Coba tu duit dan tenaga untuk bikin kapal terbang F-35 dipake buat penelitian
nyari obat buat berbagai penyakit..
Saya senang dengan pendapat Representative Justin Amash yang berpendapat bahwa
.... spending as a bigger threat than war.
Pendapatnya itu juga berlaku, menurut hemat saya, buat negeri lain, termasuk
Indonesia.
Zaman perang antara negara sekarang ini sudah boleh dikatakan liwat.
Kemajuan ilmu pengetahuan diberbagai bidang bagusnya untuk bikin hidup itu
nyaman buat semua manusia..
--
Monday, Feb. 25, 2013
The Most Expensive Weapon Ever Built
By MARK THOMPSON
Marine Major Aric "Walleye" Liberman was uncharacteristically modest for a Navy
SEAL turned fighter pilot. He had just landed an F-35--one of the 2,457 jets
the Pentagon plans to buy for $400 billion, making it the costliest weapons
program in human history--at its initial operational base late last year. Amid
celebratory hoopla, he declined photographers' requests to give a thumbs-up for
the cameras that sunny day in Yuma, Ariz. "No, no, no," he demurred with a
smile.
Liberman's reticence was understandable. For while the Marines hailed his
arrival as a sign that their initial F-35 squadron is now operational, there's
one sticking point. "It's an operational squadron," a Marine spokesman said.
"The aircraft is not operational."
The F-35, designed as the U.S. military's lethal hunter for 21st century skies,
has become the hunted, a poster child for Pentagon profligacy in a new era of
tightening budgets. Instead of the stars and stripes of the U.S. Air Force
emblazoned on its fuselage, it might as well have a bull's-eye. Its pilots'
helmets are plagued with problems, it hasn't yet dropped or fired weapons, and
the software it requires to go to war remains on the drawing board.
That's why when Liberman landed his F-35 before an appreciative crowd,
including home-state Senator John McCain, he didn't demonstrate its most
amazing capability: landing like a helicopter using its precision-cast titanium
thrust-vectoring nozzle. That trick remains reserved for test pilots, not
operational plane drivers like him.
(PHOTOS: Top 10 Most Expensive Military Planes)
The price tag, meanwhile, has nearly doubled since 2001, to $396 billion.
Production delays have forced the Air Force and Navy to spend at least $5
billion to extend the lives of existing planes. The Marine Corps--the cheapest
service, save for its love of costly jump jets (which take off and land almost
vertically) for its pet aircraft carriers--have spent $180 million on 74 used
British AV-8 jets for spare parts to keep their Reagan-era Harriers flying
until their version of the F-35 truly comes online. Allied governments are
increasingly weighing alternatives to the F-35.
But the accounting is about to get even worse as concern over spending on the
F-35 threatens other defense programs. On March 1, if lawmakers cannot reach a
new budget deal, the Pentagon faces more than $500 billion in spending cuts in
the form of sequestration, which translates into a 10% cut in projected budgets
over the coming decade. Two years ago, the White House predicted that those
cuts would be so onerous to defense-hawk Republicans that they would never
happen. But the GOP is now split, with a growing number of members who are more
concerned about the deficit than defense.
"We are spending maybe 45% of the world's budget on defense. If we drop to 42%
or 43%, would we be suddenly in danger of some kind of invasion?" asked
Representative Justin Amash, a Michigan Republican and part of a new breed of
deficit hawks who talk of spending as a bigger threat than war. "We're
bankrupting our country, and it's going to put us in danger."
MORE: How the F-35 Nearly Doubled In Price (And Why You Didn't Know)
House Republican leaders have started to speak of the military cuts as
inevitable. President Obama has warned that without a new plan from Congress,
there will be "tough decisions in the weeks ahead," like the recent
announcement that an aircraft-carrier deployment to the Persian Gulf will be
delayed to save money.
The sad irony is that cutting the F-35 at this point won't save much money in
the near term, because the Pentagon recently pushed nearly $5 billion in F-35
contracts out the door. Yet sequester-mandated cuts will push both the purchase
of additional planes and their required testing into the future with an
inevitable result: the cost of each plane will rise even higher. Unfortunately,
that won't be anything new for the F-35 Lightning II.
How Did We Get Here?
The single-engine, single-seat f-35 is a real-life example of the adage that a
camel is a horse designed by a committee. Think of it as a flying Swiss Army
knife, able to engage in dogfights, drop bombs and spy. Tweaking the plane's
hardware makes the F-35A stealthy enough for the Air Force, the F-35B's
vertical-landing capability lets it operate from the Marines' amphibious ships,
and the Navy F-35C's design is beefy enough to endure punishing carrier
operations.
(VIDEO: The Costly F-35 Fighter: Positive Angle of Attack)
"We've put all our eggs in the F-35 basket," said Texas Republican Senator John
Cornyn. Given that, one might think the military would have approached the
aircraft's development conservatively. In fact, the Pentagon did just the
opposite. It opted to build three versions of a single plane averaging $160
million each (challenge No. 1), agreed that the planes should be able to
perform multiple missions (challenge No. 2), then started rolling them off the
assembly line while the blueprints were still in flux--more than a decade
before critical developmental testing was finished (challenge No. 3). The
military has already spent $373 million to fix planes already bought; the
ultimate repair bill for imperfect planes has been estimated at close to $8
billion.
Back in 2002, Edward Aldridge, then the Pentagon's top weapons buyer, said the
F-35 was "setting new standards for technological advances" and "rewriting the
books on acquisition and business practices." His successor voiced a different
opinion last year. "This will make a headline if I say it, but I'm going to say
it anyway," Frank Kendall said. "Putting the F-35 into production years before
the first test flight was acquisition malpractice. It should not have been
done."
The Pentagon and its allies say the need for the F-35 was so dire that the
plane had to be built as it was being designed. (More than a decade into its
development, blueprints are changing about 10 times a day, seven days a week.)
"The technological edge of the American tactical air fleet is only about five
years, and both Russia and China are fielding fifth-generation fighters of
their own," argues Tom Donnelly, a defense expert at the American Enterprise
Institute. "Preserving the cumulative quantity-quality advantage requires that
the United States field a full fleet of fifth-generation fighters now."
MORE: The F-35: Super Plane for Super Cruise
Others suggest that no nation is close to fielding weapons in sufficient
quality and quantity to challenge U.S. air dominance anytime soon and that the
rush to develop the F-35 was more internal than external. "There's always this
sexual drive for a new airplane on the part of each service," says Tom
Christie, the Pentagon's chief weapons tester from 2001 to 2005. "Persistent,
urgent and natural."
The resulting bastard child was a compromise, not optimum for any one service
but good enough for all three. Neither the Air Force nor the Navy liked its
stubby design. The F-35C's squat fuselage puts its tailhook close to its
landing gear (7 ft., compared with 18 on the F-18 it is replacing), making it
tough to grab the arresting cable on an aircraft carrier. Its short range means
aircraft carriers ferrying it into battle will have to sail close to enemy
shores if the F-35C is to play a role. It can fly without lumbering aerial
tankers only by adding external fuel tanks, which erases the stealthiness that
is its prime war-fighting asset.
Cramming the three services into the program reduced management flexibility and
put the taxpayer in a fiscal headlock. Each service had the leverage generated
by threatening to back out of the program, which forced cost into the backseat,
behind performance. "The Air Force potentially could have adopted the Navy
variant, getting significantly more range and structural durability," says John
Young Jr., a top Navy and Pentagon civilian official from 2001 to 2009. "But
the Air Force leadership refused to consider such options."
Yet if the Navy, and Young, were upset with the Air Force, the Air Force was
upset with the Marines. "This is a jobs program for Marine aviation," says
retired general Merrill McPeak, Air Force chief of staff from 1990 to 1994.
"The idea that we could produce a committee design that is good for everybody
is fundamentally wrong." He scoffs at the Marine demand for a plane that can
land vertically, saying, "The idea of landing on a beach and supporting your
troops close up from some improvised airfield, à la Guadalcanal, is not going
to happen."
Focused on waging two post-9/11 wars, the Pentagon let the F-35 program drift
as costs ballooned and schedules slipped for a decade. The Marines' F-35 was
supposed to be capable of waging war in April 2010, the Air Force's in June
2011 and the Navy's in April 2012. In a break with Pentagon custom, there now
is no such "initial operating capability" date for any of them; each is likely
to be delayed several years.
Regardless of the plane's merit, the lawmakers pushing for it are hardly
disinterested observers. The then 48 members of the Joint Strike Fighter
Caucus, many of whom sit on key Pentagon-overseeing panels, pocketed twice as
much as nonmembers in campaign contributions from the F-35's top contractors in
the 2012 election cycle. Those lawmakers' constituents, in turn, hold many of
the F-35 program's 133,000 jobs spread across 45 states. (F-35 builder Lockheed
Martin says jobs will double once the plane enters full production.)
Complicating matters further, the Pentagon and Lockheed have been at war with
each other for years. Air Force Lieut. General Christopher Bogdan, a senior
Pentagon F-35 manager, declared last summer that the relationship was "the
worst I've ever seen--and I've been in some bad ones." But the two sides insist
the worst is now behind them. Lockheed CEO Marillyn Hewson said last month that
the aircraft has topped 5,000 flight hours, stepped up its flight-test schedule
and is steadily pushing into new corners of its flight envelope. "Our maturing
production line, operational-base stand-up and expanded pilot training are all
strong indicators of the F-35 program's positive trajectory," she said.
Deliveries of fresh F-35s more than doubled in 2012, to 30 planes.
Pilots love the F-35. There are few gauges, buttons or knobs in the cockpit.
"What you have in front of you is a big touchscreen display--it's an interface
for the iPad generation," says Marine Colonel Arthur Tomassetti, an F-35 test
pilot. "You have an airplane that with very small movements of your left and
right hand does what you want it to do. And if you don't want it to do
anything, it stays where you left it." That makes it easy to fly. "I'm watching
the emerald-colored sea up against the white sand," Tomassetti says of his
flights from Florida's Eglin Air Force Base along the shore of the Gulf of
Mexico. "I remember lots of flights in other airplanes where I never had time
to do anything like that."
But military technology has been moving away from manned fighters for years.
Drones, standoff weapons and GPS-guided bombs have cut the utility of, and need
for, such short-leg piloted planes. Their limits become even more pronounced
amid the Pentagon's pivot to the Pacific, where the tyranny of distance makes
the F-35's short combat radius (469 miles for the Marines, 584 for the Air
Force, 615 for the Navy) a bigger challenge.
Computers are key to flying the plane. But instead of taking advantage of
simplicity, the F-35 is heading in the other direction: its complexity can be
gleaned from its 24 million lines of computer code, including 9.5 million on
board the plane. That's more than six times as much as the Navy F-18 has. The
F-35 computer code, government auditors say, is "as complicated as anything on
earth."
Computers also were supposed to replace most prototyping and allow all three
kinds of F-35s to roll off the Texas assembly line at the same time, just as
Avalons, Camrys and Venzas are rolling out of Toyota's huge Kentucky plant.
"Advances in the technology, in our design tools and in our manufacturing
processes have significantly changed the manner in which aircraft are designed
and built today," Paul Kaminski, the Pentagon's top weapons buyer, said in 1997.
But Lockheed is no Toyota. Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine, the bible
of the aerospace industry and a traditional supporter, published an editorial
last fall that declared the program "already a failure" on cost and schedule
and said "the jury is still out" on its capabilities. It suggested pitting the
F-35 against existing fighters--Air Force F-15s and F-16s and Navy F-18s--for
future U.S. fighter purchases.
J. Michael Gilmore, Christie's successor as the Pentagon's top weapons tester,
reported in January that all three versions will be slower and less
maneuverable than projected. Weight-saving efforts have made the plane 25% more
vulnerable to fire. Only one of three F-35s flown by the U.S. military, he
added, was ready to fly between March and October.
Such problems inevitably lead to delays, which relentlessly drive up the price.
"Lockheed Martin and the F-35 program have not shown any kind of sensitivity to
costs," says Richard Aboulafia, who tracks military aviation for the Teal
Group, which analyzes the defense business. "That makes for a vulnerable
program."
And dark clouds are gathering. Pentagon and Lockheed officials know they need
to sell hundreds of F-35s to a dozen nations to reduce the cost of each U.S.
plane. But Canada announced in December that it is considering alternatives to
its planned buy of 65 F-35s after an independent analysis pegged their lifetime
cost at nearly $46 billion, roughly double an earlier estimate (the estimated
U.S. lifetime cost: $1.5 trillion). Australia recently suggested it wants 24
more St. Louis--built Boeing F-18s, almost guaranteeing a reduction in its
planned purchase of up to 100 F-35s.
The Right Kind of Plane?
While debate swirls around how to build the F-35 right, there's a more
important question: Is it the right kind of plane for the U.S. military in the
21st century? The F-35 is a so-called fifth-generation fighter, which means it
is built from the ground up to elude enemy radar that could be used to track
and destroy it. Stealth was all the rage in military circles when the Pentagon
conceived the F-35. But that was well before the drone explosion, which makes
the idea of flying a human through flak and missiles seem quaint. "The Air
Force," Aboulafia says, "eagerly drank gallons of the fifth-generation purple
liquid."
Improved sensors and computing are eroding stealth's value every day, says
Admiral Jonathan Greenert, the chief of naval operations. Eventually, he warns,
they will give potential foes "actionable target information" on stealth
platforms.
The Air Force feared "additional fourth-generation fighter acquisition as a
direct threat to fifth-generation fighter programs," Air Force Lieut. Colonel
Christopher Niemi, a veteran F-22 pilot, wrote in the November-December 2012
issue of the service's Air & Space Power Journal. Its refusal to reconsider
buying new fourth-generation F-15s and F-16s in lieu of some F-35s "threatens
to reduce the size of the Air Force's fielded fighter fleet to dangerously
small numbers, particularly in the current fiscal environment."
A stealthy jet requires sacrifices in range, flying time and weapon-carrying
capability--the hat trick of aerial warfare. All those factors have played a
role in the fate of the Air Force's F-22 fighter, the nation's only other
fifth-generation warplane. It has been sitting on runways around the globe for
seven years, pawing at the tarmac as the nation waged wars in Afghanistan, Iraq
and Libya. Yet the F-22, built to fight wars against enemies that have yet to
materialize, has yet to fly a single combat mission.
If sequestration happens March 1, F-35 officials have made it clear they will
be forced to slow production and delay flight tests. Both steps will make each
plane that is ultimately bought more expensive.
But thanks to $4.8 billion in Pentagon contracts for 31 planes pushed out the
door barely 100 hours before the original Jan. 2 sequestration deadline, much
of the program will continue on autopilot.
"The F-35 program has built up a good buffer by getting the most recent lot of
aircraft awarded in time," says Todd Harrison, a defense-budget expert at the
independent Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "That means
Lockheed and all the subcontractors have a backlog of work that won't be
affected by sequestration, so they can continue working as planned for the time
being."
Apparently the F-35 may end up being pretty stealthy after all.
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