When I worked at Digital, my boss, Fred A., and I attended a special briefing about new technology that was coming out.
That technology turned out to be the ground-breaking Alpha 2164 processor (which sank without a trace due to Digital’s incredibly bad go-to-market strategy). At one point in the meeting, the product manager said, rhetorically, “how stupid would that be?” with regards to pricing the processor too high. Fred replied seriously, “I don’t know. How stupid is there?” Implying that there is some kind of maximum stupid, or local carrying capacity for how stupid something can get.
I’m reminded of this by a bit of F-35 related news; the F-35 being one of America’s depth-gauges for stupidity, or corruption, or both. The F-35 is probably going to go down in history as the fighter jet (which it’s not) that ate the Air Force; probably the last new human-piloted combat aircraft. It may also go down in history as the aircraft that ate the Navy. Neither service needs to fling living meat into a cockpit to go fly out and deliver high explosive onto peasants, which is all the Air Force and Navy do these days, anyway.
You’re probably already familiar with the Gerald Ford class aircraft carriers’ problem with launching catapults. [stderr] But it turns out that’s not the only problem: the Gerald Ford‘s inter-deck elevator system [the one in the picture is not the Gerald Ford] is also electronic, and also doesn’t work.
This is the end point of the principle of “buy it before it’s ready.” You wind up with stuff that doesn’t work that you paid a great deal for. You don’t need a doctorate in Applied Scamming to know what comes next: if you want it to actually work, you pay more. And more and more. [ni]
The Navy decided to omit the gear for the F-35 in order to keep Kennedy under the $11-billion cost cap that Congress has imposed on the ship’s construction. The sailing branch plans to christen Kennedy in late 2019 and add F-35-compatibility at a later date.
Remember, these are the yutzes who got an unasked-for $30 billion more tacked onto last years’ defense budget (Trump was already planning on diverting money for his stupid wall) and a $750 billion defense allotment in the new budget congress is busy carving up. $11 billion is too much, congress says, while they simultaneously fret over the 9/11 first responders’ health care fund which is a measly $1 billion.
Did you see how I tried to slip “omit the gear” by you? I know you’re eagle-eyed skeptics and you’ve been wondering “what gear”?
“All three of those causal factors – making the adjustments to the nuclear power plant that we noted during sea trials, fitting in all of the post-shakedown availability workload and finishing up the elevators – they’re all trending about the same time,” Geurts told the subcommittee.
I love military glarp-speak. It’s like a bunch of stupid people talking the way they imagine smart people talk. Let me translate that for you: the elevators don’t work. The $11 billion ship is limited to whatever aircraft it can park on the deck. After the on-deck complement has been launched, the carrier will have to resort to harsh language.
“Cost caps imposed by Congress on the Ford-class program to keep the price of these ships from escalating have accomplished the opposite effect,” a committee staff member told Werner, “with the Navy accepting delivery of unfinished carriers and intending to pay more money later on to add critical capabilities in the future.”
They paid for ships and planes that are both unfinished. If you ever find yourself in conversation with one of those “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” jokers, ask them how they square such obvious fraud with their endless support for “defense” [because the “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” types tend to be in favor of throwing money at the Department of Defense but not at poor people].
Meanwhile, the Royal Navy (Aka: “the first navy that has been eaten by the F-35”) has deployed basically its entire floating inventory to the Strait of Hormuz: a frigate and a destroyer. They don’t even have an aircraft carrier that can launch planes because the F-35 is their “combat ready aircraft” – their air assets would actually be dramatically outnumbered by the Iranians.
If it is any consolation to you, US corporations do this privately too – they buy unfinished solutions that work only on paper from the cheapest bidder and then they shout and huff and puff when these miracle solutions do not work in real life and they throw money at the problems to make it work at least somewhat.
I am convinced that without ripping of employees and/or customers and/or swallowing smaller companies and sucking them dry, American corporate managers are incapable of turning a profit. They are too ignorant of how reality works for proper long term planning and development.
It seems to me that if you’re going to name something after Gerald Ford, you have a expect a certain degree of ineptitude.
Charly@#1:
If it is any consolation to you, US corporations do this privately too – they buy unfinished solutions that work only on paper from the cheapest bidder and then they shout and huff and puff when these miracle solutions do not work in real life and they throw money at the problems to make it work at least somewhat.
Oh, I know. For example: Oracle deployments. I know one software startup that bought a sales automation package that was basically nonexistent code that needed to be written. Two years and $200,000 later it was still not working.
If you want to read about a “spend a lot for nonexistent software” disaster, search up the sordid history of the FBI’s Virtual Case File. It’s horrifying. But it’s a few billion dollars. The Navy spends that on donuts.
It does get one wondering if maybe the whole sordid charade is being orchestrated by a secret cabal of pacifists within the military-industrial complex, whose ultimate goal is to make weaponry so expensive and so unreliable that nobody can fight wars anymore.
Last I checked, the floating inventory of RN major surface warships consisted of 6 destroyers and 13 frigates.
It had looked like Canada managed to dodge the F-35 boondoggle, until the Pentagon put pressure on Canada to relax their “industrial benefit” requirements in the bidding to supply new fighters. And now other firms are threatening to back out of the bidding process because they reckon the fix is in for Lockheed Martin.
Remember the story a few years ago about Norway trying to back out of the F-35? They preferred a Swedish fighter, but then the Americans threatened to withhold electronics from the Swedes, and Norway is back in the fold.
Rob Grigjanis @5: What good are trading partners if you can’t coerce them into buying your shitty goods that they don’t want?
The USN insists that it needs no fewer than 11 aircraft carriers to meet its legally mandated requirement to keep two carrier groups at sea at all times.
Having N ships on active duty does not mean you can deploy N ships tomorrow. Apparently.
Rob Grigjanis @ # 5: … Norway is back in the fold.
They were pining for the fjold all along.
… their air assets would actually be dramatically outnumbered by the Iranians.
Can’t remember where I read, back in the last century, that experience and theory both posited that the side which brings the most planes to an aerial battle tends to win, regardless of respective fanciness.
Dunno if that still applies, but if I ran an air force, I’d probably start shopping for a flying AK-47: cheap, durable, with abundant spare parts availability.
Given that a lot of Iranian planes are getting rather old I wonder if they are checking out the Russian Su-57 or similar? It seems to still have a few relatively minor technical problems but compared to the F-35 it looks rather impressive and perhaps a bit cheaper.
The Swedish Gripen might also be a good option but I cannot see Sweden willing to sell it to Iran and it is a good bit older.
The Su-57 does seem to actually “fly” and reportedly the Russians are going into serial production with it. The rumour was that Russia could not finance this alone so they must have some customers.
Andrew Molitor @7:
Absolutely, and I was wrong to say all the active destroyers and frigates were the “floating inventory”, since at least a handful of them would be undergoing refit, maintenance, etc.
Won’t you think of the poor defense contractors? Trickle Down and all that.
Well here in Australia we have drunk the F-35 kool-aid too. And now, several years later the country has exactly one plane delivered. Not ready for action any time soon!
And yes, the Digital Alpha. In the mid 90’s DEC encouraged me to do a compiler port to the architecture – even gave us a free workstation. I spent quite a lot of time writing a new code generator for the machine. IMO it was a fine architecture, and the compiler was awesomely fast. But none of our customers ever bought the Alpha so I had to write my time off to experience(TM).
Lofty@#12:
Won’t you think of the poor defense contractors?
They’re doing just great. I’m scared they are going to have so much $ they start buying critical infrastructure. You know: “this nuclear reactor brought to you by Lockheed Martin, the company that makes the F-35!” and “this city sewer system designed by the company that built the Zumwalt!”
cafebabe@#13:
Well here in Australia we have drunk the F-35 kool-aid too. And now, several years later the country has exactly one plane delivered.
Yeah, but it can shoot down the entire enemy airforce single-handed! If it’s not in maintenance that day.
I wonder where Australia ships its F-35 engines for maintenance.
IMO it was a fine architecture, and the compiler was awesomely fast. But none of our customers ever bought the Alpha so I had to write my time off to experience(TM).
I’m sorry Digital wasted your time. They wasted a lot of people’s time. I was part of the team that did the ULTRIX port, which was then killed in favor of Windows NT. “Arrrgh!”
At the same meeting I referred to earlier (which was really cool. Dick Sites, the processor architect gave an amazing 2-hour talkthrough about what it takes to make such a thing) and Ken Olsen did Q&A. Fred A instantly had his hand up:
Fred: “How are the systems going to be priced?”
Olsen: “A top of the line Sun SPARC right now is $10,000 and these systems will be twice as fast so we are going to aim for 1.5 SPARC – around $15,000.”
Fred: “Then you may as well charge $1,500,000. for it and hope you can sell one at that price.”
Fred was completely right, of course. Digital went out with a high-priced solution that had a heat sink the size of a cinder-block and it ran the then-wobbly NT kernel but there were no applications for it so everyone kept using Windows.
The 2164 team did an amazing job of programming a version of the microcode to emulate Intel X86 and you could actually run 32-bit apps under emulation on the 64-bit CPU and it was as fast as a … regular Intel processor at 6x the price.
Marcus@#15: Yes, the same Ken Olsen who famously could not think of any reason that anyone would want a computer in their home. Hell, already when he said that I had two PDP-11s in my bedroom.
Because otherwise it was very cold in winter, and you just happened to live next door to a hydro power station? (And also had a free supply of very good earplugs?)
I also assume it was a ground-floor bedroom…