Failed military industrial complex chronyism as usual. Government builds more than anyone wants because lobbyist and officials with shipyards in their district want money. The military industrial complex just funnels as much money as they can with zero fucks given about if the end product is successful.
The A-10 Warthog. A plane that is immensely useful as long as your enemy doesn’t have planes of their own, air defense, shoulder-fired weapons or machine guns.
ROFL, the A-10 is the most successful close air support aircraft ever. It was kept flying for 20+ years past it’s retirement age with everyone trying to kill it (leadership and Congress) because nothing can come close to doing what it can.
You want a failure look at the F-22 being retired without ever seeing combat despite there being active wars. It was too expensive and too unreliable.
the A-10 is the most successful close air support aircraft ever.
Yes, because America’s enemies during that time didn’t have planes of their own, air defense, shoulder-fired weapons or machine guns.
What they had was old AK’s, Soviet artillery shells filled with fertilizer, Casio watches and Nokia phones. (Oh, and they won.)
That has turned into one of the most useful political tools ever made.
For all its flaws, it’s an aircraft that when it showed up to the first Red Flag training series, it flew against the best fighter pilots and aircraft in the western world racking up a 78:1 kill ratio.
The cost has come down on A models, flight availability has risen, and costs per airframe are dropping as costing and maintenance costs reduce.
It’s got problems. It has lord of problems. It’s got a reputation as a failure of a program from the early 2Ks, but it is in reality the most successful political military program ever created. Every. Single. One. Of NATO countries want them, but just need to figure out how to buy them. 16 countries we want able to integrate and work closely with us have them in order or are flying them.
They offer capabilities simply not possible with any other aircraft, and quarterback the battle space with sensor integration from inputs across all aircraft, radars, and it’s own sensors. This gets pushed out to every other data linked aircraft in the battle space.
The F-35 is an incredible and continually getting better program.
As former enlisted Navy let me say this. Every officer thinks they’re captain Picard. That they can just say, “make it so” and somehow all of this impossible shit will just happen. Contractors will never work themselves out of a job. Most sailors are fuckups who join because they couldn’t put a life together in the real world. It is literally a billion dollar mess. The train wreck of the LCS program really highlights all these issues.
I was in the Navy when these we being announced, and since I worked in the engine room everyone had an opinion…
Officers wouldn’t stop talking about how great they’d be. Because lots of stuff was automated and there wouldn’t be many enlisted. They envisioned it as like a Star Trek bridge where they had a handful of people to push buttons for them.
Every enlisted knew it would go to shit, because eventually everything breaks. And if the people on it only knew how to press buttons, no one would be able to fix what broke.
I didn’t know the actual plan was to rely on contractors so much for maintenance, but that’s probably the stupidest part of the whole thing. It’s bad enough if they’re brought on for shipyard stuff where it’s parked for 6-12 months, but trying to get them to do routine maintenance is insane.
Every enlisted knew it would go to shit, because eventually everything breaks. And if the people on it only knew how to press buttons, no one would be able to fix what broke.
I think you’ve just summed up modern civilization right there.
Not really the same thing if you’re talking about cars.
But the people on this ship were literally prohibited from even touching some systems.
Auto mechanics are all over the place on land. But if something breaks out at sea with six months left on deployment…
Going back to port and scheduling contractors to come out before you even know what’s wrong is fucking insane for any type of ship, and 100x as stupid for military vessels.
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