Ice Age
Posted on 07/27/2019 7:55:43 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
When something isn’t very good, someone may joke that it’s still “good enough for government work.” Maybe the thinker who coined that expression had the F-35 program in mind.
The F-35 (also known as the Joint Strike Fighter) is a military jet that was supposed to be able to do it all. The program was started in the 1990s with the intention that it could serve the Air Force, the Navy and the Marines and their various mission needs with only minimal changes to the initial platform. That would deliver cost savings across decades as one jet replaced (at least) three other types of plane. It seemed like a great idea in concept.
But, predictably, the jet that tried to do everything ended up having more problems than successes. By the time designers had added stealth technology, short runway functionality, and various weapon systems, they had a jet that was too bulky, too slow and too costly. “The result is an expensive jack-of-all-trades, but a master of none,” The National Interest's Dave Majumdar writes, calling the JSF “one of the 5 worst fighter jets ever made.”
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. By this time, Lockheed was supposed to be churning out F-35 jets at a cost of $40-$50 million each. Instead, the military now says it wants to buy 470 of the fighters, at a cost of $34 billion. That would be more than $80 million per plane, twice what was promised.
Yet even as it tries to buy more of these planes, throwing good money after bad, the Pentagon admits the JSF program is failing. The Air Force’s top testing official wrote in 2016 that the F-35 is “not effective and not suitable across the required mission areas and against currently fielded treats.”
It also falls short of existing platforms. Military analyst Dan Grazier writes, “In the air-to-air mission, the current F-35 is similarly incapable of matching legacy aircraft like the F-15, F-16, and F-22.” And when it comes to supporting troops on the ground, one job the JSF was supposed to be designed for, “testing shows the F-35 is incapable of performing most of the functions required for an acceptable close support aircraft, functions the A-10 is performing daily in current combat.” One reason for that failure is that the F-35’s guns aren’t very accurate. A report noted that pilots routinely miss their targets because of software failures.
Plus, contractor Lockheed Martin struggles to even keep the F-35 in the air. “A handful of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters built during the early days of the program could become unflyable by 2026, after just 2,100 flight hours,” Popular Mechanics wrote this year. “The culprit is almost certainly the F-35’s design and production plan, which involved starting to build the planes before the final design specifications were set.”
Just last month, the Pentagon’s Inspector General said Lockheed may have over-billed the military by more than $10 million for spare parts that were never delivered. “We determined that the DoD did not receive RFI F‑35 spare parts in accordance with contract requirements and paid performance incentive fees on the sustainment contracts based on inflated and unverified F‑35A aircraft availability hours,” a report concluded. Spare parts wouldn’t save the plane, but we shouldn’t be wasting money on parts we never even get.
The Washington Post reports that “the late senator John McCain called the F-35 a ‘poster child for acquisition malpractice’ a ‘scandal’ and a ‘tragedy’ at different points during his tenure as Senate Armed Services Committee chairman.” I frequently disagreed with Sen. McCain, but he was correct here. Even after all the time and money invested, the F-35 isn’t very good.
Not very good isn’t good enough for the men and women in military uniform. They deserve the best tools our country can give them. The over-budget, under-delivering F-35 is not such a tool, and it’s not “good enough for government work.”
I have always seen that as a weak argument. How could the tooling be impossible to make the second time?
That would be a great option too. Upgraded materials and avionics.
I’m sure they could, if they did it once, they could do it again.
Ya, that’s a good post on these aircraft. That was my thoughts as well. The F-15 could be produced easily with new materials and upgraded avionics again. Great aircraft. That thing has enough thrust, you could park it facing straight up and it would launch straight up. 25,000 lbs of thrust per engine. At least it used to have that.
I’ll confirm your statement. I have interacted directly with the first three or four dozen Air Force Pilots to fly them at Luke. Of course, they don’t comment directly about any technical issues, but they all were enthusiastic about the upgrade to F-35A for their missions.
One of the biggest aspects about the fifth generation fighters is the helmet-targeting and communications tie in to other aircraft. Separate from the airframe itself, that system makes them killers when tested against all other aircraft.
“This man is very bendy.”
No.. what they say in public vs private is two different things.
I’ve thought about this too.
My guess is the message is to China, Russia, and North Korea. Maybe to Iran.
I am too pragmatic to believe we are currently being visited by “aliens” because...where are they? Distances are too long. And, it just doesn’t make sense.
I DO think there is a possibility that we HAVE been visited in the past. I DO believe there is a possibility that there we more advanced civilizations on earth long before this “round trip” between ice ages. There are some odd things on the planet that do not adhere to the “humans” have been civilized since 7,500 BC.
It is possible someone stumbled on some stuff that we were able to figure out.
I saw a petroglyph in the southwest USA that was the perfect depiction of an molecule of Oxygen. Tell me the natives that were dwelling in the caves of southern Nevada and Arizona knew how to draw molecules?
People get all worked up about the cycles of live and nature. I stopped caring a long time ago. I just think the possibilities are cool.
Mission creep, Congressional crony capitalism (pushing a piece of the pie some corporate constituent wants to get), and too many cooks spoil the broth makes MANY DOD projects bigger financial burdens than they are military successes. The F-35 is merely one example. IT is not THE problem, just a symptom.
My ignorance is showing...But (honest question) I’ve never seen explained anywhere why tooling built once cannot be built again...
The cost involved in rebuilding the tooling and line to produce more F22s can’t be greater than the cost of developing a new fighter from scratch...Or can/is it? I suspect there’s no big money in it for defense contractors is one reason lines never seem to restart...New designs are where the profit is?
Would someone with aerospace manufacturing or related experience please enlighten me?
It can be but is quite expensive.
Exactly, LS.
I flew tactical aircraft for over 20 years, and all of my contacts who actually FLY the F-35 cannot say enough good about it. It is a game changer.
There is much disinformation, misinformation, and ignorance on this thread.
The “god’s eye” feature is never discussed by the detractors. Absolutely the biggest advance in aviation in decades.
The “god’s eye” feature is never discussed by the detractors. Absolutely the biggest advance in aviation in decades.
Critical thinkers understand that a lot of the bad-mouthing comes from earned media who are paid to write articles like this to try market alternatives.
Once such tripe is published, the articles are immediately cited by the “woe is me” “we’re always getting screwed” negative nancies that seem to populate the board these days.
That and the defective F-16 engines that tend to flame out after a certain number of hours (this was an opems ecret when I was in the USAF in the 1990s - an USAF procurement attorney once gave me the skinny on it....)
As an aside, the A-10 owes much to an unlikely predecessor, the Luftwaffe's premier ground-support aircraft (and obsolete dive bomber), the gull-winged, sirens-built-into-its-wings-for-terror, Stuka.
The legendary Stuka pilor Hans Erich-Rudel (who - by far - had the most kills of all kinds of any pilot in WW2 - you can look it up) was consulted in depth by the designers of the A-10 ...
I’m relatively sure the naysayers are likely gamers with only knowledge they’ve gained from the concepts provided in their games. Having served active and civilian for the government, I know that there are ALWAYS two (sometimes more) sides to everything: unclassified and classified.
The video games usually feature, at best, unclassified information and some speculative fantasies as to classified technologies. Practically every great military that went down to defeat had prepared to fight the “last war”. The current generation four aircraft we have were, and still are fantastic performers, however S300/S400 air defense systems are rendering them impotent. Yes, there are ECM systems and decoys, etc. that can be used to try and defeat the SAM systems, but the SAM’s must be overcome first! That takes time and resources, and sometimes that’s still not enough. You cannot conduct operations underneath that kind of protective umbrella (sea Arab-Israeli wars of the past if you have any doubts).
F-35’s are designed to operate in those environments to first destroy the SAM umbrellas so that other less capable generation four aircraft can operate in those environments. Unlike the video gamers who can open up “editor mode” and add state of the art systems in and advantageous position on the fly, in the real world much preparation has to occur way before the missiles can fly. There is no “editor mode” in the real world. And unlike the cyber universe of video gamers, resources are much more scarce, and cannot be easily repaired or replaced in a timely manner if they are damaged. Either your stuff works as designed for it’s mission(s), or it doesn’t. There is no time for “do-overs or replays”, and when your pilots are killed, there aren’t any reruns for them to reappear in. The same thing goes for the bad guys.
World War 2, Korea, Vietnam, even the Gulf Wars are the “last wars”... we don’t need to prepare to fight them again! We need to be ready to fight and win the next war using newer, improved state of the art equipment.
So, unless you have no-shit classified access to all of the information concerning the design and use of the F-35’s, you might be just blowing smoke up everyone’s skirt.
I don’t believe in outer space aliens, either.
Used to land their every week long ago(passenger). Always new F-15’s lined up.
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