Anyone who thinks the American military system is wasteful and worthless (and it does indeed have very serious problems indeed) should have a look at the British system.

Well actually you should not – because you will scream too much.

The United Kingdom spends a lot of money on defence and has brave and professional soldiers, sailors and airmen.

But the army, navy and airforce are falling apart – they are becomming nonfunctional.

The Royal Navy and Royal Air Force have virtually gone already. And the army will follow.

Things are that serious.

And (just to give one example) in the South Atlantic we face Argentina in alliance with Brazil (before you laugh – look up their combined forces).

“But America will save us”.

These days “America” is President Barack Obama (I hate even writing the word “President” before that person’s name, but he is President).

Barack Obama HATES AND DESPISES THIS COUNTRY.

You would not think so from the fact that British book shops (from Waterstones to Tesco – not that there is much difference) only put pro Obama books on their shelves, but he does.

So the winner gets the contract, which on its face is way overpriced, but that winning bid will have to sustain the company when it doesn’t get the next couple of contracts.

That’s not how it works, though — at least, not for large contracts like a jet. The winning bidder becomes the primary contractor, but the Pentagon farms out substantial portions of the work to other contractors, to help spread around the cash flow. They do that because of exactly the problem you described: that there would soon not be enough companies around for a healthy bidding process if they didn’t.

For what it’s worth, I suspect the VR system is incredibly good value for the money. I didn’t see anything in that video that looked even remotely expensive, and the potential payoff is huge. Military aircraft are very complex to build, making production efficiency a major factor in project cost. Anything that helps move the aircraft through the process faster is worth a very large R&D investment.

VR in one form or another is clearly the way of the future in aircraft design. Already, flight testing has become primarily an exercise in confirming the data generated by the computer models. The F-22 performed within 2 percent of model data on every parameter throughout the flight test phase. Imagine how much it’s worth to prevent just one flight test accident!

Those quickly tossed out prototypes from the skunk works – they were analog planes. From the F16 onward military planes have been fly-by-wire – i.e. highly software-intensive. A very large number of lines of high level real time code intensive – orders of magnitude larger than anything most software engineering teams ever must design, code, test and integrate. That code must keep an airframe aloft that would sink like a rock, not glide to earth, if power is lost. That code controls wing surfaces, manages electromagnetic protections, coordinates defensive and offensive systems, keeps crew alive and breathing … and it does it in coordination with specialized electronics and the other hardware.

The recent Airbus problems only hint at the complexity involved in designing, building and testing such planes. Airbus requirements don’t come close to the performance extremes demanded of a military plane – much less a plane that, say, must be stealthy and serve both as a fighter and bomber, with versions that can take off/land from carriers as well as air fields.

One last point re: the VR system. What is originally designed to simplify human factors validation may well serve as the platform for training maintenance and crew later.

I have a friend who runs a small manufacturing shop, that does a lot of business making small accessory bits for armored vehicles. TAC-COM is just around the corner. Control boxes, consoles, switch housings, that sort of thing.

He keeps a ‘black museum’ of parts that have made their way back to him as being insufficiently rugged.

“Failed after having full can of .50-caliber ammunition dropped on it.”

“Legend became illegible – suspect repeated exposure to insect repellent.”

“Graphic not clear when using NVGs.”

“Repeated impact causes unacceptable damage to PASGT helmet.”

And so forth.

This stuff has to work even though it gets a daily battering from boots, dirt, diesel fuel and puke, dished out by an endless stream of soldiers whose very last concern is the careful handling of the equipment Uncle Sam supplies. They tend to keep it clean, to be sure, but they beat the snot out of it when in use.

The militray environemnt is so much more dmeanding that it’s no surpise that their stuff costs more. I’m not saying that that explains all of the added costs of military procurement, far from it, but it does cover a large part of it.

I can think of only a couple of pieces of civilian equipment which have recently transitioned into the US military successfully more-or-less unmodified. I don’t mean 3-ring binders or canteen trays, I mean pieces of warfighting equipment. Anyone care to try and name as many as a half-dozen such?

And on the subject of getting planes built in a short time, here’s a vid I found in a comment thread on the SOTU speech.

America’s First Jet Flight, October 1942 (Link) complete with a look at another aviation pioneer, Larry Bell. I shall resist any snark on the probable cost of the doorbell plunger in today’s procurement environment.

“I can buy most of this stuff from China on ebay for… about £2.99.”

…and then you’ll discover why the “lowest bidder” mentality costs lives.

The term “mil-spec” often gets sneers from people who don’t know what’s involved.

Here’s a simple case in point. Some time ago, my old website’s readers got together to buy new sniper scopes for some soldiers about to ship out to Iraq. Their old scopes were Vietnam-era, and were completely worn out.

So we got them brand-new, state-of-the-art, best-in-the-business, top-rated civilian scopes. Cost: about $1,800 each. Mil-spec scopes typically cost about $5,000 each, so we thought we were doing it properly.

All three of the new scopes were broken within a year, because of the stresses and strains from typical military use. So we had to buy them new ones, again. And again, less than a year after that. (Remember: you cannot get any better scopes on the civilian market than NightForce –forget Swarovski and Zeiss; they break even quicker.)

And these were replacing scopes that first saw service in the mid-1970s, finally wearing out in the early 2000s.

As Llamas said above, you can always get something cheaper. But it’s not what you want to carry in the field when lives are at stake, and breakage is fatal.

‘I can buy most of this stuff from China on ebay for….about £2.99.’

Er – no, you can’t.

What you can buy on eBay looks like what you have, may be dimensionally similar, but lacks the supporting documentation and infrastructure that proves that it is, what it is specified to be.

I hear this all the time – but I can buy that for $XX less on eBay! Sorry – not if you want to guarantee the performance that was originally designed. When you go to buying Chinese parts that come with certifications and calibration reports and RoHS compliance and all the rest of it – suddenly, the price goes up quite a bit.

Now, we could debate forever about whether some or all of the specifications that surround a piece of militray kit are really required for function – especially in the US, where many of those requirements are social or political and have nothing to do with meeting militray goals – but the fact remains that if you want something that is guaranteed to meet all of its specifications – you have to pay for it.

A 3″ 28-gauge hypodermic needle, for applying adhesives, from EFD Inc – 3¢ each.

The physically-identical needle, but for applying anaesthetics – 85¢ each. Because that needle comes certified as being sterile, made from the specified materials, sealed, autoclaveable and all the rest of it. The material cost is identical – it’s the processing and system cost you’re paying for.

llater,

llamas

‘Kelly Johnson developed the P-80 in six months.”

Yes, he did, or rather, his team did, and it was a complete dog of an airplane as originally built, with an astronomical failure rate and a distressing habit of killing its pilots in the process. General Yeager (who was there) has written quite descriptively of the issues involved in just keeping the early models flying at all. If any current development of military aircraft had the failure rate of the P80 at the same stage of development, it would be cancelled out of hand as a hopeless failure.

It took the best part of 3 years to iron out all of the dreadful problems on the early prototypes and develop the -B and -C models to a state where they were reliable enough for serious deployment.

Apocryphal tales of instant development of the most amazingly-complex products almost-always overlook the reality of their actual reduction to a device that’s useable in the real world. A sketch on a cocktail napkin, or a single working prototype, may lead the average person to think that the process of design and dvelopment is complete – alas, it is not so. The same goes for Earl Bakken’s first pacemaker design – it was a long, long, looong way frm being a viable product, as the subsequent trials and tribulations of Medtronics shows. First functional demonstration of the concept does not equal finished product.

For an exellent discussion of why military procurement makes everything so complex and costly, I suggest (as before) Edwin Luttwak’s book ‘The Pentagon and the Art of War’ – 25 years old and still 99.875% accurate.

llater,

llamas

You have to look at the suppliers who con un-knowing Defence bureaucrats out of vast sums, a little at a time, for things like…

5/8″ roller bearings (from Barden)….at £64 + vat (EACH) I have lots of them here, in sealed bags, they are so expensive that I can’t bear to open them to the air…
a simple AMD 16-pin pic chip, for £86
An electrolytic capacitor (OK it’s tantalum) for £6.80 per capacitor
A 1/4 watt carbon resistor, 5% tolerance, for £0.42 EACH
A pair of pliers, which (it is said…?) was to cost the Pentagon $33,000….until some sharp-eyed clerk spotted what it was….

I can buy most of this stuff from China on ebay for….about £2.99.

The jury is out, I am afraid, on this one.