Averaged out, the program cost you $86.28 in 2013, that $1.5 trillion is over 55 years. Our local state government wastes more than that per person per year!

except it's already cost over $400B and it still doesn't work properly.

That's $400B since 1996, America has spent more on pizza in the same timeframe.

Not arguing that it's money well spent, it's just hard to get worked up over such small sums of money.

Perhaps consumers have spent more on pizza, but the government hasn't.

*promote

Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Friday, January 2nd, 2015 11:25pm PST - promote requested by kulpims.

Yes, that's the comparison I was making. If every man, woman, and child in the U.S. spends $3 per week on pizza by themselves, how upset should you be that your federal government spent $1.66 for each of you on the f-35 program?

There are a lot of other things to be more upset about, like the way lobbyists direct federal spending, tax breaks for the rich, or the cost of housing 25% of the world's prison population.

Perhaps the government should be spending the money on pizza for everyone than on this plane that doesn't work.

Just imagine how much money they'd waste on that program!!! The $1000 Raytheon pizza times 316 million anyone?

At least you'd get pizza though.

This video lacks a lot of salient details.

Yes, the F35 is aiming at the A10 because contractors want jobs (something to do).

However, the strength of the A10 is also its weakness. Low and slow also means that it takes you a long time to get to your troops. Fast jets arrive much sooner (significantly so). A combination of both would be ideal. F35 to get there ASAP, and A10 arriving later to take over.

It's not really worth debating the merit of new fighters. You don't wait for a war to start developing weapons.

Yes, our recent enemies are durkas with small arms, and you don't need an F35 to fight them - but you also don't even need to fight them to begin with - they aren't an existential threat. Terrorist attacks are emotionally charged (well, until they happen so often that you get used to hearing about them, and they stop affecting people), but they are nothing compared to say, a carpet bombing campaign.

The relevance of things like the F35 is to have weapons ready and able to face a large national power, should a nation v nation conflict arise with a significant other nation. In the event that such a conflict ever does, you don't want to be caught with your pants down.

Defense spending costs scale with oversight requirements.

Keep in mind that money pays people. Even materials are simply salaries of the material suppliers. The more people you put on a program, the more that program will cost.

Yes, big contractors make big profits - but the major chunk of their charges is still salaries.

Let me explain what is going on.

Remember the $100 hammers?
In fact, the hammer still cost a few bucks. What cost 100+ bucks was the total charges associated with acquiring a hammer.
Everything someone does in association with acquiring the hammer, gets charged to a charge code that's specific for that task.

Someone has to create a material request - $time.
Someone has to check contracts for whether or not it will be covered - $time.
Someone has to place the order - $time.
Someone has to receiver the package, inspect it, and put it into a received bin - $time.
Someone has to go through the received items and assign them property tags - $time.
Someone has to take the item to the department that needed it, and get someone to sign for it - $time.
Someone has to update the monthly contract report - $time.
Someone has to generate an entry in the process artifacts report, detailing the actions taken in order to acquire the hammer - $time.
Someone on the government side has to review the process artifacts report, and validate that proper process was followed (and if not, punish the company for skipping steps) - $time.

Add up all the minutes here and there that each person charged in association with getting a hammer, and it's $95 on top of a $5 hammer. Which is why little things cost so much.

You could say "Hey, why do all that? Just buy the hammer".
Well, if a company did that, it would be in trouble with govt. oversight folks because they violated the process.
If an employee bought a hammer of his own volition, he would be in trouble with his company for violating the process.
The steps are required, and if you don't follow them, and there is ever any problem/issue, your lack of process will be discovered on investigation, and you could face massive liability - even if it's not even relevant - because it points to careless company culture.

Complex systems like jet fighters necessarily have bugs to work out. When you start using the system, that's when you discover all the bits and pieces that nobody anticipated - and you fix them. That's fine. That's always been the case.



As an airplane example, imagine if there's an issue with a regulator that ultimately causes a system failure - but that issue is just some constant value in a piece of software that determines a duty cycle.

Say for example, that all it takes is changing 1 digit, and recompiling. Ez, right? NOPE!

An engineer can't simply provide a fix.

If something went wrong, even unrelated, but simply in the same general system, he could be personally liable for anything that happens.

On top of that, if there is no contract for work on that system, then an engineer providing a free fix is robbing the company of work, and he could get fired.

A company can't instruct an engineer to provide a fix for the same reasons that the engineer himself can't just do it.

So, the process kicks in.

Someone has to generate a trouble report - $time.
Someone has to identify a possible solution - $time.
Someone has to check contracts to see if work on that fix would be covered under current tasking - $time.
Say it's not covered (it's a previously closed [i.e. delivered] item), so you need a new charge code.
Someone has to write a proposal to fix the defect - $time.
Someone has to go deal with the government to get them to accept the proposal - $time.
(say it's accepted)
Someone has to write new contracts with the government for the new work - $time.
To know what to put into the contract, "requrements engineers" have to talk with the "software engineers" to get a list of action items, and incorporate them into the contract - $time.
(say the contract is accepted)
Finance in conjuration with Requirements engineers has to generate a list of charge codes for each action item - $time.
CM engineers have to update the CM system - $time.
Some manager has to coordinate this mess, and let folks know when to do what - $time.
Software engineer goes to work, changes 1 number, recompiles - $time.
Software engineer checks in new load into CM - $time.
CM engineer updates CM history report - $time.
Software engineer delivers new load to testing manger - $time.
Test manager gets crew of 30 test engineers to run the new load through testing in a SIL (systems integration lab) - $time.
Test engineers write report on results - $time.
If results are fine, Test manager has 30 test engineers run a test on real hardware - $time.
Test engineers write new report - $time.
(assuming all went well)
CM engineer gets resting results and pushes the task to deliverable - $time.
Management has a report written up to hand to the governemnt, covering all work done, and each action taken - documenting that proper process was followed - $time.
Folks writing document know nothing technical, so they get engineers to write sections covering actual work done, and mostly collate what other people send to them - $time.
Engineers write most the report - $time.
Company has new load delivered to government (sending a disk), along with the report/papers/documentation - $time.
Government reviews the report, but because the govt. employees are not technical and don't understand any of the technical data, they simply take the company's word for the results, and simply grade the company on how closely they followed process (the only thing they do understand) - $time.
Company sends engineer to government location to load the new software and help government side testing - $time.
Government runs independent acceptance tests on delivered load - $time.
(Say all goes well)
Government talks with company contracts people, and contract is brought to a close - $time.
CM / Requirements engineers close out the action item - $time.

And this is how a 1 line code change takes 6 months and 5 million dollars.

And this gets repeated for _everything_.

Then imagine if it is a hardware issue, and the only real fix is a change of hardware. For an airplane, just getting permission to plug anything that needs electricity into the airplanes power supply takes months of paper work and lab testing artifacts for approval. Try getting your testing done in that kind of environment.



Basically, the F35 could actually be fixed quickly and cheaply - but the system that is in place right now does not allow for it. And if you tried to circumvent that system, you would be in trouble. The system is required. It's how oversight works - to make sure everything is by the book, documented, reviewed, and approved - so no money gets wasted on any funny business.

Best part, if the government thinks that the program is costing too much, they put more oversight on it to watch for more waste.
Because apparently, when you pay more people to stare at something, the waste just runs away in fear.
Someone at the contractors has to write the reports that these oversight people are supposed to be reviewing - so when you go to a contractor and see a cube farm with 90 paper pushers and 10 'actual' engineers (not a joke), you start to wonder how anything gets done.

Once upon a time, during the cold war, we had an existential threat.
People took things seriously. There was no F'ing around with paperwork - people had to deliver hardware. The typical time elapsed from "idea" to "aircraft first flight" used to be 2 years. USSR went away, cold war ended, new hardware deliveries fell to a trickle - but the spending remained, and the money billed to an inflated process.

-scheherazade

@scheherazade - nice post. Parts of it seem to suggest that it's a system that is necessary and can't be improved upon? Like when you say you need this and that. But it must be something that can be improved, because otherwise it suggests that the system is perfect?

What strikes me is that even with all of that seemingly necessary stuff going on, all of the considerations into the stuff you posted about, the plane was still (apparently, i don't know the ins and outs) poorly made. Are they experimenting on what they can achieve, or was this supposed to be achievable?

All well and good, but the reason why all the oversight costs piles up is because this plane isn't a solution to a military problem, it's a solution to an economical problem.

It's government stimulus, pure and simple. Get a whole bunch of different contractors from different companies and hand them money to build parts for a warplane that covers roles that are already covered. Keep those guys ticking over to prevent a collapse of the arms industry (or to prevent them developing products for sale to buyers the US might not consider kosher).

And then, because you're dealing with different companies, you need to coordinate, ensure compatibility, oversea each company to make sure they are on time/program/budget etc etc.

You build a plane under one roof, the entire process is overseen by the company and the government get's to check up on them. Far simpler. One department doesn't deliver inside that company, their management has to fix the problem or default on the contract. One company holds up the whole plane, do the other companies get penalised? Of course not, their staff sit around drawing wages with their thumbs up their asses waiting. And the government keeps paying.

Additionally, the planes the F35 is supposed to replace are all better at their jobs because they are specialised. You put every topping ever conceived on that government pizza and no one will like it (apart from perhaps the homeless who would eat anything to stave off starvation). Build a new warthog, improve on the materials, give it better armaments etc and put the tried and true design back to work. That's the core of the super hornet program, right?

When you look at the state of the world, the only real threats currently to America are the bloody terrorists (which, as you note, isn't exactly an existential threat), and the flexing of military might in 2nd world countries not withstanding, there is very little need for a frankenplane that doesn't do anything particularly good.

China and Russia? Lol, the US has 75% more combat aircraft and 400% more combat helicopters. Factor in China's pretty sparse air assets, in an air war, including force multipliers such as electronic warfare/early warning/air co-ordination and carriers, the US would be able to show down both nations handily with it's existing fleet.

I really do appreciate the point you're making, but that just adds insult to injury. The awful waste built in to the program is even more appalling when you consider that the F35 is a plane no one really needs, or even wants.

It seems that no one is understanding that it's likely that under no circumstance will the F35 ever see combat. We'll have newer combat drones ready for our next major conflict, or we'll use our older but proven air force. Trying to use an incomplete, buggy, untested, piloted plane instead of a complete, untested drone will not likely be happening. Americans just don't accept the loss of pilots and billion dollar aircraft anymore, since we know there's an alternative that's cheaper, less dangerous (for us), and better at it's job.

I get your point, and agree to an extent.
Unfortunately, the F35 fails at increasing our abilities in any way, because it doesn't work.
As to the $100 hammer, most if not all of what you talk about is also done by companies NOT working for the Fed. They have systems to track their own spending and production. It does add to costs, but is not the major driving force of costs by any means. It's maybe 5%, not 95% of cost, normally. The $100 hammers and such are in large part a creation of fraud and/or a way to fund off the books items/missions.
The F35 has had exponentially more issues than other projects, due in large part to spreading it's manufacturing around the country so no state will vote against it in congress.
I think you're overboard on all the 'steps' required to change a software value. I also note that most of those steps could be done by 2 people total, one engineer and one paper pusher. It COULD be spread out among 20 people, but there's no reason it must be. If that were the case in every instance, we would be flying bi-planes and shooting bolt action rifles. Other items are making it through the pipeline, so the contention that oversight always stops progress is not born out in reality. If it did, we certainly wouldn't have a drone fleet today that's improving monthly.

Ugh, the F-35 is such a waste of money, and is costing the Canadian gov't so much. We did a no bid contract, which is the stupidest thing in the world unless you're the one getting it, and it doesn't even meet the needs our country demands from its fighter/bombers.

Of course I do have my love of the A-10, I think it's just an amazing plane. I still remember that footage from the first gulf war when an A-10 landed, and it looked like swiss cheese.

Here it is:

http://youtu.be/1BecNTYPYbU

The necessity [of the process] is debatable.

Much of the process exists in order to facilitate the creation of 'artifacts' (actual term used).

Because the oversight folks on the govt side are not technical, and can not interpret test data, they are reduced to interpreting the process - under the assertion that proper process leads to proper development.

Someone has to generate the documents for the oversight folks to review, so contractors have people on hand to write the papers. Those people are not engineers themselves - so they suffer the same 'not technical' limitation as the oversight folks. So they strictly publish documents pertaining to the process taken for each task performed.

For actual 'test data interpretation', the engineers themselves are tasked to create those portions of the documentation. Essentially, the engineers grade themselves, often under a basic understanding that management wants the best light shed on the results.



If the government actually cared for honest effective oversight, they would instead toss all these paper requirements, fire all the government oversight 'English degree' deadweights (non-technical degrees all the way across the sky), and instead contractually embed government employed engineers into the contractors.

Then government paid engineers can participate in the program development, and subsequently be tasked to give short and sweet personal reports on the progress without having to worry about what the contractor thinks of the report (contractor does not pay them, and can't fire them).

-scheherazade

My post is not hyperbole, but actual personal observation.



You also have to factor in cost+ funding.

On one hand, it's necessary. Because you don't know how much something truly new will cost - you haven't done it before. You'll discover as you go.
It would be unfair to bind a company to a fixed cost, when nobody knows what the cost will be. It's mathematically unreasonable to entertain a fixed cost on new technologies.

(Granted, everyone gives silly lowballed best-case estimates when bidding. Anyone that injects a sense of reality into their bid is too costly and doesn't get the contract).

On the other hand, cost+ means that you make more money by spending more money. So hiring hordes of nobodies for every little task, making 89347589374 different position titles, is only gonna make you more money. There's no incentive to save.



F35 wise, like I said, it's not designed for any war we fight now.
It's designed for a war we could fight in the future.
Because you don't start designing weapons when you're in a war, you give your best effort to have them already deployed, tested, and iterated into a good sustainable state, before the onset of a conflict that could require them.

F35 variations are not complicated. The VTOL variation is the only one with any complexity. The others are no more complex than historical variations from early to late blocks of any given airframe.

The splitting of manufacturing isn't in itself a complication ridden approach. It's rather normal for different companies to work on unrelated systems. Airframe will go somewhere, avionics elsewhere, engine elsewhere, etc. That's basically a given, because different companies specialize in different things.

Keep in mind that the large prime contracts (Lockheed/GD/etc) don't actually "make" many things. They are systems integrators. They farm out the actual development for most pieces (be it in house contractors or external contractors - because they are easy to let go after the main dev is over), and they themselves specialize in stitching the pieces together. Connecting things is not difficult when they are designed with specified ICDs from the get-go. The black boxes just plug up to each other and go.

The issues that arise are often a matter of playing telephone. With one sub needing to coordinate with another sub, but they have to go through the prime, and the prime is filtering everything through a bunch of non-technical managers. Most problems are solved in a day or two when two subs physically get their engineers together and sort out any miscommunications (granted, contracts and process might not allow them the then fix the problem in a timely and affordable manner).

The F22 and F35 issues are not major insurmountable tasks. The hardest flaws are things that can be fixed in a couple months tops on the engineering side. What takes time is the politics. Engineers can't "just fix it". There's no path forward for that kind of work.

Sure, in a magic wonderland you could tell them "here, grab the credit card, buy what you need, make any changes you need, and let us know when you're done" - and a little while later you'd have a collection of non-approved, non-reviewed, non-traceable, non-contractually-covered changes that "just fix the damn thing"... and you'd also have to incur the wrath of entire departments who were denied the opportunity to validate their existence. The 'high paid welfare' system would be all over your ass.

-scheherazade

I agree with your general point.

I personally would never consider 'replacing' the A10 with the F35.

But I still think you don't design weapons for what you need now, but to be ready for what you could need in the future.

Su-35 / Mig35, pak-fa, J-10, J-20, fighter tech is moving along in the world. The goal of systems like the F35/22 is to remain superior in any theoretical/potential future conflict. The only thing the F22/35 have to do with today's conflicts is the possibility to be shoehorned into dropping bombs on some scare crows in the middle of nowhere.

Sure, people pick on the F35 for being fat and happy - but fighters are more than turn turn turn turn shoot. They are systems to sense/detect, share info, build a battle field picture, jam opponents, strike the opponent's sensors, build situational awareness while denying the opponent his own SA. They build an environment where your forces can maneuver around enemy forces, strike key locations, and leave (without an actual fight), so that the enemy eventually finds himself with nothing left to defend, and they just quit without ever fighting. Modern fighters are an information system as much as a weapons platform.

Even in WW2 the powers learned the lesson that a good fighter is not necessarily a good pure dog fighter. The zero was the best turning fighter of the war - and it sucked. US planes would just not bother dogfighting with it. US planes would fly high above, dive down onto a zero, shoot at it, fly right by, and zoom back up. They didn't have to dogfight, because they had more speed and altitude, and the zero was helpless, it was a fighter stuck playing defense in air to air combat.

Times changed, today's tactics are not speed and altitude, they are situational awareness and detectability. It's the kind of fighting the F35 is tailored for, and it's not worth being too hard on it for not being ideal for more classical combat applications.

-scheherazade

That is disconcerting. I understood they were not efficient, but to be that much worse than normal industry is almost criminal, no matter the reason.

Designing for the future was also my point. Since it seems we have already gotten to a point where lost lives and aircraft are intolerable, we should design cheaper, better performing drones to remove those issues, not continue with older insanely expensive models already obsolete for the most part before deployment...IMO.
I do understand the 'farming out' of contract work, what I was talking about is intentionally spreading the work to all states in order to gain congressional backing, not using the best/cheapest manufacturer. I have no solution, just griping. ;-)
I think we should go (back?) to allowing private companies to produce prototypes to compare that meet requested/required criteria instead of a design competition. Then at least the only issues would be manufacturing specs and costs of mass production, not making it work at all decades and billions (trillions?) down the road....but I'm just a layman looking from the outside.

I'm sorry, but the planes we currently have in production are more than capable handling any role we need for conflicts. They even have future capability with tweaking, such as what was done to the super hornet. The F-35 is simply a freaking pork product that allows the current generals to have a nice job later with defense companies, congressmen the chance to give money to their states, etc. Drones are the future.

The world isn't static.
For example, the J-20, between its stealth capabilities and its ability to jam radar, significantly lowers the range of our BVR radar guided missiles, because our radar guided missiles can't track them beyond a given range.
So you have to get closer - ideally without moving into range of the opponent's missiles.

A Super Hornet (which BTW is an ~entirely new plane compared to the original hornet. It's not an 'upgrade' to an existing airframe.) can't move in closer without exposing itself to fire.

Furthermore, the F35's ability to get closer than conventional fighters makes it 'take point' for information gathering and transmitting data over the network.

Yes, the F35 is has a wasteful inflated budget in large part architected to throw money at political friends - but the vehicle does exist to plug a real hole.

-scheherazade

Every time I here about the F-35 I remember this anime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macross_Plus