The Jet that Ate the Pentagon

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/04/26/the_jet_that_ate_the_pentagon

by Zarkonnen • 14 years ago

57 84 14 years ago

rollypolly• 14 years ago

  F-35 lacks the F-16's agility in the air-to-air mode and
  the F-15E's range and payload in the bombing mode, and it
  can't even begin to compare to the A-10 at low-altitude
  close air support for troops engaged in combat.

"jack of all trades, master of none". :(

D_Alex2• 14 years ago

You sound like my wife... she says I lack the good looks of Hugh Jackman and athletic abilities of Michael Phelps, and I can't even compare to Bill Gates in the amount of money I bring in.

Not defending the F-35 though. My main issue with it is that I can't see that it is needed at all.

evoxed2• 14 years ago

The US doesn't need them– but they'd love to sell them to other countries to recoup some of their costs. Too bad their pricing difficulties have pretty much ruined any chance of that working though, as Japan's already announced that they don't want them for more than the original projection.

potatolicious2• 14 years ago

> "My main issue with it is that I can't see that it is needed at all."

I don't usually find myself defending defense spending... but war-related technology is something you don't know you need, until you do, by which time it's too late to procure it.

If the US is going to continue its M.O. of attacking countries whose military air presence can be counted on two hands, and consists mostly of old Soviet cast-offs, then sure, the current level of tech is more than sufficient. Overkill, even. I don't think there has been a single loss of U.S. military aircraft to enemy action since... Kosovo?

I think a main impetus of this particular project is because both Russia and China are rapidly developing their own 5th-generation fighters, and while a head-to-head with China doesn't seem entirely likely, it's certainly less farfetched than the idea was 20 years ago.

Don't take it the wrong way, I'm not defending this particular boondoggle of a project, but the need for a 5th-generation fighter is entirely understandable.

On the plus side, it doesn't look like other countries' 5th-gen fighter projects are doing much better... The Chinese project has faced delay after delay after delay, and the Russians too.

philwelch15• 14 years ago

The F-16, F-18, A-10, and Harrier are aging airframes that won't last forever. They need to be replaced. And frankly, stealth is such an improvement in terms of survivability in combat that the marginal expense of stealth technology is easily worth it just to protect the monetary investment the government makes in a trained pilot.

The F-35 might not be the best design (they'd be better off with a cheaper F-22 derivative and a separate replacement for the Harrier I think) but it fulfills a real requirement.

rdtsc2• 14 years ago

It is needed because it is designed to replace all those.

Imagine your wife had Hugh Jackman, Michael Phelps and Bill Gates as her husbands in some strange polyamory type setup (hey you brought your wife into the conversation first ;-) ). And then one day, all those husbands disappeared and she was left with you.

darnton• 14 years ago

Hard to believe the article can make this observation without mention of John Boyd. http://www.amazon.com/Boyd-The-Fighter-Pilot-Changed/dp/B002...

yread• 14 years ago

Sounds a bit like the Space shuttle

newbie122• 14 years ago

The politicians' "make it do everything" mantra is the same reason the space shuttle was a disastrous, budget-consuming failure.

starpilot• 14 years ago

The F-35 is stealthier and has far better avionics than all of those aircraft. It could detect and shoot down an F-16 before it knew it was there, and do the same to ground targets. It doesn't have the low-speed loitering ability of the A-10, but that feature makes sense only for a pre-MANPADS era or battle.

philwelch15• 14 years ago

Actually, the STOVL variant of the F-35 has exactly the low-speed loitering ability, not of the A-10, but of the Harrier. That's what it was designed for.

chris_wot4• 14 years ago

You know something - I just tried to load this website as the article looks interesting. But it was taking forever to load. So I downloaded YSlow to find out what on earth was causing the problem, and the site has:

* 41 external javascript files

* 22 external CSS files

* Totals to 2106.9K of files, of which 1151.4K are javascript files, and 598.9K in images. It took 204 HTTP requests to get this page to load.

* has about 37 different DNS lookups to get access to all the files

One of the websites that host external javascript files took over 9 seconds to load approximately 350K.

On top of this, I've never seen so much analytics and tracking on any website - ever!

Seriously, someone needs to have a good look at the way that this site is constructed. Such a massive bandwidth hog - and noticably slow!

evoxed2• 14 years ago

I didn't notice until I read this and pulled up the page again. My connection is apparently fast enough for it not to matter, but I was watching the DNT+ badge. 4... then 6... then incrementing up to 14 blocks. I guess they've got a lot goin' on.

chris_wot4• 14 years ago

Damn.

Facebook Connect

Twitter Badge

AddThis

Google Adsense

OutBrain

Quantcast

Comscore Beacon

Omniture

Google Analytics

New Relic

ChartBeat

That's remarkable!

BruceM• 14 years ago

@blakehounshell (one of their editors) is very active on Twitter (and a great person to follow), so I passed the link to this along to him.

A lot of the stuff being loaded seems to come from their commenting system.

chris_wot4• 14 years ago

Thanks! I sent them an email, a tweet may be a bit more effective :-)

jakeonthemove4• 14 years ago

Just use NoScript (and optionally AdBlock Plus) and forget about it :-)...

antidoh• 14 years ago

Ironic environment for an article about an airplane overburdened with mission creep.

showerst• 14 years ago

I'm actually the guy responsible for this site (Web Director at FP).

The reason for all of this is that it's a kitchen-sink Drupal install, plus every ad industry service in history.

We've been working to cut all of this down, but I haven't been on the job for very long =P. A fair number of the images aren't even properly minimized! You'll see it improve soon though =).

chris_wot4• 14 years ago

Nice - welcome aboard :-)

spodek• 14 years ago

Visiting Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) for the first time, their Vietnam War museums reminded me of the consequence of a tactical advantage (like air superiority) in the context of a failed strategy (like invading without a good reason).

You lose wars.

The life and business on the streets there reminded me what happens when you don't invade for no reasons.

Capitalism flourishes.

At least from what you see on the street level, capitalism is doing better there than in the bailout-laden U.S.

Did I oversimplify? Of course. But until the U.S. shows some strategic intelligence like "don't invade countries without a reason" its tactical choices will always fail too.

By the way, they call it the American War there.

hnhg2• 14 years ago

Given a time when everyone was told there was a great threat from the aggressive expansionism of the Soviet Union and China, they felt they had a good reason. They thought Vietnam would result in a domino effect across the region.

I don't think it was a great reason and most now don't, but then again I thought Afghanistan could never work, and there were very few of us who would say so. It's easy to get swept up by militaristic arguments it seems.

darklajid• 14 years ago

And Afghanistan did 'work'?

toyg• 14 years ago

"few of us" were actually quite a majority... Of people who knew what they were talking about. And we were right: Afghanistan cannot be "conquered" or "fixed", as 10+ years of failed occupation have proven.

newbie122• 14 years ago

The holocaust in Cambodia committed by the Khmer communists was one direct result of our failure in Vietnam. And it took the fall of the Berlin Wall and the broad collapse of communist ideology in the 1990s before Vietnam began to liberalize.

jeltz• 14 years ago

Some blame the American bombings, which started with Operation Menu in 1969, for giving Pol Pot the popular support he needed.

I do not know enough of Cambodian history to tell if it is true, but at least it sounds like a plausible scenario.

GiraffeNecktie• 14 years ago

Correlation is not causation. One could just as easily argue that it was the intervention of western powers (France and the US) in Southeast Asia that gave the communists legitimacy which then lead to the holocaust in Cambodia. Liberalization in Vietnam had more to do with changes in China and improved relations with the United States, than the Berlin Wall.

philwelch15• 14 years ago

The US was an ally of South Vietnam at their government's invitation, and never did actually invade North Vietnam. If they did, maybe the war would have gone differently.

smacktoward• 14 years ago

> The US was an ally of South Vietnam at their government's invitation

Oh come on. South Vietnam was an American client state from the word go. American advisors helped run Ngo Dinh Diem's campaign in the 1955 referendum that set up the South Vietnamese government. When Diem didn't turn out to be the man the U.S. government had hoped he would, American money helped finance the 1963 coup that killed him.

> and never did actually invade North Vietnam

No, we just bombed the holy hell out of them: see Operation Rolling Thunder (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Rolling_Thunder) and Operation Linebacker II (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Linebacker_II) for examples.

jbooth7• 14 years ago

I'd suggest reading this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_assassination_of_Ng%...

danssig• 14 years ago

I wouldn't be so sure. It hasn't worked out well in Iraq or Afghanistan.

rdtsc2• 14 years ago

Oh I see. So they installed the government in SV, propped it up and then that government officially invited us. And then we reluctantly offered our "help"?

onetwothreefour• 14 years ago

LOL.

A bit of revisionist history never hurt anyone.

staunch• 14 years ago

I just assume they're funneling huge portions of that money into secret projects. How else do they get their hands on a spare $100 billion without anyone noticing?

Better to seem incompetent than reveal you've got a warp drive/time machine/transporter project.

I know it's kind of an optimistic view, but it does make me feel better.

toemetoch• 14 years ago

Have a look at all the bells and whistles that pop out for vertical take off: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm7_PPE-8nk

Those are all intricate mechanisms that need to withstand severe levels of stress.

its_so_on• 14 years ago

Oh man, you're right. Can you imagine if it could also turn into a submarine and have to withstand immense water pressure, have an intricate periscope, etc? That would justify 100billion for sure. Note to military: no, please don't. I'm only kidding....

philwelch15• 14 years ago

That's what happens when you have a reasonable idea, i.e. let's replace the F-16 and F/A-18, and all of a sudden someone says "hey, the Harrier is getting old too" and you realize the politicians aren't going to pay for two new planes at once, especially not after how much they've already spent on the F-22 and B-2, so you just throw all the requirements together, so by the time it lands on the desk of an actual engineer who realizes what a hash of things you've made, it's too late to change course.

bcl• 14 years ago

Software isn't the only thing that suffers from feature creep (or bloat). The V-22 Osprey has similar problems, driven by their attempt to meet the requirements of all the branches of service.

jakeonthemove4• 14 years ago

I really like the F-22 - they should've kept building it and maybe modified it for different purposes. The F16 are also pretty capable.

The only way the F35 will pay for itself is if it can turn into a space fighter :-D - otherwise, with all those components onboard, it will cost even more to maintain it over the next several decades.

Heck, in a real war, I'd rather take something simpler that is easy to build and cheaper to repair - Russia seems to have it right with the SU/MIG 3X, which are just perfected 2X designs...

api• 14 years ago

The clusterfuck of competing requirements reminds me almost exactly of the space shuttle, a similar disaster that barely worked.

The shuttle could have been really awesome had its requirements only been set by NASA. Instead they had the NRO and other agencies jumping in there with space-irrelevant stuff that never even got used.

lonnyk• 14 years ago

Please elaborate on what was added by whom and not used?

sgt101• 14 years ago

For the Shuttle the big unused and underused capabilities were "retrieval to cargo bay and return to earth" and "launch to polar orbit".

I believe that this was imposed on the program by the US Airforce due to the need to collect spy satellites for service and put large payloads into polar orbit.

I think that the polar orbit requirement was never used, and had a very significant impact.

ck2• 14 years ago

They'll never admit that war is an outdated business model.

But the military industrial complex needs to be slowly starved to death.

jbattle• 14 years ago

The business model isn't fighting the war, it's selling stuff prior to prepare for a war that may or may not happen.

dantillberg• 14 years ago

This is kind of an unfortunate title for those of us that still remember 9/11.

RyanMcGreal• 14 years ago

This story will also have strong significance for Canadians, whose government is currently in the throes of a controversy over how much we're planning to spend to buy a fleet of F35s.

The Jet that Ate the Pentagon

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