Comment by jandrese
3 months ago
You're looking at this all wrong. Taking 20 years to develop an airframe is fully intentional. The whole point of that project is to keep military contractors in business in peacetime because if war breaks out it will be much harder to start a company from scratch. If the company were efficient and pumped out aircraft like a normal company the government would be stuck with thousands of otherwise useless machines to maintain. By dragging out the development for decades they can keep the engineers employed without burdening themselves with enormous O&M costs.
Obviously this will have to change if war breaks out for real, but in theory they won't be scrambling to hire people and will have at least some production capability. They will be scrambling to expand the production lines, but they won't be starting from 0.
A lot of people see defense contractors as an enormous waste of money, but to the government it is a strategic investment.
Is this goal documented by the Department of War somewhere? Or are you guessing that there has to be a strategic reason for what seems quite wasteful. It sure seems like there's more efficient ways to achieve this goal.
What would you suggest as a more efficient way to achieve this goal? Building thousands of advanced fighter jets for private citizens? Keeping highly skilled engineers up to date on the most modern technologies and maintaining specialized factories is inherently expensive. You can't leave the factories mothballed because you need to keep the skilled workers employed and practiced with manufacturing.
Maybe there could be something like a weekend warriors but for machinists? One weekend a month, one week a year you build fighter jets. This does mean there needs to be private sector demand for those skillsets so the reservists have relevant day jobs.
Rather than the sarcastic non-answer, you could just respond to the question as asked.
Is this an official goal, or at attempt to handwave away the fact that we seem to waste trillions and decades to get anything done?
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Have legitimately successful aerospace companies that sell to other places, and create dual-use industries like autonomous driving with more DARPA challenge type stuff
My question is genuine.
Not really the point, but an idea that springs to mind is selling fighter jets to allied countries.
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