In practice, the US has already demonstrated that its primary airpower projection is via unmanned systems, the manned combat aircraft is the mounted cavalry c. 1920.
1. The US hasn't had to overcome a first-rate Integrated Air Defense System since the 1970s. UAVs, while hard to detect due to their small RCS, have extremely poor overall survivability. It's part of what makes them so cheap.
2. The US is rarely flying drones against an adversary with robust Electronic Attack capabilities. They're pretty useless if their datalinks to their Ground Control Station are jammed and you don't have HARMs on-hand to suppress/neutralize/destroy the jamming source.
3. The future of air power is likely to be a mix of manned fighters with UAVs as wingmen or forward-deployed scouts/sensor platforms, and then further in the rear big (manned) "bombers" with deep magazines throwing missiles into the fight from far away, handing off target tracking to the manned fighter. Even something like an F-15 Strike Eagle or a Su-34 could fulfill that latter role with the right electronics suite and ordnance upgrades...
GPS jamming can be made vastly more difficult by special antenna configurations, and additionally I'd hope that military drones have precise IMUs and star trackers to serve as fallback.
I've always had a suspicion that the generous piles of cash thrown at the F-35 program was really going to two programs:
1) A well-publicised cover (F-35)
2) A secret Skunk Works project like F-117, SR-71
But a corporate welfare program as you suggest is more likely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Aurora#U.S._sighting_c...
(Evidence of something moving around Mach 5 at high altitude, rattling the rocks, captured by seismic equipment since the 90ies. Overton Window has now been open long enough for Lockheed Martin to tentatively present https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_SR-72 as something new.)
If the US is clever (NSA: this is your queue) it would find a way to use the current difficult political climate to focus on what they are supposed to do (I guess preventing war maybe) and in a relevant way for the times. The Russians basically did this with internet trolls. They took something simple (and amusing at times) and weaponised it.
I guess one would hope enough people that are both clever and uhm, ethical, work for the three-letter organisations.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9QXjBVC233s
The Afghanistan Papers - which dropped off the mainstream media's radar almost instantly - is further evidence it's alive and well.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/...
I'm unconvinced by this assessment, for one they haven't had symmetrical warfare in a long time and a pilot is way harder to jam. for another long range laser ciws systems are getting more and more effective and if you armor cheap unmanned system they stop being cheap. but ultimately they have limited payload option and you can always pack more countermeasures than the enemy pack missiles so it's yet unclear what the best option is in a defended/contested airspace
But now I wonder: if this is just so much smoke, mirrors and rose-tinted narratives of potentiality... when will the bubble pop? And what might cause that? And what might the pop (or maybe explosion) look like?
My curiosity is mostly just idle/morbid musing - this seems much like watching a moth encounter a candle.
And for the engineering tasks I was doing, there were no good ways to categorize the task, so I eventually gave up and called all the data loads I was doing "LUBRICATION/OTHER". Hey, making the data flow better is a kind of lubrication, right?
I would say "maybe it's gotten better since I used it years ago" but from this article it looks like the answer is a solid "No".
The failure rate of large scale IT projects is the huge. For large, complex projects the statistics is
2% success
42% challenged
56% failed
The new system has probably similar 50% change for success. I think giving the new project to the same contractor may improve the changes. Hhey have hopefully learned something.
Which involves as stellar things as delivering a not-working (but "valid under contract" so we couldn't sue them) system for logistics management (everything from ensuring parts are on the shelves to assigning jobs to technicians and pilots for a mission) that we later found was rebranded broken car logistics support software, something that was found 3 years post original delivery date by new employee of a team working on fixing it - which meant we had to rework a crucial module.
Said software had gems like JS copied from geocities in 1998 handling drop down menus (which were broken unless very specific browser versions were used) - in 2012. (original delivery date was 2009~2010).
The "redo" contract is going to the same guys who just did the failure, and I've seen no mention of removal of one of the bigger pain points, which was use of cloud.
heart warming to see us draw ever closer to the cyberpunk dystopia of my childhood dreams.
https://thenewstack.io/how-the-u-s-air-force-deployed-kubern...
"“One point for the team was to demonstrate that it could be done,” Chaillan said. He challenged the Air Force and its partners to get Kubernetes up and running on a jet in 45 days, and while that was as difficult as it sounds, the team met the goal and F-16s are now running three concurrent Kubernetes clusters, he said."
ODIN being in the cloud is nothing new - a big pain point with ALIS is the fact that it's cloud based.
That's more than a few EMP's...
Of course if they deploy it on a single Digital Ocean droplet then it's a bit more vulnerable.
https://pando.com/2015/09/24/war-nerd-why-f-35-albanian-mush...
Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month (1975)
It covers things like tracking wear&tear of components so that you know when to replace parts, and more importantly, know when to schedule repairs - it's crucial that you have well-planned maintenance that ensures maximum availability of aircraft, so you need to stagger them - which is non-trivial to do. That's probably the "MVP" level, which to be practical might involve tons of other stuff.
On a predecessor to ALIS for a different plane, even planning a mission went through it - you had someone come to you with requirements, and you'd arrange which plane, which pilots, which technicians to prepare it for flight, where are the tools they need for it, generate a fueling chart, everything based on the availability and qualifications.
Once the plane returned from mission, you'd enter various flight data, including stuff like "how many rounds the autocannon fired" so that the underlying MRP system could calculate maintenance dates and the like.
The ultimate goal is that you have a squadron that has maximum possible availability so it can fulfill its job in the air, without surprise maintenance (or worse - stuff breaking down) foiling your mission plans, and where your stores contain enough of all materiel necessary.
ALIS covered, AFAIK, all elements of logistics for F-35, a giant integrated system. Great on paper as the top level idea, everything got worse the more you got into implementation of the goals. I heard of rebasing where the bringup of local ALIS node took longer than the whole rebased mission. Downloading flight records post-flight would take longer than the flight. Planes that won't fly unless connection with "cloud" part of ALIS (all hosted centrally in USA) was done at least once a month. Gigantic amounts of data you had to transfer between "cloud" and local instance, making it more than problematic to run on ships equipped with F-35B and F-35C.
And of course the fact that data packages describing the operation theater can be generated only by one or two labs in USA (good luck, export customers!)... which is part of the ALIS cloud (and now ODIN cloud), which also is hosted by Lockheed Martin in USA.
Now that I think of it, ALIS explains significant portion of the money USAF puts into Starlink as its only customer...
Lockheed Martin's long term profit margin is around 6-7 percent (recently above 9%). Lockheed pays more wages than it makes profits.
If you count the whole value chain, with contractors and their subcontractors, it's probably something like 50% total worker compensation (wages, benefits), 10% profits, 10% cost of capital, rest is taxes, real estate, energy and raw materials.
Popular history tends to be a distorted view of history that willfully ignores evidence to the contrary to tell a good story, and military history especially tends to fall victim here. As a good case in point, take WWI. In popular history, WWI is a war of unimaginable destruction because generals were idiots fighting Napoleonic-era tactics with modern weaponry. But that's not really sustained by the evidence. The generals and officer class were aware of how much more effective modern guns and gunnery was compared to the Napoleonic wars, and their battle plans accounted for this. Trenches came out of known tactics--on the defensive, digging in is the most effective way to avoid the lethality of opposing weapons, and an underground trench is more effective than an above-ground static fortification.
More prosaically, Napoleon had much larger armies available to him than his opponents: "You can't stop me, I spend 30000 men a month" [1].
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25qmz6/can_s...
Isn't the idea of skunkwork projects exactly to avoid bureaucratic waste for the sake of radical innovation?! Let me give three quotes from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Skunkworks_projec...:
"A skunkworks project is a project developed by a relatively small and loosely structured group of people who research and develop a project primarily for the sake of radical innovation."
"Everett Rogers defined skunkworks as an "enriched environment that is intended to help a small group of individuals design a new idea by escaping routine organizational procedures.""
"[T]he term [skunkworks] was generalized to apply to similar high-priority R&D projects at other large organizations which feature a small elite team removed from the normal working environment and given freedom from management constraints.".
In this sense, the projects you are talking about surely cannot be skunkwork projects, but are just ordinary cooperate projects with a huge conservative cooperate-bureaucratic structure.
> Skunk works can sustain, at max manpower. It is bureaucratic waste with minimum productive output.
to me, "it" seems to refer to "[s]kunk work" and referring to skunk work with respect to "max manpower" does not sound like skunk work to me, but throwing lots of cooperate ressources (instead of a small elite team) at the project.
In the true sense of the word, yes. However, the MIC and the budgets that support it have their own working definition. It's not about the ends/results, It's about the means (swallowing more and more budget).
I would suggest they are primarily an ECM platform. It is well known that the F-22 is a superior fighter compared to the F-35. The main feature of the F-35 that puts fear in potential adversaries are the capabilities that become available when multiple F-35 are in the air and linked with one another (or other larger aircraft with comparable systems, e.g. AWACS).
missiles don't have the same restrictions because they don't have to have anything in the way of performance as loiter time or target search system or payloads.
what you're thinking of are Anti Radiation missiles such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-27_(air-to-air_missile)
but that ties with the point being made originally, you have to sacrifice payload, or go bigger to have more payload options, or go sideway and have air superiority drones sweep the area before, and it all ties into the "this stuff hasn't been tested in symmetric warfare so who knows" argument.
> With the F35 budget well over a trillion dollars (this is 2-3 orders of magnitude larger than needed to fund maximum number of projects Skunk works can sustain, at max manpower), it is a bureaucratic waste with minimum productive output.
Skunkworks is great, but works while it is small and nimble. Fund it fully. But this could cost billions, tens of billions at most. Not trillions that have been spent on F-35.
However I wouldn't use a civilian made system for this, you're going to spend the rest of the program lifetime correcting security holes.
No the reason is that there are fundamental differences in the risk profile of the civilian and military sector.
Adversaries will insert spies in mission critical projects if they are publicly accessible. Once the main contributors stop maintaining the project the military will have to hire people and train them for maintenance but all the people that can train the replacements have already left. The military has to verify every single line of code every time the code base is updated.
All of these problems don't exist in projects where the full life cycle is taken care of by the military.
The internet of things suffers from the same problems. Once you are dependent on a vendor and that vendor shuts down or cancels a product you're stuck with a lot of paperweights. The vendor is usually not acting in your interest.
OTOH there are many satellites up there whose missions are unknown (to us). Who is to say that some party wouldn't try it, maybe during a geomagnetic storm? Or, maybe some crazy like NK because, hey, got china watching my Six!1!! Of course the orbits, and therefore the owners are known.
This does not need to be 'high tech' in the way some understand rocket science or reentry vehicles to be. Just some crude device which survives start and waiting 'up there', then being ignited later, without the complications of reentry heat and burn.
Last time I did the math though, you'd only get a few tens of kilometers of effect radius with an 20ft shipping container sized device so realistically, EMPs are only deployable using nuclear weapons detonated in the atmosphere.
But we were stuck moving what was supposed to be just deployment into "actually useful for something" state, including rewriting more and more of the code (because L-M license forbid us from modifying their code...)
Have you heard of the cloud native computing foundation where members have committed to longterm investment in kubernetes development?
Kubernetes is the commoditization of infrastructure layers and serious forward looking companies are member of CNFC.
I assume you are aware of the history of Silicon Valley with defense contractors. And you probably also heard that the FBI approached Paypall for fraud detection capabilities. Hence Peter Thiel's venture Palantir.