How to Bankrupt a nation

[tw]

In early 2000, the Coast Guard needed new ocean going patrol vessels. A new design was implemented. But extremists do not know how to design; only know politics and lying. So George Jr's administration wackos decided to build the entire fleet without first developing a prototype. Therefore all those ships could not put to sea due a threat of sinking. The stern might break off. It would only do 20 knots when the Coast Guard needed 30 knot ships.

Same fools also decided (too late) to replace Space Shuttles. Being extremists (not intelligent moderates), they rush the Constellation, Ares, and Orion into production. Finally someone with basic intelligence canceled that fiasco after a first test flight.

Another project continues a legacy of extremists. The F-35 is structured so that this plane, no matter how defective, cannot be canceled. The Washington Post discussed this in F-35's ability to evade budget cuts...

Pentagon officials accepted Lockheed's claim that computer simulations would be able to identify design problems, minimizing the need to make changes once the plane actually took to the sky. That, in turn, led to an aggressive plan to build and test the aircraft simultaneously.

Cautioning that all of those assumptions were flawed, Spinney and other defense analysts urged the Pentagon to see the plane in flight before committing to buy it. But senior Defense Department officials in the George W. Bush administration did not heed the warnings.

Defense Department committed to manufacturing F-35s before its design was finished.

The F-35 was conceived on the same concept that created an Air Force's worst plane - F-111. A plane designed for all services was so defective that, when it attacked Kadaffi in Libya, something like half turned back due to system failures. Knowing this, the Air Force only planned refueling for half the attacking fleet.

F-35 for the Marines is a vertical landing version that has yet to demonstrate the ability due to major engineering flaws. But the F-35 started production in 2007 ("before the first flight tests had even begun") with full production planned in 2010. So that half the fleet would be built next year. And so that production would be too difficult to stop.

Another legacy of George Jr. This article discusses management ignorance today that was just as obvious in another program flawed by the same mindset. Before Challenger exploded, numerous engineers, not even on the program, warned how bad the Shuttle was and how management was ignoring it. Of course.

"In 2009, Gates grasped the dysfunction." ... "Until recently, he said, Lockheed's software developers worked at computers that were not connected to each other." This sounds as dsyfunctional as how most American banks operate.

Despite the lobbying, a few members have spoken out. One of them was Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a former Navy pilot. In December 2011, he took to the floor of the Senate to lambaste the development effort. "In a nutshell, the JSF program has been both a scandal and a tragedy," he said.

Engineering designs often have mistakes. Easy to solve in a design phase. Almost as easy to solve after a prototype defines them. Once manufacturing starts, any flaw means finding the flaw, kludging a solution to work around an existing design, causes disruption and compromises on every adjacent design, and implementing changes that solve the problem at the expense of reliability. At a minimum, work increases by a factor of 3. Massive cost increases.

The F-18A and B-1 bomber both demonstrate disasters created by management. Fortunately others with engineering (rather than business school) knowledge canceled another disaster called the B-70 bomber. Fortunately Admiral Thomas Connelly literally risked his carreer to define the shit F-111. His balls resulted in the F-14 Tomcat. That name is no accident.

But in a country whose graduates are only 6% engineers (when 12% are needed), then no wonder so many even believed an obvious myth - Saddam's WMDs. Or ignore another disaster - F-22. The informed why two most successful warplanes (F-16 and A-10) were developed.

George Jr was an MBA. Massive engineering projects started in the 2000s are now showing what happens when the boss has no idea how the work gets done.

"Though the F-35 is rarely mentioned by those seeking to rein in federal spending on Capitol Hill", well, we have a Congress that cannot even eliminate the penny and the paper dollar bill. More trophies to MBA and wacko extremist type thinking. But then some people say they want America to fail. Is the F-35 another trophy?

BTW, this applies to America. Norway, Britain, Canada, Australia, and other nations who are paying for it.