Comment by cjbgkagh
11 hours ago
The program was intended to make money and it did. My university has ties to the military and I was talking to people working on the Joint Strike Fighter about ways to reduce software bugs, I was told candidly that software bugs are job security and they’ll be riding that gravy train all the way to retirement, which they did.
The F-35 is built for exactly the right defence contractors and pork-barrelling. As for war, can we get back to you on that?
The F-35 is a perfect pork-barrel example: by using subcontractors distributed in many house districts, the project owner ensures its political viability. By my count, only Louisiana, Wyoming, Nebraska, and North Dakota show less than $1MM in "economic impact".
https://view.ceros.com/lockheed-martin/f35-domestic-impact/p...
The polite way of saying that is "Its a jobs program."
well yes you need to keep the aerospace and engineering pipelines full if you ever need to actually go to war. So boeing and all the other chumps making gravy is part of the deal in downtime
That is asinine, what do you think happens to those institutions when incompetence is what gets rewarded. The real threat to the US military is not the lack of weapons, or that the F35 is not as good or as cheap as it could have been, it's because it is a lumbering bureaucracy full of people who couldn't get better jobs elsewhere.
> it's because it is a lumbering bureaucracy full of people who couldn't get better jobs elsewhere
So, raise the amount of money paid to the military so the most qualified candidates apply?
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These capabilities don't stick around for free. A corporation isn't going to keep around design staff doing nothing. Even if you move the design staff to the military stuff, you still need to give them work or their skills atrophy.
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> it's because it is a lumbering bureaucracy full of people who couldn't get better jobs elsewhere.
I don’t think that they exploit the military industrial complex for personal job security and fortune makes it likely that they’re incompetent. In fact, as a society we seem to praise those who are exceedingly successful at such exploitation, and even elect them to the highest levels of government and hang onto every word they say.