Posted on 03/21/2015 10:41:32 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
First of all, be aware that strange things happen in the U.S. military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about. Take the example of the M1 Abrams tank. The U.S. Army has an inventory of 6,300-odd of these tanks, including 4,000 in storage in desert. It doesn’t need any more, but Congress keeps voting to keep the production line going, churning out unwanted tanks. Ironically, that means that funds aren’t available to upgrade the gas turbine engines of its existing tanks to make them more efficient. The M1 Abrams gets half the fuel mileage of the German Leopard II tank of similar capability.
But this is a tale about the F-35. It has been said that the story of the F-35 begins in 1942 in the Battle of Guadalcanal. The U.S. Marines, doing the ground fighting, were upset that the other services weren’t providing enough air cover. The pounding they got from the lack of air cover is part of their institutional memory.
So when the U.S. Defense Department decided to build a 5th-generation stealth fighter to replace the F-16, the U.S. Marines insisted that this include a short take-off and vertical landing (STOVL) variant. The trade-offs necessary to effect this fatally compromised the whole project so that none of the variants do their job adequately. Specifically, the requirement to have a lift fan 1.27 meters in diameter on the centerline of the aircraft behind the pilot resulted in two bomb bays instead of just one on the centerline. This made the aircraft wider, draggy, slower, and less maneuverable. In short, the F-35 can’t turn, can’t climb, can’t run.
In fact, it isn’t a fighter aircraft in the first place. It is really a light bomber, designed as such from the get-go.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
A great deal of this is really done to win political favors (Senator X needs a big federal program in his state), or to reward lobbyists (the guys at Lockheed really helped me out in the last election), and to provide a jobs program (lots of people are basically unemployable -- let's have them "build an airplane" for a few years).
It's amazing that we ever get a weapon system that functions.
And, oh by the way, when we DO get a weapon system that functions, we work very hard to kill it -- like the A-10 or the F-22.
An updated Harrier would have made a lot more sense.
The fighting men and taxpayers suffer.
Quite right. Though the majority of people who build airplanes are not unemployable. They’re the kind of people who would find other jobs if an airplane factory wasn’t hiring.
I don’t know why they don’t do competitions like they do for drones. The apparatus thinks they can make better design decisions than demonstrations of performance.
I’d add the F-14 to your list.
Part of the problem is that we no longer buy special purpose weapons. Since every weapon must perform every mission each customer, marines, fighter squadrons, bomber squadrons insist that the next vehicle must perform their mission before all others. The compromises are just that, compromises, in all senses of the word. You end up, every time, with a camel instead of a race horse.
A lot of smart, capable people -- absolutely. An aeronautical engineer or radar specialist or other people like that -- they are not unemployable.
But there are a lot of civil servants and run-of-the-mill contractors pushing paper. Some of these bureaucrats are utterly useless.
The current system is over-filled with people who attend meetings for a living.
You got it exactly.
Its a big win from the contractor perspective - between overruns, design changes, rebaselines and every other idiot tactic they will haul away billions with a B in taxpayer cash.
They could care less if anythinng useful emerges from that. Why should they? They didnt make the system so stupid.
Please include the SGT York anti-aircraft gun in that list. I was at the Air Defense Board at Fort Bliss during the development phase of that dog. The CG of Fort Bliss went down in flames over his ardent support for that weapon.
Weapons procurement is seriously in need of tearing down and starting over. Defense contractors, for decades, have been mere crony capitalists, getting in bed with the whores who dominate Washington DC.
does anyone think that the corruption in government somehow doesnt apply to the dod. the only difference is, i’d rather have my stolen tax dollars go to having more weapons, more employment for workers, than having it go to inner city, obese welfare queens.
Possibly I was unclear. When I think of someone who is unemployable, I think of longterm loser status. Druggies, petty criminals, welfare deadbeats, etc.
Very few of those, I suspect, would work at an airplane factory.
The deadweight types you describe are indeed little net benefit to the economy, but somehow they always seem to find employment.
F-35 is a high priced flying computer game that can’t do half of what an A-10 can. Its like government bailing out GM only with aircraft instead of autos.
It's designed to be the M-16 of the air — something that will need tons and tons of R&D [and therefore money] to fix it, this without regard to actual field-conditions.
Exactly.
Yeah, once upon a time, military contractors cared about the systems they developed. I'm sure some still do. Unfortunately, I've seen too many who are incentivized by how many ECPs they get—not if the System meets requirements and is on cost/schedule. It's also the fault of the Program Managers who won't hold their feet to the fire. I suspect their careers are over if they do. It's the military equivalent of TBTF.
Roger that. The real deadbeats wouldn’t be anywhere near a program like this. But I have worked with very highly paid civil servants who wouldn’t survive in the mail room at a serious private company.
Article after article after article exposing just how terrible this airplane is and how much of a complicated and costly failure it is.
If there were any honor, honesty or integrity in the leadership the program would be scrapped and the F-22 production restarted but this time by someone other than the failed Lockheed crap works. The F-15SE would be produced in numbers and a suitable combat team would be produced.
There is no honor, honesty or integrity in the leadership of this country though. It is all for sale to the highest bidder.
Couldn’t the A-10 be modified for carrier duty?
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