Usually what happened was the original budget was simply never realistic. The number one driver of cost is the capability of the product, and its size.Borgholio wrote:Let me pose a question about military spending: How much could be saved if we actually built things efficiently? Whenever I read up about new weapons systems, I hear constantly about going over budget, over schedule, ending up with a design that doesn't match the original specifications and needs.
Yeah, but the original cost goal was for it to be cheaper then an F-16 while mounting vastly more capability and in the range of 50% greater MTOW. This was never reasonable, nor was the idea of making one airframe do three roles (all Clinton era politics) and yet and the mass production cost is still expected to be in the 80-90 million range. People pay that much for Eurofighters right now that are far less capable and somewhat smaller. The F-35 also did have a vast amount of capability creep very early in the program, but then that was things wanted and needed and intended for other nations new fighters like DAS and integrated electronic warfare capability. The Russian PAK-FA meanwhile will be a slightly larger size, twin engined, not to mention Russian, and is being projected in the 100 million dollar range. This is just what fifth generation fighters cost. Mind you F-15Es were also near 100 million, if being one of the more capable of largest of forth generation birds.
For instance, as pointed out already, the F-35 costs spiraled out of control.
Ah yeah downscaling a 750 plane program to 187 will do that. Had another 100 been produced the flyaway cost was going to be about 100 million each. This didn't happen because the Bush administration took away about 15 billion in production funding to help.... hold down the size of the defense budget. That hits programs all the time on unit cost. Over and over and over again. Oh while its begun to change in the last few years, for a long time the US government refused to make multi year production contracts, this was purely the US congress at work and never something desired by the US military. Congress wanted to bicker every year.
The F-22 is even worse, costing $150 million dollars per plane.
Well, and way better radar, and heavier caliber VLS system so we aren't stuck with a weapons envelope decided on before most of us were born, and a very heavy gun armament, and actual growth margins and a much larger hanger, and manning costs reduced such that even the non military GAO still thinks it will it is in fact cheaper then an Arleigh Burke over a 30 year lifespan, but hey gotta cut everything!
The Zumwalt cost billions of dollars more than any other ship (over 1/3 the cost of a Gerald Ford Class carrier) and it doesn't have any more capability than an Arleigh Burke aside from being stealthier.
Because materials costs went up, US shipyard labor is expensive as hell because the yards do nothing but a few warships a year, which is unrelated to anything military, and the ships are very highly capable. But in fact the Burke was cheap because so many had been built, and now that the line was stopped, demolished, DDG-1000 built, and now the Burke line is having to be reestablished that's completely reset the cost on the hulls, and the first repeat Burke is going to be around 2.5 billion dollars anyway. This isn't in fact much cheaper at all then repeat DDG-1000 hulls would have been. Inflation is a bitch too.I wonder, why did costs of ships skyrocket so much?
Oh and THE SAME DAMN THING happened with the Seawolf class in the 1990s. People bitched it was too expensive, too big, it was cancelled at three boats and the new leaner Virginia class built, which ended up costing just about the same amount but for less submarine thanks to inflation and the massive cost of designing a less capable but still all new submarine. But a new sub was needed, because the LA class was from the 1960s in conception and simply incapable of further growth or modification.
What is reasonable? What is the point of buying a weapon if the enemy will simply destroy it the first chance they get and all the troops using it are killed? Cost and capability are linked, and you do pay a premium for the top end of capability. The US has been doing this since WW2, and the results in warfare speak for themselves, very successfully. If the US bought inferior weapons it would need more of them, and operating costs are far greater then the costs of the weapons themselves. Look at a real breakdown of the US defense budget some day. New hardware is only a small piece of the spending.
Wouldn't it save a great deal in military spending if ships and planes actually cost something a bit more reasonable?
Yeah they still bid, its just not many are left to bid because most of them already when bankrupt or were told to merge by the US government... because people wanted less defense spending and that meant fewer projects ever exist! The US is presently designing one fighter that has to be squished into three roles (making it by far the most complex weapon evar!), in the 1970s it at one point had five in development at the same time all for different roles. Four of those are still in service today. Which is a big advantage to designing highly capable weapons, they remain viable for a very long time. The present US military is almost entirely equipped with upgraded products of the 1970s, with most being physically built by the end of the 1980s. In fact most of these systems actually started being designed in the 1960s.
In the past, companies actually bid on projects
I'll note also that people bitched to high hell about how the F-15 cost several times as much in 1972 as the F-4 Phantom had in 1960. And the F-4 Phantom was as much as seven times the cost of the fighters of the generation before it. But it also could do more then one thing, flew twice as far at twice the speed and with four times as many weapons.
They do get penalized, all the time. They also get forced to make changes all the time that they have no control over because technology changes, requirements change due to shifting policies, often highly political ones, or enemy spies compromise systems, as has happened on the F-35. The entire electronic warfare system had to be redesigned because the Chinese hacked phone conferences in the Pentagon and listened in on highly classified conversations. Lockheed had no fault in that, why should they pay for it?
and were penalized if they didn't meet desired specifications, or if they went over budget or schedule. When did that change? Why can't we go back to that?
Now meanwhile the US military has dozens of bases it wants to close, thousands of civilian staff it could eliminate without loosing any military capability at all, but the US congress wont allow this, because military bases are the ultimate pork, and nobody will vote to close any more of them. The present BARC round has been frozen for years.
