Various sources say that there are 95,000 people employed by this project which is slated to manufacture 187 aircraft total.

What the hell are all those people doing?

Does this mean that the F-35 program, whoch will make 1700 aircraft for the US alone, employ 950,000 people?

No wonder this stuff costs so much.  The program's contractors are featherbedded beyond belief.

Congrats on killing this pork program.

Various sources say that there are 95,000 people employed by this project which is slated to manufacture 187 aircraft total.

What the hell are all those people doing?

Does this mean that the F-35 program, whoch will make 1700 aircraft for the US alone, employ 950,000 people?

No wonder this stuff costs so much.  The program's contractors are featherbedded beyond belief.

Congrats on killing this pork program.


I dunno what they were doing, but now they're collecting unemployment.

It's hard to get those defense programs cut once they get started.  To you it's pork.  To Representative McBacon, it's 10,000 jobs lost in his district and 10,000 votes he ain't getting next time.
:(

Various sources say that there are 95,000 people employed by this project which is slated to manufacture 187 aircraft total.

What the hell are all those people doing?

Does this mean that the F-35 program, whoch will make 1700 aircraft for the US alone, employ 950,000 people?


Nope.

What we're doing with the F-22 is analagous to what we've done with the space programme over the past 40 years:

1) Design something absolutely awesome.
2) Divide up its construction so that every Congressional district gets some of the pork.
3) Build it.
4) Now that you can build it, you can either mass produce it or scrap it.
5) If you mass produce it, no new pork.  So you scrap it before you've got enough of 'em to make a difference.
6) Then you build another one from scratch.

Or, from another thread on another message board:  "Want 187 pizzas?  Cost ya $100K to rent a storefront, build some ovens, get the health inspections done.  And $1K to staff the restaurant for the one days it'll take to bake 'em.  And $187 for the flour, cheese, and pepperoni."

If you're a private citizen interested in pizza, you pay the $100/day in rent in case you want the right to buy a dozen pizzas for next week's shindig.

If you're the government, you buy the 187 pizzas, then you demolish the building.  A whole lotta restauranteurs, pizza oven makers, and Italian chefs will be lining your pockets with campaign dollars as you try to decide ("gosh, there are so many choices") who makes the pizzas next week.

The reason the F-22 costs "too much" is because we're making too few of 'em.  If you only made one prototype, the entire R&D costs of building it are embedded in that prototype.  If you make a million of 'em, the R&D costs get spread out over the production run, and you're basically down to the cost of materials.  It's why a Bugatti Veyron costs $1.2M and a Toyota Camry - which only goes about half as fast - costs $12K. 

(I actually support the F-22 programme.  The F-35 is damn good, but the F-22 is better.  Yes, 187 Raptors will probably tide us over until UAVs can outfight anything in the skies, but I'd rather err on the side of caution.  We made the mistake of removing cannon from manned fighters in the 60s because we thought that missiles would replace the gun over Vietnam, and it cost us dearly in lives and planes.  On the off chance that geeks flying 15-gee-turning UAVs still won't outfly a well-trained Russian or Chinese pilot in some variant of the Su-27, the marginal cost of producing another block of F-22s isn't that much, all things considered.)

But that's not how we roll anymore.

The money's spent in the design, testing, and procurement.  After that, there are no more political favors to be handed out.  So we scrap everything before we achieve any economies of scale, and we start over.

In somewhat more verbose terms:


    The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial society. At present, when few human beings even have enough to eat, this problem is obviously not urgent, and it might not have become so, even if no artificial processes of destruction had been at work. The world of today is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared with the world that existed before 1914, and still more so if compared with the imaginary future to which the people of that period looked forward. In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient -- a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete -- was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person. Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing. This failed to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimented society. As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was fifty years ago. Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices, always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage, have been developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped, and the ravages of the atomic war of the nineteen- fifties have never been fully repaired. Nevertheless the dangers inherent in the machine are still there. From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process -- by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute -- the machine did raise the living standards of the average humand being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.

    But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction -- indeed, in some sense was the destruction -- of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. To return to the agricultural past, as some thinkers about the beginning of the twentieth century dreamed of doing, was not a practicable solution. It conflicted with the tendency towards mechanization which had become quasi-instinctive throughout almost the whole world, and moreover, any country which remained industrially backward was helpless in a military sense and was bound to be dominated, directly or indirectly, by its more advanced rivals.

    Nor was it a satisfactory solution to keep the masses in poverty by restricting the output of goods. This happened to a great extent during the final phase of capitalism, roughly between 1920 and 1940. The economy of many countries was allowed to stagnate, land went out of cultivation, capital equipment was not added to, great blocks of the population were prevented from working and kept half alive by State charity. But this, too, entailed military weakness, and since the privations it inflicted were obviously unnecessary, it made opposition inevitable. The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare.

    The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed. A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that would build several hundred cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labours another Floating Fortress is built. In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another. By the standards of the early twentieth century, even a member of the Inner Party lives an austere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the few luxuries that he does enjoy his large, well-appointed flat, the better texture of his clothes, the better quality of his food and drink and tobacco, his two or three servants, his private motor-car or helicopter -- set him in a different world from a member of the Outer Party, and the members of the Outer Party have a similar advantage in comparison with the submerged masses whom we call 'the proles'. The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city, where the possession of a lump of horseflesh makes the difference between wealth and poverty. And at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.

    War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself. Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist. The splitting of the intelligence which the Party requires of its members, and which is more easily achieved in an atmosphere of war, is now almost universal, but the higher up the ranks one goes, the more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink. Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed master of the entire world.

...and the punchline is that there are still people who decry Orwell's 1984 a work of fiction.

Orwell was an optimist.  He wrote the book as a warning.  In 1948, even he couldn't have imagined that people would end up using it as a functional specification. 

The reason the F-22 costs "too much" is because we're making too few of 'em.  If you only made one prototype, the entire R&D costs of building it are embedded in that prototype.   If you make a million of 'em, the R&D costs get spread out over the production run, and you're basically down to the cost of materials.  It's why a Bugatti Veyron costs $1.2M and a Toyota Camry - which only goes about half as fast - costs $12K. 


And that really is it in a nutshell.  Remember, the F-22 project started in 1981.  It was accepted by the Air Force in 1991, and the first production aircraft started it's testing in 2003.  That is 22 years of design, development, and testing before the first actual unit rolled off of the assembly line.  And like so many other things, the cost per unit stems not from the cost of each unit, but in all the money spent before it was made.

In things like automobiles, that is spread widely because of the numbers put out.  And it is lessened because each model is an advancement over the previous.  But the higher costs can be seen in the development of Electric and Hybrid cars.  When they were once horribly expensive, the cost is now getting closer to where it can compete with the standard versions.

This is something that comes up over and over again when it comes to military equipment.  Because of the byzantine system put in place by the GAO, DOD, JCS, CBO, and the rest of the system, it takes years for anything to be accepted, at a huge cost.  Even something that sounds as simple as "Body Armour" or "HMMWV Up-Armour Kits" take years (if not decades) to design, test, redesign, retest, field test, competative bid, and budget before they are ever seen by those of us in uniform.

While most think of the PATRIOT Missile as a technology from 1990, it was actually first fielded in 1984.  And while the "Missile Defense" part came from President Reagan's Star Wars research, the original design came from President Nixon's SAM-D program.  And that was the follow-up to President Johnson's and Robert MacNamera's AADS-70s program.

The reason the F-22 costs "too much" is because we're making too few of 'em.  If you only made one prototype, the entire R&D costs of building it are embedded in that prototype.  If you make a million of 'em, the R&D costs get spread out over the production run, and you're basically down to the cost of materials.  It's why a Bugatti Veyron costs $1.2M and a Toyota Camry - which only goes about half as fast - costs $12K. 


I hear what you are saying.

But the bill that was just voted down was going to spend $1.8 BILLION to manufacture only seven additional aircraft.

That's $257 million per additional airplane, which does NOT count the sunk cost of development.

Awful expensive cost for incremental airplanes at the end of a production run.

I would never call Orwell "verbose."

I don't quite understand what you are saying.  Are you extremely cynical?  You seem to get Orwell's prophetic analysis and yet favor the very thing he was warning against.

???

Echo,

The problem is how to steward and properly manage defense spending dollars.

One additional F-22 costs $257 million .  One additional F-35 (which the US will be acquiring in quantities anywhere from 1700 to 2400) costs $83 million. 

For the cost of one F-22 I can buy three F-35's.

If the United States had unlimited resources yes, I would want an F-22 in every garage.  But we have to make sure that we spend wisely.

But at a cost of $1.87billion for 7 F-22's the choice is easy to make.  End it.

You seem to get Orwell's prophetic analysis and yet favor the very thing he was warning against.

???
i second max's befuddlement. what's up with that?

Echo,

The problem is how to steward and properly manage defense spending dollars.

One additional F-22 costs $257 million .  One additional F-35 (which the US will be acquiring in quantities anywhere from 1700 to 2400) costs $83 million. 

For the cost of one F-22 I can buy three F-35's.

If the United States had unlimited resources yes, I would want an F-22 in every garage.  But we have to make sure that we spend wisely.

But at a cost of $1.87billion for 7 F-22's the choice is easy to make.  End it.


I guess we're F'd either way!

:-\\

I don't quite understand what you are saying.  Are you extremely cynical?  You seem to get Orwell's prophetic analysis and yet favor the very thing he was warning against.



i second max's befuddlement. what's up with that?


Yes, I'm extremely cynical.  But that's beside the point ;)

To address both or your - dead-on insightful and karmaworthy - questions, let me put it this way:

Point A: George Orwell, overgeneralized to "all that military-industrial complex spending is about taking money from the proles and burning it so as to stay in power"

Point B: Whargarrblwell's (Orwell never said it; the link I've found indicates the source of the misquote originates with Kipling, and in the absence of further research, I concur -- the sentiment is inconsistent with Orwell's, but very consistent with Kipling's writings) overgeneralization of the notion that our freedoms are contingent because "Rough men stand ready" to defend these freedoms with violence.

If you draw a line from point A to point B, I'm somewhere in the middle.

The F-22 is an air superiority fighter.  Air superiority means it's designed to not only beat any fighter flown by any air force on the planet, it's designed to beat anything publicly acknowledged as being on the drawing boards of any nation on the planet.  (The F-35, by contrast, is designed "merely" to beat any fighter flown by any air force on the planet, which is why we feel secure in selling them to our allies, which means we can afford to build more of them, and consequently, the unit cost is lower.)

You export the good stuff, but you keep the best stuff for yourself.

In the end, we're back to the Western vs. Soviet philosophies of engineering:  Small numbers of advanced machines that use technology as a force or capability multiplier, versus large numbers of machines that are rugged and maintainable.  Sometimes, technology beats numbers:  M-1 vs. gazillions of T-72s.  The untouchable SR-71 that was more fuel-efficient at Mach 3 than at Mach 2 vs. MiG-25s that burned their engines out within minutes of mach 2+ flight trying to take a shot at it.  Sometimes, dumb-but-rugged wins.  Soyuz vs. Space Shuttle.  Pays your money, takes your chances.

The funny thing about the balance between high-tech and dumb-but-resilient, is that sometimes you pays your money, you takes your chances, and you're not sure who wins.  The transistor and the microchip rendered the vacuum tube obsolete, but because vacuum tubes are much more reslieant against EMP effects than integrated circuits, there was one application that still required their use: systems that had to function in the event of nuclear war.  In one of the crowning ironies of the Cold War, the West's SAGE system - built to detect incoming Soviet bombers - relied on vacuum tubes sourced from the only countries that still manufactured them... the comparative technological backwaters of of the Soviet bloc.

In the end, we're back to the Western vs. Soviet philosophies of engineering:  Small numbers of advanced machines that use technology as a force or capability multiplier, versus large numbers of machines that are rugged and maintainable.  Sometimes, technology beats numbers:  M-1 vs. gazillions of T-72s.  The untouchable SR-71 that was more fuel-efficient at Mach 3 than at Mach 2 vs. MiG-25s that burned their engines out within minutes of mach 2+ flight trying to take a shot at it.  Sometimes, dumb-but-rugged wins.  Soyuz vs. Space Shuttle.  Pays your money, takes your chances.


There is one other area where the Soviet Union differed from the US:  The willingness to take horrendous losses in a conflict.

In World War II, the US lost around 416,000 military members.  The Soviet Union lost between 8.8 and 10.7 million military members.  In the 8 years of war in Afganistan, the US has had 753 killed.  In the 10 years the Soviet Union was in Afganistan, they lost between 14,453 (Soviet figures) and 15,051 (independent figures).  That is roughly 20 Soviets to every American killed.

One reason the Soviets were able to get away with their quality of equipment, was that largely the Government did not care.  With universal conscription, they could take those kinds of losses without it affecting their ability.  And of course the population and soldiers would not dare complain.

The last time the US fielded in large numbers an inferior piece of equipment was in WWII, with the M-4 Sherman tank.  The armour was to thin, the gun to light, and unlike most tanks of the era, they ran on gasoline instead of diesel.  This meant when a tank was struck from a round, it would burst into flames.  The Brits called them "Tomycookers", and the US troops called them the "Ronson" (who's cigarette ligher slogan at the time was "Light up the first time, every time!".

While many help credit the Sherman with winning the war, it was because of the huge numbers produced, not the quality of the tank that made that possible.  It was vastly inferior to the Soviet and German tanks of the time.  And after the war was over, the remaining Shermans were converted to M4A2 Shermans, with a diesel engine and thicker armour.

People need to realize that whenever they choose to put inferior military equipment in the hands of our service members, they are acepting the fact that there will be a higher rate of casualties if that equipment is ever needed.  But most people never think of it in that way, they only think of the money spent.

*shrugs*  And those of us in the military are used to that.

There is one other area where the Soviet Union differed from the US:  The willingness to take horrendous losses in a conflict.

In World War II, the US lost around 416,000 military members.  The Soviet Union lost between 8.8 and 10.7 million military members.  In the 8 years of war in Afganistan, the US has had 753 killed.  In the 10 years the Soviet Union was in Afganistan, they lost between 14,453 (Soviet figures) and 15,051 (independent figures).  That is roughly 20 Soviets to every American killed.
That's kind of continuing Foo's "technology vs numbers" argument.. and especially in Afghanistan, there's still doubt as to whether technology will win out where numbers lost.  I'm kind of hoping that there are now enough brains in the political arena there now to work out a solution: the military cannot secure Afghanistan alone, it never has been able to - Afghanistan is that kind of place.

PS Thanks about the Sherman tank history - I'd heard the "Ronson" tag before, but never realized where it came from, nor that the large numbers of Shermans were actually running on petrol.