What Would You Cut?
Leon Panetta is upset about the possibility of further cuts to the Defense Budget, saying it would harm our security. Garbage!
There is no justification in terms of threats to the US for the billions wasted on the Missile Defense System. The system has never passed a real-world test, and only passed a bare majority of the fraudulent ‘tests’ that were designed to prove its success.
Not only does it not work, major portions of the infrastructure for the system are going to need major work to repair shoddy initial construction that was hurried to meet a deadline.
You save money by eliminating systems, not trimming around the edges.
The F-35 needs major scrutiny because all of the ‘working’ examples have just been grounded again because of problems with its ground power system. This happened before and was supposedly faulty maintenance procedures, but it has occurred again after the procedures were changed.
This program is so over time and budget, that many of the countries that signed on are looking at alternatives before they lose their air forces. Locally there is a wing of personnel polishing the seats of office chairs because they have only one recently arrived aircraft to work on and none they can fly.
We spend all this money, and can’t seem to supply the people on the ground the tools they need to actually do their jobs.
17 comments
And don’t forget the F-22, also grounded because every current example has a bad habit of asphyxiating its pilot.
At this rate, the Air Force will be reduced to throwing rocks at any potential opponent, because every flyable airframe will have disintegrated from old age.
– Badtux the Flightless Penguin
(Just like the USAF’s F-22’s and F-35’s, now that I think about it!)
I have been trying to ignore the F-22, another aircraft with no real purpose, along with the B-1 and B-2. The missions for the B-1 and B-2 are created out of whole cloth to justify their existence.
I’m reminded of the SR-71’s older brother, the YF-12, that was going to be the NORAD long range interceptor, until people figured out that if we deployed it, it would have to fly low and slow to intercept its targets. Also, its primary missile was more expensive than the TU-95s it was designed to eliminate.
We keep sending up a pair of F-16s to intercept people flying Cessnas, at an outrageous cost. We need something cheap with guns for that kind of operation, not supersonic jet aircraft.
Well… I know what I’d cut!! 😉 But I’ll leave that for another thread! 😆
You know how it will go. Anything in a Rethug controlled district, county, city or state won’t be touched. Anything in a Dem area can be eliminated. 🙂 *shrug*
The military-industrial complex is smarter than that, Kryten. They break these systems up so that parts are made in districts with both Repubs and Dem Congresscritters, so it doesn’t matter who has the majority.
Truth be told, I haven’t seen a new major Pentagon system in decades that was worth buying. There have been so decent refinements of old designs, like the FA-18 Super Hornet, but all new systems tend to be overly complex and multi-use, doing none of their stated missions as well as the systems they are replacing.
The version of the F-35 that is supposed to replace the Harrier jump-jet currently requires nearly class-100 lab conditions to actually take-off or land vertically without destroying the engine with the debris blown up. Fabulous intake design that I’m sure worked like a charm in the computer simulations, that somehow didn’t include any dust or FOD in the landing zone.
Maybe. I worked for the MIC (GD) for a while, and they were not that bright back then. Greedy, yes and mostly rethugs, even in the 80’s. I think they are worse now. It’s not just current programs that are useless, but they have killed off many other projects (some even that were of some value and actually worked, such as the Crusader self-propelled 155-mm Howitzer. it successfully completed all first round tests, and even MRSI. It was killed by rethugs because the Bushmoron crew wanted more air power. Now GD has resurected Crusader in Europe in partnership with KMW and others (under a new name and a redesign). And other MIC companies are doing the same. Leaving the stupid USA to make their toy’s in the EU, Singapore, India and elsewhere. And you can bet the profits, or benefits, are not going to the USA. *shrug* The ARmy really wanted Crusader, so it wouldn’t surprise me if they buy them from the EU or Singapore. The Army has their new light 105mm SPH called Styker *made by GD*, but what they don’t say is that it was made in SA in cooperation with Denel SA, and in fact uses weapons systems designed and owned by Denel SA because the Bushmorons killed the US 105 & 155mm programs. And there are many other examples. The US Marines are buying systems from BAE, etc, etc.
Won’t matter the way things are going what US MIC projects get cut. The US Military will be importing everything anyway. *shrug*
You can add the V-22 Osprey to your list also. 😉
The FA-18 Super Hornet was actually basically a new design, sold as a re-working of the old F18 Hornet only to get it past the beancounters. Granted, it was a new design that was no conceptual leap — just make a big, cheap bomb truck, basically a scaled-up Hornet, for hauling heavy loads long distances, duh — but the only thing it shared with the Hornet was the two digits “1” and “8” and the avionics suite (and really, why re-invent something that worked?).
Which is the problem with today’s new designs coming from the MIC, they’re too ambitious. But that’s not the MIC’s fault. That’s the perfumed princes at the Pentagon, who pile their wish lists hip deep. The days of a M4 Sherman which was a refinement of the M3 Grant which was a modification of the M2 Medium Tank are long gone, the Pentagon doesn’t want better versions of old concepts, they want a jet that will defy the laws of physics with every new concept under the sun included, even if none of it has been proven to work in the past.
Which reminds me of one of my rules for good product design: One concept. That is, a new product should have one concept or technology that’s new and innovative. The rest should be something safe and well-known. Including more than one new technology as part of a new product is simply too much risk, because you’re squaring the unknowns. And the risk grows exponentially as you add yet more new concepts or technologies into your product, until you eventually arrive at the point where delivering the product is as unlikely as Michelle Bachmann passing a sanity test or cows flying by flapping their ears. Sadly, the Pentagon appears to either not know, or have forgotten, that lesson…
– Badtux the Technology Penguin
Kryten, I think the unsuitability of Osprey has been flogged to death here, and the transport & helicopter combination has a proven track record. An Osprey landing or taking off is such an easy target for iron sight shooters that no one would waste a missile on one.
The Repubs don’t believe in boots on the ground, they want fast, clean wars fought with high tech toys from a distance, which is why drones are so popular. Maybe because I was in the US Air Force and watched the Soviet VVS, I am painfully aware of the limitations of air power. Overwhelming air power requires to the enemy to go to guerrilla tactics whether they want to or not, and you can’t win a guerrilla war from a cockpit, you need boots on the ground.
The Stryker started out as a good idea and design, then they started playing with it. It was supposed to drive-on/off a C-130. The specifications were designed so that it could roll off the rear ramp of a Hercules with guns blazing, but now it is ‘some assembly required’ and it needs a loadmaster’s exemption to even be loaded, which requires better runways. It has lost a major design specification by being screwed with after the project was underway.
That, Badtux, is the best way of getting something useful, because it not only avoids the beancounters, it avoids the ‘enhancements’ and wish-lists of a lot of the Pentagon’s sand table warriors.
Having been on the receiving end of some of the Air Force’s new and wonderful redesigns of old equipment, I really appreciated the skill and craftsmanship of our maintenance guys. because without them to fix all of the mistakes made in a re-fit, the stuff would have been totally worthless. It had swell new features that no one used because they had nothing to do with the actual job, and very useful older functions were missing.
You’re right about overreaching, because there is no way of predicting how things will work when everything is new and untested in the real world. Just look at the Boeing 787. AirBus just cleaned Boeing’s clock on new orders by modifying an older design, while Boeing is still trying to get one out the door.
Boeing seems to have neglected to line up any suppliers of nuts and bolts for its new aircraft. The aircraft has been delayed multiple times because of a shortage of aircraft fasteners, not just at Boeing, but at many of the subcontractors.
Overwhelming air power requires to the enemy to go to guerrilla tactics whether they want to or not, and you can’t win a guerrilla war from a cockpit, you need boots on the ground.
An interesting observation. I might add that you not only need boots on the ground, you need boots on the ground immersed in or at least very familiar with the culture. Parachuting foreign troops into a foreign culture and expecting them to be able to find and eliminate the guerrillas in the midst of the locals is as futile as expecting them to find needles in a whole country of haystacks. In the end, it’s not even boots on the ground that win guerilla wars — it’s boots on the ground and secret policemen. Without the latter, even Stalin had trouble with guerillas — he had to pull the Red Army out of the Ukraine after WW2 because they were totally ineffective and send in hoards of secret policemen backed by NKVD/MVD internal troops, who did mass relocations of people so that every village ended up full of strangers any of whom might be secret policemen and otherwise disrupted the ability of the guerillas to hide in the local populace. By the end of the UPA in the early 50’s it was joked that if four UPA partisans got together, three of them were MVD spies.
So that’s that. Boots. Cops. None of that has piss-all to do with stealth bombers and gigantic motorized artillery systems. BTW, Kryten, the Crusader was cancelled because it was too heavy — after all the Pentagon lard was added, the bloody thing was 110 tons. The Crusader in the end was the wrong weapon for the wrong war — a great weapon for the plains of Eastern Europe if we wanted to invade the Soviet Union, but too big and cumbersome for anywhere else. A smaller more mobile system was/is needed… but I’m dubious whether today’s MIC is capable of that, given the fact that the Pentagon keeps bloating up requirements to Texas-size every time the subject of firepower comes up.
– Badtux the War Penguin
I use ‘boots on the ground’ to mean people physically present in the territory, with a quick shift to policing rather than major combat. It takes a lot of people, and a very long time, but there are no short cuts. You can’t succeed if you don’t speak the local language and understand the culture.
If you are not willing to make the long-term commitments, and the US never is, just don’t get involved.
Going after bin Laden should have been the singular goal in Afghanistan, but they turned to nation building. They lost bin Laden and tied the US up in a decade of worthless warfare. We finally got bin Laden and Afghanistan is worse off than ever.
Another part of the problem now is that the Pentagon realised in the 80’s that there was a need to cut costs and duplicate efforts. Up until then, all 4 major services (Army, AF, Navy Marines) had their own projects without much regard to the other services, except where comm’s and transport were concerned. When Crusader was given the go ahead, the 155mm cannon was also destined to be used by the Marines and the Navy. The navy wanted them for their proposed next gen Destroyers (DD-21) to start with. When some programs were cut, they affected several projects. The Navy was forced to go back to 5″ gun they wanted to get away from. They eventually cancelled DD-21, and resurrected it as the DDG 1000. The documents I have show that the cost has increased significantly. The other problem is that when a project is cancelled, there is usually a heavy penalty payment to the contractors, not to mention the wasted money spent on the project to that point. The projected cost for the DD-21 were from $650 mill to $750 mill per ship for a total 32 ships. Pretty cheap all things considered. The DD-21 was a multi-role ship. Not just for sub-hunting or interdiction, it was also designed to support the Marines and Army with land suppression and land attack capabilities (one of the reasons for having 2 rapid fire howitzers with self-guided munitions with a range of about 100km). These were designed to be more easily and cheaply replaced eventually by a rail-gun being developed also.
When the Whitehouse kills 1 project, it affects several, and costs a fortune in the short and long terms. Add to that the projects it decides it wants that don’t work that costs a fortune, and you have waste on a massive scale.
But hey, it sounds good, and that’s all the politicians care about. That and their eventual kickbacks when they get a place on the board of a company they supports, then a massive golden parachute when they *retire* a couple years later. There were some smart people in the Pentagon, but they have mostly been replaced with ass-kissing sycophants. *shrug*
The true absurdity in the American system, it that if you want to make a project more efficient and cost effective, well that counts as a change order and boosts the cost of the project.
Yes, there are ripple effects to ending projects, but at some point you have to say enough.
I have no problems with ending projects, for legitimate reasons (ie. they don’t work etc), but cutting projects that have valid reasons for being and that affect multiple services, is just stupid. Your problem is that most projects are created or cut for political or to either prop up or make things difficult for a company (or companies), or enhance the bank balances of those involved.
Sadly it seems most people are too stupid or lethargic to understand the true cost of all this BS. If anything takes more than a soundbite to explain, people just get glassy-eyed. Which is the way the criminals-in-charge want it.
Good luck with your next big war. 😆
Yes, Kryten, good luck with that. I am wondering who the U.S. is supposed to be fighting in this next big war — a Russia still mostly armed with antiquated Soviet-era weapons, whose military can only win victories only over other nations armed with antiquated Soviet-era weapons? A China with no real Navy whose military is almost totally oriented around defense, with no force projection capabilities worth the name, that appears more interested in conquering the world economically than in conquering the world militarily? India? Pakistan? Don’t make me laugh.
The reality is that there is no equivalent of the Soviet Union today and arming the U.S. military to fight the Soviet Union is thus as ridiculous as arming the U.S. military to fight Tojo’s Imperial Japanese Navy and Army.
We keeping developing and paying for the 1% problem, which leaves us totally unprepared for 99% of our threats. Most of what we get into is based on proposals from the defense industry, rather than military planners.
We invaded a country when we had no plan of action if we defeated their military. The Iraqi army was never asked to surrender, which is unbelievable.
The upper level of the military is overwhelmingly political, with almost no competent commanders. It’s embarrassing.
I hear what you’re saying, Kryten, but when the success of a program is based more on the prime contractor’s ability to spread the work around to the right Congressional seats, the qualify of work has to be suspect. The Air Force tanker debacle is a prime example of a political military system, i.e. the system was re-bid until Boeing won the contract. AirBus had the better system, and everyone knows it.
I can’t wait until we have F-22s trying to escort Cessnas out of restricted airspace.
It’s Management By Airline Magazine. In case you’re wondering what I mean, Pointy Hair Boss sees article in airline magazine about the latest craze. Said PHB then returns to his office and says, “Why aren’t *WE* jumping on (random latest craze)?” Competent subordinates try to explain that (random latest craze) is a stupid idea that enriches only the people who write such articles for airline magazines (generally folks who provide equipment or etc. for implementing said craze) and isn’t appropriate for the products that the company sells, but the boss man is adamant: The next product must incorporate (random latest craze).
Drives me nuts. My boss tried doing that to me once, proposed the latest craze because it was the latest craze, nevermind that it wasn’t appropriate for our product. We spent a week or so in design discussions trying to figure out a way to make it work and never really succeeding, until finally in frustration I spent 45 minutes doing it the *right* way, presented it to boss and to the team that was charged with implementing the new product as a fait accompli (“we can use this non-faddish but already operational way of doing this, or we can spend *another* week futilely trying to cram a square peg into a round hole”), and faced with the fact that it literally took me *45 minutes* to render the whole exercise of cramming the new fad into the product pointless, *finally* folded and went with the technology that was appropriate for what we were trying to do, rather than the technology that was all the craze in the airline magazines.
But that was us, spending our own money with the very real risk of going out of business if we didn’t ship product in a timelyand cost-effective manner. The DoD *never* folds when their PHB’s decide to go with some fad (pushed by the defense industry of course), because hey, it’s not *their* money, it’s *taxpayer* money. Thus why we have the F-35 that’s supposed to be the One True Fighter for Air Force, Navy, and Marines — even though the only version of it that actually works is the Air Force version and the Navy already has a perfectly good almost-new fighter (the Super Hornet) and has no need of a new one that lacks the range and lifting capability of their current fighter, and the Marines version is a complete unworkable fiasco that makes the Osprey look like a great idea. And all of this is, from what I can tell, for use in bombing third world countries armed with, at best, 1970’s-era Soviet weaponry. There was a case to be made for the F-22 for those rare times we want to kick over a 3rd world nation that actually has modern air defenses and we need a stealth fighter to go in there and do some things while the air defenses are being taken out. But there’s no (zero) case for the F-35 — everything it’s tasked to do, the F-16 (or F-18 Super Hornet) can do equally well for much less. Sure the F-35 will supercruise. And that’s important for an air-to-ground bomb truck tasked with bombing attacking 3rd world guerrillas attacking one of our outposts… why?
– Badtux the Warlike Penguin
Yes, exactly. 🙂 When I was with GD for a year, I heard and saw a lot. A lot of people were very dissatisfied back then, and it has gotten worse over the past couple decades. It’s why I brought up the Crusader and DD-21. They were programs I knew about. They had very legitimate reasons for being, and had value for the 2-3 decades from now. The DD-21 and Crusader would both have been in service, would have been much cheaper that what is replacing them (I mean, seriously… approx $700 mill for a very advanced platform as DD-21 was is peanuts!) Just one of them had the firepower of a battleship (with vertical launch tubes and long-medium range TLAMs, 2 12 rpm 155mm guns that could deliver a time-on-target salvo of upto 12 rounds – and in a squadron of 4 ships, could deliver a ToT salvo of 48 HE, AP, rounds! Not much could survive that), was twice as fast as any warship currently in service, had C3 capabilities to rival current Command Ships, was highly modular with an IPS (Integrated Power System), it was highly stealthed (semi-submerged)… the list is endless! When we saw the plan, we were in awe. 😆 I still remember the grins, and the discussion after the briefing. The US has finally started a program that was truly worth doing. Because of the DD-21, Crusader and several other projects were born (even the UAV’s!) Meeehhhh… We all should have known it was too good to be true. The USA always kills off anything good. Whatever that may be. *shrug*
It was one of the reasons I and many others left GD. You work your ass off on a project, to get called into the Boss’s office and told it’s dead (or just get a memo in your in-box). The joint RAAF/USAF project I was working on was killed that way. Right after successful trials of the prototypes. But it would have extended the life and mission of the F-111. And the politicians banking on F-18 etc couldn’t have that.
There is a long tradition in the Department of Defense of phasing out systems the first year they finally work the way they were supposed to when they were bought.
It is a said fact that the ‘viability’ and any particular project is directly proportional to number districts of members on the House Armed Services committee in which the project will be built.