
The Pentagon's $399 Billion Plane to Nowhere - mcalmels
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/07/08/pentagons_399_billion_plane_nowhere?utm_source=digg&utm_medium=email
======
spodek
It would appear this nation's military is a fat, bloated welfare recipient,
feeling entitled and too powerful for anyone to do anything about it,
impoverishing the nation.

We all know it has many brilliant and capable individuals and teams in it who
can do great work, but the _system_ is anything but.

The money ultimately goes to people, meaning we are paying people to do
unproductive work, though I'm sure plenty of it goes to executives extracting
rents without working productively. Weapons are not the only way to make a
nation secure. Collaborative relations with other countries and less disparity
of wealth help too. Imagine the security that money could create if used to
help others instead of threaten them, or invested into entrepreneurship or
helping keep the government accountable.

History shows what happens to cultures where the people can't rein in its
powerful who look for more power. I hope we figure out how to.

~~~
rickdale
All the money we spend on the fighting the wars, yet we can't over spend on
treating the veterans. It's really pathetic.

~~~
lostgame
Veterans, yes. But how about all the people who lost their jobs in the US over
the last 20 years because of the obvious incompetence of the government to
budget in any way that makes sense.

Priorities. If you have a ton of starving and jobless people in your country,
you do not spend a quarter of a TRILLION dollars on killing more people. I'm
sorry, you just don't.

~~~
Tloewald
Actually government jobs programs kind of directly affect joblessness and
hunger. The question is whether this is the right kind of jobs program. Fixing
infrastructure would create more jobs with a greater multiplier (construction
workers are lower paid and spend more of their income) and produce lasting
value.

Edit: weird typo.

~~~
JPKab
You are exactly right.

These huge military projects (which for the most part are utterly unnecessary)
are nothing more than jobs programs cloaked as national security. There is
certainly a huge element of rent extraction by defense contractor executives,
as well as small business owners who utilize specialized direct award "set
asides" designed for minorities, women, service disabled veterans (the vast
majority of these are people who were never in combat, and have minor injuries
at best such as back-pain), etc. Of course, the large defense contractors
simply sub-contract to these small businesses and then do all the work, while
the 3 people who constitute the small business pocket money for doing nothing
other than existing.

But beyond the rent-extraction, you have a nation with a hugely oversized,
overstaffed military. We take people, the vast majority of whom have an
average high school record and zero college experience, and then put them into
an immensely bloated, 1950's era organization. A small percentage of them will
learn how to perform combat operations. The majority of them will learn to
perform the logistics functions (supply, maintenance, repair, administration)
that are the backbone of any military.

While some of these skills learned (electronics, software, etc) are in demand
in the private sector, the vast, vast majority are not. In fact, a huge
percentage of the administrative functions in the military have long been
automated in the private sector. It is a truly overstaffed, bloated beyond
belief organization.

So where do you go when you get out of active duty? If you are like many
folks, you are truly fed up with being in a large government institution, and
you want nothing more to do with the military. You go to school, aggressively
learn some trade/skill that is in demand in the private sector, and you leave
it.

The majority of people I've encountered don't do this. Instead, they take the
only jobs they are qualified for: "quals" (somebody with military experience
in some obscure area of logistics for an organization that is required on
paper for a contractor to have employed upon award of a contract) for a
defense contractor, or a civil service civilian job in the Department of
Defense or other segments of the Federal gov't.

Both are, to some degree, do nothing jobs. A "Qual" might provide lots of
advice to a defense contractor they are employed by, but typically they are
just there because the contract demands that they are. They are mostly figure-
heads. The joke in the industry is that many are hired and hang out in
darkened offices playing video games, separated from the software developers
and managers who were never in the military.

The civil service jobs in the Federal gov't are like working in any large
bureaucracy. Mediocrity isn't just tolerated, but is the norm. People come in
at 9 and leave at 3. If you care about your job, you work hard and end up
carrying the weight of several of your coworkers who do nothing but watch the
clock. Promotions are based on paper qualifications and certifications, are
decided by people who have never met you, and are frequently awarded to people
who dedicated their time to gaming the paper system instead of performing
their job function.

What I am saying sounds anecdotal, but organizational experts who have studied
failures at places such as the V.A. have all summed these findings up in a
scientific way.

In Arlington, VA, there is a neighborhood called Crystal City. In Crystal
City, there is a large, brand-new environmentally sustainable building which
houses a huge number of EPA employees. The EPA has a valuable, important
mission. For someone like me, it is beyond depressing seeing the employees
milling about on 2 hour lunch breaks. The vast majority of them drive to work,
despite the building being walking distance from a subway station. There is a
mass exodus at 3PM as they all leave for suburbia.

Just like the rest of the Federal gov't, the EPA and the DOD are nothing more
than giant employment programs. The difference is that the EPA gets its budget
hammered by one political party that hates it, while the DOD is universally
praised and worshipped by people who don't understand that the percentage of
members who will ever see combat is in the single digits.

------
danso
> _" An upfront question with any program now is: How many congressional
> districts is it in?" said Thomas Christie, a former senior Pentagon
> acquisitions official._

The military-industrial complex runs deep...and it goes to show how little we
can rely on politicians to confront it. If you were a Representative from the
few regions that still has an industrial base, it would be easy to justify
just another "Yes" vote, for something that brings 50-500 well-paying jobs and
is ostensibly there to "help America"...and hard to justify why you were one
of the few to say "No" when ultimately, your share of the pork is small. But
spread that attitude across dozens of representatives...and then you have a
pork train that's too hard to stop, even if it is subpar in meeting its
objectives. Maybe most projects are like this, it's just that this one kept
going for a few hundred billion too far.

~~~
gavanwoolery
The problem with this type of spending, whether or not it does create jobs, is
that it is inherently wasteful. If it were a good plane, and not a political
show pony, I'd let it off the hook. But billions are being poured into this
fancy paperweight, when that money could more readily benefit programs like
NASA (I am a fan of private space enterprise, but if we are going to go nuts
with the political budget, might as well be on things that are useful). This
type of spending creates a false economy that is not a meritocracy but (for
lack of better words) a porkocracy.

~~~
themartorana
It's true, but the same people voting yes "because jobs" vote no on
infrastructure repair and improvement projects - desperately needed work that
would also create jobs and have a huge, noticeable positive impact on the
general citizenry.

Govn't spending to create jobs is always welfare, no matter where we put the
money. Why not put it somewhere that will create the same number of jobs, and
have something other than a flaming war plane to show for it?

~~~
Thriptic
New defense projects are sexy; bringing this type of work to a district makes
politicians seem "innovative", and it's the type of thing that plays well in a
campaign speech. Maintaining and expanding infrastructure isn't sexy. It won't
keep politicians elected.

------
cipher0
Pierre Sprey (F-16's designer) on the F-35 "The F-35 was born of an
exceptionally dumb piece of airforce PR spin"
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxDSiwqM2nw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxDSiwqM2nw)

~~~
sz4kerto
Good interview. Problems he's mentioning is basically true for any complex
engineering problem: \- stakeholders with different agendas building a common
product does not work well \- one size does not fit all

Same is true for software, etc.

~~~
mercurial
Also known as "design by committee".

------
lostgame
...

$399 billion could virtually end hunger in America.

...

Or, you know, we could kill more innocent people halfway across the world.
Yeah, let's do that.

America!!!

~~~
Someone1234
This isn't Reddit. I don't come to HK to read memes or "jokes." Please
contribute something more substantive.

You could have made your point about hunger and priorities without it turning
into an "America!!!" gag. Then maybe someone else would have replied and the
conversation would have moved forward.

~~~
lostgame
I'm not going to apologize for my use of a little bit of internet-flavoured
comedy to make light of an otherwise absolutely horrifying situation.

As a dual US/CDN citizen myself, I really have to look at this and say 'Whoa.
A country that I have pledged my allegiance to is, even as I type this,
actively choosing to spend money on killing people outside of their country as
well as it's own citizens, instead of helping the people inside of it's own
country that are unfortunate bi-products of it's government and banking
system's poor decision making over the last century.'

I work in theatre as well as software development, and in theatre we have two
faces, a laughing face and a crying face. Because everything is a tragedy or a
comedy, depending on how you look at it. I'm just choosing to use the smiley
face. :O)

------
cdr
Previous F-35 stories on HN:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7989659](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7989659)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7906501](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7906501)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7111843](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7111843)

------
datahipster
$399B is enough to have funded NASA from 1980-2012.

Source:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Annual_budget.2C...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Annual_budget.2C_1958-2012)

~~~
gus_massa
To be fair, almost a half of that NASA budget was used to pay for the Space
Shuttle, that was a plane with many technical problems that use suppliers from
almost the 50 states to gain political support in the congress.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program#Budget](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program#Budget)

------
joelgrus
We're just lucky that this sort of boondoggle only happens in the military.
Imagine how much trouble we'd be in if the rest of our government were engaged
in this kind of corruption and/or ineptitude!

~~~
altcognito
It happens in most institutions of size where the goal is to control as many
people as possible and the incentive is to create even more layers because
then you've got "more people underneath you".

GM had/has an amazing number of levels of mismanagement.

Go after multiple solutions. Sure, cut spending, eliminate bureaucracy, but
improve the process of improvement as well: Figure out how to make government
changes on a smaller and more agile level. Figure out how to make flatten the
legal landscape and make it more accessible.

------
carlosft
I recently called my senators and congressman about this issue. None of the
staffers were able to provide me with their public opinions on the project.
Two mentioned that they haven't received any calls on the matter. If you care
about this issue, and are a US citizen, call
([http://www.contactingthecongress.org/](http://www.contactingthecongress.org/))
your elected officials.

~~~
JPKab
This is by design. Lockheed first learned how to game congress with the B1B
(another useless plane).

Here's the recipe:

Talk to the military, see what's giving them a hard-on these days. Get them to
start coming up with a project to put on contract.

Military issues Request for Information/Request for Proposal based on
requirements you told them to use

Contact any and all congressman. Let them know that you intend to make widget
X for Aircraft Z in their respective District. Ensure that virtually every
congressional district in the country contains a business that is making at
least one or two parts for the aircraft.

A new general comes in who is honest, realizes the weapons system is useless,
wants to can it. Congress says no, we need it. Who wants to be the guy who
threw away jobs in his district?

Critical general leaves, is replaced by politically minded General who wants
to be in charge of a "successful" program, drinks the kook-aid and pretends
its not a giant boondoggle.

Profit.

~~~
commandar
>Lockheed first learned how to game congress with the B1B (another useless
plane).

Well, except that the B1B was manufactured by Rockwell who have since been
absorbed by Boeing.

~~~
JPKab
ah, I stand corrected. What I should've said was the defense contracting
industry learned how to game congress.

------
marktangotango
Seems like I remember (back in 2005-6) taht the JSF/F-35 was well within
budget and on time BEFORE the F-22 was cancelled because of the explosion in
costs that now confronts the F-35. Can anyone corroborate that or am I totally
off? It really seems that once the F-22 was cancelled the F-35 became the new
'cash cow' so to speak.

~~~
Tloewald
The irony of the F22 being cancelled in favor of the F35 is pretty rich.

------
dotcoma
Do they say $399 Billion because it looks cheaper than $400 Billion? ;-)

~~~
washadjeffmad
They're worried that if they charged $400bil and the government paid with a
400 billion dollar bill, someone could just pocket it. This way, they'd have
to make change for $1 billion from the till.

~~~
stronglikedan
I think it's so the people will say "Oh well, at least it's not $400
million.", and go on with their day. But, it could be your theory too, or may
both! :-)

------
claudiusd
FWIW defense spending during the WWII and the Cold War did wonders to spur
technical innovation. Silicon Valley in fact was a product of WWII defense
activities
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley)).

While I don't necessarily agree with the end product and how it will be used,
I say defense spending like this is ultimately good for the tech sector. It's
funding innovation that wouldn't otherwise get funded and creates lots of
attractive jobs in technology that will hopefully bring more people to the
field.

We may not have even had the microwave oven today if it wasn't for defense
spending on radar technology
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_oven#Discovery](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_oven#Discovery)).

------
01Michael10
War, the military industrial complex, and homeland security are our biggest
money black holes our tax dollars go into and not things like food stamps.
People need to start to get clued in...

I would like to make sure Lockheed Martin gets mentioned as the incompetent
manufacturer in this debacle.

~~~
wuliwong
I believe you are wrong about that. While defense spending is big, it's not
the highest. Health and Human Services and Social Security are both
significantly higher portions of the budget. Unless there's a bunch of "off
the books" spending?

You can easily see here in this extremely user-friendly document
[http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2...](http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2014/assets/budget.pdf)
:-p

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Food stamps =! social security. Also SS isn't an entitlement, I fucking paid
into it, i should get something back.

~~~
01Michael10
No one said food stamps = social security but they both are social programs
that benefit people.

Social Security is in fact an entitlement as in workers are "entitled" to
their benefits by paying into the system. Republicans later smeared the word
entitlement because it now also refers to welfare programs (entitled by law)
so people get confused.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entitlement](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entitlement)

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Yes but comparing to the military is unfair. These are two very different
types of programs. Of course SS costs more, we're all paying massive amounts
into it for our retirement.

Military on the other hand is spending congress controls and whether its 1
dollar or 1 trillion is by their whim. No one is explicitly paying into it. In
these kinds of military vs "welfare" spending, removing SS from it makes
perfect sense. It pays for itself, and then some (when congress isnt stealing
from it). Military is all debts and spent money. Its doesn't pay for itself.
It buys 1 trillion dollar jet programs that are the laughingstock of the world
as our corruption and incompetence are clear to see.

~~~
01Michael10
I think you are confusing me with wuliwong...

------
allthatisgold
After reading the Wikipedia page on this plane, you'd have to be crazy to buy
it:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning_II)

Note: it's a long article

------
Gravityloss
It seems to be expensive, but what would have been the alternative to JSF or
to the F-35?

The trillion dollar budget was postulated by some already long beforehand.
Bill Sweetman wrote that into his book ten years ago already:
[http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Fighter-Lockheed-Martin-
Strik...](http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Fighter-Lockheed-Martin-
Strike/dp/0760317925) Unfortunately, with this being what it is, nobody
believes the companies' presented combat aircraft prices. Just a while ago,
the French Dassault Rafale doubled in price, some time after winning a huge
fighter order competition in India, and it's a plane that's been operational
already for fourteen years!: [http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-dna-
exclusive-100-price...](http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-dna-
exclusive-100-price-escalation-on-rafale-fighter-aircraft-to-rs-175-lakh-
crore-likely-to-dent-iaf-s-strike-capability-1957107)

Maybe two or three different aircraft could have been developed, and it would
have been faster and cheaper in total - since each design could have been more
straightforward, more specialized for its mission. Who knows? This is far from
obvious to me. Pierre Sprey advocated this line. But even his favorite
optimized light weight fighters were adapted to multiple roles and replaced
many more specialized aircraft.

Another alternative would have been to develop nothing really new, just keep
operating old airframes, maybe manufacture some minor updates (F-15, F-16 and
Super Hornet are being manufactured). They don't have stealth, though some
versions have some minor stealthiness. Russia and China are developing at
least reasonably stealthy aircraft (PAK-FA, J-20, J-31). The F-22 is not
manufactured but AFAIK the tooling is preserved. But it's a more specialized
aircraft anyway. I think doing nothing would not have been a politically
possible path.

Everybody complains but there aren't that many better directions. Some
countries could at least buy European or Russian generation 4.5 fighters if
they want to avoid JSF, but that's mostly it.

~~~
commandar
The problem isn't just that the F-35 is multirole but is trying to cater to
the various quirks of multiple services. I mentioned it upthread, but an
example of this is the very shape of the aircraft was determined in large part
due to the Marines' vertical take off requirement. This necessitated a huge
lifting fan in the fuselage, which had major ramifications on the
maneuverability of the aircraft and the pilot's visibility out of the cockpit.
Then there are all the modifications made to the C variant to accommodate
carrier landings for the Navy.

The end result is that you have an airframe that was meant to save money by
being common between all three services which has ended up with a parts
commonality of only 25-30%[1] and whose performance has suffered because of
the requisite compromises made to chase that goal.

I think one of the other big things that gets lost in these conversations is
that the F-35 was meant to be cheap and widely fielded. The problem is that
the program's bloating to the point that they're getting too expensive to
field in numbers that would replace the existing force.

The response is usually that the high tech gadgetry in these planes will save
the day. That's problematic. This is going back to the F-22, but RAND ran a
widely-circulated simulated conflict in the Straight of Taiwan a few years
back[2]. The result was that the F-22s held their own... until they ran out of
missiles and were overwhelmed by the sheer number of opposition planes that
were being thrown at them.

So, basically, my answer to your question would be forget the super planes and
focus on cheaper, more, and good enough. Accept that fighter, bomb truck,
_and_ stealth is a pick two proposition. Design something light, cheap, and
modernized to fill the multirole capability of the F-16 today; it's very
difficult to replace a $40M jet in the same kind of numbers with a $150M one.
Supplement the F-22 with new production F-15SEs. Look into things like the
Textron AirLand Scorpion to fill the permissive environment CAS role that the
A-10C fills today.

KISS.

[1] [http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/lightning-
rod-f-35-fight...](http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/lightning-
rod-f-35-fighter-family-capabilities-and-controversies-021922/)

[2]
[http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2009/RA...](http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2009/RAND_MG888.pdf)

~~~
Gravityloss
I don't dispute your points: it is very expensive and there are problems.

So, at the risk of oversimplifying, your preferred approach would be to stop
the F-35 program (or programs) and start a few new different aircraft
programs, and trying to depend on existing or mild developments as well?

It would not be cheap either, and it would take time.

------
jebblue
Obama runs the Whitehouse and has for 6 years, so is he responsible? It didn't
take him long after signing on to fire the NASA administrator.

~~~
Someone1234
Obama is definitely partly responsible.

This isn't a party political issue anyway, both the Democrats AND Republicans
support this program and have for quite a while. As the article says
contractors exist in 45 states, so that's 45 senators who have a vested
interest in its future.

This 10,000 pound gorilla has been around for quite a few years before Obama
and while it would have been political suicide to try and kill it, it would be
interesting to see if Obama could have killed it (since he is in command of
the military, but congress actually makes a lot of the acquisition decisions).

I'm sure Obama could have ordered the US military to not buy the F-35 anymore
but then what? The contracts still exist and the military's budget is based
around those purchases (i.e. the money likely cannot be used for alternatives
without approval).

~~~
rstupek
You mean 90 senators (out of 100)

------
pinaceae
oh yeah, all military spending is just soooo stupid ... say people writing
comments on something originally funded by the very same military-industrial
complex, living in an area largely funded through said complex after ww2.

but we like drones and robots, right? boston dynamics, the darpa challenge,
... oh what a WASTE.

and the technology invented and developed for this plane will appear nowhere
else, ever. that's how tech innovation works, all dead ends.

------
aburan28
I would not be surprised if this cash cow gets cancelled after this recent
grounding. This scheme is hardly going unnoticed.

------
CalRobert
Eh. You get what you vote for.

------
justinpaulson
Did anyone else get overloaded by the foreignpolicy.com design? Yikes!

