Posted on 07/04/2017 9:19:38 AM PDT by Kaslin
The people working on various aspects of the F-35 fighter program must be very frustrated. The program is still highly classified, so that much that is taking place within the program is simply not available for discussion. And yet, the F-35’s critics are baying and howling and often deliberately misrepresenting the program and its products.
The F-35 program is not one program. It is several. Its products are three different aircraft and several brand-new, and highly innovative, technologies. It provides quantum leaps in aviation technology in many different areas. Simultaneously achieving all these technical breakthroughs has obviously proved difficult. But that is not surprising -- it is the norm in innovative engineering.
The program is producing three very different aircraft: the F-35A is a conventional takeoff aircraft for the Air Force. The F-35B is a vertical takeoff and landing capable aircraft for the Marine Corps. The F-35C is a catapult takeoff and carrier landing aircraft for the Navy. From a distance, the aircraft look alike and inside they share much avionics and the core of the engine. But don’t be fooled. These are very different aircraft.
The F/A-18 Hornet and the F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet also look like they are the same aircraft. But they are really two completely different aircraft. The Hornet was developed in the 1970s and was manufactured in the 1980s. The Super Hornet was developed in the 1990s and was in production after 2000. The Super Hornet is 20% larger, up to 15,000 pounds heavier, has 40% greater range and 50% greater endurance. They look alike simply because the Super Hornet borrowed excellent aerodynamic design from the Hornet. Time and money saved.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Don’t blame the contractors, blame the government and the acquisition process. It’s broken beyond repair and works like all socialist government programs.. keep throwing money at it.
The government doesn’t know how to run a business much less a project. When you change managers every 2 - 3 years and at every change someone changes requirements to make their mark, adds something new that the aircraft wasn’t designed for in the first place, incompetent test engineers and a piss poor work environment and you get shx.. which is exact;y what the F-35 is.
Re: “The majority of our senior military leadership would sell out this country (and many already have) for their own personal gain.”
If they were interested in personal gain, why would they choose a military career?
As I recall, you can’t reach a $100,000 pay check until you get promoted to general, which takes at least 30 years, and excludes about 99% of all officers.
If you have good leadership skills and good math skills, and you are interested money, most people would quit the military before age 30, and start their own business.
The same amount of money in the hands of any honest, creative and capable people would have produced magic in just about anything.
Spread around it could have done more good. Drones, more F-22s, a nice fleet of new F-15SE trucks, some F/A-18 upgrades all would have done all this turd the F-35 can do and much better with much less drama and much more certainty.
Wrong airplane, wrong time, wrong compromises, wrong company.
Stealth capability only if you don’t carry much and compromise the mission? People got way carried away with stealth. WE have become educated fools enamored with technology and complexity for the sake of technology and complexity. Not everything you can do is a thing you should do.
Take for example a new Caterpillar Road Grader as an example of overly complex for its own sake. The machine has triple redundant electric over hydraulic steering. Caterpillar boasts of “fighter plane equivalent technology”! It is a freaking road grader for crying out loud! The basic function and need has not changed in a hundred years. Why, pray tell, does it need a triple redundant electric over hydraulic microprocessor controlled steering system? My old Allis Model D still pushes dirt, is easy to work on, is reliable and has never had a steering failure and it is only slightly older than I am. It still puhses and grades right along side the modern cousins that are unnecessarily vastly more complex. I will admit though that laser grade control is a heck of a major improvement! Hardly anyone knows what a blue top is anymore.
The United States Marine Corps has done an outstanding job with the Harrier despite its many handicaps and serious deficiencies. I’m sure they will manage to do the same with the much more expensive and equally capable F-35 somehow.
I worked for Lockheed. It is the most corrupt company I have ever seen. I walked away from 6-figures because I could not stomach it. They take bilking the government (and taxpayer) to a new level.
+1.
Hmmm...
The battle against a completely surrounded ISIS force in Raqqa (Syria) has been going on for 8 months!
Also, Trump's claim that Syrian President Assad used chemical weapons two months ago, and that Assad planned to use chemical weapons again just a few days ago, are simply not credible by my standards.
From memory, the UN has investigated 12 alleged chemical attacks in Syria.
It found chemical traces at only two sites, and it could not determine which side had used them.
Almost 100% of the information we have on Assad's alleged chemical attacks comes from local anti-Assad military groups, or from local anti-Assad "monitor" groups.
Battle of Mosul - has been going on for 8 months; per semi-official history of this battle:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mosul_(2016–present)
Trump commented on the Battle of Mosul and the Mosul Offensive that preceding it by 5 months, during the campaign. He said we were pre-announcing our plans and not taking advantage of the element of surprise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosul_offensive_(2016)
Immediately upon assuming command, President Trump put new rules of engagement into effect. This is to what I referred when I said Trump is kicking ISIS ass in Iraq. (I could say much the same thing about Syria.)
http://www.militarytimes.com/articles/us-changes-rules-of-engagement-for-mosul-fight-in-iraq
For my Republican friends who still think George W. Bush did good by getting us into Iraq; and, for my Democrat friends who still think Barack Obama did good by thinking you could treat Muslim extremists with respect, think about the trillions of dollars they have cost this country. The tens of thousands of U.S. troops dead and severely wounded physically or emotionally. The millions of casualties in the Arab world. The thousands of people subjected to torture such as we have not seen since the Middle Ages.
Then think of how much progress we have made since Trump has taken the oath of office. America First is not isolationism, but is the alternative to both isolationism and to neo-con one-world government.
All aircraft design is a series of tradeoffs.
No one design can be all things, to all services, to all missions.
The DoD has been down this road before, and it didn't learn it's lesson. Congress is partly to blame, because they thought they could fund just one platform that would satisfy all the services. But it was the DoD that sold them this line, and Congress bought it.
Now, we are screwed. There is no money for a better aircraft, and we don't have another 2 decades to wait for one.
“As I recall, you can’t reach a $100,000 pay check until you get promoted to general,”
Officers do quite a bit better than that a lot sooner. I don’t begrudge anyone their pay. It’s the corruption that bothers me. It’s the political self-dealing that bugs me.
It is, quite literally the Military Industrial Complex that Eisenhower warned us about.
Build a drone around the cannon from an A-10 and attach some hard points for bombs and AGM’S , plus make it capable of vertical take off and landing, so both the Army and Marines can have CAS without risking pilots.
It's probably closer to the truth that Lockheed Martin was hip deep in the F-35 program and didn't fight very hard to keep the F-22 production line open past the 187 buy. Had Boeing won the JSF competition, L-M would have lobbied congress much harder to purchase more F-22s.
I don’t know what a blue top is, until I google it, which I will.
But anyway, your post is excellent.
This has long been my position, that Lockheed is corrupt. Many will howl in protest at the suggestion that they lobbied against their own production of the F-22 so the DoD money could be saved to work on the much more profitable and more numerous F-35. I remember it. It happened. It was a convenience for president barky to close the F-22 line.
Others will defend Lockheed and the F-35 program citing USAF mismanagement. Bunk. They could have done the same thing Douglas did with the XB-19 that was obsolete before it was built. Douglas insisted the Army cancell the contract. The Army didn’t. Douglas tried to do the right thing which is something I have not seem much of from Lockheed on the F-35 program.
A blue top is a square stake placed its top at grade. There is a little blue tassel affixed to the top of the stake (they can be other colors). “Cutting blue tops” is when the operator just skims the little blue tassel off the stake but does not hit the stake. When he does this he is “on grade” for final. Grade stakes are also called “hubs”.
With any complicated system, the more you ask it to do the less well it will do it.
A small, prop driven, COIN bomber would be great. The F35 would be horrible at that role.
Not to mention the risks to losses. Losing a few F35’s would mean we pull them out of the theater. Quantity has a quality all its own.
“To big to fail” means “to many people on the gravy train to keep it going”.
Someone needs to teach the Defense department project management skills. Kill it if it needs to be killed, and move on.
The Russians are fielding tanks, helicopters, and fighters two or even more generations ahead of what we have, and the money keeps going into a fighter than is pretty hard on the pilots.
I don’t think people in this country understand what project management really is. I have not seen very many good projects since the 50s and maybe the 60s.
I can tell you what it is not. It is not endless Gant charts stewed in minutiae, endless meetings over very little, hoardes of people who have nothing to do with product, teams without managers and supervisors, lack of accountability with consequence, shape shifting of objectives. It is project leaders brave enough to declare ongoing failure, stop it and stop the bleeding and realign and retool for success. There are some things that are mutually exclusive in nature and some things that just can’t be done now. The jokes about bureaucrats and politicians being so stupid to declare they will repeal the laws of physics are not fairy tales.
How did General Groves build the Pentagon in the blink of an eye and then go execute the Manhattan Project? It was not just money being thown at the problem. It was something we don’t seem to have much of these days and that is not politically correct determined leadership. We have corrupted the meaning of leadership to the point it is unrecognizable.
I can’t imagine being the guy that signs the mission orders to do Close Air Support with an F-35
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