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The Pentagon is accelerating production of Lockheed Martin Corp.'s F-35 jet even though the planes already delivered are facing "significantly longer repair times" than planned because maintenance facilities are six years behind schedule, according to a draft audit.
The time to repair a part has averaged 172 days -- "twice the program's objective" -- the Government Accountability Office, Congress's watchdog agency, found. The shortages are "degrading readiness" because the fighter jets "were unable to fly about 22 percent of the time" from January through August for lack of needed parts.
[...] The F-35 program office and Lockheed have identified steps to increase parts availability "to prevent these challenges from worsening" as aircraft numbers increase, the GAO said, but Pentagon documentation indicates "the program's ability to speed up this time line is uncertain."
The GAO also disclosed that the F-35B -- the Marine Corps version of the fighter that's scheduled to begin ship deployments next year -- won't have required maintenance and repair capabilities at sea and "will likely experience degraded readiness."
(Score: 3, Informative) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday November 05 2017, @07:09PM (16 children)
The F-35 also uses a lot of technologies which are just pain bad ideas and/or don't seem mature enough to be even considered for aerospace use - the OBOGS and internal weapons bays being 2 good examples. There are a fuckton of internal cooling issues that were solved problems in aerospace half a century ago.
It's like Lockheed-Martin fired all of their proper engineers and hired kids who thought with straight faces how much of a cool idea it would be to make Robo-Plane. The end-result, while is is really cool-looking, is a plastic half-baked junkheap that would get its ass kicked in a knifefight by decades-old Russian Junk. Those engineers put all of their eggs in the stealth-basket, but the second the enemy develops better methods to detect it (and they may well have something now that is at the least good enough), the plane is far more useless than decades old aircraft and will be a sitting duck in the sky.
The only reason why foreigners buy it is due to intense political pressure, and even our best allies are very publicly hesitant about investing in it when they could instead have the good, proven stuff like Super Hornets and Strike/Silent Eagles, perhaps some F-16s as well.
Of course, I had the opportunity to fix shit on the most awesome air superiority aircraft in the world, to this day, the F-15E Strike Eagle. Truly the Cadillac of aircraft: roomy, good-looking, and faster than living fuck.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Virindi on Sunday November 05 2017, @08:05PM (6 children)
That's what the customer wanted, and from a certain perspective it makes perfect sense.
Currently, stealth aircraft are highly effective against 1970s era technology. Russia (and probably China) have been developing technology for years to counteract radar stealth (such as multi-station radar and passive radar), but so far they have not shared it with everyone (Possibly Iran? Hard to trust rumors).
So against an enemy with outdated technology, a stealth aircraft makes the already low chance of losses even lower. And who do we actually fight? Countries with 1970s technology! The military knows that the public wants the number of losses on our side as small as possible (thus drones) and this is playing towards that. In world war three this plan would be counterproductive, but that is less likely to actually occur. And as long as there is enough hype about the latest technology, it can still serve as the deterrent it needs to be against a direct conflict with Russia or China.
The use of stealth is a plan aligned with the wars we actually fight, not the ones we want to avoid.
And that will work great until anti-stealth radar becomes more commonplace. I wouldn't be so sure, though, that we can count on a particular timetable for that. So the plan may be flawed.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday November 05 2017, @08:20PM (1 child)
Disagree. Recall the stealth fighter that was shot down over Serbia. All the technology in the world can't save you from idiot planners making idiot plans, and anyway, contingency plans against old technology were developed by not flying the same routes every goddamn day as well as utilizing band 1 and 2 ECM on C-model Eagles and other aircraft, and band 1.5 ECM on Strike Eagles.
(Score: 2) by Virindi on Sunday November 05 2017, @08:25PM
You can always get complacent and make mistakes. I am guessing that is what happened there.
Just because the technology is effective doesn't mean you don't still have to be on your game.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday November 05 2017, @08:46PM (3 children)
Who is "the customer?" We are the customer, and every other "customer" besides the U.S. can go suck eggs.
Reminds me of a Star Trek: TNG episode in which the Federation fights itself as an exercise. As I recall, Lt. Worf was asked how to fight despite going up against a superior adversary.
He replied, "guile." Never underestimate an an enemy with shit gear with only "guile" as their advantage.
Perhaps we have grown too fat in our hubris. Fortunately, we still have the real advantage in other areas and are just now starting to embrace "guile" as an effective strategy.
(Score: 2) by Virindi on Sunday November 05 2017, @09:10PM (2 children)
"The customer" is the US military (and Congress). Stealth is what they wanted. Engineers do not decide military procurement strategy.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday November 05 2017, @09:20PM
And yet, the ancient B-52 is still a part of our military doctrine.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @03:42AM
Please don't forget all the other suckers the US conned into buying into the f-35 clusterfuck, e.g. Britain, which is currently wasting a percentage of my taxes on this POS..
(Score: 5, Insightful) by RamiK on Sunday November 05 2017, @08:11PM (2 children)
The F-35 wasn't designed by engineers. It was designed by patent lawyers and lobbyists seeking to spread the supply-chain across enough states to make the project politically favorable to support and suicidal to oppose. Like the x86, C++, Windows and Linux, being technically superior would have actually been counter-productive to the F-35 success. To get through appropriations, budgetary committees and reviews, a small efficient solution will always lose-out to too-big-to-fail, inefficient solutions that create jobs and earn votes.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday November 06 2017, @04:00PM (1 child)
"designed by patent lawyers and lobbyists"
Don't forget about all the ignorant officers at the Pentagon, who kept adding wishes on to this magical unicorn/dragon hybrid. They would add mutually incompatible wishes to the wish list, and the Fairy MilitaryIndustrialComplex would promise to bolt all that shit on there.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Tuesday November 07 2017, @02:49PM
It's not ignorance. They keep inflating their requirements so when budget cuts are brought to the table they'll always have plenty of leeway to negotiate. It also helps that when something goes wrong you can always point to last year's meeting saying "We would have been able to prevent this if only our budgets were approved"...
Though being fair, with the exception of the revenue services, everyone in the public (and many in the private) sector do this.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by Virindi on Sunday November 05 2017, @08:15PM (4 children)
By the way, I should add...
The explanation above also makes sense given the theory behind the F-22/F-35 pair. The F-22 was supposed to be the "real fighter" to take on the "serious enemies". The problem is, tens of billions of dollars for a weapon that is only useful in WWIII is not politically palatable. But the F-22 is still designated to fill the role you are looking at.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 05 2017, @08:21PM (3 children)
F-22 is not only super expensive, but can't be exported. So F-35 is cooked up to export to allied countries, but they tried to cram so much into it to make it high-tech swiss knife.
Hah. High-tech swiss knife/rifle/rocket launcher/nail polisher. Think about that.
(Score: 2) by Virindi on Sunday November 05 2017, @08:30PM (2 children)
Sure. The real issue is that when cooking up this strategy, military planners assumed they had a much bigger budget available. A political miscalculation.
Had the plan proceeded as envisioned, the F-22 would be a decent weapon for the stated scenario. And they probably would have exported it to our most trusted allies, such as the UK, Australia, etc. As it is now, the plan has kinda gone to crap.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday November 05 2017, @08:55PM (1 child)
The F-22 utilizes the OBOGS, and it is well-known that even its own pilots didn't want to fly it.
I assume that if the problem was rectified, it was only by operating a more aggressive maintenance cycle.
(Score: 2) by Virindi on Sunday November 05 2017, @11:04PM
Both planes certainly have overly complex onboard logic. I mean just look at the problems we DO know about, like the "crossing the dateline bug". The backup oxygen system sounds like it was a similar type of issue; the backup oxygen system was not designed to deploy even when the computer detected a failure of the main system.
Luckily the occurrence of these kinds of problems tends to decrease as time goes on with a given system, as bugs are found and fixed. And in the meantime, there are still older aircraft in reserve.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @05:13AM
They intentionally do this to try to stay ahead of the competition. A lot of past planes had problems early on. However, the cutting edge also sometimes bleeds. They often don't price the risk into it.