-16 pilot put it like so: "We went to our simulated airfield out in the far part of the airspace. As the two ship from the northern half
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These weapon systems are so expensive they try to not expose them.
F-35 = $103 million a copy CH-53E = $136 million a copy
The US armed forces tries to not use CH-53E in hostile territory because of cost.
How about F-35s that will never be combat ready. https://www.popularmechanics.c... [popularmechanics.com]
Why do we buy these systems?
We should be building planes with longer ranges or evaluate the need / effectiveness of carriers when weapons like the DF-21 stonefish exist.
If it's any consolation, the Chinese Chengdu J-20 is thought to cost in the vicinity of $120 million per unit. I rather like the Chinese concept behind the Chengdu J-31 better, it is estimated to costs only about $60-70 million per unit. It may not be quite as sophisticated as the F-35 but if you can build it in larger numbers that won't matter too much and if the Chinese can achieve the kind of cost lowering the F-35A has achieved as production of it ramped up, the price tag on a J-31 could drop into the $
terrible waste of money (Score:2)
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Yes, I can read, thank you. At more than $180 million for *each* tanker ("72 Stingrays at a cost of $13 billion..."), this is just a hideous, hideous waste of money! And that doesn't count the inevitable cost overruns. If the military can't think of some significantly smaller expenditures, then we need some new military leaders.
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Two thoughts on this boondoggle: first, it's a terrible waste of money and second (and well put a few posts above), it's an accident waiting to happen on landing.
Think of it as an opportunity cost. The navy either has to acquire longer range fighters and strike aircraft, buy more of their existing aircraft to use as tankers, or acquire a dedicated tanker aircraft.
As far as reliability, I suspect an automated drone will be more reliable than a human pilot in short order for difficult operations like landings.
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There is no need for the navy to do any of the above. Consider:
"A total of 262 KC-135s and 46 KC-10s operating out of 21 locations in 10 countries provided round the clock aerial refueling support to U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy, U.S. Marine Corps, and Coalition forces during Desert Storm." (https://archive.org/stream/DTIC_ADA279743/DTIC [archive.org]
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The navy either has to acquire
longer range fighters and strike aircraft, buy more of their existing aircraft to use as tankers, or acquire a dedicated tanker aircraft.
There is no need for the navy to do any of the above. Consider:
"A total of 262 KC-135s and 46 KC-10s operating out of 21 locations
in 10 countries provided round the clock aerial refueling support to U.S.
Air Force, U.S. Navy, U.S. Marine Corps, and Coalition forces during
Desert Storm." (https://archive.org/stream/DTIC_ADA279743/DTIC_ADA279743_djvu.txt [archive.org] with obvious typos in aircraft designations corrected.)
Yet the navy still maintains their own in-flight refueling capability using fighter/attack aircraft.
Isn't a majority of the air force's tanker assets reserved for strategic operations?
As far as reliability, I suspect an automated drone will be more reliable than a human pilot in short order for difficult operations like landings.
You can suspect all you want, but when was the last time you heard of a tanker crashing on a carrier? Navy pilots are exceptionally good at landing on carriers.
Using drones for refueling would free up pilots (or the expense of those pilots) for jobs they can currently do better than autonomous aircraft.
a carrier will last 15 mins ... (Score:2)
Against a serious foe such as Russia or China.
So a total waste of money.