The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

The F-35 was Lockheed's entry in the Joint Strike Fighter program. The JSF has roots going back to 1996. The X-35 first flew in 2000. The F-35 first flew in 2006, and didn't enter service until 2015(!!).

That's nearly 20 years to develop a single airframe. Yes, it's the most sophisticated airframe to date, but 20 years is not trivial.

The F-35 had many issues during trials and early deployment - some are excusable for a new airframe and some were not. I suspect the issue wasn't "move fast, break things" but rather massive layers of bureaucracy and committees that paralyzed the development pipeline.

The F-22 was part of the Advanced Tactical Fighter (ATF) program which dates back to 1981. It's prototype, the YF-22 first flew in 1990, and the F-22 itself first flew in 1997. It entered production in 2005. Again, 20+ years to field a new airframe.

Something is very wrong if it takes 20+ years to field new military technologies. By the time these technologies are fielded, a whole generation of employees have retired and leadership has turned over multiple times.

> but rather massive layers of bureaucracy and committees that paralyzed the development pipeline.

They decided to make one airframe in three variants for three different branches. They were trying to spend money they didn't have and thought this corner cutting would save it.

> Something is very wrong if it takes 20+ years to field next-generation military technologies.

It's the funding. The American appetite for new "war fighters" is exceptionally low when there's no exigent conflict facing us. They're simply building the _wrong thing_.

It's peacetime engineering. These things would be developed 10x faster during a hot war. Look at COVID vaccine in 10 months vs. 7 years normally.

Lack of funding? My impression is that the F-35 program is the most expensive in history.

The problem clearly is, once a need is identified - it can be costly or ruinous to wait 20+ years to realize the solution. The DoW is clearly signaling they want the "Need -> Solution" loop tightened, significantly, sacrificing cost for timeliness.

That puts the US on good footing, ready to face peer and near-peer, next-generation warfare.

If Ukraine has taught us anything, it's off-the-shelf - ready today - weapons are needed in significant quantity. Drone warfare has changed almost everything - we're seeing $300 off-the-shelf drones kill millions of dollars of equipment and personnel. If the military needs anti-drone capabilities, it can't wait 20+ years to field them.

We don't just need to pick on new/next-generation military technologies either. The US currently produces between 30,000-40,000 155mm artillery shells a month, but Ukraine (at peak) expended 10,000 per day[1]. The loop is far too long...

[1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/ukraine-...

It didn’t take 20 years to make an airframe it took 20 years to do lots of research which eventually resulted in a wide range of systems and multiple very distinct airframes.

Hell F-35B does vertical takeoff and still mostly uses the same systems as the other designs, that should tell you something.

That's not surprising. If you allocate 1500 billion USD to building the Death Star, it will simultaneously be

1. the most expensive space station program in history, and

2. severely underfunded compared to the desired deliverable.

Most of time, this delay is in peacetime, it makes sense to do a ton of testing, wait until testing results then go to full production. Your primary concern is not spending a ton of money and not getting a bunch of people killed. It's basically waterfall in fighter development.

Wartime is more agile, you quickly close the loop but downside is sometimes does not work and when it does not work, there might be a people cost. US has done it with fighters before, F-4U Corsair was disaster initially in carrier landings and killed some pilots in training. However, this was considered acceptable cost to get what was clearly very capable fighter out there.

Sure because we decided to gut manufacturing in this country. It was deliberate decision made not by DoD following Federal Acquisition rules but by beancounters who didn't want to spend money on keeping manufacturing alive. Since we don't have civilian manufacturing base in this country and military does not want to buy a ton of artillery shells just for them to go idle, here we are.

> The US currently produces between 30,000-40,000 155mm artillery shells a month, but Ukraine (at peak) expended 10,000 per day[1].

Wars are incredibly expensive, and the US should not be producing weapons, in peacetime, at the rate they would be expended during an active war. What we should have the ability to rapidly scale production.

It doesn't take 20 years to do that, it takes 20 years to do that and wade through the bureaucratic morass. The SR-71 went from initiation to deployment in under a decade, more than half a century ago. With the myriad of advancements in everything from engineering, computation, to business development/management practices, building new cutting edge planes is the sort of thing we should be getting better and quicker at.

Design iteration cycle-times should be decreasing due to CAD, experimental cycles-times reduced due to the proliferation of rapid-turn 5-axis CNC mills, experimental cycles reduced due to simulation, business processes streamlined due to advancements in JIT manufacturing and six-sigma/kaizen/etc, and so on and so forth. That this isn't occurring is a giant blinking red light that something is wrong, and that we are going to get our lunch eaten by someone who researches, designs, and manufactures with a modicum of competence. Ostensibly China.

Peacetime funding.

Experts generally expected that there would be effective COVID vaccines by the end of 2020, because vaccine development is not magic. There are several known approaches to creating vaccines, and it was reasonable to expect that some of them would work.

What set COVID vaccines apart was government commitment. Governments around the world bought large quantities of vaccines before it was known whether that particular vaccine would be effective. (Regulatory approval was also expedited, but that it business as usual during serious disease outbreaks.)

The equivalent with fighter jets would be the government committing to buy 200 fighter jets, with an option for many more, from everyone who made a good enough proposal. And paying for the first 200 in advance, even if it later turns out that the proposal was fundamentally flawed and the jets will not be delivered.

Manufacturing in western countries was gutted by treasonous politicians bribed by corporations to do an end-run around the environmental laws, workplace regulations, and human rights that had been hard-won by the people over the previous 50-100 years, by allowing these abuses to continue elsewhere without even being required to pay commensurate tariffs or penalties.

Weapons need to be replaced, even ones never used. To be capable of scaling production you need at least some degree of production constantly simmering in the background. Yet even then, there is a limit to how much you can scale up on demand.

The best and cheapest weapons are the ones never used, but making no weapons at all is the most expensive choice in the end.

> What we should have the ability to rapidly scale production.

How should the US make the manufacture of, say, the primers for artillery shells "rapidly scalable" in a way that is different from building a large stockpile? Be specific. Would you nationalize factories but leave them idle? You certainly won't have time to build or retool factories and staff them during a peer conflict. How would you present this to Congress vs. running those factories in peacetime as a jobs program?

> Something is very wrong if it takes 20+ years to field new military technologies.

Is it? By what criteria? IMHO the point is to get new tech out quickly enough that you aren't falling behind other major powers in the international arms race. The F35 seems to be ahead of the competition because countries around the world are lining up to buy it over much cheaper alternatives from Russia (Su57) and China (J35).

Not to mention that the Su57 also had about a 20 year development cycle. Maybe that's just how long takes to develop a new stealth fighter?

F-35B was added to JSF to ensure Lockheed (who had been working on exactly that since 1980s even to the point of licensing designs from USSR) was the only company that could win the contract.

The problem is you have these hugely expensive facilities like the tank plant in Lima that's pretty much only good for making tanks. Transitioning manufacturing to production lines that can be economically kept online because they make non-tank products when we're not fighting anyone is the way to go.

There's a ton of work going on in this area, and has been for a while (check out DARPA's AVM project for some of it).

The SR-71 had a strait forward mission well suited to a specialized airframe, and again you’re focusing on the airframe.

Just the software for the helmet alone provides a huge technical advantage that has little to do with how the aircraft is manufactured other than having the appropriate sensors, communication systems, and computing power. Yet through all that bureaucracy what would normally be 3 different airframes all get to leverage the same systems without the need for retrofits etc. It’s inherently a two step process to figure out what you need before you can finalize the design.

By comparison vs the F-35, the B-2 spirit was vastly more expensive and far more limited. The F-35 also costs less than the more specialized F-22, but that versatility takes time.

Invest in technology that makes the facilities that manufacture primers useful for more than just that one product. One might do that by changing the nature of the manufacturing facility towards a multipurpose "forge", changing the nature of primers so they're more like commercially attractive products, or some combination. DARPA has been working pretty hard on these topics over the years.

I was working on one when we got shut down due to a political squabble resulting in sequestrations. Reminds me of our recent shutdown in many ways.

> Would you nationalize factories but leave them idle?

Yes. Historically, these would be the national armories, Navy Yards, and Air Force plants. You know, Springfield Armory (of .30-06 Springfield fame, now a museum), Watertown Arsenal (now a fucking Home Depot, among other things), Charlestown Navy Yard(Boston, now largely a museum), Philadelphia Navy Yard (redeveloped? not my area), Air Force Plant 42 (near LA, still in use by Skunk Works among others), and others.

Having the capital idle/underutilized but maintained and a core group of people with the institutional knowledge ready to pass on during that rapid scaling up is what would make the factories able to scale up. Gun barrels (of all sizes) are relatively specialized from a manufacturing standpoint. Nobody is seriously arguing for having capacity to scale up to build 16" guns for battleships, but 5" guns are extremely common in naval use and 155mm guns are common for artillery. Being able to surge production of those without having to go through a learning curve would be a really great ability to have.

Interestingly, Goex, maker of black powder, is located on a military facility (Camp Minden) because that process remains both hazardous and surprisingly relevant to modern military use.

I think this is the crux of it. The article discusses Ukraine but they weren't making millions of drones, the private capital wasn't there and the bureaucracy that coordinates it wasn't primed until the war.

> The American appetite for new "war fighters" is exceptionally low when there's no exigent conflict facing us.

Isn’t this a self-fulfilling prophecy? Who would want to get into a conflict with someone who has guaranteed air supremacy?

The F-35 has the equivalent of an 80486 in it because it is so old, and can’t be updated.

Agree, agree, agree.

New technologies should make iteration time on this stuff faster not shorter... even for complex things like fighter aircraft.

The fact that there are over a dozen Chinese humanoid robotics companies that have shipped working products in the past 12 months should be a big red flag.

I will say though that during WW2 and the Cold War, the amount of tolerance for killing test pilots was much greater given the number of people dying during active military conflicts at the time.

Or, simply open up the sales of tanks to the civilian market.

That's a joke, of course, but even if they were demilitarised variants there'd probably still be a market for it.

I would even go one step back in the process. Make it possible to rapidly build factories in the US. And don’t idle that capacity — consider how quickly China brings factories online and how rapidly they could scale weapons production by shifting production of car factories to weapons factories.

This is, of course, a hard problem to solve, but solving it would be quite valuable for the US even without any wars.

That is not a guarantee. We look at WW2 and think that what happened then will happen at any other time. But in WW1 the US had to borrow rifles from France. WW1 was a total disgrace as far as the US military industrial complex was concerned. I know I'm committing a bit of a sin, today marks the 107th anniversary of the end of WW1 and that end was possible because of the US involvement. But, uncharacteristically for the US, it was the manpower, not the arsenal of the US that decided the end of that war. And, yes, even at that time the US was the largest economy of the world.

> Springfield Armory

Side note, if you're ever in central Mass, the Springfield Armory is a great tour.

Agile, vertically-integrated weapons manufacturing... in 1820.

They've got an original wooden copying lathe: traces a finished master rifle stock with a contacting friction wheel, then carves the same shape onto a blank. https://www.nps.gov/spar/learn/historyculture/thomas-blancha...

It was finally closed in 1968.

Manufacturing in western countries was gutted by the price of labor (read: rising standard of living relative to global averages).

1. It's difficult to manufacture competitively when a local living wage is in the upper echelons of global wages.

2. It's often cheaper to manufacture something semi-manually (e.g. 80% automated) than invest in buying and maintaining full automation.

> can’t be updated

You mean the ICP that's already been updated as part of TR3 to support Block 4 features? https://militaryembedded.com/avionics/computers/f-35-program...

So then what value does the bureaucratic process add if it's the first thing that gets shitcanned when good results in good time matter?

At the end of the day it's all people cost. Just because it's fractional lives wasted in the form of man hours worked to pay the taxes to pay for unnecessary paper pushing labor instead of whole lives doesn't actually make the waste less (I suspect it's actually more in a lot of cases).

There definitely is a market for such vehicles:

http://www.exarmyvehicles.com/offer/tracked-vehicles/tanks

https://mortarinvestments.eu/ArmouredVehicles

https://miltrade.com/pages/military-vehicles-for-sale-in-eur...

https://tanksales.co.uk/sales/

Ten or fifteen years back, I had an ambition to buy such a vehicle and drive it around at Burning Man. I eventually settled for a deuce-and-a-half, which caused enough struggle and frustration that I'm glad I never actually bought a tank.

A related article https://archive.is/2024.12.17-161126/https://www.theatlantic...

Our scaling is human oriented - add more shifts. Maybe we can adapt new manufacturing methods like screw extrusion mentioned in the article

No, it was gutted by what I said it was gutted by. The price of labor I include in workplace regulations but I could have called it out on its own too.

If corporations could not have moved operations offshore to exploit workers and the environment in other countries for lower cost, then they would not have. They were permitted to.

Where the old "labor costs did killed it" canard really falls over is when you look at primary industry and things that physically can't be packed up and moved off shore in western countries. Mining, farming, forestry, fishing, things like that. Traditionally a lot of those industries have had high labor input costs too. They miraculously didn't all fall over like manufacturing though.

Labor costs are a cost, same as compliance with other workplace regulations and environmental laws of course. They are not the reason manufacturing was offshored though, they are the reason that corporations bribed treasonous politicians to allow this offshoring to occur with no penalty. As I said.

Yes, this is absolutely part of it. Even if you had unlimited funding, unlimited trained workers, and a defect free, perfect weapon/product design, the urban planning regime would force you to spend 12 years in consultations before you could put one shovel in the ground to build the factory. Through p it all they would be trying to negotiate the size down and down and down until it finally was a factory the size of a single-family house.

You just, without a hint of irony, compared killing service personnel with civil service office work. Giving someone a job isn't what wasted tax money looks like.

But it's not the technologies that are a problem most of the time. It's that:

- DoD / DoW is a chaotic project owner, trying to squeeze in colossal and sometimes self-contradictory lists of requirements, which it wants to change often.

- The US government is a poor customer, which runs out of money from time to time.

- The US Congress is a cantankerous financier, which haggles for the money every year, and demands the production to be distributed all over the place, to bring jobs to the constituencies which voted for the congresspersons.

- The companies that produce this stuff are few and mostly cannot be easily replaced, and they know it. This is because in the late 1980s the US government decided that it has won the Cold War and will not need the many competing manufacturers of military gear any more. That proved to be a bit shortsighted, but now it's a bit late.

What was frustrating about it? From time to time your exact plan sounded appealing to me.

To be fair the F22 would have been closer to the F35 in price if the number produced were larger so that the R&D was spread over a larger number of airframes. Such a pretty plane.

> The American appetite for new "war fighters" is exceptionally low when there's no exigent conflict facing us.

That’s a problem easily solved.

We have the menace of the Red Maple Leaf people to the north, and perhaps a buffer zone south of the Rio Grand would stave off the caravans, give Texans some breathing room, and make more room for real Americans. Remember, the anti-Christ may show up at any time.

Better to keep things running at a low level than fully idle I'd think. Even if the outputs are consumed by testing, development, or even just stockpiled. Lots of things can get lost by not making parts for a while, including the knowledge involved in troubleshooting or replacing parts.

Of course then people would complain about all the money wasted not utilizing the equipment/space enough.

> Something is very wrong if it takes 20+ years to field new military technologies. By the time these technologies are fielded, a whole generation of employees have retired and leadership has turned over multiple times.

Conversely, the Navy's first SSBN went start to finish in something like 4 years.

And unlike the F-35, which could easily have been an evolution of the existing F-22 design, the Navy had to develop 4 major new pieces of technology, simultaneously, and get them all integrated and working.

1. A reduced-size nuclear warhead (the missile would need to fit inside the submarine for any of this to matter) 2. A way to launch the nuclear missile while submerged 3. A way to reliably provide the nuclear missile with its initial navigation fix at launch 4. A way to fuel the nuclear missile with a safe-enough propellant to be usable on a submerged submarine without significant risk to the crew

The USAF's Century series of fighters were turned around quick. So was the B-52.

Having been involved in defense innovation efforts during my time in uniform, I cannot overemphasize how much the existing acquisition system is counter-productive to the nation's defense, despite 10+ years of earnest efforts dating back to before Trump's first term.

Most of the aspects to it are well-intentioned and all, but as they say the purpose of the system is what it does, and what America's defense acquisition system does is burn up tax dollars just to get us a warmed-over version of something grandma and granddad's generation cooked up during the Cold War.

Its turned into a death spiral because as these programs get more onerous the cost goes up, and who in their right mind thinks it's a good idea to just let people go off on a $1B effort with less oversight?

Until it's even possible to deliver things cheaply through the DAS (or WAS or whatever it will be now) we'll never be able to tackle the rest of the improvements. I look forward to reviewing the upcoming changes but Hegseth isn't the first one to push on this, it's a huge rat's nest of problems.

> Mining, farming, forestry, fishing, things like that. Traditionally a lot of those industries have had high labor input costs too. They miraculously didn't all fall over like manufacturing though.

Mining has been dropping since the 80s [0].

Farming, forestry, fishing are estimated to decline by 3% in the next 10 years [1]. After having fallen from ~50% of the US population in 1870 already.

It's cheaper to do things where labor is cheaper, then ship them around the world by sea.

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPUBN212W200000000#:~:tex...

[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/Farming-Fishing-and-Forestry/Agricul...

Don't forget Belarus just today mentioning they have nukes in warm standby mode.

We have scaled artillery shell production, it's about 3 times what production was prior to the conflict in Ukraine. And the Pentagon claims they'll double that again by next Spring.

Given that the actual peer conflict that matters to the US will almost certainly be decided by air and sea power, this all seems very much like pointless distraction.

But evidently it can be done, because it is being done. I suppose we are now more ready for some weird anti-matter goldilocks outcome where the PRC can somehow land and supply forces in Taiwan, while still somehow also being incapable of preventing the US from sending forces and supplies to the island. Seems like a weird fixation, but hey, it doesn't cost that many billions of dollars to accommodate Elbridge Colby.

Of course, our ally who actually needs artillery shells for counter battery fire, South Korea, can produce them in vast quantities. They are also conveniently located in the Pacific. It is one thing for them to be wary about doing too much help Ukraine. Russian can complicate their life quite a bit.It would be quite another thing if the US actually asked for shells in the middle of a war with China.

> Mining has been dropping since the 80s [0].

> Farming, forestry, fishing are estimated to decline by 3% in the next 10 years [1]. After having fallen from ~50% of the US population in 1870 already.

You're linking to employment. Like manufacturing, these industries have been significantly automated and mechanized. So yes they have been employing fewer people. Corporations can't move the land and minerals and oil and gas offshore though, so those industries have not been killed. The cost of labor didn't kill them. That's despite all these minerals and petrochemicals and farmland available all around the global south too.

What evidence is there of that?

And without the F-35B, what would be flown by the US Marines, and by most other countries' aircraft carriers, all of which require vertical take-off and landing?

They borrowed (or rented for $1 for the duration of the war) binoculars from US citizens for WWI. Then returned them after the war was over. Patriotic people sent them in.

Harrier 2.0

The Chinese laborers working in BYD and foxconn factories have higher wages than their equivalents in Mexico and Vietnam building products sold for 3-5x as much in the US. The cheapest labor in the world is found in Africa and yet Western industrial manufacturing has largely ignored the continent. The price of labor isn't the most important factor here.

The original estimate was $250b. They undershot that by 10x. The expense is all "overages."

Late addition of VTOL variant on mandates common airframe when it was well known that only Lockheed had anything in pipeline that could match the requirements and even then -B meant delays and issues due to inherent complexity of VTOL (to the point Britain nearly canceled the order for -B, only finding out it was too late to refit Queen Elizabeth carriers with CATOBAR kept the purchase afloat)

Reality is that VTOL model is ultimately a niche variant whose mandated commonality with air force and CATOBAR carrier variants impacted negatively both non- and VTOL options.

However, slapping supersonic VTOL requirement on what was supposed to be F-16 replacement in the given timeframe meant Lockheed would automatically get ahead as every other vendor had to scramble nearly from scratch while L-M had fresh supersonic VTOL data from both their own lab work and experimental work on Yak-141

If we're talking actual functional tanks, then they're expensive as shit to buy, and expensive as shit to drive.

If we needed it for war, I suspect everyone involved would be eager to eliminate the restrictions.

What is more critical as Ukraine has shown is ammunition, ie artillery shells, and of course any anti-drone ammunition (missiles are extremely expensive solution that should be reserved for ballistic missiles and not cheap drones).

More tanks on Ukraine's side wouldn't change current battlefield massively, drones limit how much use from tanks you can get. If you can scale your production to 10-50x within weeks then all is fine but thats almost impossible practically.

If anybody thinks we are heading for a peaceful stable decade without need of such items in massive numbers must have had head buried in the sand pretty deep.

US ammo for civilian use isn't magically much more expensive than in cheaper places around the globe. Could be many factors ie economies of scale but at the end it doesn't matter - price of labor isn't a deciding factor, definitely not when you have US military budget.

I don’t know what your first sentence means. Do you say “killing” to mean “eliminating the job of”? I don’t see anywhere that mentioned “killing”.

If your second sentence is correct, then let’s allocate taxes to digging holes and filling them in? Ad absurdum but I think it applies? Like it seems reasonable to have an opinion on whether a function should continue to be funded by tax dollars. In a properly operating economy this would open up skilled labor to work somewhere more useful. Unless they weren’t actually skilled, in which case yes you have a problem hmm…

I’ve never really understood how the logic of the second amendment doesn’t extend to tanks and nukes.

That is a theory, but the evidence is that VTOL F-35s are needed and used widely.

> -B meant delays and issues

The -B was the first of the three variants to become operational.

For very special meaning of operational that could be summarized as "USMC could not allow it to fail".

And the delays were on the whole project due to forced commonality (in addition to L-M being L-M)

The argument was literally about pilots dying because of war-time cutting of costs to ensure fast deployment of new tech. Then somebody misread the room and suggested office work was just as much of a waste of life as dying in a horrible accident due to canning of safety testing.

Can you provide any evidence? What I'm stating are public facts. We can always come up with reasons, but we need evidence of what actually happened.

The problem is, the US sea power is being dwarfed by China rapidly, who have now surpassed the size of the US Navy and are quickly going to be even larger.

And the US does not have enough missiles for a war with China or even Russia realistically.

It's why there's a panic for artillery shells. They realize any real symmetrical with an enemy that isn't some guys in caves would become a war of attrition through numbers fast.

Lobbing billion dollar missiles as a strategy fails when you run out of money for them.

I'm not sure there is any law against owning an unarmed tank. But for "dangerous and unusual" weapons themselves, an important case is from 1939 - Miller vs USA. [1] And it's absurdly weird. Basically the defendant was a thug with a penchant for snitching on everybody.

In his final case, which he also snitched during, he argued that a law he had been charged under (a firearms regulation law) was unconstitutional. The judge who heard his case was very much in favor of the gun control law and had made numerous public statements as such, but he also likely knew that the law was on very shaky constitutional ground, and had been fishing for a test case to advance it. And he found that in Miller.

So he concurred with Miller about the law's unconstitutionality! That resulted in the case being appealed up to the Supreme Court. Conveniently for the state, neither Miller or his defense representation appeared. So it was argued with no defense whatsoever. And Miller was found shot to death shortly thereafter, which wasn't seen as particularly suspicious given his snitching habits. And that case set the ultimate standard that's still appealed to, to this very day.

This is made even more ironic by the fact that the weapon he was being charged for possession of as being 'dangerous and unusual' was just a short barrel shotgun, which was regularly used in the military.

[1] - https://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/ECM_PRO_060964.p...

> Do you say “killing” to mean “eliminating the job of”?

No. They mean killing as in ordering a pilot to fly an airplane with less cautious testing resulting in a crash and the death of the crew.

> I don’t see anywhere that mentioned “killing”.

It is there. This is what stackskipton said “Your primary concern is not spending a ton of money and not getting a bunch of people killed.” They even use the example of the F-4U Corsairs mentioning how during the program pilots died.

This is the comment potato3732842 replied to and this is the context their message should be interpreted in. They compared “fractional lives wasted” which they define as “man hours worked to pay the taxes to pay for unnecessary paper pushing labor” with “whole lives”. They don’t define what they mean by whole lives lost, but since they wrote it as a response to stackskipton‘s comment from context i think they mean pilot deaths.

To me it seems they are arguing that if we accept more mangled pilot bodies pulled out of burning wreckages then we can do the program cheaper. And to understand where they stand on the question they call the work needed to prevent those pilot deaths “unnecessary paper pushing”. Is your reading of the comment different?

> The Chinese laborers working in BYD and foxconn factories have higher wages than their equivalents in Mexico and Vietnam building products sold for 3-5x as much in the US.

I'm having a hard time parsing this. Also, source?

> The cheapest labor in the world is found in Africa and yet Western industrial manufacturing has largely ignored the continent. The price of labor isn't the most important factor here.

... Yeah this seems fair. I think a lot of Africa has an infrastructure problem - it doesn't matter how cheaply you can manufacture if you can't move large volumes of raw materials/parts to the factory and finished goods from the factory. Plus many areas in Africa have security issues which make them less attractive places to do business. Geographically, a lot of the continent is cursed with hard to navigate rivers as well (the upper Nile being an exception), so only coastal shipping is really viable.

> what value does the bureaucratic process add if it's the first thing that gets shitcanned when good results in good time matter?

This is like asking what good do reserves do if you spend them down in a crisis.

The bureaucracy aims to keep waste and corruption to a minimum during peacetime. In war, the aims change--you're now not only ramping up production, but the penalties for fucking with a war are typically more drastic than lining one's pockets during peacetime.

$300 drones are not doing much of anything in Ukraine. Maybe some light weight ISR, but they don't even go-to the front line before having several grand of hardened radio equipment put on them - at which point they're not $300 anymore...

The flippant commentaries about drones help no one: they're a significant change in the intel environment, but nobody carefully inspects assumptions about cost efficiency or on the ground conditions.

Expensive drones are being used to fulfill roles which artillery fires could fulfill far more effectively, except both sides of the conflict don't have enough artillery but for vastly different reasons (whereas significant amounts of supplies are coming from a party which is more or less arming both of them: China's factories).

It should be noted that Ukraine has invested significant effort attempting to acquire US spec long range weapons like ATACMS and Tomahawk, and F-16 and HIMARS were both a big deal which took significant effort to get. Drones have created a new warfare dimension, but I find the way they're often discussed lacks of a lot of rigor or bearing on how they're actually being used.

> But in WW1 the US had to borrow rifles from France. WW1 was a total disgrace as far as the US military industrial complex was concerned

Up until WW1, the US were not a global military power, and because of their location, they had little reason do become one. Additionally they were not involved directly in ww1, so they had little reason to develop quickly a military industry that was at the level of western europe

Western countries wouldn't have moved manufacturing to China in the past if wages weren't cheaper.

I think the cost of labour now is kind of irrelevant. It was the cost of labour (and China being a stable country with favourable rule of law) that drove offshoring in the 90s and 2000s. The Chinese manufacturers chose to invest in process improvement and automation rather than just chasing the cheapest labour - and so now they've got a massive technical advantage.

> The best and cheapest weapons are the ones never used, but making no weapons at all is the most expensive choice in the end.

As a big part of Europe is learning at great cost.

Re: NASA chasing around for Saturn V blueprints and the blueprints for the equipment needed to make the actual rocket parts.

Think about the local implications of what you just said. If we toss the process when effective expenditure of resources toward results matter and consequences are the most serious then the process must be less efficient at producing good results for the expenditure than the corruption (or whatever else the process is replacing). So then why are we running it at all?

You can absolutely make an argument about accepting reduced efficiency to dilute concentrated harms (e.g. keep a test pilot from dying), but none of the peddlers of process dare even make that argument so I suspect the math is questionable without hand waving or subjective valuation (e.g. face saved avoiding errors).

The American people have no appetite for war with Canada. Half the country think it's a deranged threat and the other half think it's a hilarious joke. There's no genuine support for it from the public.

Mexico is another story, but even then I don't think there's much in the way of public support for a ground invasion.

The point about government waste is that some of the things government does save lives. So money wasted equates to lives that could have been saved. See value of a statistical life etc.

There is a market to buy a tank that originally cost $10m for $10k. You can drive it round fields and crush stuff for YouTube content.

I think there is a much smaller market for people wanting to pay the new price

> The fact that there are over a dozen Chinese humanoid robotics companies that have shipped working products in the past 12 months should be a big red flag.

I think that mostly means money is cheap in China. In America, if you try to start a humanoid robot company you'll immediately run into the "Why though?" question when you try to get money for it. The case for the economic relevance of humanoid robots is dubious at best, so to proceed with such a development program you need your own money or at least good friends with connections who don't care about money.

> The bureaucracy aims to keep waste and corruption to a minimum during peacetime.

This thread is discussing bureaucracy as the cause of waste and corruption during peacetime.

You'll never find evidince hard enough to fashion the sort of club people who ask such questions ought to be bludgeoned with.

Do you really think anyone would be so stupid as to leave hard evidince? That's the magic of the whole process, they can do those things fully within the bounds of the process. They decide (or don't), often at the urging of lobbyists, or non-lobbyists parties who themselves typically aren't completely impartial, what they want. And often they have a specific product in mind that they want, but they can't say that so they write the requirement to all but say it.

Often times this is very reasonable and comes as the result of the end user having used multiple products or having used multiple contractors and knowing from experience with near certainty what or who they want.

In the alternate case where it's pork, this is often how upstarts get their start. Whoever the prime is doesn't wanna pay out the ass for someone else's pork that's been inserted into the requirements so connections get leveraged and several dominoes later a subcontractor to someone is under contract + NDA to buy a controlling stake in an idling paper mill and refit as necessary the small town's wastewater plant it dumps into because that is how they are going to provide the filter media meeting the performance specified in the requirements without being forced to pay out the ass for the product the lobbyists ghost wrote into it. The prime has basically entered into contract to create a company making a competing product out of thin air. There are many funny stories like this kicking around the beltway.

I agree that the F-22 is gorgeous, but it is also extremely expensive to operate, couldn’t be exported, can’t do carrier launch or VTOL so the demand was inherently lower.

That said, we could have made more than 195 of the them, but even at 750 it would have still been significantly more expensive per aircraft than the F-35 and it wouldn’t have let us cancel the F-35 program.

> Of course then people would complain about all the money wasted not utilizing the equipment/space enough.

I think this is why the USA, UK and France are all big exporters in the defence sector.

> I’ve never really understood how the logic of the second amendment doesn’t extend to tanks and nukes.

Probably because if people could buy tanks to protect themselves, then the police would also need tanks to deconflict a situation where someone with a tank is upset and the damages are a bit higher when tank rounds start flying around. Imagine two neighbors getting into it in a a town, not to mention a city.

Even portable nukes are a stretch in the logic of "I need to protect my home" from intruders, not to mention the hundred kiloton yield ones.

War and peacetime are two different things. During wartime you need lots of materiel quickly, so value for money estimates, anti corruption practices all get reduced in the name of production numbers at all costs. Verification is easier because you go directly from the assembly line to the front line. If it doesn’t work, you find out and make changes quickly. You know what you need because you’re in the process of using it.

In peacetime, everything is different. You don’t know who your next opponent is going to be, so you need to keep options open. You don’t know if you’ll have a war before the equipment you just bought rots away. You don’t want wartime production levels and stifling your wider economy. You also don’t want a Russia situation where you ignore value for money estimates and audits only to find the money you spent on missiles went in the back pocket of a random colonel.

The "special casing" of "operational capability" is public fact - USMC decided to claim initial operational capability on aircraft that didn't even have complete SMS (stores management system), something that was missing even after first "front line" USAF units got theirs. Block 2 software had only minimal air-to-air and air-to-ground capabilities implemented. Block 3 was the infamous one with constant reboots, with Block 3F the first planned to provide full not just weapons capability, but even flight envelope. Heck, in 2015, they barely lifted limitations on attitude and acceleration/wing loading after finally testing them in flight.

Conflicts between requirements of -A/-C and -B, among other reasons due to weight, were discussed as far and wide as GAO reports, because like with F-111, there was strong political push for maximum commonality, which resulted in cascading issues - for example, -B added 18 months around 2004 to -A and -C when the fuselage ended up too heavy for -B to operate with any equipment, and extensive rework had to be done on all models to shave ~1200kg. By 2010 there was discussion to cancel -B altogether.

On a topic closer to typical fare on HN, ALIS (IIRC now renamed to ODIN, but awarded back to the same team...), the ground support system critical to even running the airplane, was close to useless in 2015. Something that anyone with experience with that part of Lockheed probably expected and were not listened to.

Ultimately the aircraft is probably pretty good (I am saying probably because some crankiness isn't much talked unless you're actually embedded with users of such hardware, and is secret - there I have only my suspicions), but the road there was more painful than it should be - and ofc I would not trust it if I was foreign buyer for reasons of not just software black boxes but also dependency on US-located labs to provide mission data updates - at least I have not heard of that aspect changing. We used to joke it was first aircraft with "phone home" license system...

> The problem is, the US sea power is being dwarfed by China rapidly, who have now surpassed the size of the US Navy and are quickly going to be even larger.

The thing is that size matters in wars of attrition, but experience almost always wins.

China's problem is that they lack the experience the US Navy gained over decades of pretty much non-stop war even if they did not go up any significant adversary since the Vietnam war.

More than half the country was against the wars in Vietnam or in Iraq (2003), but they still happened. And if the current administration decides they want to invade Canada, Canada will be invaded no matter what the country thinks. Same goes for Mexico. How it ends, it is a completely different story and another administration's problem.

> During wartime you need lots of materiel quickly, so value for money estimates, anti corruption practices all get reduced in the name of production numbers at all costs

Everyone keeps saying this yet it seems to be the opposite, results for dollars tradeoffs are better in wartime.

If anything it seems like the difference is that during wartime it's easier for the end users to tell the bureaucracy to get out of the way and as a result value for money is unchanged or even improved.

>You also don’t want a Russia situation where you ignore value for money estimates and audits only to find the money you spent on missiles went in the back pocket of a random colonel.

There is no difference to the taxpayer or the soldier in the trench whether the money went into one specific colonel's back pocket or got pissed away on running organizational process. The money is gone and the missile isn't there.

At you can least throw colonel in jail (or out a window, because Russia). Imagine if instead of a colonel's pocket the money was spent pushing papers around to no end? It would be the Spiderman pointing at Spiderman meme and nobody would be held responsible except perhaps an unlucky scapegoat.

This movie is for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_(film)

People can and do own tanks. Since they are giant (hard to park), slow moving, consume a lot of fuel, tend to need expensive maintenance, and can't be operated on many roads due to weight / vehicle restrictions, few people want to do this.

As far as nuclear bombs go... there are restrictions on owning fissile material in general that would preclude owning enough to have a working bomb.

> Everyone keeps saying this yet it seems to be the opposite, results for dollars tradeoffs are better in wartime.

Do you understand what economies of scale are? Of course some production costs go down because you're producing far more. You're producing at this high level because the enemy is busy blowing up your equipment!

This is also why it's easy to show results: you have live test subjects in the form of the enemy you're trying to blow up and who's trying to blow you up.

Hell, the article also makes clear that this "low-bureaucracy nirvina" that you seem to believe in was costing the US taxpayer huge sums of money in waste and inefficiency.

> At you can least throw colonel in jail (or out a window, because Russia).

What planet are you on? Russia only found out because their tanks ran out of diesel and got towed away by Ukrainian farmers! Are you seriously suggesting the optimal result is for NATO forces to find out our equipment never got manufactured right when we need it?

Every comment I've seen from you has been "bureaucracy bad!" without any clear knowledge beyond some handwaving, usually ignoring the topic at hand.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

>Do you understand what economies of scale are?

Do you understand what results are? Not having something because people lied and took money is no different to the guy in the foxhole or the guy ordering those guys around than not having something because nobody lied and the money got spent paying people to do work that did nothing to get that something closer to being actually available.

>Hell, the article also makes clear that this "low-bureaucracy nirvina" that you seem to believe in was costing the US taxpayer huge sums of money in waste and inefficiency.

The article literally spends approximately 1/3 of its scroll bar talking about the problems with the system and how all the steps, all the process, all the tangential work that must per the rules be done despite not being part of the critical path of fielding systems prevents said systems from being delivered on time or on budget.

>Are you seriously suggesting the optimal result is for NATO forces to find out our equipment never got manufactured right when we need it?

It speaks volumes that your responses are constantly attempting toward strawmen and false dichotomies rather than assess what the right amount of procurement process is.

The conventional wisdom is that you need to buy several military vehicles in order to get and keep one up and running. Some things are going to come broken, some things will inevitably break, and the replacement parts aren't exactly at your local auto parts shop.

> The bureaucracy aims to keep waste and corruption to a minimum during peacetime

This is the problem though - the bureaucracy is guaranteed to add a lot of cost, both in its own personnel, the personnel in the companies employed to deal with the bureaucracy, and the additional time taken for all bids to be evaluated. This is guaranteed to slow down everything, with the promise that it will try to prevent issues. Which, if the bureaucracy is badly run, weaponised, or captured, is a terrible trade.

The process aims to minimize risk. This goes for process in general - that's why process exists.

Okay, let's think about what risks might be associated with making a fighter plane. The plane could blow up. The plane could be hard to maintain. The plane could get fighter pilots killed.

In a war, death is already on the table and soldiers are, more or less, expendable. In peacetime, this is not the case.

It's not that when we are in war, everything goes lovey dovey and great. No. Shit goes wrong constantly.

But we don't have time to care, we have bigger fish to fry: war.

>> Do you understand what economies of scale are? > Do you understand what results are?

So I take it, no, you don't understand. You're comparing costs and processes that exist outside of wartime to costs and processes that exist during wartime and haven't considered why, despite being told.

> It speaks volumes that your responses are constantly attempting toward strawmen and false dichotomies

I find it hilarious that you state this after your first 2 paragraphs.

> the right amount of procurement process is.

This childish fixation on a flat number is why you don't seem able to understand the problem.

Let's go back to the top, where you said:

> If we toss the process when effective expenditure of resources toward results matter and consequences are the most serious then the process must be less efficient at producing good results for the expenditure than the corruption (or whatever else the process is replacing). So then why are we running it at all?

This was in the context of comparing wartime to peacetime procurement processes. My entire comment addressed the difference between those environments, which you completely ignored to have a childish rant about "too much process." This isn't the first time you've responded to my comments by ignoring the substance and instead trying to (badly) strawman it.

Programs like the F35 might possibly be used funnel money into other LM black projects over the years

That wasn’t a heroic effort, it was a straightforward application of mRNA technology paired with an FDA Emergency Use Authorization to bypass the onerous approval process. And even that 10 month process could have been significantly faster if they performed human challenge trials.

You’re right of course, but there’s another important way the US contributed. Who do you think paid for those French rifles in the first place? The Entente was financed by Wall Street for years, until Wall Street ran out of money and the federal government took over the loans. The British Empire was close to insolvent at the end of the war—the main reason they were so insistent on receiving reparations from Germany was because of their own debt to the United States, a debt they ultimately defaulted on.

Also the DoE having to figure out how to make Fogbank again (a classified material used in weapons which they lost the manufacturing documentation for)

> no different to the guy in the foxhole

In peacetime, the American in the foxhole doesn’t die nor does the American or Brit across from him. Everyone merely has simulated results.

A great deal changed after Vietnam. Iraq was only possible because the country had a general blood lust against Muslims after 9/11, who were easy for a mostly white christian country to "other".

Nothing like that exists for Canada. Proposals to invade Canada aren't taken seriously by the public. Those who pretend to support it are just trying to piss people off with how stupid they can be.

> The bureaucracy aims to keep waste and corruption to a minimum during peacetime.

Sorry, but is this sarcasm ? Pity that HN doesn't alow limited emojis to convey intent.

The contract modification that the American taxpayer paid over $7 billion for that wasn't released until 2023?

For that you got an update to...

>2900 DMIPS, 1MB L2 Cache 512MB DRAM, 256MB Flash 128KB NOVRAM

So you got to upgrade from an 80486 level to something the equivalent of an early-2000s Pentium II.

What happens if we go to war? We just gonna build a new fast procurement process from scratch when we decide we need it? How do you even decide that for a low intensity conflict?

You ever heard the phrase "you fight how you train"? We're training our suppliers to be crap.

If most of the losses in your military are training disasters based on the current strategic outlook of maintaining highly effective deterrence, then you go for safety. If most of the losses in your military are (hypothetically) getting slaughtered by a superior enemy who has failed to be deterred, then you go for experimentation, iteration, try quickly and fail quickly. Life is just cheaper in wartime.

I feel like we got locked into the aerodynamic & airframe structural limitations of a particular CVN format with the USS Enterprise and are doing some wacky things, like not navalizing the F-22 or the C-130 or the B-21, because we can't dream any larger without assuming that such a ship would cost infinity dollars. South Korea, Japan, and China build larger container, tanker, and bulk ships all the time for ~1% of the price of a supercarrier; It's not that adding tens of thousands of tons of steel is going to break the bank, it's that a carrier group encompasses most functions of the military. The larger a ship gets the easier it is to move quickly through the wind, and the slower effective landing approaches are. The longer the catapult, the lower the necessary acceleration. CATOBAR takeoff and landing that works a little more like normal runway takeoff and landing means more of the USAF R&D ends up being projectable power.

It would cost an insane amount of money.... but... It already does cost an insane amount of money, and then we have to run three separate military aviation programs for different regimes.

In an indirect way, yes, some of the profit LM makes on the F-35 contracts does flow to internal R&D projects that may ultimately contribute to a black program. But actual black programs are funded by Congress. Even the most secretive, unacknowledged special access programs still have someone on the intelligence or defense committees giving the thumbs up to allocate money towards some department or agency's black budget. There would simply be no need to illegally launder money through another program unless LM was intent on using that money for criminal activities.

I'm sure it's been done elsewhere, look at Iran-Contra, but it just wouldn't be done for something like a defense contractor building planes. It would be completely unnecessary and likely illegal.

Are we not in peacetime? What war has the US declared?

We're in peacetime, but the current leadership perceives us to be in a pitched great-power struggle, and perhaps near-term shooting war, with China. Similarly, while we are not literally at war with Russia, we are in a very acute global conflict with them of another type that might be thought to warrant a different pace of military innovation. Perhaps these factors are what GP had in mind.

The difference is getting material vs getting designs.

It is way easier to scam someone when your major output is just blueprints that everyone acknowledges aren't even ready to be used.

You're looking at this all wrong. Taking 20 years to develop an airframe is fully intentional. The whole point of that project is to keep military contractors in business in peacetime because if war breaks out it will be much harder to start a company from scratch. If the company were efficient and pumped out aircraft like a normal company the government would be stuck with thousands of otherwise useless machines to maintain. By dragging out the development for decades they can keep the engineers employed without burdening themselves with enormous O&M costs.

Obviously this will have to change if war breaks out for real, but in theory they won't be scrambling to hire people and will have at least some production capability. They will be scrambling to expand the production lines, but they won't be starting from 0.

A lot of people see defense contractors as an enormous waste of money, but to the government it is a strategic investment.

The US military doesn’t want to sacrifice the capacity to go through the Panama Canal without getting a large benefit.

As to cost, in many ways a cruise ship is a better comparison than a cargo ship. The giant crew needed to maintain and operate a large aircraft fleet themselves need support staff, supplies, housing, etc. Carriers are expensive because of the people and systems onboard not the size of the ship.

Even just moving aircraft up and down from the flight deck requires a massive and thus expensive system. Civilian nuclear reactor are hideously expensive to build and operate let alone a system designed to ramp up and down more quickly, operate on a moving ship etc. Close in weapon systems have limited field of fire when you want a clear flight deck etc.

So sure, in theory you could just say we want a larger flight deck and are going to just have a number of empty components to pad out the ship but it’s not so simple.

Is this goal documented by the Department of War somewhere? Or are you guessing that there has to be a strategic reason for what seems quite wasteful. It sure seems like there's more efficient ways to achieve this goal.

So you have no evidence. I do, and I'm open to something besides conspiracy theories.

Thanks. I do know about most of that but I'm not sure it distinguishes the F-35 from any very large, very complex, bleeding edge technology project.

> the road there was more painful than it should be

See above - it's so hard to say. The conception was such an enormous project: build a bleeding edge system, higher performance than anything to be built for decades, even a new concept of fighter planes (as a sensor node on a network built around situational awareness, more than anything, as I understand it), that satisfies the requirements of not only the Navy, Air Force, and Marines, but a dozen militaries in other countries - and for all, critical to existential survival.

If you've ever had a project with more than one boss who are independent of each other, you know the pain of trying to choose even specifications. Imagine the F-35 meetings.

Was it worth the pain? It did allow an enormous economy of scale, a trillion dollars over its lifetime. They payoff is now, when it's the best fighter plane in the world that everyone wants, and a Dutch jet can land in Italy or Okinawa and get parts and maintenance.

But that doesn't answer the original question of whether the VTOL (really STOL) -B model was included mostly to give Lockheed the contract. In all those countries, there was too much demand for S/VTOL to just skip it, and there were and are zero alternatives. Something else could have been designed - but why when you can leverage all this massive development of the F-35?

> ALIS (IIRC now renamed to ODIN, but awarded back to the same team...), the ground support system critical to even running the airplane, was close to useless in 2015.

Also, I think ALIS was controlled and operated by Lockheed - it was essentially a service from Lockheed. The US military was limited in its ability to do its own inventory, maintenance, etc. Now the military insists on controlling the IP for its acquisition, to a large extent. I don't know what the IP status of ODIN is.

What would you suggest as a more efficient way to achieve this goal? Building thousands of advanced fighter jets for private citizens? Keeping highly skilled engineers up to date on the most modern technologies and maintaining specialized factories is inherently expensive. You can't leave the factories mothballed because you need to keep the skilled workers employed and practiced with manufacturing.

Maybe there could be something like a weekend warriors but for machinists? One weekend a month, one week a year you build fighter jets. This does mean there needs to be private sector demand for those skillsets so the reservists have relevant day jobs.

To the extent that there is a gap in sea or air power, you fix that, you don't waste attention or money on side projects like artillery shells.

The administration claims that it isn't distracted by Ukraine and Europe, and wants to focus on threat from China, but the strategic imperative for increasing shell production is Ukraine and the threat from Russia to Europe. Let the Europeans sort that out. And, if the Israelis want lots of shells, let them sort it out, or better yet do without.

Or acknowledge that you are doing something that is apart from your main strategic focus. It is possible to walk and chew bubblegum. Bubblegum doesn't cost all that that much.

But the pretense that artillery shells are desperately needed for deterrence in the South China Sea is rather tiresome. There are far more important munitions supply gaps. Just because a couple of conservative think tanks wanted to make hay about about sending shells to Ukraine a couple of years ago is political drama, not something actually important.

Rather than the sarcastic non-answer, you could just respond to the question as asked.

Is this an official goal, or at attempt to handwave away the fact that we seem to waste trillions and decades to get anything done?

The F-22 itself was delayed because of the end of the cold war. The original plans were to have it enter service in 1995, and then this slipped by a year or two. They could have had it being pass produced from 1997, but they delayed it because of the peace dividend. (This is from Aronstein et al, "ATF to F-22 Raptor"). So one should not consider the 2005 date as "how long it took".

My question is genuine.

Not really the point, but an idea that springs to mind is selling fighter jets to allied countries.

Re: wages, we have info from reporting. BYD had protests last year when they cut worker overtime at one of their factories, dropping salaries that were previously 8.5k-11.5k USD to 5-6k. Foxconn offers base rate around $2.50/hr, so 5k USD without overtime (which you'll inevitably work). This used to be higher as well.

Mexican autoworker wages came up during the GM UAW negotiations. Those range from about $9/day (~3k USD) up. Higher paying positions tend to go to Americans crossing the border.

Vinfast pays about 100M dong (4k USD with bonus) to their factory workers in Vietnam, which is quite a decent wage locally from what I understand.

Have legitimately successful aerospace companies that sell to other places, and create dual-use industries like autonomous driving with more DARPA challenge type stuff

The US sacrificed that a long time ago, when it first introduced supercarriers in the 50's. Too tall for the bridges, too wide for anything but the Third Locks era, and then only with some minor alterations.

Now that we do have the Third Locks, I think it would be reasonable to replace the bridges and make the alterations, a rounding error in the CVN budget.

Repositioning is far from the only concern but it is something they care about. For example the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower crossed the Suez Canal in 2021.

The much smaller Wasp-class amphibious assault ship on the other hand can carry as many as 20 F-35B’s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasp-class_amphibious_assault_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America-class_amphibious_assau...