SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II multirole fighter plane has numerous software and hardware flaws. So many, in fact, that it won't be ready to deploy before 2019:
The F-35 multirole fighter won't be close to ready before 2019, the US House Armed Services Committee was told on Wednesday. The aircraft, which is supposed to reinvigorate the American military's air power, is suffering numerous problems, largely down to flaws in the F-35's operating system. These include straightforward code crashes, having to reboot the radar every four hours, and serious security holes in the code.
Michael Gilmore, the Pentagon's director of operational test and evaluation, reported that the latest F-35 operating system has 931 open, documented deficiencies, 158 of which are Category 1 – classified as those that could cause death, severe injury, or severe illness. "The limited and incomplete F-35 cybersecurity testing accomplished to date has nonetheless revealed deficiencies that cannot be ignored," Gilmore said in his testimony [PDF]. "Cybersecurity testing on the next increment of ALIS [Autonomic Logistics Information System] – version 2.0.2 – is planned for this fall, but may need to be delayed because the program may not be able to resolve some key deficiencies and complete content development and fielding as scheduled."
He reported that around 60 per cent of aircraft used for testing were grounded due to software problems. He cited one four-aircraft exercise that had to be cancelled after two of the four aircraft aborted "due to avionics stability problems during startup."
(Score: 4, Funny) by geb on Thursday March 24 2016, @10:55AM
At the start of the cold war, when the military industrial complex was in its infancy, US military spending increased massively and its citizens were worried about how the US would afford it.
The budgets got increased regardless of the concerns, mainly because the USSR was a big obvious genuine threat, and so everybody got to see how this big experiment in military stimulus spending would work.
It turned out pretty well. A lot of the spending was on very basic stuff - construction of bases, carpentry, simple metalwork, welding, pouring concrete. It was all work using transferrable talents, so the military could employ hundreds of thousands of ordinary workers. The pay mostly went straight back into the wider economy, and the work left all the contractors in a good position to perform other useful civilian jobs afterwards. It was expensive, but the money all stayed in circulation inside the country.
Fast forward a few decades, and exactly the same military stimulus thinking is going on. It has been formalised for so long that it can't easily be stopped, but the work being done is vastly different. Boots-on-the-ground wars take money outside the country, unlike cold wars where most of the spending is at home. The tech level of combat has changed, so that a bricklayer can't help you win a war anymore. Money goes to huge companies, instead of day labourers. The money doesn't return any more.
There is one obvious conclusion to take from this, one change that makes everything right once more: advanced multi-role strike fighters should be made out of wood and concrete.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday March 24 2016, @02:18PM
The tech level of combat has changed, so that a bricklayer can't help you win a war anymore.
He can if he's in the forces opposing the US. Heck, an illiterate camel herder can help you win there. Take enough of the infidels with you when you promote yourself to glory and eventually they give up and go home.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Thursday March 24 2016, @02:57PM
And more to the point, Dwight Eisenhower (a guy who knew a thing or two about how the military works) was warning us all about this in 1960, when he first used the term "military-industrial complex".
The problem, though, isn't that the tech level of combat changed - wood and concrete still help a lot, and are still a major part of military spending. No, what's changed is the corruption level, to the point where the Pentagon recently spent $43 million on a gas station [reuters.com], and cannot account for $8.5 trillion [yahoo.com] (to give an idea of how staggeringly huge that number is, it equals about half of the current US GNP and about 40% of the US national debt). The F-35 is another perfect example of this, since it was supposed to be done several years ago and cost about 1/3 of what it's currently slated to cost.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday March 24 2016, @05:09PM
And more to the point, Dwight Eisenhower (a guy who knew a thing or two about how the military works) was warning us all about this in 1960, when he first used the term "military-industrial complex".
After spending 8 years fueling the industry he meekly spoke out against it on his way out of town.
What happened is that WWII opened the eyes of our industrial leaders as to the vast amount of profit in modern wars. The "cold war", the China lobby and limited wars like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan in essence are simply a means to keep cashing in, the longer and more protracted, the less likely a solution, all the better...