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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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, there are ripple effects to ending projects, but at some point you have to say enough.

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*

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.

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