USA planning to shrink armed forces

[Deleted]

Aircraft don't tend to get shot down when SEAD and CAP are done well either. And those can always be done, but stealth always is at risk to be defeated.

wouldn't it be better to just scrap the aircraft totally and just fire the missile the aircraft fires from the ship directly?
You don't really need the aircraft at all.

[Masark]

Aircraft tend to be cheaper when they don't get shot down

Given that the A-10 seems to be flyable in any condition short of "atomized", it would appear to get fair marks in that category.

[Kellhound]

The argument they make is that it'll be cheaper to maintain 1800 F-35s, rather than 1600 non-stealthy F-16 successors, 100 A-10s (or A-10 successors) and 100 F-117 successors.

That's pretty laughable considering how costs of the F-35 has doubled on a per-plane basis as procurement was cut from 3500 to 2700. There is absolutely no need for thousands of stealthy attack aircraft. Stealth is only needed until air defenses are broken, which we've been doing for 25 years with a fleet of 60 F-117s and 21 B-2s, and in any case using a tiny subset of both fleets.

And now, the Air Force just started it's new heavy bomber "B-3" program, which they expect to buy 100 of (so in reality 30) for a price of $500 million a piece (so in reality $2 billion). And they will be super stealthy, but likely not nuclear capable until the late 2020s in order to spend that mere $350 million on making the F-35 nuclear capable.

There is absolutely no consistency to any of it. If you're going to do that, why not build modernized, simplified B-2s, which you have the tooling for still? Or hell, something smaller, that's F-111 sized.

It's somewhat telling to me, that the F-35 is called that actually, instead of the A-35 or F/A-35, considering that it's an atrocious platform for air superiority (right down to it's pre-F-16 lack of a bubble canopy) that is being designed around ground attack. It's like a continuation of the Air Force brass' old weird 20 year dream of having an Air Force of only Fighters Aircraft and Heavy Bombers.

The Navy has already proved the F-35 is going to be far more costly to operate than the current air fleet, and the USAF is reluctantly agreeing.

[Korgoth]

The human element reduction surprises me. The aircraft doesn't, as their roles are better performed by drones. But then maybe drones will take over the human roles as well.

[Deleted]

, but likely not nuclear capable until the late 2020s in order to spend that mere $350 million on making the F-35 nuclear capable.

(right down to it's pre-F-16 lack of a bubble canopy) that is being designed around ground attack. .

Why would anyone in their right mind pay even 350 dollar, for a bomber with nuclear capabilities? hello the 1970s called and they have this thing called an ICBM...
as for ground attack, drone or just cruise missile...

its like the heavy carrier for deploying nuclear armed bombers...

[Kellhound]

I'm not disagreeing with your argument. It's perfectly valid that because everyone knows the US is top dog and neither or China or Russia will make a move that will involve the US, other countries don't have to spend on defense because they live in the shadow of the US. Hell, I served 9 years in the Army and in both conflicts abroad.

But I've seen how wreckless Commanders are with money. My last Brigade Commander had me spend 120k to install a dual screen VTC in his conference room. Upon it being completed, he decided it was too big and had me gut the codec and cameras and just buy two 60 inch LEDs at 1k each. The rest of it got shoved in some closet to never be seen again and no one batted an eye. When i was in Iraq, the Sergeant Major took FOO funds and bought paint so he could have Soldiers paint the outside of the HQ building. Thne rather than use our own cooks, we hire civilians to come in and do the job Soldiers are supposed to do. It's a mess and if it takes tightening the purse to get the military on board, so be it.

Personally if I were the Defense Secretary, I'd abolish the Marines and Air Force and allocate their personnel and hardware to the Army and Navy. Why we have each service doing its own cyber and intelligence planning is beyond stupid. We don't need mechanics in all four services. Almost every base is joint anyway, so start using military personnel to do military jobs. Bring the airforce plane mechanics and pilots to the Army and let all the overlap MOSs compete for the new size in force. Same thing with Marines and the Navy. Send the ground marines to the Army and anythign aircraft/watercraft related to the Navy.

That idea could save us billions each year. But it'll never happen because of "history" and lobbyist would lose out huge contracts.

But back to my original point, we already have the largest budget in the world despite not being the largest countries in population or land mass. Spending is our issue, so when we cut from one program we shouldn't just send that money to another. We need to genuinely cut back and audit and hold every agency accountable for misuse and incompetence.

It would be better to keep the Marines and turn the Army into the National Guard. Large scale ground wars involving the US are not likely in the near term, but littoral conflict is likely.

- - - Updated - - -

The human element reduction surprises me. The aircraft doesn't, as their roles are better performed by drones. But then maybe drones will take over the human roles as well.

Drones have weaknesses that manned aircraft do not.

[Korgoth]

Drones have weaknesses that manned aircraft do not.

They also have vast advantages. Lower unit costs, no human life risk, and most importantly much longer flight times.

[Kellhound]

They also have vast advantages. Lower unit costs, no human life risk, and most importantly much longer flight times.

And one Com signal being jammed away from being useless.

[Frolk]

now use 25% for education and 25% to NASA and other space-related science and perhaps we can have a brighter future after all

[Skroe]

There should be some blame handed to congress too, they are rather fond of allocating defence money to the business, Who just happen, by some weird coincidence, be located in their districts, and sometimes worse, not just assigning stuff the pentagon wants, but actively try to fund shit it does not want, Tanks for instance, lots of them gotta be built, ignoring the fact that the pentagon doesn't want them.

Some blame, but less than you might think.

As far as one's homes state is concerned, what is the most significant thing a federal elected official can do? Bring jobs and money home. It wasn't always this way, but it is explainable and very natural if you think about it: the many things the Federal government needs, needs to be produced SOMEWHERE, and that means investment and jobs.

This isn't done by senators, or even with their implicit approval. It's done to product programs. Lockheed Martin for example, produced parts for the F-22 in 44 states. 44! Inefficiencies alone added a tremendous amount to costs, and I can tell you, Massachusetts, as one of those 44 states, with it's absurdly low unemployment and real ease of getting a job, did not need to contribute to the F-22 program. But John Kerry protected it just the same, because even a few hundred jobs is a few hundred jobs.

The problems of efficiencies are galling. Let's talk space launch systems, since those are disposable big ticket items. The EELV class (22,000 kg to Low Earth Orbit) Delta IV Heavy, produced by ULA (a Lockheed / Boeing consortium that operates on publicly owned facilities) isone of the two big launchers the government relies upon (along with the Titan V) has a unit cost of $386 million and is produced in 17 states. By contrast, SpaceX is privately building it's own EELV class "Falcon Heavy", which will be bable to launch 53,000 kg to Low Earth Orbit at a cost of $135 million. And it's produced in two states, with 70% of every vehicle in California.

ULA requries a 24 month lead in time for the production of every single Delta IV Heavy.
SpaceX is producing 9 Falcon 9s (the core of Falcon Heavy) every month, and is soon to double that.

Spreading around jobs kills efficiency and dramatically increases prices. You can even see that in Tanks, which are produced in one factory, as we said, but have seen their cost remain flat for years. the traditional defense companies can do this, but they're not compelled to.

Who knows honestly how to get out of this mess. Its' efficiency versus jobs. How can any senator or congressmen seriously vote to not bring a program that will creat jobs home? Perhaps a solution would be to put manufacturing decisions in professional DoD hands, but then you'd run into the problem of government telling a private company what to do.

Frankly, the best thing, maybe the only thing, government can do in the short term, is change the law, to make it extraordinarily difficult an costly for a contractor to sue over a canceled contract, and then ban further use of Cost-Plus contracts.

[Korgoth]

now use 25% for education and 25% to NASA and other space-related science and perhaps we can have a brighter future after all

I'd give it all to NASA. Until the public teacher unions are broken no real reform will be possible, and money just gets pissed away. Though I guess you could use it for Student Loan forgiveness which could help to boost the economy by raising the spending power of an entire generation.

[Deleted]

"The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government". -Milton Friedman.

I don't think you understand this quote. Milton Friedman is saying that you can't get someone to do something without giving them the right incentives first. It is private agents who does the progress, but there's no saying that a centralized power can't be giving the incentives.

[Korgoth]

And one Com signal being jammed away from being useless.

How useful is a U2 Without coms? Or an A10? Maybe in an all out war you can fire blind on the target you suspect is correct, but not in any conflict we have been in my life time.

[Skroe]

Why would anyone in their right mind pay even 350 dollar, for a bomber with nuclear capabilities? hello the 1970s called and they have this thing called an ICBM...
as for ground attack, drone or just cruise missile...

its like the heavy carrier for deploying nuclear armed bombers...

Because despite what people on the internet believe, the US isn't actually excited about the prospect of killing large numbers of human beings.

Our ICBMs are all solid rocket missiles. All of them. That was done on purpose: they can be stored ready to launch without having to be fueled (which makes liquid ICBMs mostly useless... they'll get nuked themselves before they lift off). But it also means that means that once the fuse is lit, that ballistic missile is going to fly, no matter what. If the Russians or anyone else ever saw our launch tubes even open en masse, that is when World War III would start... they would strike first (it is also what we would do).

Bombers have a very powerful psychological advantage in brinksmanship and nuclear relations. The US can launch them and have them in the air, and Russia (or china) will know that. While launching nuclear armed bombers is provocative, it is intentionally so: it shows the other country we're serious, and we WILL nuke them if they push us to far. But unlike ICBMs, bombers can be called back. If the situation is de-escalated, once say, the Russian President sees B-2's popping in and out of Radar just on the inside of the NATO/Russia border, and has a change of heart, World War III is averted. Furthermore the President of the United States could use withdrawing bombers as a bargaining chip in deescalation.

The predecessor to this program was considered to be a drone. That was abandoned because Robert Gates was uncomfortable with exactly the scenario I just described above, but without a human pilot in the cock pit who could follow orders and turn it around.

Lastly, in an actual World War III, the purpose of the B-2 and B-1B in their nuclear roles were nerver to bomb cities or major bases (ICBMs would do that). But rather both would go behind enemy lines - the B-2 stealth, the B-1B fast - and with their direct satellite uplink, be able to hunt for mobile launchers in Siberia. During World War III, the US would not be able to wait for the destruction of Russian/Soviet Air Defense to do that, and ICBMs would take far too long to fly there. So search and destroy heavy bombers were called for.

For it's part, this is why Russia is so annoyed about our anti-Ballistic Missile shield, because Mutually Assured Destruction is undercut by this stuff. If the US struck first and sent in it's bombers to attack mobile launchers, almost the entirety of the Russian deterrent would be destroyed before launching off the ground. Out of thousands of missiles, only a few dozen would fly, which our modest ABM system could handle. It is thus, poor first strike protection, but excellent second strike protection.

But bombers serve a purpose that ICBMs never could in both these regards. Cruise Missiles COULD theoretically serve that purpose now, but the Cruise Missile that can "loiter" and search for targets of opportunity (which is what the B-2 / B-1B mission would be in World War III), are less than 5 years old... their first military use was in Libya. Before that, they needed to be programmed for targeting before launch or in mid-air. That technology simply didnt exist, and even then, unlike a B-2 which can fly for 30 hours straight with airrefuelling, a cruise missile has more limited endurance.

[Deleted]

Some blame, but less than you might think.

Frankly, the best thing, maybe the only thing, government can do in the short term, is change the law, to make it extraordinarily difficult an costly for a contractor to sue over a canceled contract, and then ban further use of Cost-Plus contracts.

the pentagon should hire better contract lawyers too, or tell the ones they have that they should tell the contractors its our way or the highway.
but that ties into the corrupting influence of money in congress.

and the space thing is at the same time disheartening and heart warming, as id like to see a man on Mars before i die, given my age, i used to think it would be so, now i just hope.

[Kellhound]

How useful is a U2 Without coms? Or an A10? Maybe in an all out war you can fire blind on the target you suspect is correct, but not in any conflict we have been in my life time.

The US Navy has lost several UAVs to unintentional "jamming" from their own air search radars. Manned aircraft can return home under heave ECM, UAVs are lost. We have not fought a technologically advanced adversary with UAVs, though the Iranians seem to have figured out how to stop one of our most advanced UAVs....

[Raeph]

Why would anyone in their right mind pay even 350 dollar, for a bomber with nuclear capabilities? hello the 1970s called and they have this thing called an ICBM...
as for ground attack, drone or just cruise missile...

its like the heavy carrier for deploying nuclear armed bombers...

ICBMs are for destroying cities and countries, showering them with warheads (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UGM-133_Trident_II can carry 14 warheads, similar to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W88).

A nuclear capable fighter is designed for a smaller tactical nuclear strike. The specs call for a B61 to be put on the F-35 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B61_nuclear_bomb) which can be armed for a much smaller explosion, as low as .3 kilotons.

The two weapon systems are designed for COMPLETELY different applications.

[Kellhound]

ICBMs are for destroying cities and countries, showering them with warheads (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UGM-133_Trident_II can carry 14 warheads, similar to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W88).

A nuclear capable fighter is designed for a smaller tactical nuclear strike. The specs call for a B61 to be put on the F-35 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B61_nuclear_bomb) which can be armed for a much smaller explosion, as low as .3 kilotons.

They two weapon systems are designed for COMPLETELY different applications.

Both lead to total world destruction though.

[Mormolyce]

That's actually quite flagrantly false for architecture, painting, and science. The first and second points are almost too easy to pick apart; see the patrons of almost ALL classical buildings and paintings. They were either the government outright (like the greeks and later romans and their administrative buildings,) government by means of the church (see Cathedrals, pyramids, mosques, etc) or the patrons were individual nobles of the landed gentry. The local shoe cobbler was not contracting Leonardo da Vinci or Botecelli to paint their daughter. Scientifically, a majority of our advancements have come as a direct result of public need (aqueducts,) war-time build up (radio, sonar, rocket engines, etc) or have been derived from government agencies. General Motors and the downtown ma and pa store didn't put men on the Moon; Nasa did. And remember that robot the size of an SUV that landed on another planet not too long ago? Who did that again? Nasa.

Not that an obtuse quote makes an argument anyway.

Yeah it's anachronistic, then again Friedman's school of philosophy has a view of history that goes back about 50 years at most. Where it's not complete fiction anyway.

[Skroe]

I'd give it all to NASA. Until the public teacher unions are broken no real reform will be possible, and money just gets pissed away. Though I guess you could use it for Student Loan forgiveness which could help to boost the economy by raising the spending power of an entire generation.

Fun Fact: Give it all to NASA, it would go to, in order...

http://www.govexec.com/magazine/2010...ractors/32159/

1 Lockheed Martin Corp. $3,586,946,390 20.49%
2 Boeing Co. 2,742,231,083 15.67
3 California Institute of Technology 1,748,922,856 9.99
4 Alliant Techsystems Inc. 710,967,241 4.06
5 Jacobs Engineering Group Inc. 693,822,399 3.96
6 United Technologies Corp. 448,196,097 2.56
7 Northrop Grumman Corp. 398,050,373 2.27
8 Government of Russia 387,656,298 2.21
9 SAIC 349,257,053 2.00
10 Honeywell Inc. 280,661,003 1.60

Give it to the DoD, it would go to, in order

1 Lockheed Martin Corp.
2 Northrop Grumman Corp.
3 Boeing Co.
4 Raytheon Co.
5 General Dynamics Corp.
6 KBR Inc.
7 Science Applications International Corp.
8 L-3 Communications Corp.
9 Computer Sciences Corp.
10 ITT Corp.



In other words, largely the exact same people.

Now you may assume, it's money better spent. Well, about that...

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/feb...scope-20120219

In deep, cold space, nearly a million miles from Earth, a giant telescope later this decade will scan for the first light to streak across the universe more than 13 billion years ago.

The seven-ton spacecraft, one of the most ambitious and costly science projects in U.S. history, is under construction for NASA at Northrop Grumman Corp.'s space park complex in Redondo Beach.


The aim is to capture the oldest light, taking cosmologists to the time after the big bang when matter had cooled just enough to start forming the first blazing stars in what had been empty darkness. Astronomers have long dreamed about peering into that provenance.

"It is the actual formation of the universe," said Alan Dressler, the astronomer at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Pasadena who chaired a committee that proposed the telescope more than a decade ago.

If the James Webb Space Telescope works as planned, it will be vastly more capable than any of the dozen currently deployed U.S. space telescopes and will be a dramatic symbol of U.S. technological might. But for all its sophistication, the project also reveals a deeply ingrained dysfunction in the agency's business practices, critics say. The Webb's cost has soared to $8.8 billion, more than four times the original aerospace industry estimates, which nearly led Congress to kill the program last year.

The agency has repeatedly proposed such technologically difficult projects at bargain-basement prices, a practice blamed either on errors in its culture or a political strategy. Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.), chairman of the House appropriations subcommittee that controls NASA's budget, said a combination of both problems affected the Webb.

"There was not adequate oversight," Wolf said. "And there were reports that the cost estimates were being cooked a little bit, some by the company, some by NASA."

People are dumbly romantic about NASA. Give money to NASA in it's current form, it'll give you the exact same missions at increased cost, not more missions. Failure to control costs has been the defining characteristic of NASA for a decade and a half, and you want to give them more money without direly needed institutional reform?

The best thing NASA could do, today, is replace it's entire leadership, bring all centers under direct control of the Administrator, close half of it's 11 major centers, fire a whole slew of it's top management, cancel the JWST, deorbit the ISS, offload the Space Mission Directorate into the National Science Foundation, give a five year contracting ban to Northrop, and audit the shit out of corrupt JPL. It's not one agency; It's 11 fiefdoms that seek to murder each other.

Everything you need to know about NASA is encapsulated in this: SMD failed to control costs for the JWST, so in 2012, it was taken out of SMD hands (where it was for a decade) and put in it's own office under the control of the administrator. It remains NASA's biggest science project though. In 2013 and 2014, SMD has and is raising holy hell about how Space Science is dying and they're being underfunded, and how their budget was cut.

Yes. SMD saw it's marquee program promoted to top-level management, but because it isn't in their section of the budget anymore (despite being sourced and originally and SMD program), they're pretending that Space Science is being underfunded. In reality, they just lost control of $400 million a year and want $400 million more.