“The F-22 WAS a pretty good aircraft ....”
I remember reading in Aviation Week in the ‘80’s that in the 2020’s each fighter jet would cost hundreds of millions. Well, the F-22 is 361 million a copy. That’s the purchase price. Maintaining them for 30 years will greatly increase that cost. We obviously need fighter aircraft. But maybe, just maybe, we’re going about it all wrong. Perhaps they should be a combination of Artificial Intelligence and remote control. That ought to cut the cost and the risk in half. Maybe they should be bought in a multi-year contract that’s funded for the entire contract rather than one year at a time so Congress can get lobbyist funds for their campaigns. Perhaps we should get the military out of the day-to-day engineering as they change what they want moment to moment. Or, never define what they want, as in the case of FCS. Maybe we need to incentivize companies differently. FCS was incentivized based on how much they spent. If their spend plan stayed on target they got extra money. The program’s design fell behind, but, they certainly spent the money on time.
Our procurement is a broken system, The F22 is too big, too stealthy,too fast, too expensive.
Why do you need stealth over friendly territory? was it built to last in Alaskan conditions? etc
Absolutey correct on the first point. DOD adds/changes with abandon and then gripes because neither original objective nor the add-ons work like they'd dreamed. The other is called 'cost plus incentive fee', a great concept except that the guy responsible for holding price down gets to evaluate performance toward that incentive.
If congress bought cars the same way they buy jets they would cost almost as much.