
F-35 logistics system to be reinvented and renamed, official says - _Codemonkeyism
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-pentagon-f35/f-35-logistics-system-to-be-reinvented-and-renamed-official-says-idUSKBN1ZE00D
======
yborg
The functioning or non-functioning of the logistics system for the F-35 is
largely irrelevant, as just demonstrated Lockheed is paid whether it works or
not; and non-functioning is much safer for the program, as non-flying F-35s
are safe from combat and accidents. In fact, low availability just provides an
excuse for the Air Force to demand additional budget for aircraft. This isn't
so much a combat system as a corporate welfare program.

In practice, the US has already demonstrated that its primary airpower
projection is via unmanned systems, the manned combat aircraft is the mounted
cavalry c. 1920.

~~~
CapricornNoble
>>In practice, the US has already demonstrated that its primary airpower
projection is via unmanned systems, the manned combat aircraft is the mounted
cavalry c. 1920.

1\. The US hasn't had to overcome a first-rate Integrated Air Defense System
since the 1970s. UAVs, while hard to detect due to their small RCS, have
extremely poor overall survivability. It's part of what makes them so cheap.

2\. The US is rarely flying drones against an adversary with robust Electronic
Attack capabilities. They're pretty useless if their datalinks to their Ground
Control Station are jammed and you don't have HARMs on-hand to
suppress/neutralize/destroy the jamming source.

3\. The future of air power is likely to be a mix of manned fighters with UAVs
as wingmen or forward-deployed scouts/sensor platforms, and then further in
the rear big (manned) "bombers" with deep magazines throwing missiles into the
fight from far away, handing off target tracking to the manned fighter. Even
something like an F-15 Strike Eagle or a Su-34 could fulfill that latter role
with the right electronics suite and ordnance upgrades...

~~~
whatshisface
If history is any indication, the future of air power will be three years of
absolutely terrible strategies after the next war starts, where the wrong
weapons are being manufactured and the right weapons are being deployed
incorrectly, then followed by one month of sanity which sets the military
doctrine for the next two decades of peace, to remain in place as it becomes
obsolete again...

~~~
jcranmer
A serious question here: what history are you drawing this inference from?

Popular history tends to be a distorted view of history that willfully ignores
evidence to the contrary to tell a good story, and military history especially
tends to fall victim here. As a good case in point, take WWI. In popular
history, WWI is a war of unimaginable destruction because generals were idiots
fighting Napoleonic-era tactics with modern weaponry. But that's not really
sustained by the evidence. The generals and officer class were aware of how
much more effective modern guns and gunnery was compared to the Napoleonic
wars, and their battle plans accounted for this. Trenches came out of known
tactics--on the defensive, digging in is the most effective way to avoid the
lethality of opposing weapons, and an underground trench is more effective
than an above-ground static fortification.

~~~
whatshisface
Any historical claim can be argued with, and I guess this is an example, but I
would maintain that WWI involved a lot of things that wouldn't be repeated
with modern knowledge. To offer another example, consider _actual_ Napoleonic-
era tactics: why was Napoleon running around and defeating everyone with them
when the same guns were basically available everywhere? Ideally everyone would
have copied his artillery tactics as soon as he used them once, but military
leadership rarely moves that fast. If you sent a general from the era to West
Point today, they would probably be able to defeat Napoleon.

~~~
credit_guy
> consider actual Napoleonic-era tactics: why was Napoleon running around and
> defeating everyone with them when the same guns were basically available
> everywhere?

More prosaically, Napoleon had much larger armies available to him than his
opponents: "You can't stop me, I spend 30000 men a month" [1].

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25qmz6/can_s...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25qmz6/can_someone_give_me_some_context_on_this_napoleon/)

------
euler_angles
ALIS. Jesus. What a disaster it was. We had to use it in flight testing and
our instantiation was so poor that you literally couldn't use it to order a
part. You had to send an email to order parts.

And for the engineering tasks I was doing, there were no good ways to
categorize the task, so I eventually gave up and called all the data loads I
was doing "LUBRICATION/OTHER". Hey, making the data flow better is a kind of
lubrication, right?

I would say "maybe it's gotten better since I used it years ago" but from this
article it looks like the answer is a solid "No".

~~~
TheCondor
What all is it supposed to do beyond parts orders?

~~~
p_l
In a system like that, ordering parts is one of the least important elements.

It covers things like tracking wear&tear of components so that you know when
to replace parts, and more importantly, know when to schedule repairs - it's
crucial that you have well-planned maintenance that ensures maximum
availability of aircraft, so you need to stagger them - which is non-trivial
to do. That's probably the "MVP" level, which to be practical might involve
tons of other stuff.

On a predecessor to ALIS for a different plane, even planning a mission went
through it - you had someone come to you with requirements, and you'd arrange
which plane, which pilots, which technicians to prepare it for flight, where
are the tools they need for it, generate a fueling chart, everything based on
the availability and qualifications.

Once the plane returned from mission, you'd enter various flight data,
including stuff like "how many rounds the autocannon fired" so that the
underlying MRP system could calculate maintenance dates and the like.

The ultimate goal is that you have a squadron that has maximum possible
availability so it can fulfill its job in the air, without surprise
maintenance (or worse - stuff breaking down) foiling your mission plans, and
where your stores contain enough of all materiel necessary.

ALIS covered, AFAIK, _all_ elements of logistics for F-35, a giant integrated
system. Great on paper as the top level idea, everything got worse the more
you got into implementation of the goals. I heard of rebasing where the
bringup of local ALIS node took longer than the whole rebased mission.
Downloading flight records post-flight would take longer than the flight.
Planes that won't fly unless connection with "cloud" part of ALIS (all hosted
centrally in USA) was done at least once a month. Gigantic amounts of data you
had to transfer between "cloud" and local instance, making it more than
problematic to run on ships equipped with F-35B and F-35C.

And of course the fact that data packages describing the operation theater can
be generated only by one or two labs in USA (good luck, export customers!)...
which is part of the ALIS cloud (and now ODIN cloud), which also is hosted by
Lockheed Martin in USA.

Now that I think of it, ALIS explains significant portion of the money USAF
puts into Starlink as its only customer...

~~~
euler_angles
Ordering parts should be a fairly simple thing to get right in comparison to
all the other things the system should do. And yet...it failed at that.

~~~
p_l
True, I think back with the unnamed project I mentioned, we had an idea to do
basic automation for that, a button that would send a message on JMS to
another system that would print it for the mechanics or in future pass it over
to procurement directly.

But we were stuck moving what was supposed to be just _deployment_ into
"actually useful for something" state, including rewriting more and more of
the code (because L-M license forbid us from modifying their code...)

~~~
euler_angles
Also as someone who has used the system, you're right about all the other
functions it does. Or is supposed to do. So thank you for posting.

------
nabla9
This was not a fluke.

The failure rate of large scale IT projects is the huge. For large, complex
projects the statistics is

    
    
         2% success
        42% challenged
        56% failed
    

[https://www.standishgroup.com/sample_research_files/CHAOSRep...](https://www.standishgroup.com/sample_research_files/CHAOSReport2015-Final.pdf)

The new system has probably similar 50% change for success. I think giving the
new project to the same contractor may improve the changes. Hhey have
hopefully learned something.

~~~
adrianN
Hack: Start development of n systems in parallel, to get 1-(0.98)^n success
probability.

~~~
ipnon
Isn't this sort of the FAAAM strategy regarding senior talent retention? Pay
10x engineers to work on pet projects rather than have them jump ship.

------
pixelface
"ODIN will be based in the cloud and designed to deliver data in near real
time on aircraft and system performance under heightened cyber security
provisions, Lord said. "

heart warming to see us draw ever closer to the cyberpunk dystopia of my
childhood dreams.

~~~
chinathrow
Wait till you learn that some F-16s run with Kubernetes on board.

[https://thenewstack.io/how-the-u-s-air-force-deployed-
kubern...](https://thenewstack.io/how-the-u-s-air-force-deployed-kubernetes-
and-istio-on-an-f-16-in-45-days/)

"“One point for the team was to demonstrate that it could be done,” Chaillan
said. He challenged the Air Force and its partners to get Kubernetes up and
running on a jet in 45 days, and while that was as difficult as it sounds, the
team met the goal and F-16s are now running three concurrent Kubernetes
clusters, he said."

~~~
jon-wood
I’m having enough trouble seeing why you’d want one Kube cluster on an F-16,
never mind three.

~~~
jmnicolas
Probably because there are tons of censors on modern jets and you need
something to manage them.

However I wouldn't use a civilian made system for this, you're going to spend
the rest of the program lifetime correcting security holes.

~~~
lowdose
Because civilian made is not invented here?

~~~
imtringued
I don't understand how you can even imply that it's because of a stupid reason
like that.

No the reason is that there are fundamental differences in the risk profile of
the civilian and military sector.

Adversaries will insert spies in mission critical projects if they are
publicly accessible. Once the main contributors stop maintaining the project
the military will have to hire people and train them for maintenance but all
the people that can train the replacements have already left. The military has
to verify every single line of code every time the code base is updated.

All of these problems don't exist in projects where the full life cycle is
taken care of by the military.

The internet of things suffers from the same problems. Once you are dependent
on a vendor and that vendor shuts down or cancels a product you're stuck with
a lot of paperweights. The vendor is usually not acting in your interest.

~~~
lowdose
If there's one open source project government can easily adopt it is
kubernetes.

Have you heard of the cloud native computing foundation where members have
committed to longterm investment in kubernetes development?

Kubernetes is the commoditization of infrastructure layers and serious forward
looking companies are member of CNFC.

I assume you are aware of the history of Silicon Valley with defense
contractors. And you probably also heard that the FBI approached Paypall for
fraud detection capabilities. Hence Peter Thiel's venture Palantir.

[https://www.cncf.io/about/members/](https://www.cncf.io/about/members/)

------
apcherry
I'd loved to see this bumped up so that it appears on the front page right
next to the link on "Why do we fall into the rewrite trap?" for a nice little
juxtaposition.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22106367](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22106367)

~~~
twic
I'd like to see someone dig up this bit from The Art of Computer Programming,
where Knuth says rewrites are compulsory:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22105850](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22105850)

------
StLCylone
Lets just call it what it is, welfare for the educated. Its a money giveaway
to support defense workers.

~~~
p_l
Welfare for the corporate offices of Lockheed-Martin. I'm not sure how well
they pay, given the level of crap they deliver, at least in L-M Global
Training & Logistics (the actual vendor for ALIS and ODIN).

------
svth
Obligatory War Nerd post:

[https://pando.com/2015/09/24/war-nerd-why-f-35-albanian-
mush...](https://pando.com/2015/09/24/war-nerd-why-f-35-albanian-mushroom/)

------
p_l
Still done by the same incompetents (but with good sales team in parent
company).

------
bboreham
“Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.”

Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month (1975)

