F-35 logistics system to be reinvented and renamed, official says
reuters.comThe functioning or non-functioning of the logistics system for the F-35 is largely irrelevant, as just demonstrated Lockheed is paid whether it works or not; and non-functioning is much safer for the program, as non-flying F-35s are safe from combat and accidents. In fact, low availability just provides an excuse for the Air Force to demand additional budget for aircraft. This isn't so much a combat system as a corporate welfare program.
In practice, the US has already demonstrated that its primary airpower projection is via unmanned systems, the manned combat aircraft is the mounted cavalry c. 1920.
>>In practice, the US has already demonstrated that its primary airpower projection is via unmanned systems, the manned combat aircraft is the mounted cavalry c. 1920.
1. The US hasn't had to overcome a first-rate Integrated Air Defense System since the 1970s. UAVs, while hard to detect due to their small RCS, have extremely poor overall survivability. It's part of what makes them so cheap.
2. The US is rarely flying drones against an adversary with robust Electronic Attack capabilities. They're pretty useless if their datalinks to their Ground Control Station are jammed and you don't have HARMs on-hand to suppress/neutralize/destroy the jamming source.
3. The future of air power is likely to be a mix of manned fighters with UAVs as wingmen or forward-deployed scouts/sensor platforms, and then further in the rear big (manned) "bombers" with deep magazines throwing missiles into the fight from far away, handing off target tracking to the manned fighter. Even something like an F-15 Strike Eagle or a Su-34 could fulfill that latter role with the right electronics suite and ordnance upgrades...
If history is any indication, the future of air power will be three years of absolutely terrible strategies after the next war starts, where the wrong weapons are being manufactured and the right weapons are being deployed incorrectly, then followed by one month of sanity which sets the military doctrine for the next two decades of peace, to remain in place as it becomes obsolete again...
A serious question here: what history are you drawing this inference from?
Popular history tends to be a distorted view of history that willfully ignores evidence to the contrary to tell a good story, and military history especially tends to fall victim here. As a good case in point, take WWI. In popular history, WWI is a war of unimaginable destruction because generals were idiots fighting Napoleonic-era tactics with modern weaponry. But that's not really sustained by the evidence. The generals and officer class were aware of how much more effective modern guns and gunnery was compared to the Napoleonic wars, and their battle plans accounted for this. Trenches came out of known tactics--on the defensive, digging in is the most effective way to avoid the lethality of opposing weapons, and an underground trench is more effective than an above-ground static fortification.
Any historical claim can be argued with, and I guess this is an example, but I would maintain that WWI involved a lot of things that wouldn't be repeated with modern knowledge. To offer another example, consider actual Napoleonic-era tactics: why was Napoleon running around and defeating everyone with them when the same guns were basically available everywhere? Ideally everyone would have copied his artillery tactics as soon as he used them once, but military leadership rarely moves that fast. If you sent a general from the era to West Point today, they would probably be able to defeat Napoleon.
> consider actual Napoleonic-era tactics: why was Napoleon running around and defeating everyone with them when the same guns were basically available everywhere?
More prosaically, Napoleon had much larger armies available to him than his opponents: "You can't stop me, I spend 30000 men a month" [1].
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25qmz6/can_s...
I would argue that WWI was so deadly because it was modern weaponry without modern medicine to go with it. We made huge strides in treating casualties between the two wars.
Thank you for correcting a common (HN/SW) perspective I've seen recently. "Software will fix all problems, everywhere"
these combat drones are manned, the human is just out in an air conditioned office building in nevada. there’s no reason you’d put someone at risk in a $150M fighter when you could bring 4-5 unmanned fighters with similar weapons platforms. i don’t think there’s any future with combat pilots flying top gun style
> 2. The US is rarely flying drones against an adversary with robust Electronic Attack capabilities. They're pretty useless if their datalinks to their Ground Control Station are jammed and you don't have HARMs on-hand to suppress/neutralize/destroy the jamming source.
GPS jamming can be made vastly more difficult by special antenna configurations, and additionally I'd hope that military drones have precise IMUs and star trackers to serve as fallback.
(with my tin-foil hat securely fastened)
I've always had a suspicion that the generous piles of cash thrown at the F-35 program was really going to two programs:
1) A well-publicised cover (F-35)
2) A secret Skunk Works project like F-117, SR-71
But a corporate welfare program as you suggest is more likely.
Why not have both?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Aurora#U.S._sighting_c...
(Evidence of something moving around Mach 5 at high altitude, rattling the rocks, captured by seismic equipment since the 90ies. Overton Window has now been open long enough for Lockheed Martin to tentatively present https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_SR-72 as something new.)
This is always an exciting question... You know, it's nice to daydream about all kinds of secret and mysterious projects. But I think another question is more about necessity, and I think necessity is what fuels a lot of politics around these kind of military projects. People pull towards both extremes and end up somewhere in the middle, which is maybe the mean of perceived necessity.
If the US is clever (NSA: this is your queue) it would find a way to use the current difficult political climate to focus on what they are supposed to do (I guess preventing war maybe) and in a relevant way for the times. The Russians basically did this with internet trolls. They took something simple (and amusing at times) and weaponised it.
I guess one would hope enough people that are both clever and uhm, ethical, work for the three-letter organisations.
nitpick: in this context, you would want to use the word "cue" not "queue". "cue" => signal for an actor to go on stage or whatever. "queue" => orderly line of people waiting to buy a movie ticket.
True, thanks. But in this case it was a fortunate fluke. Their queue is probably pretty long and unresolved as we speak.
It... doesn't really work
It was a typo, I acknowledged it, and made a joke. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It's such a good corporate welfare program that it produced an actual good aircraft.
It's more worker/voter welfare than corporate welfare. Socialism for the middle class.
Lockheed Martin's long term profit margin is around 6-7 percent (recently above 9%). Lockheed pays more wages than it makes profits.
If you count the whole value chain, with contractors and their subcontractors, it's probably something like 50% total worker compensation (wages, benefits), 10% profits, 10% cost of capital, rest is taxes, real estate, energy and raw materials.
Trickle-down economics?
No tinfoil hat required. Not only was this guy a famous general, he was the POTUS as well. The Military Industrial Complex is very real.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9QXjBVC233s
The Afghanistan Papers - which dropped off the mainstream media's radar almost instantly - is further evidence it's alive and well.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/...
Real work is (comparably) cheap. With F35 budget well over a trillion dollars this is 2-3 orders of magnitude larger than needed to fund maximum number of projects Skunk works can sustain, at max manpower. It is bureaucratic waste with minimum productive output. My 2c.
> Skunk works can sustain, at max manpower. It is bureaucratic waste with minimum productive output. My 2c.
Isn't the idea of skunkwork projects exactly to avoid bureaucratic waste for the sake of radical innovation?! Let me give three quotes from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Skunkworks_projec...:
"A skunkworks project is a project developed by a relatively small and loosely structured group of people who research and develop a project primarily for the sake of radical innovation."
"Everett Rogers defined skunkworks as an "enriched environment that is intended to help a small group of individuals design a new idea by escaping routine organizational procedures.""
"[T]he term [skunkworks] was generalized to apply to similar high-priority R&D projects at other large organizations which feature a small elite team removed from the normal working environment and given freedom from management constraints.".
In this sense, the projects you are talking about surely cannot be skunkwork projects, but are just ordinary cooperate projects with a huge conservative cooperate-bureaucratic structure.
Yes, and that's exactly what the post you are responding to said. Read it again: it says that the money is far more than skunkworks could possibly spend, so it's far more likely that the evaporating money is being boiled away by ordinary bureaucratic waste with nothing to show for it.
I am no native speaker of English, but at
> Skunk works can sustain, at max manpower. It is bureaucratic waste with minimum productive output.
to me, "it" seems to refer to "[s]kunk work" and referring to skunk work with respect to "max manpower" does not sound like skunk work to me, but throwing lots of cooperate ressources (instead of a small elite team) at the project.
"It" here refers to "F35 budget". The punctuation is not ideal; I think it would be clearer something like this:
> With the F35 budget well over a trillion dollars (this is 2-3 orders of magnitude larger than needed to fund maximum number of projects Skunk works can sustain, at max manpower), it is a bureaucratic waste with minimum productive output.
The word "Skunk" does not start a new sentence. It is in the middle of this phrase: "this is 2-3 orders of magnitude larger than needed to fund maximum number of projects Skunk works can sustain". I'll agree that the punctuation isn't ideal; that phrase should have been preceded by a comma.
The poster you are responding to is correct. Sorry, I could have been clearer in wording and "it"s.
Skunkworks is great, but works while it is small and nimble. Fund it fully. But this could cost billions, tens of billions at most. Not trillions that have been spent on F-35.
Isn't the idea of skunkwork projects exactly to avoid bureaucratic waste for the sake of radical innovation?
In the true sense of the word, yes. However, the MIC and the budgets that support it have their own working definition. It's not about the ends/results, It's about the means (swallowing more and more budget).
Pay attention to the time frame for that trillion dollars: 55 years.
> airpower projection is via unmanned systems
I'm unconvinced by this assessment, for one they haven't had symmetrical warfare in a long time and a pilot is way harder to jam. for another long range laser ciws systems are getting more and more effective and if you armor cheap unmanned system they stop being cheap. but ultimately they have limited payload option and you can always pack more countermeasures than the enemy pack missiles so it's yet unclear what the best option is in a defended/contested airspace
Honestly non fully autonomous UAVs are going to drop like flies if they encounter a F-35. People seem to fail to understand that the F-35 is also an advanced ECM platform. What is that drone going to do once its connection to the remote base is cut?
> also an advanced ECM platform
I would suggest they are primarily an ECM platform. It is well known that the F-22 is a superior fighter compared to the F-35. The main feature of the F-35 that puts fear in potential adversaries are the capabilities that become available when multiple F-35 are in the air and linked with one another (or other larger aircraft with comparable systems, e.g. AWACS).
Home in on the loudest RF source and try to ram it?
they don't have the engine and maneuverability to reach that speed. if they had, you'd have to have the same kind of logistic and complexity as a fighter craft, negating most of the above points about drones.
missiles don't have the same restrictions because they don't have to have anything in the way of performance as loiter time or target search system or payloads.
what you're thinking of are Anti Radiation missiles such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-27_(air-to-air_missile)
but that ties with the point being made originally, you have to sacrifice payload, or go bigger to have more payload options, or go sideway and have air superiority drones sweep the area before, and it all ties into the "this stuff hasn't been tested in symmetric warfare so who knows" argument.
I know it's far-fetched, but what I was thinking about is if the F-35 is operating in CAS mode or otherwise flies through the area drones are in, then as long as the fighter is flying towards the drones, they may have a shot at placing themselves in front of the fighter, hoping the pilot will be distracted enough to ram them.
Genuinely curious: how do you jam a line-of-sight radio link?
Determine the frequency, then overpower the transmitter. Or just kill the transmitter...
If that's the case, sounds like a very peaceful solution for the world. The alternative is pushing for actual armed conflicts where actually working machines are killing actual people for corporate welfare.
Well said.
But now I wonder: if this is just so much smoke, mirrors and rose-tinted narratives of potentiality... when will the bubble pop? And what might cause that? And what might the pop (or maybe explosion) look like?
My curiosity is mostly just idle/morbid musing - this seems much like watching a moth encounter a candle.
I see two scenarios - the US military running out of money, or the F35 becoming necessary against an existential threat. I don't see either of those happing to the mainland US anytime soon. I'm just pissed that my own country is wasting endless money on this absurd boondoggle, where it represents a significantly larger fraction of our GDP.
I guess nothing special at all, just the next big project.
ALIS. Jesus. What a disaster it was. We had to use it in flight testing and our instantiation was so poor that you literally couldn't use it to order a part. You had to send an email to order parts.
And for the engineering tasks I was doing, there were no good ways to categorize the task, so I eventually gave up and called all the data loads I was doing "LUBRICATION/OTHER". Hey, making the data flow better is a kind of lubrication, right?
I would say "maybe it's gotten better since I used it years ago" but from this article it looks like the answer is a solid "No".
What all is it supposed to do beyond parts orders?
In a system like that, ordering parts is one of the least important elements.
It covers things like tracking wear&tear of components so that you know when to replace parts, and more importantly, know when to schedule repairs - it's crucial that you have well-planned maintenance that ensures maximum availability of aircraft, so you need to stagger them - which is non-trivial to do. That's probably the "MVP" level, which to be practical might involve tons of other stuff.
On a predecessor to ALIS for a different plane, even planning a mission went through it - you had someone come to you with requirements, and you'd arrange which plane, which pilots, which technicians to prepare it for flight, where are the tools they need for it, generate a fueling chart, everything based on the availability and qualifications.
Once the plane returned from mission, you'd enter various flight data, including stuff like "how many rounds the autocannon fired" so that the underlying MRP system could calculate maintenance dates and the like.
The ultimate goal is that you have a squadron that has maximum possible availability so it can fulfill its job in the air, without surprise maintenance (or worse - stuff breaking down) foiling your mission plans, and where your stores contain enough of all materiel necessary.
ALIS covered, AFAIK, all elements of logistics for F-35, a giant integrated system. Great on paper as the top level idea, everything got worse the more you got into implementation of the goals. I heard of rebasing where the bringup of local ALIS node took longer than the whole rebased mission. Downloading flight records post-flight would take longer than the flight. Planes that won't fly unless connection with "cloud" part of ALIS (all hosted centrally in USA) was done at least once a month. Gigantic amounts of data you had to transfer between "cloud" and local instance, making it more than problematic to run on ships equipped with F-35B and F-35C.
And of course the fact that data packages describing the operation theater can be generated only by one or two labs in USA (good luck, export customers!)... which is part of the ALIS cloud (and now ODIN cloud), which also is hosted by Lockheed Martin in USA.
Now that I think of it, ALIS explains significant portion of the money USAF puts into Starlink as its only customer...
Ordering parts should be a fairly simple thing to get right in comparison to all the other things the system should do. And yet...it failed at that.
True, I think back with the unnamed project I mentioned, we had an idea to do basic automation for that, a button that would send a message on JMS to another system that would print it for the mechanics or in future pass it over to procurement directly.
But we were stuck moving what was supposed to be just deployment into "actually useful for something" state, including rewriting more and more of the code (because L-M license forbid us from modifying their code...)
Also as someone who has used the system, you're right about all the other functions it does. Or is supposed to do. So thank you for posting.
Your detailed comment is highly appreciated.
Can you imagine trying to deal with that crap in an actual hot war when things are happening?
This was not a fluke.
The failure rate of large scale IT projects is the huge. For large, complex projects the statistics is
2% success
42% challenged
56% failed
The new system has probably similar 50% change for success. I think giving the new project to the same contractor may improve the changes. Hhey have hopefully learned something.
In this case the chances of success are even lower, given the track record of the company doing it.
Which involves as stellar things as delivering a not-working (but "valid under contract" so we couldn't sue them) system for logistics management (everything from ensuring parts are on the shelves to assigning jobs to technicians and pilots for a mission) that we later found was rebranded broken car logistics support software, something that was found 3 years post original delivery date by new employee of a team working on fixing it - which meant we had to rework a crucial module.
Said software had gems like JS copied from geocities in 1998 handling drop down menus (which were broken unless very specific browser versions were used) - in 2012. (original delivery date was 2009~2010).
The "redo" contract is going to the same guys who just did the failure, and I've seen no mention of removal of one of the bigger pain points, which was use of cloud.
Hack: Start development of n systems in parallel, to get 1-(0.98)^n success probability.
Isn't this sort of the FAAAM strategy regarding senior talent retention? Pay 10x engineers to work on pet projects rather than have them jump ship.
If only the variables were independent, right...
This has been proposed and it seems like a credible strategy. The actually implemented versions seem to always end the competition phase relatively early so they are not very good experiments for validating the idea.
"ODIN will be based in the cloud and designed to deliver data in near real time on aircraft and system performance under heightened cyber security provisions, Lord said. "
heart warming to see us draw ever closer to the cyberpunk dystopia of my childhood dreams.
Wait till you learn that some F-16s run with Kubernetes on board.
https://thenewstack.io/how-the-u-s-air-force-deployed-kubern...
"“One point for the team was to demonstrate that it could be done,” Chaillan said. He challenged the Air Force and its partners to get Kubernetes up and running on a jet in 45 days, and while that was as difficult as it sounds, the team met the goal and F-16s are now running three concurrent Kubernetes clusters, he said."
I’m having enough trouble seeing why you’d want one Kube cluster on an F-16, never mind three.
Probably because there are tons of censors on modern jets and you need something to manage them.
However I wouldn't use a civilian made system for this, you're going to spend the rest of the program lifetime correcting security holes.
Because civilian made is not invented here?
I don't understand how you can even imply that it's because of a stupid reason like that.
No the reason is that there are fundamental differences in the risk profile of the civilian and military sector.
Adversaries will insert spies in mission critical projects if they are publicly accessible. Once the main contributors stop maintaining the project the military will have to hire people and train them for maintenance but all the people that can train the replacements have already left. The military has to verify every single line of code every time the code base is updated.
All of these problems don't exist in projects where the full life cycle is taken care of by the military.
The internet of things suffers from the same problems. Once you are dependent on a vendor and that vendor shuts down or cancels a product you're stuck with a lot of paperweights. The vendor is usually not acting in your interest.
If there's one open source project government can easily adopt it is kubernetes.
Have you heard of the cloud native computing foundation where members have committed to longterm investment in kubernetes development?
Kubernetes is the commoditization of infrastructure layers and serious forward looking companies are member of CNFC.
I assume you are aware of the history of Silicon Valley with defense contractors. And you probably also heard that the FBI approached Paypall for fraud detection capabilities. Hence Peter Thiel's venture Palantir.
“One point for the team was to demonstrate that it could be done,”
I guess some sensor/radar data processing ?
I can run Kubernettes on my laptop even while in orbit.
Oh no, oh no no no... Please tell me you are joking. The good news though is that World War III is officially cancelled now. If anyone will ever decide to start it, they would probably debug crashing pods and spaghetti code in startup scripts for years afterwards.
All avionics are done these days in the form of communicating microservices, the main difference is that scheduling and routing is static and assigned upfront.
i was 100% certain this comment was a parody.. until i clicked on the link...
At least it's on board.
ODIN being in the cloud is nothing new - a big pain point with ALIS is the fact that it's cloud based.
A few EMP bursts can demolish the cloud, at least as we civilians know it.
I dunno about that, if you're multi-region? https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regio...
That's more than a few EMP's...
Of course if they deploy it on a single Digital Ocean droplet then it's a bit more vulnerable.
How do you get EMP bursts powerful enough to do that?
Yeah that's my point. If the vulnerability relies on nukes then is it even a vulnerability? If nukes are being exchanged that's game and it's a moot point.
Is it? I thought about it like that for a long time also. But nowadays i think think this thought applied to the 'city killers' on or slightly above ground only.
OTOH there are many satellites up there whose missions are unknown (to us). Who is to say that some party wouldn't try it, maybe during a geomagnetic storm? Or, maybe some crazy like NK because, hey, got china watching my Six!1!! Of course the orbits, and therefore the owners are known.
This does not need to be 'high tech' in the way some understand rocket science or reentry vehicles to be. Just some crude device which survives start and waiting 'up there', then being ignited later, without the complications of reentry heat and burn.
Miles of copper wire, thick titanium tube, large neodymium magnet, and C4. The hard part is the simulations/experimental design of the titanium part such that the exploding C4 and melting wire don't disintegrate the whole device before the magnet has had a chance to pass through the whole coil.
Last time I did the math though, you'd only get a few tens of kilometers of effect radius with an 20ft shipping container sized device so realistically, EMPs are only deployable using nuclear weapons detonated in the atmosphere.
Nukes. But in space.
I wonder if it was proposed by a Neal Stephenson fan (DODO)?
I'd loved to see this bumped up so that it appears on the front page right next to the link on "Why do we fall into the rewrite trap?" for a nice little juxtaposition. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22106367
I'd like to see someone dig up this bit from The Art of Computer Programming, where Knuth says rewrites are compulsory:
Lets just call it what it is, welfare for the educated. Its a money giveaway to support defense workers.
Welfare for the corporate offices of Lockheed-Martin. I'm not sure how well they pay, given the level of crap they deliver, at least in L-M Global Training & Logistics (the actual vendor for ALIS and ODIN).
There is a reason the richest counties in the US are all suburbs of Washington DC...
Obligatory War Nerd post:
https://pando.com/2015/09/24/war-nerd-why-f-35-albanian-mush...
Still done by the same incompetents (but with good sales team in parent company).
“Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.”
Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month (1975)