Posted on 05/01/2024 7:18:21 AM PDT by hardspunned
Only 29% are mission capable despite costing $100m each.
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We have reached the point where our government is ready to collapse under the weight of its own corruption. A symptom of this is the inability to achieve anything because there are too many corrupt fingers in the pie. You can witness this on a smaller scale with state public works that never seem to end. To wit, the Francis Scott Key bridge will never be rebuilt to its former glory, if they even manage to rebuild it at all.
They are stealing money. Executing the top 10% of all defense contractors working and retired over the last 40 years could solve the problem.
Just my $.02 on this subject.
Gaetz seems to get dumb on occasion and he’s dumb on this one. The F-35 is an amazingly capable aircraft. Although I have been out of the contracting business for nearly 10 years, I did have the privilege of directing the creation of F-135A, B, and C transition training for both pilots and maintainers. Part of the problem in mission capability is the fact that Congress and the Services expected these three variants to be largely interchangeable regarding parts and avionics. They are not. As development and testing proceeded it became obvious (as it should have been from the beginning) that even though these aircraft shared many mission capabilities, each was a very different aircraft. As I’ve been out of the business for a long time, In my opinion only, the mission readiness issues stem from there actually being a multitude different parts that may perform a unique function on each of the three variants. That coupled with the fact that the aircraft was sold internationally and that the international versions all required different parts and mission requirements only add to the problem. We had some of the same problems with the F-14 and F/A-18 series aircraft but the F-35 problems are compounded but the numerous variants.
Irrespective of these issues, aggressor pilots usually lose during air-to-engagements, and the F-35 is a massive step up in air-to-ground employment with superb target recognition and stand-off capabilities. The bad guys on the ground will be dead before they see any evidence that the F-35 is anywhere in the area. Again, just my $.02.
Between Tiger 1s (1347 built) and Tiger 2s (492 built) they had less than 1900 of the super tanks. The Soviets built close to 80,000 T-34s that were damned good according to Guderian.
Reminds me of the V2. Amazing marvel. But typical German blockhead thinking. They spent the equivalent of the Manhattan Project building it. And it delivered roughly 3300 tons of bombs with accuracy enough you could aim “at London”.
By contrast, we and the Brits dropped 3900 tons on Dresden.
What the Germans gadget project accomplished in the whole war, we could do once or twice a week.
Big numbers matter in wars.
“Sustainment costs $1.58 T??”
That caught my attention as well. Surely that was a mix up.
That’s the problem, getting them in the sky. 29% air worthy, $1.5Trillion in maintenance to keep 29% going. That’s under normal peacetime conditions. What happens to that 29% when under stress of multiple sorties a day? No one is questioning what it can do if it’s available.
A plane designed by political committee.
You have a warped sense of showboating. He is one of the most articulate and to the point members of congress. His questions are relevant, he is always prepared, he nails it. call is showboating if you want but we need 100 more like him
LOL. I wish I could share your optimism. The more likely scenario in a country as institutionally corrupt as the U.S. today is that this “fairly honest accounting” is nothing more than a tool for defense contractors to get more taxpayer money — to fix things that weren’t built correctly in the first place.
It’s just like incompetent teachers and crappy school administrators citing the poor test scores of their students to justify their demands for more money for schools.
I thought the same thing as I was typing the comment. I’ll tell you what floors me, Russian defense spending in 2024 is projected to be $71Billion! That’s some MIC we’ve got.
And not enough ground crews to work on them.
= = =
And some of the crews trying to screw two male bolts together.
For now. What was the projection a few years ago, 1.3?
Oops I meant *F-35A, B, and C* (F-135 is the engine designation. My apologies)
Sounds more like a combination of lack of spare parts and (lack of) quality maintenance crews.
I've seen mechanics working on aircraft I wouldn't let work on my lawnmower.
Low hanging fruit.
Yeah, I hear you. It’s easy to be a cynic nowadays, but you can end up being off target if you lean on that too much.
Back in the olden days of Conestoga wagons and F-4 Phantoms, I worked on the latter. It was peacetime...drat that Ronald Reagan...and some smart logisticians devised a scheme called Supply Oriented Maintenance (as opposed to Combat Oriented Maintenance ) which would allegedly streamline training of flight crews and maintenance folks. It worked as well as anything bureaucrats and preening office-type military minds can devise, I suppose. It led to stupid stuff like scheduling regular complete radar system calibrations being followed by complete airframe inspections, which resulted in aircraft sitting idle (in hangars) for a period of time while that phase of maintainence was done. During that time, aircraft that were flying would naturally have issues arise. When they did, the supply chain would be used to provide parts, and aircraft would be returned to mission capable status. Hiccups in supply logistics would arise, and time constraints would sometimes dictate that someone’s ass might be in a sling if Aircraft X wasn’t ready for training missions PDQ. In these incidents, it would be noted by the smart folks whose asses were involved that there were perfectly good parts sitting in the hangars, not doing much of anything. Cannibalization of those aircraft would be the result. In the case of the radar I worked on, it meant taking one part from a well calibrated system and slapping it into another system. The results weren’t always as good as a fine-tuned system, but it worked well enough. Extend that concept to the myriad systems that make up military sircraft...hydraulics, weapons control/ delivery, comm/nav, autopilot, egress, fuel/ engines. and you start to get an idea of what’s involved in keeping a fleet flying.
When the time came for an actual vote, she was re-elected to that leadership post by a wide margin. And she’d still be there today if her own constituents hadn’t thrown her out on her ass in 2022.
Yep.
Recruiting and re-enlistments are understandably down. Who is going to enlist only to be subjected to Critical Race Theory bull crap. “You’re white, you’re a racist”, etc. And who wants to be led by unqualified, politically correct people who were chosen only because of the color of their skin or their sexual orientation? Unit cohesion must be almost non existent.
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