Pentagon Wars - Bradley Fighting Vehicle Evolution

When you need the absolute best for something, you need to specialize. That's why there have historically been so many different kinds of aircraft, each with relatively discrete missions. The F-35 is a terrible aircraft, and the procurement is deeply suspect. The South Korean acquisition process leaked some surprising information about the acquisition process and the F-35 failed the relatively modest criteria the Koreans had set and an older aircraft (F-15) to be purchased. At the time there was loads of news about the F-35 failing the acquisition and it even made it into Aviation week. Doing a google search now, it looks like it was a smooth process from RFP to acquisition and I can't find many of the older articles [1] The rumor is that Lockheed bribed the hell out of the Korean National Assembly and "won" the initial round of acquisition, but the agency in Korea responsible for the acquisition (DAPA) saw right through it and awarded the final contract to Boeing. The National Assembly got upset, Lockheed got upset and probably some U.S. congressmen got upset and the entire acquisition was tossed out "recompeted" and of course the F-35 won the second time. It's a sad joke and I can't even begin to guess at the acquisition shenanigans that happened in the U.S. 1 - [LINK] edit a great movie about this is the movie "Pentagon Wars" which includes this great scene. [VIDEO]

This clip from the Pentagon Wars always comes to mind when I hear about a delay in the F-35. Needless to say this clip is on my mind every few months... [VIDEO]

This video about the evolution of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle may shed some light on why the Air Force ended up with a report with far more requested changes than SpaceX had anticipated: [VIDEO]

Can't believe noone posted yet [this clip from Pentagon Wars]( [VIDEO] ) about the clusterfuck that was the Bradley Fighting Vehicle.

It's from Pentagon Wars, and it's an obligatory YouTube clip always linked in F-35 HN threads: [VIDEO] .

Agreed, but more specifically here is the 10 minute video which best distills the whole movie. It's worth watching: [VIDEO]

The F-35 is becoming the definitive example of how scope creep destroys a project. A system designed to do everything for everyone. When it should be designed to do one thing better than everything else. Divide the F-35 into three different attack aircraft. Single engine CAS with STOVL capability. Big/fast/stealthy twin engine bomber. Carrier based attack drone. All three would likely fulfill their roles better for lower total cost and be operational on a shorter timeframe. The F-35 reminds me of this short story by A. C. Clarke [LINK] And this scene from pentagon wars: [VIDEO]

Please, let's not try to justify post-facto what is an utter accident of history. Javascript wasn't "designed to be sandboxed", it was designed (in something like a week) to move crap around an html page. It then grew and mutated in the frankenvm we all "enjoy" today; which is why all these "security features" that were tacked on (like xmlhttprequest, same-origin, "secure cookies" etc etc) are constantly failing and require more and more hacks to keep up appearances. > My users don't want to download and install a binary onto their PC Your users were absolutely fine with Flash, and if Macromedia had not gone to the dogs after the Adobe acquisition, they would likely still be. They were fine with ActiveX objects (in fact, they loved them!). Your users don't know the difference between markup and binary blobs, they just don't care. By shoving scripts down their throat "because the browser starts faster than a java applet", we simply abuse their good faith. Maybe you could have claimed "javascript is more secure" back in 2001, when 99.99% of scripts out there were perfectly readable with view-source; in the age of minifying, obscuring and compiling, that's simply not true anymore. Javascript is now effectively the same as a binary blob, the only difference being that Google, Microsoft and Mozilla do some of the bootstrapping for you. Hell, even HTTP/2 is now binary! Please, don't try to claim a moral high ground that was lost 10 years ago. We've decided to abuse the browser-donk

It reminded me the feature creep scene in HBO's Pentagon Wars, which is eerily similar to what can happen in the software world: [VIDEO]

Watch the "Pentagon Wars - Bradley Fighting Vehicle Evolution" video: [VIDEO] It's a great example of how trying to design a product that works well for every stakeholder in every scenario leads to a Frankenstein of a product that doesn't work well for anybody. This happens all too often in government (typically military) contracts.

This is a not a new problem. There is a classic comedy scene of the Bradley fighting vehicle's problematic design process here: [VIDEO]

There's a whole movie about it if you haven't seen it: [VIDEO] unless this was an intentional reference, then, whoosh

There's a dated but entertaining dramatization of this failure from the movie Pentagon Wars: [VIDEO] .

> The F-35, by comparison, was a platform vehicle, with the base suited to adapting to a variety of capabilities and missions. That means more voices demanding priority of features, more expensive engineering to get a variety of polygon pegs into the same round hole, and many first-of-its-kind features for a variety of ancillary tasks. > No real surprise that it didn't work out. For a humorous presentation of this, watch the movie Pentagon Wars : [VIDEO]

Your argument overlooks the many examples of utterly wasteful military spending that happens even against wishes of the military itself because the spending itself really is the focus over the actual military effect. So we could easily compromise between our PoVs and let you have all the military might you want - even if US might already peaks over the next few countries together (and looking at Afghanistan, Iraq, how is it even used?) - but you could still cut a lot of the pork. I think things might get a bit crazy in the next century with climate change creating a lot of additional pressure, so I don't mind living in a well-armed Western Bloc, but that does not mean I have to ignore the incredible waste. I remember a Youtube summary/satire about the Bradley vehicle development, as an example for how it works (although it really shouldn't): [VIDEO] --- and that is before senators get involved who are concerned about getting and keeping spending for their state.

> a jumbled mess of different priorities that everybody resents Sounds par for the course. Link to Pentagon Wars: [VIDEO]

I think you better gave examples of government being inefficient. But also I was to add that there are places that do milk the government. Both of these can be true. It's not homogeneous. But you're right that we should be more nuanced and it's good to have an insider perspective. For a more funny example of your point, I like The Pentagon Wars' Bradley tank evolution [VIDEO]

Reading this “We weren’t sure LCS was executing the missions it was designed for,” Commander of Naval Surface Forces Vice Adm. Roy Kitchener said in January 2022. “And so we … went out to the number of fleet commanders and said, ‘Alright, what do you want it to do? And what missions do you want it to execute based on the environment we’re in now?’” reminds me of this excerpt from a movie: Pentagon Wars - Bradley Fighting Vehicle Evolution [VIDEO] From the movie "Pentagon Wars". Bradley Fighting Vehicle design and development. Any design engineer will love this scene.

Modularity and abstraction come up against some limits when different customers have incompatible domain models, and thus different ideas of what your product ought to be. While I've seen its historical accuracy questioned, something about this satire from Pentagon Wars still resonates: [VIDEO]

It's a lateral move. Recall that the US is updating their nuclear stockpile[0]. This is not expanding the stockpile, but neither is it reducing it. The F-35 was created to be a one-size-fits-all solution invented by the same bureaucrats who invented Full Stack Developer or the Bradley[1] with exactly the same results. If you're talking Doomsday clock, well there is a certain country actively stating they are willing to use nuclear weapons in an ongoing conflict that you might want to consider to contextualize (which itself requires further contextualization all the way down the rabbit hole) [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]