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

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285 points ridruejo | 2 comments | 11 Nov 25 14:34 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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stackskipton ◴[11 Nov 25 21:26 UTC] No.45893105[source]▶
As someone who has some familiarity with this process, just like safety regulations are written in blood, Federal Acquisition rules are written in misuse of money, sometimes criminally.

Yes, we have swung too much towards the bureaucrats but I'm not sure throwing out everything is solution to the issue.

Move fast works great when it's B2B software and failures means stock price does not go up. It's not so great when brand new jet acts up and results in crashes.

Oh yea, F-35 was built with move fast, they rolled models off the production line quickly, so Lockheed could get more money, but it looks like whole "We will fix busted models later" might have been more expensive. Time will tell.

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Alupis ◴[11 Nov 25 22:37 UTC] No.45893847[source]▶
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.

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Retric ◴[11 Nov 25 22:52 UTC] No.45894007[source]▶
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.

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p_l ◴[11 Nov 25 23:58 UTC] No.45894576{3}[source]▶
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.
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mmooss ◴[12 Nov 25 05:35 UTC] No.45896702{4}[source]▶
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?

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p_l ◴[12 Nov 25 06:27 UTC] No.45896955{5}[source]▶
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

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mmooss ◴[12 Nov 25 07:31 UTC] No.45897304{6}[source]▶
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.

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p_l ◴[12 Nov 25 07:36 UTC] No.45897328{7}[source]▶
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)

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mmooss ◴[12 Nov 25 07:49 UTC] No.45897413{8}[source]▶
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.
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1. p_l ◴[12 Nov 25 12:15 UTC] No.45899230{9}[source]▶
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...

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2. mmooss ◴[12 Nov 25 18:10 UTC] No.45903547[source]▶
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.