6 ms·

It depends on what you consider the goal of the F-35 to be. If you believe it's to build a next generation fighter plane then yes it's a disaster. If you beli

by jpobst 8y ago

It depends on what you consider the goal of the F-35 to be. If you believe it's to build a next generation fighter plane then yes it's a disaster. If you believe it's a way to funnel trillions of dollars of taxpayer money to private defense companies then it's a rousing success.

testfoobar 8y ago
1500 domestic suppliers in 46 states. https://www.f35.com/about/economic-impact https://www.f35.com/about/economic-impact
- bonesss 8y ago
  I recall a post-mortem for the Superconducting Super Collider that pointed out a painful dichotomy: to build political support the contracts and suppliers had to be spread across many districts and states, but because it was a high tech project it was much, much, much more sensitive to component delays and quality issues. The big takeaway: with non-challenging, small fry, projects you can play all the politics you want and still land them; challenging projects have a much stronger need to be guided by actual practical project concerns & engineering or you substantially increase the risk of failure. The Manhattan project, and the incredible post-WW2 military engineering, worked because the brains got money and control so they build to the challenge at hand. When Porky Pig has first dibs the merely 'insanely hard' becomes impossible... Alan Kay said something to the same effect about the golden age of innovation at Xerox Parc: (brains + money) - BS = profitableSurprises.
  - slededit 8y ago
    The Manhattan project was distributed all around the country. From the pile under bleachers in Chicago, to the Hanford site in WA, the testing in the New Mexico desert, and Oak Ridge in Tennessee.
    - bonesss 8y ago
      That's orthogonal to my point :) If engineering concerns dictate project planning, structure, and execution you're at least playing the game. Compromise is the nature of the beast, and practical realities dictate decisions. If political financing, back scratching, and pocket filling dictate the projects planning, structure, and execution: you've increased complexity and risk substantially, and the likelihood that you've made the project nigh impossible to complete rises accordingly. Fermi et al were not working in Chicago to balance the distribution of pork, IoW... Hard projects do not have the margins to allow those kinds of inefficiencies. And not to dis the military industrial complex, but that distinction is fundamental to all R&D projects. Everyone involved should have known better when this boondoggle started.
- MindTooth 8y ago
  Because I can see nothing on that sites that resembles marketing, at all.. (Specific the front page and its news.) I guess the war machine needs to function so that we only focus on the left hand, and ignores what the right hand does.
- ProAm 8y ago
  This is the same reason the SLS wont get cancelled, I believe it funds suppliers/contractors in all 50 states. It will never get voted to be cancelled.
chiefalchemist 8y ago
The latest DoD budget was (afaik) a ~10% increase to: $700,000,000,000 But the media's attention surrounding that recent increase was focused on Stormy Daniels and/or some other alleged Trump admin gaffe. The MIC is very real. But it has been so normalized that few understand how "resource intensive" it really is. So much so (and I paraphrase): "We spend more on defense than the next 8 nations COMBINED." POTUS Obama SotU Address 2016 A former general and POTUS warned us about the MIC and we aren't interested.
- bonesss 8y ago
  > But the media's attention surrounding that recent increase was focused on Stormy Daniels and/or some other alleged Trump admin gaffe. I'm a bit of a cynic, so I would readily cast a negative eye to the entire corporate media machine and assume they're void of integrity and merely interested in what grabs eyeballs and money ('if it bleeds, it leads')... In that vein I don't think the media has attention. "Media" throws anything it can to the wall in hopes of making money, and find a public who cares very little about either insane deficit increases. Point of fact, even the Stormy Daniels sex scandal barely registers in terms of meaningful public reaction... Time was a President would be out the door for a hint of something like this. I blame the people who have removed civics, and civic history, from childhood education. The same people who have eliminated previously sacred media segregation laws, and also eased campaign finance laws to the point of shadowy billionaires openly bankrolling national candidates and extremist agendas...
  - chiefalchemist 8y ago
    I sit corrected. The MSM has attention...to profits. They'd show a pig taking a shit if it would increase ratings. You're not a cynic. You're spot on from my pov. It's the majority of semi-intelligent / semi-reasonable ppl who have lost their critical thinking minds. What's going on is obvious, __if__ you're not constantly whipped up in some emotional frenzy. But that's a big if at this point.
- rkuykendall-com 8y ago
  It's just not what the people want to hear. Trump was elected saying the military needed "rebuilt."
ataturk 8y ago
MIC gonna MIC. It's been like this for my entire lifetime. Every war since WWII was at the behest of these industries.
Clubber 8y ago
Good one. It reminds me of Hitler's infamous Tiger II tank. Amazing, nearly unstoppable technology; when it didn't break down driving off the factory floor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_II
binarray2000 8y ago
From a man who knew, what he's talking about, George F. Kennan: "Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy." https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_F._Kennan https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_F._Kennan
- bmer 8y ago
  Another quotation from that page: " There are certain sad appreciations we have to come to about human nature on the basis of these recent wars. One of them is that suffering does not always make men better. Another is that people are not always more reasonable than governments; that public opinion, or what passes for public opinion, is not invariably a moderating force in the jungle of politics. It may be true, and I suspect it is, that the mass of people everywhere are normally peace-loving and would accept many restraints and sacrifices in preference to the monstrous calamities of war. But I also suspect that what purports to be public opinion in most countries that consider themselves to have popular government is often not really the consensus of the feelings of the mass of the people at all, but rather the expression of the interests of special highly vocal minorities — politicians, commentators, and publicity-seekers of all sorts: people who live by their ability to draw attention to themselves and die, like fish out of water, if they are compelled to remain silent. These people take refuge in the pat and chauvinistic slogans because they are incapable of understanding any others, because these slogans are safer from the standpoint of short-term gain, because the truth is sometimes a poor competitor in the market place of ideas — complicated, unsatisfying, full of dilemma, always vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse. The counsels of impatience and hatred can always be supported by the crudest and cheapest symbols; for the counsels of moderation, the reasons are often intricate, rather than emotional, and difficult to explain. And so the chauvinists of all times and places go their appointed way: plucking the easy fruits, reaping the little triumphs of the day at the expense of someone else tomorrow, deluging in noise and filth anyone who gets in their way, dancing their reckless dance on the prospects for human progress, drawing the shadow of a great doubt over the validity of democratic institutions. And until people learn to spot the fanning of mass emotions and the sowing of bitterness, suspicion, and intolerance as crimes in themselves — as perhaps the greatest disservice that can be done to the cause of popular government — this sort of thing will continue to occur."
hinkley 8y ago
So here’s what I remember from American and World History classes. World War II is joined by the US. Shortly after we start selling war bonds to raise tons of operating capital. We commandeer Detroit and have them build airplanes. No new cars are made for something like four years. The draft starts, women start making the airplanes, and any raw material that goes into equipment or feeding the army gets rationed. After the war “we need to be prepared” morphs from maintaining a strong industrial complex into a special case: the MIC. Maybe because we felt that World War III would be fought in weeks and not years. I don’t think we know that to be the case anymore. Wouldn’t it be better for the peace time welfare of Americans to spend this volume of money on all of the constituent pieces needed to build a war machine but in plowshare form. Domestic production of steel, aluminum, titanium, rocket motor parts. High explosives. High output robust turbofans. Transsonic passenger jets. Sensor arrays, predictive systems, generators, high torque motors (IC and electric), rifles, tents, ruggedized integrated circuits. Only a few of those are strictly wartime products.
- partycoder 8y ago
  Churchill saw that the defeat of Britain was inevitable without allied help so through the Tizard Mission they transferred their military technology knowledge to the US in exchange for help. That included the cavity magnetron radar technology, one of the first mobile radars as well as other important innovations. The US engaged the Germans on land but that went very poorly, so they kept doing strategic airstrikes, notably taking down the German synthetic fuel production capabilities. This forced Germans to advance east. Meanwhile America supplied the Soviets with trucks and boots, helping the Soviets fight the Germans, a successful plan that resulted in heavy Soviet casualties. The Pacific front was a different story.
  - greedo 8y ago
    Uh no. I'll just address the inaccuracies in your second paragraph. By the time the US was engaging the Germans on land (Operation Torch in Nov. 1942), the Germans were already stuck in Stalingrad and had been defeated in their attempt to capture Moscow. They would never pose a serious threat in the East again. By spring they would be retreating as the Soviets unleashed their rebuilt armies on the weary Wehrmacht. Operation Torch didn't go "poorly," though the green US troops didn't perform as well as seasoned British or German troops would have. Nor did US troops perform poorly during Operation Husky. By the time the Allies landed in Normandy, the US was performing extremely well. Strategic airstrikes by the US (and British) never had a significant impact on the German industrial output. Nor did they have a damaging effect on German morale.

by jpobst 8y ago

testfoobar 8y ago

1500 domestic suppliers in 46 states. https://www.f35.com/about/economic-impact https://www.f35.com/about/economic-impact

bonesss 8y ago
I recall a post-mortem for the Superconducting Super Collider that pointed out a painful dichotomy: to build political support the contracts and suppliers had to be spread across many districts and states, but because it was a high tech project it was much, much, much more sensitive to component delays and quality issues. The big takeaway: with non-challenging, small fry, projects you can play all the politics you want and still land them; challenging projects have a much stronger need to be guided by actual practical project concerns & engineering or you substantially increase the risk of failure. The Manhattan project, and the incredible post-WW2 military engineering, worked because the brains got money and control so they build to the challenge at hand. When Porky Pig has first dibs the merely 'insanely hard' becomes impossible... Alan Kay said something to the same effect about the golden age of innovation at Xerox Parc: (brains + money) - BS = profitableSurprises.
- slededit 8y ago
  The Manhattan project was distributed all around the country. From the pile under bleachers in Chicago, to the Hanford site in WA, the testing in the New Mexico desert, and Oak Ridge in Tennessee.
  - bonesss 8y ago
    That's orthogonal to my point :) If engineering concerns dictate project planning, structure, and execution you're at least playing the game. Compromise is the nature of the beast, and practical realities dictate decisions. If political financing, back scratching, and pocket filling dictate the projects planning, structure, and execution: you've increased complexity and risk substantially, and the likelihood that you've made the project nigh impossible to complete rises accordingly. Fermi et al were not working in Chicago to balance the distribution of pork, IoW... Hard projects do not have the margins to allow those kinds of inefficiencies. And not to dis the military industrial complex, but that distinction is fundamental to all R&D projects. Everyone involved should have known better when this boondoggle started.
MindTooth 8y ago
Because I can see nothing on that sites that resembles marketing, at all.. (Specific the front page and its news.) I guess the war machine needs to function so that we only focus on the left hand, and ignores what the right hand does.
ProAm 8y ago
This is the same reason the SLS wont get cancelled, I believe it funds suppliers/contractors in all 50 states. It will never get voted to be cancelled.

chiefalchemist 8y ago

The latest DoD budget was (afaik) a ~10% increase to: $700,000,000,000 But the media's attention surrounding that recent increase was focused on Stormy Daniels and/or some other alleged Trump admin gaffe. The MIC is very real. But it has been so normalized that few understand how "resource intensive" it really is. So much so (and I paraphrase): "We spend more on defense than the next 8 nations COMBINED." POTUS Obama SotU Address 2016 A former general and POTUS warned us about the MIC and we aren't interested.

bonesss 8y ago
> But the media's attention surrounding that recent increase was focused on Stormy Daniels and/or some other alleged Trump admin gaffe. I'm a bit of a cynic, so I would readily cast a negative eye to the entire corporate media machine and assume they're void of integrity and merely interested in what grabs eyeballs and money ('if it bleeds, it leads')... In that vein I don't think the media has attention. "Media" throws anything it can to the wall in hopes of making money, and find a public who cares very little about either insane deficit increases. Point of fact, even the Stormy Daniels sex scandal barely registers in terms of meaningful public reaction... Time was a President would be out the door for a hint of something like this. I blame the people who have removed civics, and civic history, from childhood education. The same people who have eliminated previously sacred media segregation laws, and also eased campaign finance laws to the point of shadowy billionaires openly bankrolling national candidates and extremist agendas...
- chiefalchemist 8y ago
  I sit corrected. The MSM has attention...to profits. They'd show a pig taking a shit if it would increase ratings. You're not a cynic. You're spot on from my pov. It's the majority of semi-intelligent / semi-reasonable ppl who have lost their critical thinking minds. What's going on is obvious, __if__ you're not constantly whipped up in some emotional frenzy. But that's a big if at this point.
rkuykendall-com 8y ago
It's just not what the people want to hear. Trump was elected saying the military needed "rebuilt."

ataturk 8y ago

MIC gonna MIC. It's been like this for my entire lifetime. Every war since WWII was at the behest of these industries.

Clubber 8y ago

Good one. It reminds me of Hitler's infamous Tiger II tank. Amazing, nearly unstoppable technology; when it didn't break down driving off the factory floor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_II

binarray2000 8y ago

From a man who knew, what he's talking about, George F. Kennan: "Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy." https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_F._Kennan https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_F._Kennan

bmer 8y ago
Another quotation from that page: " There are certain sad appreciations we have to come to about human nature on the basis of these recent wars. One of them is that suffering does not always make men better. Another is that people are not always more reasonable than governments; that public opinion, or what passes for public opinion, is not invariably a moderating force in the jungle of politics. It may be true, and I suspect it is, that the mass of people everywhere are normally peace-loving and would accept many restraints and sacrifices in preference to the monstrous calamities of war. But I also suspect that what purports to be public opinion in most countries that consider themselves to have popular government is often not really the consensus of the feelings of the mass of the people at all, but rather the expression of the interests of special highly vocal minorities — politicians, commentators, and publicity-seekers of all sorts: people who live by their ability to draw attention to themselves and die, like fish out of water, if they are compelled to remain silent. These people take refuge in the pat and chauvinistic slogans because they are incapable of understanding any others, because these slogans are safer from the standpoint of short-term gain, because the truth is sometimes a poor competitor in the market place of ideas — complicated, unsatisfying, full of dilemma, always vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse. The counsels of impatience and hatred can always be supported by the crudest and cheapest symbols; for the counsels of moderation, the reasons are often intricate, rather than emotional, and difficult to explain. And so the chauvinists of all times and places go their appointed way: plucking the easy fruits, reaping the little triumphs of the day at the expense of someone else tomorrow, deluging in noise and filth anyone who gets in their way, dancing their reckless dance on the prospects for human progress, drawing the shadow of a great doubt over the validity of democratic institutions. And until people learn to spot the fanning of mass emotions and the sowing of bitterness, suspicion, and intolerance as crimes in themselves — as perhaps the greatest disservice that can be done to the cause of popular government — this sort of thing will continue to occur."

hinkley 8y ago

So here’s what I remember from American and World History classes. World War II is joined by the US. Shortly after we start selling war bonds to raise tons of operating capital. We commandeer Detroit and have them build airplanes. No new cars are made for something like four years. The draft starts, women start making the airplanes, and any raw material that goes into equipment or feeding the army gets rationed. After the war “we need to be prepared” morphs from maintaining a strong industrial complex into a special case: the MIC. Maybe because we felt that World War III would be fought in weeks and not years. I don’t think we know that to be the case anymore. Wouldn’t it be better for the peace time welfare of Americans to spend this volume of money on all of the constituent pieces needed to build a war machine but in plowshare form. Domestic production of steel, aluminum, titanium, rocket motor parts. High explosives. High output robust turbofans. Transsonic passenger jets. Sensor arrays, predictive systems, generators, high torque motors (IC and electric), rifles, tents, ruggedized integrated circuits. Only a few of those are strictly wartime products.

partycoder 8y ago
Churchill saw that the defeat of Britain was inevitable without allied help so through the Tizard Mission they transferred their military technology knowledge to the US in exchange for help. That included the cavity magnetron radar technology, one of the first mobile radars as well as other important innovations. The US engaged the Germans on land but that went very poorly, so they kept doing strategic airstrikes, notably taking down the German synthetic fuel production capabilities. This forced Germans to advance east. Meanwhile America supplied the Soviets with trucks and boots, helping the Soviets fight the Germans, a successful plan that resulted in heavy Soviet casualties. The Pacific front was a different story.
- greedo 8y ago
  Uh no. I'll just address the inaccuracies in your second paragraph. By the time the US was engaging the Germans on land (Operation Torch in Nov. 1942), the Germans were already stuck in Stalingrad and had been defeated in their attempt to capture Moscow. They would never pose a serious threat in the East again. By spring they would be retreating as the Soviets unleashed their rebuilt armies on the weary Wehrmacht. Operation Torch didn't go "poorly," though the green US troops didn't perform as well as seasoned British or German troops would have. Nor did US troops perform poorly during Operation Husky. By the time the Allies landed in Normandy, the US was performing extremely well. Strategic airstrikes by the US (and British) never had a significant impact on the German industrial output. Nor did they have a damaging effect on German morale.