
The F-35 Is a $1.4T National Disaster (2017) - markonen
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-f-35-14-trillion-dollar-national-disaster-19985
======
jpobst
It depends on what you consider the goal of the F-35 to be.

If you believe it's to build a next generation fighter plane then yes it's a
disaster.

If you believe it's a way to funnel trillions of dollars of taxpayer money to
private defense companies then it's a rousing success.

~~~
testfoobar
1500 domestic suppliers in 46 states.

[https://www.f35.com/about/economic-
impact](https://www.f35.com/about/economic-impact)

~~~
bonesss
I recall a post-mortem for the Superconducting Super Collider that pointed out
a painful dichotomy: to build political support the contracts and suppliers
had to be spread across many districts and states, but because it was a high
tech project it was _much, much, much_ more sensitive to component delays and
quality issues.

The big takeaway: with non-challenging, small fry, projects you can play all
the politics you want and still land them; _challenging_ projects have a much
stronger need to be guided by actual practical project concerns & engineering
or you substantially increase the risk of failure.

The Manhattan project, and the incredible post-WW2 military engineering,
worked because the brains got money and control so they build to the challenge
at hand. When Porky Pig has first dibs the merely 'insanely hard' becomes
impossible... Alan Kay said something to the same effect about the golden age
of innovation at Xerox Parc: (brains + money) - BS = profitableSurprises.

~~~
slededit
The Manhattan project was distributed all around the country. From the pile
under bleachers in Chicago, to the Hanford site in WA, the testing in the New
Mexico desert, and Oak Ridge in Tennessee.

~~~
bonesss
That's orthogonal to my point :)

If engineering concerns dictate project planning, structure, and execution
you're at least playing the game. Compromise is the nature of the beast, and
practical realities dictate decisions.

If political financing, back scratching, and pocket filling dictate the
projects planning, structure, and execution: you've increased complexity and
risk substantially, and the likelihood that you've made the project nigh
impossible to complete rises accordingly.

Fermi et al were not working in Chicago to balance the distribution of pork,
IoW... Hard projects do not have the margins to allow those kinds of
inefficiencies. And not to dis the military industrial complex, but that
distinction is fundamental to all R&D projects. Everyone involved should have
known better when this boondoggle started.

------
rayvd
How do the issues with the F-35 platform stack up against those of earlier
models? I've read anecdotes that early on the F-16 and F-15 also had
significant flaws, yet those were eventually sorted out and both have become
mainstays of air forces around the world.

I've no doubt there have been massive costs overruns (what government program
doesn't), but would be willing to bet that the F-35 turns out to be a really
good plane and does nothing to threaten the US's position as the premier air
power.

Some good discussion:

[https://www.quora.com/Is-the-F-35-as-bad-as-many-people-
clai...](https://www.quora.com/Is-the-F-35-as-bad-as-many-people-claim-Will-
it-be-a-good-fighter-when-its-needed)

~~~
Retric
It's questionable if manned high performance fighter aircraft have a vital aka
non symbolic role in a modern army. That's not to say the F-35 will not be
used or even preform well, but consider unmanned satellites made manned high
altitude surveillance obsolete even if they where not as directly useful.

~~~
tropo
It is tempting to dismiss the possibility of a serious war. We did that after
the Great War, the War to End all Wars, now known as World War I. It's been a
while, over 70 years now, but you can be sure that there will be another
serious war.

When that happens, there will be no satellites. There will be no way to
remotely operate any equipment. Mere navigation and communication will be
difficult again.

Any sort of unmanned equipment will have to operate autonomously, making
deadly decisions in an unfamiliar and hostile environment. That's a tall order
for modern AI.

~~~
Retric
Back in the 90's missiles where already able to navigate by landmarks and
stars. GPS is nice, but it's in no way needed for Drones.

The kind of war you are talking about is exactly the kind of war where small
numbers of expensive F-35's will very quickly be destroyed and how quickly new
weapons can enter the battlefield will be a major issue. The vast distributed
supply chain is probably the number 1 issue with F-35's for that kind of a
fight.

While not great as spy satellites, using flocks of cube satellites for
communications would be very hard to shut down. A single launch could put
hundreds of separate targets up which would need to be individually targeted.
Similarly unmanned drones can fill in for spy aircraft in tactical situations
and are very cost effective.

I can't say what the modern version of total war between modern supper powers
would look like, but I very much doubt it would look much like WWII.

------
patcheudor
The F-35 program is an amazing thing in 2018 when every war in the last two
decades has been mostly about ground insurgents. This, taken with the fact
that we've had massive technological advances when it comes to drone warfare
and the F-35 very much looks like a plane from the past, not the future. It
would seem to be much wiser to scrap the program and re-focus on drone based
solutions but that's going to hurt someone's ego so it's likely the F-35 will
continue.

~~~
philjohn
Our current adversaries are mostly insurgents - however, if you look forward
at dwindling resources and nations doing the unthinkable and waging wars over
them, then the F-35 makes more sense. With a complex and lengthy development
process you're planning for the war after the next, not the current.

That being said, with all the problems the F-35 has, much like the Eurofighter
before it, it might be no match for what another advanced economy could
produce.

~~~
jlmorton
The chances of developed nations going to war with each other over dwindling
resources is extremely close to zero.

~~~
robotresearcher
Surely given a long enough time window it approaches one?

~~~
nostrademons
Only if you assume the concept of "nation" will outlast the concept of "war".

There are a number of reasons to believe that the future of warfare will look
much more like Syria, i.e. states implode from within and then break apart
into a number of warring factions, each fighting over territory & resources
within the carcass of the state. Actually, most of the bloodiest 20th century
conflicts were of this type (eg. Russian & Chinese civil wars, Rwandan
genocide & Congo Wars, civil wars in Nigeria/Sudan/Ethiopia), and historically
the highest death tolls have usually occurred in civil wars where an empire
breaks up or in conquests when a much more developed power invades a less-
developed power (eg. Mongol conquests or European conquest of America).

WW2 was a historical anomaly in that it was fought between developed nations.
It's an anomaly we pay a lot of attention to, though, because it led to the
current international system of American hegemony and history tends to get
written by the victors.

~~~
jcranmer
> WW2 was a historical anomaly in that it was fought between developed
> nations. It's an anomaly we pay a lot of attention to, though, because it
> led to the current international system of American hegemony and history
> tends to get written by the victors.

Because major historical powers like Rome, China, Mayans, Egypt, Assyria,
Babylon, Persia, Macedonia, France, the Holy Roman Empire, Spain, Britain
never fought any wars against other powers that were at their same level of
development. Oh, wait, _all_ of them did.

The anomaly is the past two centuries or so, which have been the most peaceful
times on record, particularly between major powers. (Since the Napoleonic
Wars, the sum total is Crimean War, Mexican-American War, Austro-Prussian War,
Franco-Prussian War, Spanish-American War, Russo-Japanese War, World War I,
Russian Civil War, World War II [noting that there's a lot of related
conflicts getting summed up here], Korean War, maybe War of the Pacific and
the Russo-Turkish Wars). Compare that to the Early Modern, which is replete
with constant conflict on Europe: 18th century alone has Great Northern War,
War of Spanish Succession, War of Austrian Succession, Seven Years' War,
American Revolution, and the French Revolutionary Wars, all of which were far
nastier than the brief wars in the 19th century (save the American Civil War
and the Napoleonic Wars).

~~~
nostrademons
Take a look at the list of wars by death toll:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll)

Categorized into great power wars (between well-defined states of roughly
equal power levels), civil wars (where a single state breaks up into multiple
factions that then fight each other), rebellions (where a state breaks up, but
into an asymmetric power balance between one province and the rest of the
state), and conquests (where a much more developed power - at least in terms
of military technology - invades and destroys a less-developed one) and
ordered by death toll, you have:

    
    
      WW2 (great power)
      Mongol conquests (conquest)
      Three Kingdoms war (civil)
      Qing conquest of Ming (rebellion, against backdrop of civil)
      Spanish conquest of Aztecs (conquest)
      Taiping rebellion (rebellion)
      Second Sino-Japanese war (great power, but against the backdrop of the Chinese Civil War)
      An-Lushan rebellion (rebellion)
      Germanic wars vs. Rome (effectively a civil war in that Roman territory was breaking up and many of the adversaries were trained in the Roman army, but you can quibble about this)
      WW1 (great power)
      Conquests of Timur (?)
      Dungan Revolt (rebellion)
      Chinese Civil War (civil)
      Spanish conquest of Incas (conquest)
      Reconquista (great power?)
      Russian Civil War (civil)
      Thirty Years War (civil - breakup of Holy Roman Empire)
      Ottoman Wars (great power)
      Moorish Wars (great power)
      Napoleonic Wars (great power)
      Mughal-Maratha Wars (?)
      Yellow-Turban Rebellion (rebellion)
      Second Congo War (civil)
      French Wars of Religion (civil)
      Indian Rebellion of 1857 (rebellion)
      Hundred Years War (great power)
      Vietnam War (civil, but with great power involvement)
      Crusades (great power)
    

Readers can draw the conclusion they like from that data, but to my eyes - if
you exclude WW2, civil wars and conquests end up killing far more people and
remaking the map more than great power conflicts.

~~~
jcranmer
There are several reasons that your data isn't correct, and I'm not going to
sit down and poke at every one of them, but let me point out some major
things.

You have a strong need to separate out civil wars from great power conflicts,
but many of them, particularly the ones that lead to lots of deaths, have very
strong international involvement, and the destruction is driven in large part
by foreign involvement. The Congo Wars and the Russian Civil War are good
examples of this. Beyond that, you basically jump at the opportunity to
classify wars as civil wars: the Germanic incursions into the Roman Empire and
the Thirty Years' War [1] are in no way civil wars.

Placing importance of wars on the raw numbers of people killed is a bad way to
go about things. First off, we have trouble establishing these counts even in
modern contexts where sophisticated bureaucracies exist to keep track of
everything (these bureaucracies have a way of breaking down in war);
historical counts involve a fair amount of guesswork, and especially in list
mode, you're not seeing similar methodologies being applied to ensure that the
estimates are comparable. Even keeping track of wars with similar
methodologies is difficult: why do we roll up all of the 14th century Anglo-
French conflicts into the Hundred Years' War, yet insist on keeping World War
I, World War II, the Russian Civil War, Second Sino-Japanese War, and the
Spanish Civil War all separate instead of a Forty Years' War?

Most importantly, however, is that raw death totals don't reflect the impact
of destruction. The deadliest war in US history is not the American Civil War,
but King Philip's War, which killed 10% of the population. The Thirty Years'
War was hardest in Northern Germany, where it killed about 50% of the people,
while World War II only managed to kill 17% of the Poles (and most of that due
to the Holocaust). Raw death counts inflate the relative importance of Chinese
wars, since the Chinese river plains were historically able to support far
larger population densities than in, say, Europe, so conflicts in China
necessarily involve more people even at a comparable level of technological
sophistication.

[1] For most of its existence, the Holy Roman Empire was not properly a
country as we would understand it in our modern terminology. Admittedly, the
Habsburgs were trying to reestablish it as a strong centralized state at the
time, but the Thirty Years' War was effectively the point at which they gave
up. It's more proper to think of the HRE at this point as closer to a 17th
century organization akin to the current European Union than the modern United
States.

------
AcerbicZero
One of the key expectations of the F-35 program early on was that "stealth"
technology would proliferate further, and the market for exporting the F-35
would be much larger than it ended up. That made it easier for everyone to
keep throwing money at the problem, although I'm sure the lobbyist did more
than their fair share.

This isn't exactly the first time we've seen attempts at "universal" solutions
to discrete military problems. The F-111 program was another disaster in the
making, only mitigated by massively changing the requirements and dropping the
Navy aspect entirely. The F-35 S/VTOL Marine variant is the largest anchor
around the programs neck, but its essentially the same set of problems the
F-111 project ran into.

The easiest fix would have been to just tell the Marines and Navy to go find
their own aircraft solutions, and let the F-35 turn into a semi-stealthy F-16
replacement. I think we might be a little past that point now, unfortunately.

~~~
amorphid
The F-111 Aardvark:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Dynamics_F-111_Aardv...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Dynamics_F-111_Aardvark)

------
unit91
> DoD has estimated that all training and operational operations over the
> 50-year life of the program (assuming a 30-year life for each aircraft) will
> be $1 trillion, making the cost to buy and operate the F-35 at least $1.4
> trillion.

A little bit of clickbait there. $1.4 trillion projected over 50 years. Don't
get me wrong, I'm not saying it's a great fighter. But we haven't spent $1.4
trillion on it (yet).

------
petermcneeley
Just in case nobody has seen the documentary about the initial design of this
fighter craft:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_WPLeDmU6o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_WPLeDmU6o)

~~~
rootbear
Thanks! I watched that when it was show on PBS (Nova?) back in 2003 and I've
been meaning to see if it was online.

------
Scramblejams
Single page link: [http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-
buzz/the-f-35-14-trilli...](http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-
buzz/the-f-35-14-trillion-dollar-national-disaster-19985?page=show)

------
JakeTyo
The F-35 promised a major a leap in technological capability. However,
technology is not at the point where it deliver on that promise. As a software
engineer, I can relate to the difficulty of joining multiple sources of data.
This is something that AI can potentially do very well. I foresee the next
generation of F-series aircrafts having something more akin to an AI co-pilot.
This would prevent information overload. Instead of a pilot ingesting hundreds
of data points, they could have a simple interface and all the cohesion
handled by the AI.

------
Nokinside
It seems that F-35 still has problems but they are slightly different than
described in the article. There is also neat solution, cut F-35 orders by
third to pay for increased maintenance and operating costs.
[http://fortune.com/2018/03/28/air-force-f-35-cost-
cuts/](http://fortune.com/2018/03/28/air-force-f-35-cost-cuts/)

The beauty of all this is that this works out fine as long as there is no
large high intensity war against near peer opponent in next 20-30 years.

~~~
stareatgoats
A lot of things would conceivably not work out fine in the scenario "high
intensity warfare against near peer opponent", in any conceivable future. Just
for the record.

------
oliwarner
People always seem to forget that money doesn't evaporate.

Public expenditure _usually_ gets ploughed directly into national and local
economies. A quarter of it comes flying right back in direct tax revenue. The
rest gets spent too.

I'm not saying it couldn't have done that in a better way, educational
bursaries, healthcare, etc but if you're looking at this from a purely
economic standpoint, the US exports this stuff. Not something you can lump on
some other causes.

------
Ensorceled
International, Canada is trying to come along for the ride.

~~~
m-p-3
Isn't Canada opting for the Rafale instead?

~~~
greedo
Rafale will cost more...

------
3pt14159
A friend of mine mentioned how the F-35 runs so hot that it has to cool its
fuel to stop it from boiling. If that is true, how does it retain stealth in
the face of thermal radiation? Like, I get radar absorbing paint, but how does
one stop heat loss?

Any design I can think of amounts to carrying some really cold stuff with you
and dumping the excess heat there when you need thermal stealth, but surely
that can't be it.

~~~
ansible
It is still releasing the same amount of heat, but diffused a bit more. The
designers were trying to avoid really "bright" hot spots, to make it harder
for IR-guided missiles to lock-on.

------
lsh123
"There is an app for that" (another view on F-35 program):

[https://theaviationist.com/2018/04/18/why-does-the-public-
ha...](https://theaviationist.com/2018/04/18/why-does-the-public-have-trouble-
understanding-the-f-35-air-force-reserve-pilots-tell-us-the-f-35a-is-a-
powerful-force-multiplier/)

------
zubi
Quote from page 13:

`After extensive troubleshooting, IT personnel figured out they had to change
several settings on Internet Explorer so ALIS users could log into the system.
This included lowering security settings, which DOT&E noted with commendable
understatement was “an action that may not be compatible with required
cybersecurity and network protection standards.”`

They use Internet Explorer?

------
linkmotif
Whenever I'm feeling bad being behind on something, I think of the F-35.
Doesn't exactly make me feel better, but at least reminds me it could be
worse.

Israel took delivery of five of these 2016-2017. I wonder how they're faring.

------
randyrand
For some opposite perspective:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GfqB7P6uAE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GfqB7P6uAE)

------
djohnston
we should just be building more warthogs

------
lajhsdfkl
This is from April 1 2017 and much of what was written in this article does
not apply any longer. The reason the US does not go 100% into drones is
because drone jamming technology is not something that can easily be countered
(the Russians are jamming US drones today in Syria).

The most interesting use of the F35 is not as a weapons platform but a sensor
platform for sneaking behind enemy lines and picking targets for ship based
weapons platforms to attack at distance.

The F-35 is definitely not a perfect program but as far as the military and US
national security is concerned, not having the first 5th generation fighter
would have been a much more significant failure than cost overruns.

Beyond actual use in war the purpose of this fighter is to tell other nations
that if you want to go war you need to to spend $1.4 trillion dollars and
countless years of research to even reach parity.

~~~
titzer
> much of what was written in this article does not apply any longer

Care to elaborate? E.g. did the US govt find $1.7 trillion in the couch
cushions, suddenly making the cost a moot point?

~~~
adventured
The infamous cost estimate is spread over 60 years, start to finish. That's
conveniently, intentionally left out of most articles that highlight the cost.

So first of all, the US will never buy 3,000 of the planes. You can easily cut
that in half or more. I'd wager on 1,000 or less. They'll end the program and
move on to the next thing/s, like they always do.

Second, they'll of course never fly for 50 or 60 years. 35-40 from today would
be more plausible as an end.

Now you're down to more like $800 billion total including the next 40 years.
The cost will move higher per plane, the US will buy less planes than
projected, and the total outlay will drop substantially as they shift funding
to new weapons programs. $20 billion per year for its life, out of what will
probably be a $900b to $1t averaged military budget over the F35's life, or
~2%.

------
bitmapbrother
I realize that the F-35 is a stealth fighter, but I can't help but think of
this quote whenever the F-35 is mentioned.

 _The results were crushing. In not a single dogfight was the F-35 able to
either defend itself against an attack from the F-16 or to convert its attack
into a kill_

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8xzLxFIjno](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8xzLxFIjno)

------
partycoder
Russian jets can take off from an airstrip full of debris. American jets need
a shiny aircraft carrier and a coin can mess them up.

~~~
mieseratte
> American jets need a shiny aircraft carrier and a coin can mess them up.

Marine variants are VTOL, USAF operates no carriers. As for the coin story,
I'm sure you're confusing A) carrier FOD sweeps, which are because small
debris traveling at high-speed will cause serious damage or B) one of those
stories about some old Chinese woman throwing coins into a jet engine and
causing a major delay and extrapolating from there.

~~~
blarg1
there's a documentary I forget where that shows a russia jet closing their
front of intakes and opening the top of them at take off, preventing debris on
the runway from being sucked in.

~~~
dingaling
That was on the early versions of the MiG-29.

The latest 29M and K models eliminated the intake plates and over-wing louvres
in favour of simpler swing-down intake grilles. That saved a lot of weight and
drag and gave extra volume for fuel.

