I find it somewhat funny (or frightening) that the media has conditioned the public to assume that all pricey weapons systems in their development phase are "struggling" rather than simply being developed.
I'm not old enough to have followed the F22 closely (and at least the end product appears to have been performing superlatively; if only there was a need deserving of its abilities), but the JSF program has been a boon of all doggles. We're going to a single engine craft over open water, which is bad enough, but we're also going to pretend the same basic airframe is good for a basic interceptor jet as well as a highly-specialized STOVL (short takeoff, vertical landing) configuration? Decades of development, billions of dollars, and millions of lobby bills later, we have two of the three variants working --overweight, over cost, and behind schedule-- the third half-working, with advice to operators to not use the STOVL features frequently because of higher than acceptable equipment failures which will
all result in lost aircraft (oh, but they're "acceptable" now, since we told you not to use them often), and again, overweight, over cost, and behind schedule.
And, now they've grounded the fleet due to suspected engine component failures. We've seen
that movie before, and it ends with us paying to design a whole new dang engine for the fleet, costing billions and leaving our air superiority at risk in the interim. Exactly how long do we really expect to keep F18's and F16's flying while we figure out our next move? KC tankers, too, for that matter (a whole 'nuther can 'o worms of the same variety, that)
The truth is that the real production run has not even started yet
And yet we've reduced our own orders for the things from well over a thousand to like a few hundred when I last looked into it (granted, that was before we stopped pretending the Sequester was real), and foreign nations have both scrapped their orders and not bought near as many as we'd hoped.
It's developmental mishaps were not really surprising, it being a completely new category of aerial vehicle.
More, they were unsurprising due to the very concept the Osprey was built upon; an aircraft you can't auto-rotate or glide into the ground, that requires two highly-sophisticated turbo-prop engines mounted on articulated armatures to stay aloft. I hear they're supposed to be trying a light gunship version at some point; good luck. A cool machine, to be sure, but suited to a
very niche roll at the end of the day, considering it was billed as a replacement for light helicopters.
I have higher hopes for the heavy-lift concept Bell was working on, a quad-copter tilt rotor, since birds like Chinooks (usually) aren't sent into stupidly hostile and dangerous environments intentionally. Ospreys are fairly vulnerable if the baddies get there in time (which is admittedly hard since they hop around so fast --but that was the same justification for Huey's which got tons of people killed/injured when over used on an enemy who'd adjusted its tactics)
The same goes for the Marine One(USMC) helicopter upgrade.
I have no comment other than that it's
one freakin' bird, and that we spend far too much on
El Jefe already.
I know we're
accustomed to military development projects tripling or more their initial budgets on average, but that is
the definition of a program being "troubled" during development. Just because they're
all FUBAR doesn't change the fact each one is a terrific waste. If it's not waste, let the DOD seek realistic budgets of 3-5X what they'd normally ask, and we'll see if that changes appropriations (if it does, that means the DOD are con-men; if it doesn't, it means the congress-critters are con-men)
And back on topic; no, the military doesn't really want a harder hitting pistol. They're just chumming the waters to keep manufacturers interested
(gun writers, too
)
TCB
