The author mentions "perverse" incentives in Congress, but what he doesn't mention (because it's a very politically difficult subject) is the perverse incentives afforded military officers. When you have a system in which it's so common as to be expected that the officers who influence your purchasing will in a couple years retire into a job with the private contractor from whom you're purchasing, you have a recipe for bias. Even from really standup people who don't recognize their own vulnerability to influence. It's just such a common thing to work in the private sector for the same office as you did when you were enlisted that nobody blinks an eye. Because it's often really good to still have those people around.
But at the same time, I think that's a pretty untenable situation. The military needs to do something to balance the career mobility of their officers with the ethical hazards of the current system. Without some rules to prevent the scenarios that have the most potential for abuse, the situation is not unlike the flow of Congress members into lobbying. Except we don't elect military officers.
It's a tough balance. Part of the promise of the military's recruiting is that you'll advance your career. They should fulfill that promise. At the same time, they need to make sure that the ways in which they fulfill that promise don't incentivize poor judgment on behalf of the public interest.
The basic perversity is building a gigantic military in peacetime because the arms companies have enormous lobbying power. Everything else flows from and is secondary to that.
Have you considered the gigantic military requirements that are placed on the United States? By treaty alone, the US is required to defend almost all of Europe, Japan, and South Korea. These are not easy requirements to disentangle from; if Japan alone were allowed and required to rearm, it could lead to an arms race that would destabilize all of East Asia and either stall or undo the tremendous economic gains that have been achieved in that region. If it wasn't for US obligations towards NATO, most of Eastern Europe would suffer the same fate that Ukraine is facing from Russia. If it wasn't for the US Navy enforcing freedom of navigation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_navigation#United_St...), tinpot dictators could shut down international trade by making and enforcing illegal claims on international waters.
Maintaining the Pax Americana is a hard, unappreciated task.
Have you considered the gigantic military requirements that are placed on the United States?
Placed by whom, exactly? It's not as if the US took on those treaty commitments involuntarily or expecting no benefits in return, and it's not as if the rest of the world would not adapt if the US reduced its military commitments over time.
For example, you talk about the US being required by treaty to defend almost all of Europe, but Europe already has collective defence agreements that are becoming stronger over time, over a million active military service personnel, thousands of aircraft, thousands of heavy armoured vehicles, hundreds of ships, special forces to rival any in the world, and two independent nuclear powers. There is exactly one sovereign state on earth that could single-handedly give the combined forces of Europe a serious fight today, and the consequences for all concerned would be so devastating that such a conflict is almost inconceivable.
There is a reasonable school of thought that argues the world would be a much safer place if the number of military superpowers in it was zero, and that as the only old-school military superpower remaining, the US is therefore a negative factor on global stability and peaceful relations.
Given the recent track record of the US, both acting as an aggressor under often dubious conditions and failing to act as a defender when weaker nations faced aggression by others, there seems little no moral high ground for the US to take here, nor any general mandate to act as the world's policeman. The alarming frequency with which the US military and its political leadership presume to take such positions anyway brings me back to the previous point about the world being better off in the long run with no military superpowers at all.
The last time the US followed an isolationist foreign policy, the Europeans got themselves into two world wars in a row. It's true that Europe has a continent-wide mutual defense agreement now. What you didn't mention is that it's called NATO and the US is the backbone of it. That's part of how it works. Otherwise you don't get the combined forces of Europe, you get indifference at best and European war at worst.
Look at East Asia. South Korea can't afford to defend itself from the North and hope to maintain their standard of living, Japan is barred by their own constitution from rearming (and if they did, that would start a regional arms race), and Taiwan would have no hope of maintaining their self-determination by themselves.
I will be the first to say that the U.S. has followed an unnecessarily aggressive foreign policy. But a very large part of how the world works depends upon the American military, and if it just went away, we would all be poorer and less safe for it.
Your information appears to be a generation out of date. The EU in particular have been working on collective defence agreements independent of NATO for quite some time.
While it's true that if current US foreign policy went away overnight it would probably make certain other parts of the world less stable for a while, such rapid change couldn't actually happen as a practical matter of international diplomacy and even basic logistical issues. This isn't a logical reason not to move in a slower and more controlled way towards a more balanced position where power and responsibility are more widely distributed.
It also seems fair to observe that the US has caused a lot of instability in recent years with its aggressive foreign policies. A large part of how the world works may indeed depend on the American military as you say, but it isn't always in a good way.
During the 70 year US superpower reign, there have been zero major wars between history's powerful nations (Germany, China, Japan, Italy, Spain, Britain, France, India, Russia); there have been no major wars in Latin America (eg Brazil invading and destroying Colombia); and there have been no more world war equivalents. The worst we've seen have been very small scale, eg between India and China.
That's not a coincidence, it's a benefit provided by the US military's overwhelming superiority.
The US military has also taken an extreme share of the burden of keeping global trade / shipping lanes open and safe for operation - and it has done an extraordinary job at it.
The USSR wasn't going to just stop mid way through Germany, and Russia was obviously not going to just stop at Georgia. Who is going to act as a big enough deterrent to them? The same countries that prevented genocide in Europe's backyard in Kosovo? No, only the US is a powerful enough threat to Russia to keep them from going on a non-stop annexation spree.
That's not a coincidence, it's a benefit provided by the US military's overwhelming superiority.
Do you really think the British and the French haven't been re-enacting Waterloo lately because the United States asked us to play nicely?
Here are some other factually correct statements, using your definition of 'powerful nation':
"In the 70 years since the formation of the United Nations, there have been zero major wars between history's powerful nations."
"In the seven decades since they lost the Second World War, Germany has had zero major wars with nations that defeated them."
"Since the formation of the EEC, there have been zero major wars between its member states."
"In more than six decades since becoming a nuclear power, the UK has had zero major wars with other powerful nations."
Obviously numerous variations on these themes are also true.
The US military has also taken an extreme share of the burden of keeping global trade / shipping lanes open and safe for operation - and it has done an extraordinary job at it.
> The EU in particular have been working on collective defence agreements independent of NATO for quite some time.
"Working on" is a far cry from "tested and in force for decades", though. When push comes to shove, it's not clear that the EU member states would unanimously act in collective defense. Ultimately, while Europe may be able to collectively defend itself, it is certainly less capable of doing so without the aid of the United States.
Even setting Europe aside, what would you suggest for East Asia? Should Japan be allowed to rearm, potentially disrupting half a century of cordial relations and trade in the region? Should South Korea be left on their own to defend themselves from a North Korean army that outnumbers them two to one?
"Working on" is a far cry from "tested and in force for decades", though. When push comes to shove, it's not clear that the EU member states would unanimously act in collective defense. Ultimately, while Europe may be able to collectively defend itself, it is certainly less capable of doing so without the aid of the United States.
Against what threat, exactly? The big (physical, military) menace at the moment seems to be Russia, and European nations are now running almost continuous military exercises in eastern Europe to train for the possibility that any of those EU states might require protection from Russia aggression over the next few years. I don't know which banner they're operating under -- I'm guessing a lot of it is NATO -- but ultimately it's still European militaries co-ordinating to put the boots on the ground.
That said, realistically, the most effective way to protect ourselves against a belligerent Russia is probably economic anyway. Although some European states are dependent on Russia for energy supplies, that goes both ways, with Russia similarly dependent on Europe for having someone to pay for its natural resources. Neither side could trash that relationship today without suffering severely for it, but in the long run it favours Europe (because energy supplies are generally trending towards nuclear and ideally renewable sources anyway, giving Europe a credible long-term alternative, while Russia has relatively little other than energy exports to support its economy through international trade today).
Even setting Europe aside, what would you suggest for East Asia? Should Japan be allowed to rearm, potentially disrupting half a century of cordial relations and trade in the region? Should South Korea be left on their own to defend themselves from a North Korean army that outnumbers them two to one?
If you're going to make this kind of argument, you have to consider the effectiveness of armies. Bigger does not necessarily mean more effective if the little guy is better trained and/or has better technology.
More generally, I don't see why every nation should not be entitled to have a military force sufficient for its self-defence needs. The last world war ended 70 years ago. Concepts like expecting Germany or Japan of 2015 not to maintain effective militaries because of what Germany or Japan did in the 1930s and 1940s are obsolete.
In the modern world, I don't see why local agreements for mutual benefit could not provide similar assurances of defence and ultimately safer conditions than having the whole world depend on the US as you seem to want. It would take time to make the transition, but it would be better for everyone if that switch did happen over time. IMHO, that includes the US itself.
South Korea is in a unique situation in that their primary opponent is willing and able to starve their own people in order to build and maintain their war machine. Also, North Korea could level Seoul with artillery fire in a matter of minutes. Even if it is possible for South Korea to deter Northern aggression, it would be far costlier for them to do so alone than it is for them to do so with American help.
As for Japan, Japan and Germany are a false equivalence. Unlike Germany, Japan hasn't received the forgiveness of their neighbors yet. Relations between Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, and even every minor Asian power would be considerably less friendly if Japan was allowed to rearm. You might convince me that the nations of Europe have learned to stop hating each other, but the nations of East Asia are a far different story, and there is nothing in the region like the EU to encourage peaceful cooperation.
You might convince me that the nations of Europe have learned to stop hating each other, but the nations of East Asia are a far different story, and there is nothing in the region like the EU to encourage peaceful cooperation.
And as long as the US continues to interfere in the regional politics to the same degree, there may never be.
There is a reasonable school of thought that argues the world would be a much safer place if the number of military superpowers in it was zero, and that as the only old-school military superpower remaining, the US is therefore a negative factor on global stability and peaceful relations.
So, in other words, you'd prefer a situation similar to the world as it was before World War 1? That world wasn't exactly peaceful either. You say that you would prefer a world with no superpowers. Such a world has existed, and it's always been rather unstable, with many regional powers jockeying for position, often leading to massive wars. And in the end, a superpower or two (Spain and Portugal, France and Britain, USA and USSR) always emerges. In fact, it's the periods between superpower domination that have been the bloodiest, as declining superpowers and regional powers jockey to see who will be the next global hegemon.
So, in other words, you'd prefer a situation similar to the world as it was before World War 1?
I didn't say that.
You say that you would prefer a world with no superpowers.
I didn't actually say that either. I'm commenting on one particular theory, not expressing any sort of personal preference.
Such a world has existed, and it's always been rather unstable, with many regional powers jockeying for position, often leading to massive wars.
If you look far enough back through history, that is true.
Then again, periods with a single superpower that became aggressive have probably led to more death and damage than any other periods in modern history except for the World Wars, while two superpowers playing poker gets you the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Given the developments in both international diplomacy and military power since those historical periods, I don't think it is reasonable to assume that a lack of superpowers would necessarily have the same result in the future.
So will Germans fight for Greece ? I doubt so, so what if Poland is attacked are the Spainyards willing to fight and die for that. We all know, the answer, and its a resounding NO. Italians are not going to fight for estonians. When it hits the fan, and I am sure it will, Americanos will come to rescue and lead the charge. You have to not look beyond the late 90s and Kosovo, to look at the collective action, or should we say the inaction of European states.
European countries have gone to war over Poland before. The idea that the EU would sit back and allow another country to invade its member states is just crazy. If nothing else, it would cause huge financial disruption to all the other countries in the union.
Britain, France and Germany alone have a combined military budget greater than any other nation save the United States. The UK went to the other side of the planet last time its dependant territories were threatened. The idea that the EU wouldn't defend itself, when it has the capability, the motive, and a long and bloody history of warfare, is so bizarre I can't even begin to understand your reasoning.
China's military budget is likely beyond France + Britain + Germany. It's admitted to be $141 billion now, and most analysts think that's understated by upwards of 50%.
Europe is allowing Ukraine (of course not a EU member) to be destroyed right now. and Russia isn't done yet, they're going to take more territory. Europe at best has been half-limp in its response. Which makes sense given the energy ransom Russia holds over most of Europe's collective head.
Like Europe previously looked the other way while Georgia was sliced to pieces. What does that have to do with the EU? We're seeing that right now, Putin is being encouraged in Ukraine, he is seeing that there are no military consequences from the EU to taking non-EU European territory.
By the time Russia gets to Odessa, Moldova is going to look like a free acquisition. Belarus is another easy target for Russia, and Putin has already said 'unifying' with Belarus was desirable and possible. Is the EU going to war with Russia over Belarus? No chance, and that's as much in their backyard as you can get.
France, Britain and Germany have a combined budget of $167 billion, and even if China's military budget turns out to exceed that figure, that's only 3 of the EU's member states.
China's military is also severely lacking in combat experience. The US is one of the most battle-tested military forces in the world, has relatively little corruption compared to China, and yet it still suffers from projects like the F-35. It's hard to estimate how effectively that Chinese budget is being employed.
The EU isn't sending a military force into Ukraine, but then neither is the US. The EU does have problematic energy ties to Russia, but that works both ways; just as Europe has an unhealthy dependency on Russian gas, Russia has an even greater dependency on Europe.
Putin's playing a dangerous game with the EU. On the one hand, the EU relies on Russia for about a third of its gas and petroleum. On the other hand, Russia depends on the EU for the majority its energy exports, and virtually all its gas exports. The EU doesn't need to go to war with Russia to cripple it; Russia's economy currently depends on the EU accepting its imports.
Ukraine is a difficult problem to solve. Sure, the EU could march in and reclaim Ukrainian territory without much resistance. The Russian army may have a lot of equipment, but most of it is outdated, and the first Iraq war proved how overwhelming an advantage a technology gap can be. But the EU has also seen what's happened to Iraq and Afghanistan, and knows that the east of Ukraine has strong Russian ties. It doesn't want to find itself in embroiled in a decades-long guerrilla war, which is what would happen if it used force.
Putin knows this, but he also knows that his country's economy is dependent on the EU. He's trying to edge Russia into a better strategic position without provoking the EU into action.
> There is exactly one sovereign state on earth that could single-handedly give the combined forces of Europe a serious fight today
The point is that we Europeans are so divided we can't even name a Foreign Minister of Europe because the Brits once again needed to prove they're special.
Hell, just kick GB out of the European Union and have a MUCH better organized and FVEY-free EU.
I think you are mistaking a small political class within the UK for the population as a whole. The public sentiment in the UK today is heavily anti-EU and the electorate would obviously choose to leave if a vote happened tomorrow.
Whether this would actually be a good idea for either party is a different question, of course. In the short term, it would almost certainly be painful for both sides, but short term politics is not necessarily the priority at this scale.
In any case, it is important not to mistake avoiding a federal system of government for a general policy of xenophobia and isolationism. You can have things like free trade (the original EEC), free movement (Schengen), and shared recognition and defence of fundamental values (ECHR) without the heavy political integration of the EU or the heavy economic integration of the Eurozone. You could have mutual defence agreements similarly.
There are a lot of people in the UK right now who think we and the EU should recognise that our goals are not aligned and go our separate ways amicably, and that we should seek simpler and more narrowly focussed agreements with our European neighbours for mutual benefit, as we would with any other foreign partner.
Your comment is lacking any specific examples or citations so it's essentially an armchair analysis based on what sounds like a simplistic "USA is sucky" opinion.
Where is this "reasonable thought" that a world without superpowers would not devolve back into world wars and mass conflict? What's different this time to prevent that from happening?
Your New York Times article is talking about the personnel count of the US Army -- that has never been the issue with military spending. The real money doesn't go to US soldiers, it goes to defense contractors. Private mercenaries and military weapons manufacturers. That's where the egregious waste is.
I'm not sure why the parent was modded down. It's 'settled theory' in the foreign policy world, though what philwelch lists are significant risks and not certainties.
Also, I would add our obiligation to ensure the flow of energy from the Middle East.
There are many benefits to being a hegemon, but it comes with obligations too.
The thing is despite the gigantic military requirements placed on US, it doesn't have be such a financial disaster only if procurement was done in a sane way. So there's really no one to blame but ourselves.
Let's have that discussion: what are the US's bottom line requirements to maintain the "Pax Americana"? Do we need Carrier Groups to deal with Somali pirates? Do we need 40,000 people in Germany? (I think everyone will accept the deployment in S. Korea...)
Today being behind on military technology by as little as 5 years can be decisive in confrontation. The last decade has brought huge changes in military technology including super and hypersonic missile delivery systems (these can defeat the US's current interception capabilities), THAAD technology, directed energy weapons, new reactive armors, satellite bombing systems, startling new radar arrays, hybrid warships, autonomous drones, practical railguns, missile adhoc networks and intelligent interception, material science bringing in new stealth materials and body armor, satellite kill systems, not to mention advancements in electronic warfare. There is constant pressure on the US, because it is the second largest arms dealer around the world, to constantly build better military equipment. And there is constant pressure to do the same because the US's military might has everything to do with the geopolitics that continue to make it rich.
The Washington Consensus chose 25 years ago to continue the investment of military with a pivot in tactics and to uses its military might in tandem with 'soft power', financial leverage, social disruption, culture export, etc in an attempt to fix its success and the success of its allies with "minimal bloodshed" - but a form of colonialism nonetheless. It will continually sell off old equipment to aid in funding new research and development.
The US is a world empire - and while this can be seen by looking at a map of military locale it is better seen as a Capitalistic one. It uses its host of leverage, import-export bank, 'structural adjustment programs', 'value sharing initiatives' and the like. The US's foreign policy is wrapped up intrinsically in providing energy security to the first world, which means constant interventionism in the Middle East. It also has a huge number of security and military obligations around the world - e.g. right now we're promised to go to nuclear war were there to be an attack on Latvia.
The US has many reasons to be militaristic - its waning economic dominance but continued military commitments and global footprint, its obligations and its own incentives to fix its success during continued globalization. Military contractors feed this fire, yes. They benefit from it, yes. But it is not as simple as military contractors lobbying successfully.
>US's military might has everything to do with the geopolitics that continue to make it rich
I'm sceptical that the military might does that much to make the US rich besides providing basic peace. Obviously things would be screwed if WW3 started.
The US has got rich mostly by trade and enterprise and producing much of the worlds high value stuff. Spending a huge portion of governments revenues on the military rather than things like education, R&D and science has probably been a drag on growth.
For example she provides energy security for Europe (why is the UAE such good friends with us - do we benefit from this relationship?), she backs her commitments with military promises (she can and does negotiate treaties and agreements, even between other countries, that fix things in her favor), her dollar is trusted more because her military is stronger (this investment is crucial), she uses her military to enforce international trade rules that benefit her (more than just 'peace' but international law - but specific international law), her military gives her access to native areas in Latin America and the Pacific that are not hers (Guam, Chile, Phillipines, etc), her military is used as a deterrent that enables her to use other strategies to break nations (she contracts and pays to kindle revolutions around the world that benefit her), she exports her old weapons and systems (a huge US export), she intervenes in nations due to natural, homegrown and installed conflict to fix a stability and peace where US companies and country have the first investment opportunities in natural resource extraction.
The US military also effectively subsidizes the national defense of a large portion of the world, much of which we trade with. It's because of our treaty obligation to defend South Korea that, instead of investing in an arms race with North Korea, they can afford to manufacture cell phones and cars and televisions and trade them to us. Likewise for Japan and the NATO members.
You mean other than the problem where they have nuclear weapons (and of course S.Korea does not), are actively developing more powerful nuclear weapons?
Besides that, who needs an arms race when you have enough artillery to kill millions of people in Seoul in the first inning of a war? North Korea doesn't need to be advanced to decimate South Korea, unfortunately.
The US isn't suffering waning economic dominance. In fact it's gaining economic power right now.
The US Dollar is stronger than it has been in 20 years, the global reserve standard is firmly in place. The Euro and Yen present no threat to that; and the Yuan, a second tier currency, is currently being backed up by the greatest accumulation of debt in world history in China.
Since 2007 the US has added around $3.x trillion to its annual GDP, while Europe has added zero and has failed to climb above the peak before the great recession. The US will hit $18 trillion in GDP in 2015, or over nine times the size of Russia, which used to be its primary superpower competitor. While US GDP has continued to climb, most countries in Europe have been flat for ~7 years (eg Germany's or France's GDP hasn't moved since 2008).
The US share of global GDP hasn't gone down in 35 years, and is still where it was in 1995/96.
(and that's during a time, since 1980, in which both Japan and China came on line as global economic powers - to maintain the US share of GDP, the US had to keep up with China, Brazil, Japan, India and countless other countries that saw economic booms since 1980)
The US _is_ doing better economically than it had been during the great recession and the lead up to it - but when one looks on a longer time horizon and when looks at more than proxy measures in the short term things do not look as well. This is not to say the US is going to go belly up. It is suffering waning economic dominance. The two are not mutually exclusive. Declining dominance means that it is losing its lead and will be overtaken. A sprinter can run faster than any other leg of a race and still be overtaken. That is what we are talking about here.
From all accounts the Renminbi is doing quite well and many allies despite pressure from the US are joining to AIIB, etc. Every criticism of the Renminbi you've put forward applies equally or greater to the dollar.
Europe is not a fair comparison. Nor is Russia (it waned into collapse the same time you start your 'comparisons'). Nor is Japan (can you fairly compare to a lost generation?). These are misleading 20th century comparisons.
Always be careful of charts and data that capture narrow slices and proxy measures - especially when they are not sourced and when the data isn't published alongside methodology. Proxy measures are extremely dangerous. Though it may explain why you feel confident using Japan as a reasonable example?
When we speak of declining dominance, it is in fact the US and its relationship to the stagnating EU, Commonwealth and Japan that informs this. The growth is not in the old world.
By all accounts, bankers, financiers, politicians, advisors - the next half century will be driven economically and politically by the Asia-Pacific. By the same accounts there are significant challenges to the world order set in WWII.
Thus the US's pivot to Asia, to the rise of China and of the Pacific.
We're not talking about scaling out cloud deployments or something here. Building a military takes an incredible amount of lead time. If you don't have a strong standing military force during peacetime, you won't have one during wartime.
Utterly false. Prior to involvement in World War 2, the US had hardly any standing army and rather weak tooling industries (being wiped out by the Great Depression) and yet still managed to field like 2 million troops and vast amounts of weapons for allies in a very short period of time.
The US began the WWII draft over a year before Pearl Harbor, and was manufacturing arms for the Allies months ahead of Pearl Harbor as well. Even a weakened American industrial base was significantly larger than that of any other country in the world at the time (http://www.combinedfleet.com/economic.htm).
World War II was an unusual case, though. Every war since then has been a relatively limited one in the sense that no one on the home front really made any kind of sacrifice or even any substantial contribution to the war effort. In World War II, as much of the country's productive output as possible was dedicated to the war effort. Civilian consumption was strictly rationed, and the population actually went along with this. People gardened and learned to get by with less because every gallon of gasoline they didn't burn, every tire they patched up instead of replacing, every bit of food or cloth or wood or steel that you didn't needlessly consume could be shipped off to the front lines and contribute to victory. Every dollar you saved could be invested in war bonds. There was hardly a single American who lived through that war who didn't make sacrifices and materially contribute to victory.
If you were able to get that level of dedication out of the population again, you could scale an effective military force in very short order the way the US did in WWII. But that just isn't going to happen again for any foreseeable conflict.
That may mean that the population doesn't really support those conflicts. There's a term for the government following the wishes of the population, what is it...
Beating up countries like North Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Serbia, and Iraq doesn't require the same level of effort, and all of those wars were made possible by the large standing military the US had. Without a standing military, we would have had to skip those wars, which would be fine in some cases (Vietnam) and potentially disastrous in others (Iraq 1991, Serbia).
>There was hardly a single American who lived through that war who didn't make sacrifices and materially contribute to victory.
Contrast this with how Americans were told to support Iraq 2 and Afghanistan: "Go shopping."
The best possible policy for peace-loving American's to adopt would be a "no war without conscription" law. This seems counterintuitive, but it is my believe that when Senators' and Presidents' and CEOs' sons lives are on the line, they'll think twice before using force. As it stands, to them it's like risking the lives of a few hundred thousand Wal-Mart employees.
Members of the all-volunteer military are significantly more likely to come from high-income neighborhoods than from low-income neighborhoods. Only 11 percent of enlisted recruits in 2007 came from the poorest one-fifth (quintile) of neighborhoods, while 25 percent came from the wealthiest quintile. These trends are even more pronounced in the Army Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program, in which 40 percent of enrollees come from the wealthiest neighborhoods-a number that has increased substantially over the past four years. (...) American soldiers are more educated than their peers. A little more than 1 percent of enlisted personnel lack a high school degree, compared to 21 percent of men 18-24 years old, and 95 percent of officer accessions have at least a bachelor's degree.
Unfortunately Heritage has become a propaganda outlet, paid for by people like the Koch's. That doesn't make their information right or wrong, just not useful for determining facts (IMHO).
In the post WW2 era though, the increases in firepower and mobility made this point moot. A well orchestrated and timed advance could conquer a nation in days, nuclear weapons not withstanding. the Army's Active Defence doctrine post WW2 reflected this, recgonizing that in the era, a war would be won or lost in the first few battles.
Eisenhower reflected upon this in his Farewell Address. The warning regarding the "Military-Industrial Complex" was placed in the context that such a construct was necessary, but needed to be kept in check:
"Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions."
I think it's worth quoting a bit more of that speech:
Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
And because the US wasn't ready the Japanese were free to run wild in the Pacific for six months, taking many islands that had to be retaken at terrible costs to combatants, civilians and treasuries.
I don't know how this was downvoted - it's completely true. Read any bio of Eisenhower. Eisenhower was involved in big experiments just to see if men and materiel could even be moved across country in the US by wheeled vehicles.
Perhaps it was the tone, "utterly false". When I see writing like that, I generally stop reading; often what follows is another hyperbolic Internet rant and I've seen enough of them for my lifetime.
Interestingly, the score for my comment has fluctuated back and forth between +6 to -2. Clearly something touched a chord, which is strange because a) WW2 is a valid counter-example to the claim that you need a huge standing army to fight and win wars, and b) the extent of my "tone" was a single word, "utterly".
May all the 'hyperbolic internet rants' limit themselves to a single word.
Designs for the US's more advanced fighters, like the P-38, P-47, and P-51, were begun in 1937-39. They were not initially available when the US entered the war.
The M4 Sherman tank design began about 1940, although it followed closely on US light and medium tank designs from 1935.
If by "prior to involvement," you mean 3 or 4 years prior, you're probably right. Most of the design and development work was done to supply the British well before 1941.
Further, the Great Depression not withstanding, and certainly by 1941, the US had the strongest economy in the world.
This is really driven by "up or out" ( also called "up and out") personnel management in the military. You're required to charge rents back to your employer for business relationships outside the military.
It's all part of the general pattern of careerism. It's in sharper relief in military contracting because there's simply more & different information about it. It is also damaging in the private sector.
It's duplicitous of me to bring this up given all the other problems with this plane, but since it's a favorite topic of argument here, let's not forget the F-35's software is mostly developed in C++, and had been, in the past, touted as a triumph of C++ over Ada.
Very much so - I naively thought Ada was going to dominate before C++ did. I tried three times to make Ada the shop standard ( in very small shops ) but there was always something that didn't fit.
It is also very strange to me that Bruce Powell Douglass' work has largely gone unlauded. As clunky as UML is, the class of tools there - beginning with ObjecTime - provide considerable value. Of course there are flaws but it nearly seems of no interest at all now.
Ok, that's scary, I would accept C for such a job but C++ provides too many opportunities for things to go wrong in strange and difficult to find ways.
Are you kidding? Accept C but reject C++? That's completely ridiculous.
"Well, the scout leader's fire control computer should have returned fire at the MIG. It should have, but the C-programmed fire control software cast the void* target object to a ... well, a seagull_t object. I guess you could say that the scout leader was shot down when a seagull fired a radar-guided missile at him. That's pretty funny, right? Right?"
Of course maybe I'm just wrong to want type safety of any kind.
It seems like I've seen this type of C-bashing (vs. C++) recently, and I don't understand it. How is well-written modern C less type-safe than C++? I define that as something along the lines of "using the latest language specification, making judicious use of all features possible, turning on extra-strict compiler warnings and errors."
To address your specific scenario, you could just as well cast a void* to seagull_t* in C++ as you can in C, can't you? I'll admit to not being totally up-to-snuff on the different casts available in C++, but IIRC C-style casting still works.
I didn't realize that distinction, so it's good to know. Still, as I originally assumed, I confirmed that gcc with `-Wall -Werror -std=c99` flags won't compile an initialization of a "struct seagull * " with a value of type "struct enemy * ", or passing a mismatch of those types to a function. If those would be the main reasons to use C++, I'd personally rather just use C with extra checks. But to be fair, maybe that's because I'm not very comfortable with C++, to the point that I didn't notice it checks pointer types.
Yes. In C, conversion between object pointer types requires a cast, but conversion from void pointer to object pointer does not; in C++, both conversions require a cast.
Conversion from void pointer to object pointer would be very a bit annoying to warn about in general, as it's so commonly used in C. And if you always use casts, that also hide other types of error (see, e.g., http://c-faq.com/malloc/mallocnocast.html).
I'm sure there are compilers (and possibly gcc/clang can do it, too...) that will warn you about this stuff without needing you to switch to C++.
Linus Torvalds once quipped (in a discussion over Git) that "even if the choice of C over C++ had no other benefits than keeping the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to prefer C".
Torvalds' criticism of C++ is lazy thinking, but the schadenfreude that non-C++ developers exult in from his criticism is just plain dumb.
Go back and read Torvalds' screed (here's a link http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus). Aside from some sloppy hand-wavy arguments about how he feels icky 'trusting' standard libraries, is he actually criticizing C++? Where in that mess of half-congealed reasoning is mention of multiple-inheritance or operator overloading, or any of the other classic C++ mis-features?
Torvalds is a systems-programmer and he detests the greedy-method design-as-we-implement approach to development that C++ application programmers wanted to bring to git. But, guess what? That pretty much describes application developers working in every development language in common use today.
You program in Java? Chances are Torvalds thinks you're a hack unworthy of working on git or linux. Ruby? Probably even worse. Javascript? Don't make me laugh. Torvalds even refers to you - yes, you - as "some CS people".
You can write the containers as a ".x" file, which is just C with all of the type names replaced by a macro name. Then you #include the .x file where needed, #define the type before, then #undef it after. Token pasting in the C preprocessor makes for unique names, so multiple container types can be used in the same namespace.
He did some consulting work for the JSF++ specification. And he's a Dane; Denmark is a Level 3 partner in JSF but hasn't officially committed to purchasing any aircraft.
It is just inconceivable that we have a multi-decade program to develop a new fighter to fill all these roles, and what we've produced is either equivalent to or worse than the incumbent in all cases, is not safe to fly in combat situations, and is more expensive to boot. I mean we've seen this sort of thing happen on a smaller scale before, but versions of this plane are supposed to replace, like, everything in multiple mission classes across multiple services. Again, just inconceivable.
This article didn't present anything that we haven't seen before, though, and the excerpts from the unnamed pilot set off the 'totally out of context' alarms in my head when reading them. Maybe it's because I'm not involved with fighter planes in any capacity; for example, I found myself thinking that maybe the pilot is not supposed to actually be looking behind them in this plane vs. using video on their HUD or something, and that explains why the helmet and seat are not optimized for head movement.
"...just inconceivable that we have a multi-decade program to develop a new fighter to fill all these roles, and what we've produced is either equivalent to or worse than the incumbent in all cases, is not safe to fly in combat situations, and is more expensive to boot..."
My first week at PLC in Quantico another candidate, prior enlisted recon guy, told me... "War is a racket". Later I found out that the quote was attributed to USMC Maj Gen Smedley Butler. Even read the book. It's kind of amazing how little things have changed at heart since he committed his thoughts to paper.
Nice rebuttal. The Apollo program was also delivered on time (JFK's "before this decade is out" deadline). I'd also add the Manhattan Project to this list.
I wonder: why can the government execute Apollo and Manhattan projects, but botches such simple projects as the Bradley APC carrier?
My theory is that Manhattan and Apollo both had exceptional, unicorn-frequency leadership. Both had flawed leaders - Tom Lehrer wrote a song about Werner von Braun, and Lesley Groves is a legendary ... figure, but it got done.
The software story in "Moon Machines" should be required for anyone who does software. The whole thing should be interesting to anyone; it's a great example of documentary filmmaking.
Apollo and the Manhattan project were both executed by fairly new bureaucracies that had people in key leadership roles who weren't selected by their ability to get promoted from within large bureaucracies.
It is possible to have institutional mechanisms or culture that keeps rot to a manageable level but nobody really knows how to do that deliberately - it's always a matter of luck. That's why it's important to allow organizations to fail. I wish we had some systematic way of allowing that for government departments the way we do for corporations.
Apollo wasn't all that different. It ended the successful relationship with McDonnell-Douglas which had produced Mercury and Gemini and brought in a number of different contractors at the same time: this was the result of lobbying and pork-barrel politics IIRC (I am not an expert). Unsurprisingly this transition set back the space program quite badly. IIRC things only really started to shape up again after the Apollo 1 fire which killed three astronauts.
IIRC it was increasingly unlikely that the Axis could actually win a conventional war in Europe during the period of the Manhattan Project. The big fear was that Germany could develop its own atomic bomb first.
Yes, that was the driver. We knew they were trying to build such a device, but we didn't know how far along they were. Given the German lead in other war technology areas (like guided missiles), it would have been foolish to underestimate them.
Of course the Germans were lucky to have lost before the bomb was ready. Otherwise instead instead of memorials at Hiroshima and Nagasaki they might be at Munich and Hamburg.
At the start of the project, the Germans were still advancing through the Soviet Union, and the Solomon Islands were still actively contested. U-Boats were doing a number on convoys.
Victory over Germany wasn't a sure thing until late 1944. The fact that U.S. leadership had the foresight to make a massive investment in the Manhattan Project at a time where half of the US Navy's carriers were out of action speaks a lot of them.
I wouldn't be wholly surprised if the entire point of the F35 is to make money off of it. Either by selling it to foreign countries, or by exploiting the large influx of tax money.
If that was your goal, it is win-win, no matter if the project fails.
I agree. F-35 seems to be developed to make money and redistribute political power. The atomic bomb was developed to make an atomic bomb. See the subtle difference in these two sentences?
And it works with so many companies today as well. That's why I'm a big fan of Tesla and SpaceX - because they build electric cars so that there are electric cars. They build rockets so that humans can go to Mars. Many other companies in these sectors are the toilet-paper type: they develop electric cars to make money on people buying them. They develop rockets to make money on companies buying launch services. It's the difference of having money as an instrumental vs. terminal goal.
War profiteering is nothing new. Corrupt generals and politicians are nothing new either.
Shitshows like the F-35 are just another symptom of the poisonous political landscape. These big projects get jobbed out to hit every congressional district to make projects tough to kill. They turn into monsters that aren't managed by anyone.
According to that clip, the key point of failure was the project manager, who just rolled over rather than properly manage expectations. Still part of the 'government', but the hero of the piece is actually the central villain.
In any case, you're suffering from confirmation bias. Plenty of government/large corp work is more than successful, from the SR-71 to Predator drones to the Mars rovers.
Don't be silly, the "unwashed" don't pay taxes. E.g. the bottom 50% pay 2.9% of total income taxes collected.
Edit: Heck, according to the IRS, in 2013 the bottom 20% paid -1.6% (negative 1.6%) of total income tax collected! I assume that's because of the EITC.
Bottom 40% - All Federal Tax - 2013 - 5.6% of tax revenue. Bottom 60% - 16.5% [1]
A good rule of thumb is all state & local taxes paid generally work out to about 1/5th of your mortgage/rent cost. But that's also not funding the F-35. (neither are payroll taxes)
State taxes are systematically less progressive than federal taxes so despite that rule of thumb you can't assume that relationship holds across income levels.
Exactly so. If they were progressive, then a fixed percentage rule would not hold. Being less progressive (more likely a fixed percentage), the rule of thumb is generally more accurate, wouldn't you agree?
For anyone wanting to see the background of these "design by committee" government projects, watch The Pentagon Wars [1]. It's a comedic insight as to how groups design a product that's too late, too large, too expensive, too hard to build, and possibly doesn't work. The story is based on the Bradley Fighting Vehicle [2].
Well there's no doubt on the side of the aerospace companies. Anyone can confidently offer to engineer you anything given sufficient time and resources, and a 'plane' that is actually a family of somewhat-related airframes in different configurations seems like a plausible way to be all things to all people given virtually unlimited budget. A certain amount of cynicism is required to bid in such circumstances, but money does tend to distort things.
The commissioning side is much less clear. Who on earth would think one size fits all is the best approach? One possible guess is that it's an attempt to CONTROL complexity and cost, compared to having a succession of over-budget programmes and small orders for aircraft that cost fortunes to develop. A big bet on technology sharing, and an acknowledgment that the development of each new line of military aircraft has already become staggeringly expensive.
The F35 program has been pretty much a disaster. But, that said, the concept of departing from a model in which every service branch and every allied country to which we sell military hardware has largely unique equipment for every mission isn't inherently a bad one. But we've apparently discovered that, among other problems with the program, it's harder to come up with a viable common design than many apparently thought.
The bulk of the requirements for the F-35 are perfectly reasonable; a stealthier replacement for the F-16 and F/A-18, which essentially perform the same role but the Air Force chose one and the Navy chose the other. If you could get a next generation light fighter-bomber to replace both, and make it stealthy enough to replace the F-117 at the same time, that would be the perfectly reasonable aircraft. As it stands, the Navy already hedged their bets with the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, which has been a complete success.
The only thing that did in the Joint Strike Fighter was the requirement to develop a STOVL close-air-support platform for the Marine Corps, to replace the Harrier. That should have been a separate project. STOVL and conventional aircraft have entirely different aerodynamic requirements, and there's no real requirement for a stealth close-air-support platform because it's not like the enemy isn't going to notice the slowly hovering jet plane that's strafing them and shooting missiles at them. But it's so hard to get Congress to fund any replacement aircraft at all that everyone decided to go ahead and put all their hopes and dreams and lobbying efforts behind a single plane.
> it's not like the enemy isn't going to notice the slowly hovering jet plane that's strafing them and shooting missiles at them
I thought the STOVL was designed to enable take off and landing without airfields and aircraft carriers. Are you sure the intent is that it will hover over the battlefield while attacking? Current planes seem to hit targets fine while flying at a much safer hundreds of miles/hour.
It's not going to hover, that would be insane (in fuel use if nothing else) but the USMC wants/needs a close air support platform. A jet that will fly sufficiently low and slow to attack ground targets effectively. Even when the friendly troops are only a few hundred meters away.
That's intrinsically different from the Air Force and Navy whose planes will spend their time closer to 30k feet then 3k feet.
Flight at low altitudes and speed requires fundamentally different characteristics then flight at high altitude and comparatively high speed.
> It's not going to hover, that would be insane (in fuel use if nothing else)
Really nerdy aside: it would also be insane with regards to hot gas ingestion. There would be a very high likelihood that the engine would take in the missile exhaust if launches happened in the semi-jet-borne or jet-borne regions.
The main platform for Marine STOVLs is pocket carriers; littoral assault carriers that lack cats and traps. Quite often they also carry amphibious landing craft as well.[0]
Reducing the number of commonly used planes from dozens to a handful is a great idea. Reducing it to one is not.
But there already are fighters that are widely used. The F16 is used by practically everybody, for example. It's a perfect backbone for a small air force, and still a very versatile fighter in a large air force. But some missions require something more specialized, and it makes sense for a large air force to have more specialized jets for those roles.
The tragic comedy of the whole thing is that, while there's always some pork-slinging going on, at the outset of the program, the whole idea of a Joint Strike Fighter program was cost savings. On the surface, it was a competent economic thought: Build a bunch of variations on the same jet to achieve better overall economy across all military branches.
I really believe the people making that decision thought they would succeed. But since the premise proved incorrect, it looks like program continues to run entirely on a combination of addictions: Escalation of commitment and pork politics.
When the F-4 Phantom was developed, it was decided that air-to-air missiles had obsoleted guns. No guns were put in the F-4. Fast forward to aerial combat in Vietnam, and mechanics were jury-rigging bolt-on machine gun pods under the wings.
When the F-4 Phantom was developed, missiles were extremely unreliable, only around one in ten hit the target they were launched against, and they could only be launched in a fairly limited circumstances.
Around 1975-1985, technology advanced and new generation of missiles entered service. They became reliable, and they could be launched successfully from a wider ranger of circumstances.
Around 1995-2005, technology advanced even more, and an even more capable generation of missiles entered service. As well as being reliable, they're now smart enough and have good enough sensors to be immune to decoys, and they're agile enough that no aircraft on earth can out turn them. Some can even be launched against targets which aren't even in front of the launching aircraft.
Unless, of course, you're interested in strafing what's on the ground. If you carry 8 missiles, you have 8 shots. Assuming you can get a lock on what's on the ground. If you have 10-30s of 20mm or larger, you can do wonders on, say, a convoy of trucks.
While we used to have different planes for different tasks, the staggering costs of current/future models is killing off such things. And as there's no external threat today (for the US military), the enemies are themselves - the different services. Nobody in the Air Force really wants to support those in the mud. But they won't give them fixed wing aircraft (A-10) so they can support themselves.
> Unless, of course, you're interested in strafing what's on the ground
My (very limited) understanding is this: Against far inferior enemies such as ISIS and the Taliban, strafing works fine. But against peer enemies, such as the Russians, we'll never get close enough to strafe. Also, guided munitions are so much more accurate than unguided ones (such as bullets) that the number of hits is comparable. What we could do with hundreds (thousands?) of unguided munitions before, we now can do with 1-2 guided ones fired from a thousand miles away.
We lack the resources to develop and buy everything we want; we can't afford it and the sequester enforced by the GOP makes it even worse. If we invest in tools to defeat ISIS, we'll get crushed by peer enemies. We need to invest in beating our peers; we will defeat ISIS regardless (at least on the battlefield), even if the tools aren't optimal for the task.
"If we invest in tools to defeat ISIS, we'll get crushed by peer enemies"
As I see it, the only peer enemies of the US are Russia and China. As both of these countries are nuclear powers, war between any of them risks terrible escalation. FWIW, the A-10 was designed to fight Soviet tanks in Europe, and I doubt the top armour of tanks has thickened that much since then. And there's lots of APC's and other semi-hard targets that would be killed just fine.
Better 10-100 A-10's than 5-10 F-35's. For pretty much any conflict without nuclear overtones the loiter time, inherent survivability and weapon delivery systems on the "old, boring" A-10 is the way to go.
> the A-10 was designed to fight Soviet tanks in Europe, and I doubt the top armour of tanks has thickened that much since then. And there's lots of APC's and other semi-hard targets that would be killed just fine.
From what I understand, the A-10 was designed for that role as it was envisioned in the 1970s, 40 years ago. The air defenses have greatly improved since then and planes like the A-10 won't get near the battlefield.
They took out about 900 mostly Russian made tanks in Gulf War 1. Plus over 3000 other targets. Four A-10s were lost, shot down by surface to air missiles of the large, non man portable variety. A-10s are effective if you can remove the serious air defences first. Syria apparently has a lot of serious air defences which could be taken out but it would be a major effort.
What we could do with hundreds (thousands?) of unguided munitions before, we now can do with 1-2 guided ones fired from a thousand miles away.
By this logic, we should only be deploying snipers instead of infantry.
Look, once you've run out of guided munitions and SAMs and things, you're going to really, really, really hope that the technologically inferior aircraft hadn't packed something as obsolete as a machinegun.
For attacking an enemy that doesn't have and real air defences they shouldn't be using a multirole jet fighter like the F-35 or a jet ground attack aircraft like the A-10. They're both way too expensive to run.
They should be using a counter-insurgency aircraft, like the A-26s the Afghan Air Force is about to receive.
Not having a real air force is not the same as not having real air defenses. And the A-10 may be a juicy target for air superiority fighters, it's very resilient against ground-based firepower.
Low and slow the A-10 can out turn just about all air superiority fighters (vectored thrust fighters being the largest exception); as the old saying goes "get down low and go go go". The true enemy of planes like the A-10 is 4th+ gen missiles combined with look down radar.
For anyone interested in learning more, the book 'Boyd' provides a lot of useful background information on
- why the F-35 is a total disaster
- the Pentagon's intrinsic inability to make reasonable decisions
In a nutshell, this guy Boyd pioneered modern fighter jet design (and important general strategic theorems as well), but spent his career fighting crony-bureaucrats to get any of it adopted by the U.S. military
Just the logical following of the F22 disaster: a plane so expensive that they won't ever dare endanger it in real operations... because $1 billion apiece!
I am not sure it was so disaster. The main problems from operational point of view for F-22 are operational costs (maintenance), and that it's heavy and flies like a slug. The latter is due design actually so the real problem is price.
They did not want to compromise the stealth and they wanted the plane to match the two-plane doctrine US forces have used since 2nd world war. Basically you got your agile and light fighters that clear the skies, and then you got the heavy planes with superior firepower that mop up the rest. So yeah, that's what they got.
F-35 attempts to be made from cheaper parts and with cheaper costs, and lighter. That means a lot of pea counting, and using simply worse parts. No wonder that program has had problems.
Operationally, F-35 is barely stealthy, and it doesn't fight that well. I'd rather sit in the cockpit of F-22 at this point.
Why? It's easy to look at rosy predictions but is there any reason to think that this project would have avoided the same systemic problems which have been endemic for the F-35? A quick glance at the Wikipedia page shows several questionable elements of the design, all of which seem to be due to the same problem of requiring one design to fill too many roles.
Actually there is. Boeing's design was forward thinking, e.g. using carbon fiber before anyone else --now common place. They also figured out a way to use the main engine to provide vertical take-off and landing, instead of having a separate engine, which would have made a big difference in cost. I watched an excellent documentary on the whole project long ago, and it was clear that Boeing design was superior, but they got shafted b/c, as other have pointed out, it wasn't about the best product, it was about defense contractor dollars.
My main reason for posting was that your original comment would have been much stronger had it included any of the arguments you made here.
That said, I would reiterate that it's not clear that all of the possible advantages would have actually been delivered in the production aircraft. Wikipedia summarizes the problem engi_nerd mentioned as “eight months into construction of the prototypes, the JSF's maneuverability and payload requirements were refined at the request of the Navy and Boeing's delta wing design fell short of the new targets”. That's the kind of thing which makes software projects fail and software is a LOT easier to change than a high-performance aircraft design.
It's very easy to believe that this wouldn't have been the only such change and that the Boeing project would have ended in the same muddle because the project is simply badly managed. Accepting so many different missions as requirements for a single design seems like something which would doom anything constructed near our our current technology levels. It really sounds like it'd have been cheaper and more successful had the Marines’ VTOL requirement been a separate design since that's frequently mentioned as the reason for the many compromises for engine safety, performance, stealth, etc.
> but they got shafted b/c, as other have pointed out, it wasn't about the best product, it was about defense contractor dollars.
Definitely contractor dollars but also high-paying jobs in legislators’ districts. From the sounds of it, the “political engineering” process has been a lot more successful than anything else on the project:
Boeing would have spent much engineering effort on mitigation of the hot gas ingestion in mode 4 problems. It's impossible to know now how difficult or easy that issue would have been to resolve. The lesson that I take away from this is: STOVL is not easy. LM, Rolls Royce, and Pratt&Whitney have had their hands full with the LiftFan.
It wasn't so crystal clear then. I'm assuming the documentary you saw was Nova's "Battle of the X Planes". Recall that a Navy requirements change made Boeing's design overweight, so it never performed any STOVL operations in its full flight configuration. Lockheed Martin had an aircraft with enough margin to do a short takeoff, supersonic dash, and then land vertically, all in the same trim. So the DoD had to choose between Lockheed, which had a plane that had already shown it could fulfill the mission, and Boeing, which proposed to build an aircraft significantly different than it had tested and hadn't had a single flight that demonstrated all capabilities like LA had.
Proven versus unproven. That's the choice that was present.
Hard to say that, we don't know what the final price of the Boeing plane would be. I liked the Boeing design better, simpler and should have been cheaper and more reliable. Complexity just kills budgets, schedules and reliability. IMHO, the Lockheed plane won because it looked nicer and maybe because of politics (up and out).
The VTOL and the complicated avionics is what is really killing the F-35 plane. The software is going to be massively more expensive that what they had planned. Debugging will take years.
Nerdy aside: the F-35 is not really VTOL, it's STOVL (short-takeoff/vertical landing).
Vertical takeoffs have been done in testing, but the jet really isn't going to be operated that way. Short takeoffs will be done regularly, though. It's amazing to see an aircraft go from a dead stop to being 50 feet in the air within less than 800 feet of runway.
Don't discount the looks department. In the fighter world, the adage has always been, "If it looks right, it flies right." Now, I'm not saying that is the criterion that should be used to select airplanes, but that mindset exists.
Boeing still would have been faced with many of these same avionics and software issues because their aircraft would have been outfitted with similar systems.
They flew single-engined jets in the 1950s and early 1960s when engines were horrifically unreliable ( most notoriously the F3H Demon with the shocking J71 ).
And that didn't deter then from doing it again later with the A-7, A-4 and F-8.
And then they learned from that lesson and today they operate the F/A-18, which, if you count all of its variants, is one of the most successful naval aircraft of all time despite having a very ambitious multi-role mission.
> the F/A-18, which, if you count all of its variants, is one of the most successful naval aircraft of all time despite having a very ambitious multi-role mission.
How is it "successful"? Has one ever been in a real fight? Almost all of our airplanes are untested (which is a good thing).
Not like anyone's anxious to pull the P-51 or Spitfire out of mothballs, certainly.
While the Hornet doesn't have a huge combat record, it has a long flight record and a long record of carrier operations and has excelled at both with less maintenance burden than its predecessors.
I know many older maintainers who started out on the aircraft types that the F-18 replaced, and then worked on the F-18. They all say that the F-18 really was a game changer. Older aircraft had frustrating issues like panels from one aircraft not fitting onto another because those older aircraft were much more hand-made and manufactured to lower tolerances. F-18s leverage digital data buses much more, greatly reducing the messes of point-to-point wiring and patch panels that older aircraft types used, making the F-18 easier to maintain, modify, and expand.
It's a little surprising that an angry rant by someone without any established expertise is given so much credibility here; I think it just echos popular memes. I don't have any expertise myself, but let me share what I've read from experts providing serious analysis:
1) Every large, complex program has similar technical teething problems. If you look back at the beginnings of today's well-established systems, including other planes, you'll see similar histories and criticism (though it was less magnified by the echo chamber of the Internet). The existence of all these bugs and problems means nothing, good or bad; they are part of every major project.
This should not surprise HN readers: Imagine an extraordinarily complex project, filled with newly invented technology, with a 20 year development cycle (and using waterfall methodology AFAIK). Add to that the extraordinary pressure on performance and capbilities (i.e., developers can't be conservative): If the project's perf isn't fast/powerful/etc enough then people die, such as the operator or the thousands to millions of others whom we can't protect, and nations might fall. You would expect a very large number of bugs; it's kind of amazing that such projects ever ship!
Perhaps they should use other methodologies to reduce these problems but with fighter planes, due to the cost of building them and of failed experiments (i.e., dead pilots), you can't 'move fast and break things'. Also, you never really can test the system until you fight an actual war against a peer enemy.
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2) The public's conception of figher planes is very outdated. They imagine dogfights in the sky, which might be as outdated as ships shooting banks of cannons at each other (this is my impression based on limited reading of people who know).
For example, a study I read by leading military strategists [1] looked at actual fighter-to-fighter encounters. The last time we saw many of them was in Vietnam (think of it: we haven't had an arial shooting war in 40 years, covering generations of (thankfully) unutilized planes and pilots). In Vietnam 80% of encounters were over before the loser had time to defend themselves, because they were not aware of the attacker.
You can see then why the F-35's design might focus on situational awareness, including: Sensors; building a network where each plane is essentially a node, so all planes all see the entire network's sensor data as well as sharing with ground systems (imagine making a data network reliable in that environment); and the pilot's UI: In prior planes pilots had to read and interpret (6? 12? more?) sensors, each on different interfaces, all while flying and fighting. The F-35's IT systems unify the data on one interface, and the computer does much of the analysis (e.g., object A1 moving at X rate with Y vector and Z characteristics is probably a bird, object A2 is a friendly plane, A3 is a civilian plane, ... and object A53 is an enemy missile).
Also, electronic warfare has become far more important, with hints of F-35's even hacking into enemy systems. To an extent, warfare has become a battle of networks shooting electronic attacks over an air gap.
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Again, none of this means that the F-35 will work out well, but most of the public discussion is misguided.
Those that know can't share what they know, they must rely on information already made public that by necessity does not tell the whole story. It's frustrating, but it's part of the nature of this work.
With the concept of strategic bombing being a moot point, replaced by unmanned guided missiles and our moral unwillingness to strike at population centers, the only real purpose of the Air Force is close-air-support. Even air superiority is, really, an adjunct to that role, in that it protects the troops on the ground against enemy ground-attack aircraft and provides cover for our ground attack aircraft.
Seeing, arguably, the most effective warplane of the last fifty years scrapped for an overpriced, ineffective boondoggle is sickening.
There are still valid strategic targets that are well outside of the role of close air support, including command centers, AAA/SAM sites, military bases, manufacturing facilities, bridges, roads, and communications facilities.
What I don't understand is why the various services care so much about what the other services do or don't do. Why does the AF insist on managing the A-10 when they clearly do not and never have wanted it? The Army wants it, let them have it. We're obviously not that concerned with duplication or waste given how much money we've spent on this and the F-22 for, apparently, no gain.
The services guard their missions jealously. They don't want competition within their various roles -- those roles are their justifications for budget, status and involvement.
There are good reasons for specialization, of course. But the institutional politics can't be ignored.
I've heard that the Marines actually have really good air support, because they have their own planes and the generals make damn sure those pilots put the bombs where the grunts need them. I doubt the Air Force likes that. But the Marines are part of the Navy, and the folks running the Navy aren't interested in ground combat. They've already got an air role, on the carriers, and a strategic bombing role, in the missile subs, so they aren't likely to encroach much on the Air Force. Since the Navy puts a cap on how far the Marines' mission would grow, the other services can live with the Marines mixing things up a bit.
It also helps that the Marines have a PR operation unlike anything anywhere on the planet.
And they might be a natural home for the A-10, right? But you can't fly an A-10 off a carrier.
So get rid of the USAF / fold it back into the Army, this way the Navy has an air wing, and the Army has an air wing. Large sky battles are unlikely to happen ever again... the USAF was designed to deal with those, right around when they had become obsolete. Hooray for Parkinson's laws.
The A-10 is a magnificent brute of a plane and does exactly the job it was designed to do, very well... so of course they want to mothball it.
I wonder how hard it would be to make it carrierable, or how hard it would be to string a bunch of barges together to make a floating airfield for it (and use a standard carrier for mechanical support).
The A10's minigun is ineffective at killing modern main-battle tanks, so I wouldn't say it's a raging sucess. In addition, it would certainly be blown up immediately if it came within shooting distance of a tank by any number of man-portable anti-air missiles.
What it can do is provide reasonable close air support against Toyota pickups and infantry, but replacement parts for the plane or the molds to create them don't exist. The A10's titanium airframe will soon need wholesale replacement as it reaches its fatigue limit, so the entire plane would need to be remanufactured.
A drone-based replacement would be far more cost efficient. I don't see why mothballing the A10 is a poor decision.
"I don't see why mothballing the A10 is a poor decision"
Because we do not have any aircraft that can stay on station above our troops stuck out in the middle of nowhere and keep them safe by shooting for multiple hours. Every other aircraft (drone include) is a drop-a-few-and-leave. That is not good enough.
Where have we faced modern main-battle tanks?
We should remove close air support from the Air Force's mission and give it back to the Army.
I thought the AC-130 was pretty good at that. It's even worse at not getting shot down of course but could provide fire support for just as long and over a wider area.
I haven't heard of an AC-130 doing it, but the folks that I talk to mention the A-10 often. More of a sharp shooter thing instead of an area effect thing.
No actually they can't. Well maybe Harriers but helicoptors are vulnerable because they enemy has manpads and drones have too much lag for close air support.
Ironically some input from Rudel was apparently used during the development of the A-10. At least this is mentioned on the Wikipedia page linked above.
> "The A10's minigun is ineffective at killing modern main-battle tanks"
This is the most ignorant comment in this entire thread. Please go read about the A10's gun -- the GAU-8/A. There is no mobile armor in the world that can withstand even short bursts of fire from it.
Prove this statement. Given that the A-10 shoots from above, that's where the armor's thinner. DU penetrators do a fair bit of damage, independent of the rumoured radioactive burst upon compression. Couple of rounds in the engine probably turn the tank into a bunker.
I wonder what a drone built on the same philosophy as the A-10 ("We built the most awesome machine gun ever, let's strap a plane to it") would look like.
Minigun? Have you seen the size of the shell fired by the GAU-8? It's designed to shoot through the top of the tank, either the turret, or the engine. Quite easy to do, even against modern tanks. Now whether it can do so against modern air defenses is to be determined.
And the primary anti-tank weapon of the A-10 isn't its gun, but the Maverick missile.
The real trouble with the A-10 is that it cannot fit modernized avionics. What needs to happen is a redesign of the A-10 airframe with modern maintenance characteristics.
Instead we got this obsession with multi-role nonsense that led to the F-35 ball of crap over both an A-10 successor and the F-22!
They were designed for strategic bombing, which was certainly a compelling mission during the Cold War.
I think it still is. Sure, there is less nuclear tension. But the idea was always to ensure that no general, no matter how drunk, could imagine actually succeeding with a first strike. That's still the right posture.
If anything, I'd worry that some Russian might think _we_ might successfully launch first, and so jump the gun in a "use them or lose them" decision. MAD only really works when _both_ sides are demonstrably convinced they can't strike first.
Also: I bet the A-10 too underpowered for carrier launch. It's designed to loiter, not dogfight -- it probably doesn't have the acceleration to lift from a carrier deck.
Pilots are the hard problem. It's really hard to train them, and to incentivize people to manage them. The Marines can piggy-back on the Navy's aviation personnel infrastructure.
And again, the Marines are capped on scope creep by their placement in the Navy. The Army isn't, so if they got planes that would be much scarier for the Air Force than the Marines.
Part of the problem is that, maybe because the acquisition process is so absurdly long, the concepts and ideology guiding policy for this thing is from the 1990s. This plane is designed for what we thought war would be like in 2025 back in 1996 or something. Even beyond the terrible $1.4T cost of this thing, I worried it's designed for the entirely wrong concept of warfare going forward. So yeah, maybe bringing the entire CAS mission into the realm of the Army would be a good idea - but even then, how much of that future demand for CAS can be satisfied by Drones for much lower cost and risk? That's the real issue, I think, because it would precipitate sort of an existential crisis for the Air Force.
I'm pretty sure the only thing the F-35 will ever shoot down is nations' budgets....
The thing is a dog - a flying compromise, that's not even particularly stealthy because it needs to carry external weapons since the internal weapons bay is barely large enough to fit someone's groceries, never mind a reasonable payload for any actual combat sortie...
Had a big argument with a coworker about that this week, actually. What's usually brought up is that having a human being physically in the battle space affords you situational awareness and experience that just can't be replicated, as of yet, with a Drone. What happens if the enemy somehow cuts off the link between Drone and control? You can set the null to fly it back to home or wherever if that happens, but, generally, a human pilot can do a lot more than that - right now. I don't disagree that on a technical level Drones would be able to, eventually, out do a pilot in theory. They aren't limited by having to keep a human alive or conscious in-flight. But there are some pretty scary moral implications if we start affording more and more autonomy to Drones in warfare.
The question shouldn't be an "all drones" vs "all pilots" argument. It should probably be more of a "how do we intelligently and operationally integrate the capabilities of Drones into our strategic goals" conversation. That just doesn't seem to be happening with the F35.
Drones work on slow ground attack convoys and buildings where they can fly around for a time but they are controlled via satelites so there is a couple of seconds of lag between when the image is recorded and the orders are received by the drone.
In a dog fight, which is really what you have to build a fighter plane for, that kind of lag means you lose every time. Add to that that drones are too slow, have no agility and little to no armour and they are going to be completely useless even against obsolete planes - SAA (Assad) show down one a few days ago.
The US has stealth drones, but that is only useful till you are discovered. If you are going faster than the speed of sound that is one thing, but these drones are not.
Dogfights are a thing of the past. Fighters don't joust at close distances anymore. I did a small part of my degree at a defence research place in the mid-90s. I remember someone showing me an experiment on how best to present range information about other planes to a fighter pilot, in terms of physical appearance. What was curious was the names for the ranges: 'safe', 'lethal', and 'very lethal'. 'Very lethal' was still several kilometers, and I asked about the guns and dogfighting - and got 'that doesn't happen anymore'.
More significant issues are speed, weather, and payload size. If you need fighter cover now, you don't want to hear "but it's raining". And speed is needed to increase operational range and response time.
I wonder how possible it would be construct UAVs that were specialized for air to air combat. They could operate in something of a hybrid mode, perhaps with ground control most of the time, but acting in full automatic mode during the dogfighting.
There'd be a lot of advantages. I presume such a dogfighting UAV would have visibility in all directions, all the time. They could potentially pull much tighter turns than any aircraft with a human on board, and with real-time point to point communication, could work together in ways that are impossible with human flown fighters.
Part of me wonders if a lot of the amazing game AI that has been developed could apply directly to such a project.
I imagine the problem with control is to just direct semi-autonomous UCAVs from an AWACS. Current drones are slow and have little agility but that's due to them being optimized for cost and loiter time. The MASTAC Frisbees used at the Navy Fighter Tactics school could pull 15 G turns, for instance.
I don't know, but my guess is hackability. I think pilots still have a ton of direct information that wouldn't be significantly vulnerable to hacking, and a lot of direct control that wouldn't be available to drone operators.
Going into more detail on this would have been more useful, but it is part of the problem. I believe it has to do with the culture of promotion that favors pilots, not to mention the revolving door.
The other major part of the problem is that drones are cheaper and present real competition to juicy manned contracts, so defense contractors don't like them. Drones might be an example of actual disruptive technology: a cheap alternative that also creates a new market (planes that can stay in the air longer than a pilot ever could). Losing one drone, or even a dozen drones, is always smaller than losing the life of a single pilot or their plane.
Drones are far more expensive than people realize. The reason the Air Force and CIA have held off on retiring the U-2 is that it's cheaper to operate than its unmanned competition.
Sure, small drones with a video camera and LOS control are cheap, but once you start talking about drones with nontrivial amounts of ordinance and satellite quality sensors you're up into the tens of millions of dollars. For the most part they are cheaper than manned alternatives, but by more like a factor of two than a factor of ten.
You have to be a pilot to fly drones in the USAF. Not really sure it's necessary, but that's the policy unless they made changes since I looked into it.
It's true, but this is a political, not technological limitation. Politics can change, and there's nothing that precludes creation of semi-autonomous drones (i.e. a single pilot operating a whole fleet) or fully autonomous ones.
The air force as a whole is a large scam committed on the taxpayer. What an irrelevant organization for the 21st century. Misappropriations like this are responsible for increased casualties in current military engagements.
But at the same time, I think that's a pretty untenable situation. The military needs to do something to balance the career mobility of their officers with the ethical hazards of the current system. Without some rules to prevent the scenarios that have the most potential for abuse, the situation is not unlike the flow of Congress members into lobbying. Except we don't elect military officers.
It's a tough balance. Part of the promise of the military's recruiting is that you'll advance your career. They should fulfill that promise. At the same time, they need to make sure that the ways in which they fulfill that promise don't incentivize poor judgment on behalf of the public interest.