If 150% over budget is actually seen as under budget, why not just make the 150% number the budget? Might as well just claim the budget was eleven thousand fairy dollars if the budgeted number is meaningless.
@@esotericcommonsense6366 I wonder if it has anything to do with Sharks piss being absorbed by their flesh before being expelled through skin or gills. That would tend to give their meat an ammonia smell and taste.
I am one of the designers who worked on the Comanche at Boeing. The Government kept changing the specifications so often it required several complete redesigns of the air-frame. We spent lab time developing new ways of making composite structures had large shops to make mock ups and I wound up flying across the country on a biweekly basis. There was so much paralysis from the Pentagon on decision making that we often had to stop work of hundreds of skilled craftsman engineers, technicians, and other scientists and wait for a decision to be made. If we could have been given a specification and turned out a prototype, even if that prototype failed it would have been cheaper to do three or four iterations than the two prototypes built.
Sounds like a Pentagon Wars scenario haha. Seems like the problem is more on the procurement side; industry can (within reason, no AI-controlled hovertanks with railguns and force fields) build whatever the military wants, the military just has a tough time deciding just what the heck it actually wants. On a related note, do you think this has something to do with vastly changing mission requirements? For the better half of two or three decades the US military has been focusing on asymmetrical counter-insurgency fighting, then we’ve done a 180 and are now focusing on peer or near-peer adversaries as our most likely main threat. And recently we’ve got both as possible threats at the same time. The lessons being learned from Ukraine are incredibly difficult from the lessons being learned from Gaza, for example, and I wonder how the military hopes to address both concerns simultaneously. My worst fear is we start getting “compromise” vehicles/weapons systems that are okay at both tasks but great at neither. Take the new Abrams they’re developing, for example. The impetus for the tank is to lower the weight by integrating as many new (but proven) systems as possible, instead of just bolting them onto a new tank. So will we see a TUSK-like system on this new tank? It would be dead weight and next-to useless on the open fields of Eastern Europe, but it would be a vital piece of kit in places in the Middle East like Gaza city.
If only they could keep the requirements fixed from their side but change them as the design proceeds and it becomes evident that some things were not thought through. Safety considerations are another source of pain, unless they were very well considered and put in clear writing they will become a show stopper.
That's the nature of our political system and is where dictatorial authoritarian governments have an advantage over democracies. I would be happy to be spending 10% of GDP on the military to ensure we stay ahead of our adversaries who wish to take away our freedom
I used to be a manager at Disney World, if I wanted a sign that said stroller parking, I would have to contact Walt Disney Imagineering and make sure it goes through the process it would cost $15,000. If I called the Orlando sign shop, sent them the picture, and have them come install it (which is what Imagineering would do anyway) it would be like $250. Disney operates just like the military, massive amounts of wasted money.
In theory, this is why the US military has shifted some functions to contractors. In practice, the contractors will charge $12,000, claiming that they saved the US taxpayer thousands of dollars, but it actually costs $20,000 if you account for various hidden expenses.
Well yes, but what if that sign was produced with conflict country paint? Disney ensures it doesn’t by sending a team to inspect the facility which will produce the sign, check county codes to ensure the facility is current with all requirements, and have a personal conversation with the team delivering the sign. That way… idk doesn’t make a lot of sense doesn’t it?
But, but I was guaranteed that the free market is way more efficient, next you will tell me that they would skimp on maintenance to reduce cost in the short term.
As someone who worked in acquisition while in the military, I can say I've seen multimillion dollar items sit in storage until they were completely obsolete and deemed trash without ever being used.
@@Nick-ve1kg Pretty much anything you can think of. Only small part of eguipment will be used while wast majority is waiting in the storage, awaiting a global conflict that never comes
This can be generalized to game theory. If there is at least 1 nation that keeps trying to invent the next nuke, we all have to stay in the competition otherwise we're risking global dominance
As someone who’s worked for one of the largest defense contractors in the world, I was happy with you bringing to light some of the biggest, most insidious, and most common problems with defense contracting practices; but I was also happy to hear you say that this was only scratching the surface of the insidiousness of these practices. It’s one of the big reasons why I had to leave the industry. Some of our bidding practices were just plain morally terrible that I could no longer let myself be a part of it.
That’s all around in government. In construction there’s always someone who wants their back scratched and was actively discouraged from doing things cheaper. I’ve built luxury apartment buildings that were over three times the size cheaper than public housing and it was all built into the design. From a draftsman perspective, I’ve seen things down in ways you would only see done with government and any attempt to cut costs were hard rejected. That also doesn’t take into account of policy too. There’s a “woman owned” erection company that’s only viable because tax “incentives” of using a minority owned company. I would personally declare them incompetent from bidding to project management but because of the city’s tax code everyone has to use them unless the GC already has the contract and they specified they don’t want to work with them. Which does happen on the big projects.
You are a good man but don't be so hard on yourself. The same stuff redesign BS happens in Corporate because they want to keep their jobs. If people weren't so crazy about laying people off all the time then you wouldn't have this pretend to be busy redesigns. You have to take a step back and realize a few things. Once I became a parent and had my kid play as a pitcher on a baseball team, I realized the truth of the military. You ALWAYS have to spend the money aka work or train. Because if you don't, you will soon suck. My tiny son could pitch that ball anywhere he wanted in the strike zone. He'd strike out batters that other pitchers couldn't. After a few weeks or month of goofing off and thinking he's so good and can avoid practice, we'd discover his skills were no longer sharp. The money I paid a 1 on 1 coach was a lot, but if you are serious like war, you better stay on your best game. It's expensive because you can't take your money with you to heaven. Other parents didn't want to spend the money for batting practice and it was my tiny son that hit the home run against a top California team and their parents then realized they had 1 chance to have spent that money wisely and didn't. You can't spend the money after you are dead from war.
Guess who contributes a crap ton to congress and senate campaigns? Take a look at Dubya Bush, VP Cheney and Trump's cabinet appointees; what their jobs were pre executive branch, its all oil or defense industry. Any 'solution' would have to lead to higher returns for defense industry shareholders. Really we should all just buy defense stock our taxes are firing up their share price anyway. Its not one party, blue senators can't win without defense dough. Thank supreme court for citizens united; corporations can't be 'silenced' of their 'free speech right' to buy elections.
1) American war is a racket. 2) American finance is a sick joke. 3) 800 military bases across the planet, with enough arms dealing & support to maintain foreign proxies in every hemisphere. You know, to ensure nobody tries to take over the world, or something. Think bigger than waste. Vast waste is only possible because the truth is infinitely worse.
The US military faces 3 issues from my perspective: scope creep, lack of tier 1 contractor competition, and requirements based on unproven technologies.
GPS, night fighting, guided missile defence, stealth, air to air refuelling etc. were once unproven technologies. Now they are the backbone of NATO. The only way to stay ahead is to innovate.
More like corruption, requitment shortages and redtape issues. Money wouldn’t be wasted if people couldn’t benefit from it and project wouldn’t be extra costly if it wouldn’t be handled as a prestige question with so much redtape that by the time they abandon the program it costed another few dozen billions. The newly kinda shut down shoreline patrol ships are a great example. Bad idea, 2 bad designs (they chose the worst), awful lot of problems with the made ships, super costly to run due to bad designs and maintinance, yet they made more bc a governor would have had to lose prestige over a closed naval dockyard and it was already financed, so why not waste the money.
I think there's a good argument to be made that the f35 is actually relatively successful now that the problems with it have been worked out. The unit price isn't bad at all and there's a ton of international buyers lining up for it. Combat capability wise, it also looks like a great platform.
I was surprised at its inclusion with zumwalt and lcs programs. If anything I think the f35 has turned out to be well worth it, Honestly the future combat army program not being included was more surprising
The twin facts that it is one, being bought by so many other nations (lots of countries are having their F-16s replaced with F35s), and that it replaces so previous planes speaks to it success. The fact that it is able to cover so many combat and mission roles will speak to long term savings for the US Military, and its sales to other nations will help alleviate its high costs.
@@sarge994I think the point was that it took 20 years and countless amount of money to make it "worth it". If U.S government didnt pose such limitations for the companies, they would be incentivized to make working products cheaper, and not half baked stuff for 4x price.
@@carrotplox But that's just it It's not 4x the price. The current price of an F-16V is within $20m of the F-35. The F-35 is cheaper than Eurofighter and the Raf. The flightaway cost F-35A is incredibly competitive price wise for what you get that's why everyone's buying it.
I took a tour of an Independence class LCS once and the concept is a great idea when you see what it looks like in person, but the issues are pretty obvious as well. Aluminium is not as fire resistant as it's melting point is half of steel's melting point, so every inch of the interior of the hull has fire proofing blankets on it. As mentioned in the video it's also more brittle than steel, aluminium will not flex if impacted by a shell, just shatter and penetrate like paper. But one of the most embarassing parts I learned was the ability to change its armaments. There is the physical ability to carry cruise missiles in a vertial launch container, except the exhaust from the rockets will MELT THE ALUMINIUM AROUND IT. Such goofy design.
lmfao that’s actually insane. i know VLS systems have that issue so russia uses cold launch systems but youd think the US who ONLY USES HOT LAUNCH would solve that lol
It's so frustrating to see what happened with the LCS programs. We clearly had the capability to build some awesome ships, but somewhere along the line the whole thing went off the rails. I agree with this video, that the culprit at least partially lies with asking one ship design to do too much. With the Zumwalt, it was trying to reach too far, too fast, tacking a bunch of experimental tech onto a new ship class only to realize it either wouldn't work as well as expected, or was just too expensive to justify. Now we're building a new flight of Arleigh Burkes, hopefully applying some of the lessons learned from those mistakes.
This is nonsense, the European Union is the strongest military power on earth. If that's true there was a reason for it likely US was near by, the European Union would likely crush the USA in an open conflict, especially a naval conflict
A key piece of context that missing is that US military spending as a share of overall government spending or GDP has fallen massively. During the Cold War highs of the 1960s, 9% of the US GDP went to military spending. Now it's 3%. Defense spending was 51% of overall federal spending in the 1960s. Now it's 14%.
But even that amount is nearly half of the US discretionary budget. When choosing where to spend, we throw half at our military as if we don't have better uses for it.
True, but that misses the point. The incentive structures are perverse, and apply to numerous government functions (prisons, telecommunications, etc.). Remember the USSR pioneered titanium welding without the private sector (which claimed it couldn't be done).
@@JustinAZdoes that mean from all the budget assigned to different projects/services military budget is still bigger by a mile than other essential services?
@@JustinAZ That is literally because we label everything "nondiscretionary". Seriously look into some of the things labeled nondiscretionary and you will quickly realize that the labels are completely arbitrary. Yes that is a exaggeration but not by much as it is impressive some of the things that would logically be discretionary that are put in nondiscretionary and vice versa.
The obvious problem is that the defense contractors' job is not to make a warship that works. Their job is to make money. Whether or not they manage to make a functional warship, one thing is sure: they are making money.
But what's the alternative? Have a government owned company/agency build it? Well, NASA's space ships are over budget and inefficient, that's why they contract SpaceX to launch for a small fraction of the price.
Not fully accurate. If the contractor delivers a shit product at inflated prices, it won't be purchased in as much quantity. Thus the contractor won't sell as much, profit overall will be much lower as initial R&D costs don't get spread over large unit numbers (if it cost 1 billion to develop, only one purchase will have to cover that entire 1 bil whereas 10 purchases will need 100 mil covered from each purchase) This can be seen in the examples Wendover brings up. LCS and Zumwalt ships were bought in puny numbers compared to initial expectations.
B 24's broke in half. B29 engines overheated. B seventeen's had a poor payload and a poor range. P 51's started with the wrong engine. P47 couldn't taxi because of poor visibility. Sherman tank had a stabilization system that nobody used. M 16 had ammunition supply problem that caused malfunctions. However it's the greatest battle rifle ever created and 60 years later the army still uses it.
M16/M4/AR-15 has been fixed with running changes over time. It was a failure on launch not cause of the ammo but because it was wrongfully thought to be self-cleaning. Combined with the harsh environment of Vietnam
Part of the issue with the M-16 is that when it was first introduced it was claimed it didn’t need to clean it. Once they figured out it did it worked better…
@@fabricebarbon5886leftists calling others leftists is humrous. We know you’d prefer the innefficient state wasting all the money, but you’ll have to do better than that lol
My favorite fact about the US military goes like this: The US Air Force has the strongest Air Force in the world, and the US Navy has the second strongest Air Force in the world. Yes, I'm being completely serious. Edit: I have since been informed that the RAF is not in fact the third strongest Air Force in the world and have changed this comment to reflect that.
@@KarldorisLambley I could have said the largest, or I could have said the most amount of money was used on it, and it would still be accurate, but I figured this would be the simplest way of putting it.
The Royal Air Force is not even close to being the third strongest. USAF #1 US Navy and Marine Corps #2 Probably the PLAAF (China) in third. The Royal Air Force is lagging even behind Australia in capability lol. Australia has strong EW assets like the Growler, and Wedgetail, Super Hornets and the F-35A. Britain has the Naval capable F-35B that sacrifices range and payload, old E-3 Sentry’s and the Typhoon which arguably is less capable than the Super Hornet.
@@everythingman987 yeah, but it's pretty difficult to determine how accurate any figures about China's military actually is since it's well documented the government lies about the size of its economy for example.
Cost-plus contracts are often written with a Guaranteed Maximum Price (GMP) with split savings. It incentivizes accurate budgeting and scheduling. It's wild that defense contracts don't have a GMP.
Perun has done a videos on different country's defense structures. An issue with the US is that it's purchasing power parity is low, meaning it's soldiers need to be paid higher than in other countries: a Lt. in the US can be paid more than a highly trained Polish Spec ops guy.
The other big thing he brought to the table, scale. The f-35 per unit costs have come down enormously since everybody else has adopted it as a standard platform. If you only build two ships, all the development costs are included in those ships, instead of something that can be iterated on, improved, and distributed across 20 or 50 ships.
@@reclassified_ What do you mean? Do you think it would be cheaper to pay same number of soldiers in US or in contries like India, China or in eastern Europe?
The F-35 isnt a good example, yes it went way over in development but has since dropped in per unit price to about 80 mil for the A unit which is cheaper than the new f-15 ex at 115 mil. Plus alot the new tech is being incorporated into new equipment.
If we're being honest, military spending as a share of the economy has never been lower for America and the rest of the world. For U.S. it's 3.5% of its GDP and the world average is 2 2%. We think that the world today is so full of violence and hate because we are more exposed to it through social media, but in reality the last 78 years has been the most peaceful period in human history.
of course due to higher populations than ever before, when there is violence, the numbers are large, but in general what you are saying is accurate especially for western countries
The huge issue the US military has is that it has to be ready for. . . . . .everything. Most nations construct their armed forces around a limited set of scenarios based on their local conditions. America can, and not infrequently does, get involved anywhere in the world in almost any kind of conflict against almost any kind of enemy. That increases costs exponentially.
@@British_Rogue The military doesn't get to choose, it's Congress and the politicians. The military is just told to be able to fight anyone, anywhere, any time.
the LCS was spectacularly successful at delivering profit to those with stakes in defense companies, just like those missiles that cost $40k to build but are bought by the pentagon for $600k each. back in the day the military used to say what they needed and companies used to compete to meet them, doing their own R&D. now we cover their R&D costs so not only are they not incentivized not to mess up, they're incentivized to mess up because it produces more profit.
That is a problem because many experts now agree it would have been better to have separate programs rather than a unified Joint program. In pursuit of "simplifying" logistics and lowering costs by purchasing similar aircraft for Navy, Marine and Air Force, it forced each of their requirements to get jammed with each other. That increased complexity of development as the F-35B's special requirements influenced the others and in the end, there ended being not as much logistics compatibility between each other. Edit: for people who doubt my claim that logistics weren't simplified THAT much. RAND (US gov think tank) published a report in 2008 saying that F-35A has 43% parts compatibility, F-35B 27%, F-35C 30%. The % has only gone down since, in 2017, USAF Lt. Gen Christopher Bogdan said parts commonality was at only 20%.
@@chinguunerdenebadrakh7022 Aside from literally all of the expensive parts, which are shared among the three aircraft... Yeah, totally no simplified logistics. The variants definitely don't all use the same engine, radar, avionics, EOTS, DAS, helmet display, gun, weapons... All that's different is that the F-35B has extra parts connected to the engine, a different fuselage, and no gun. The Navy variant has extra big wings. The most you can say is that, perhaps, if F-35 were separate USAF and USMC and USN programs, the USAF may have a much larger twin engine aircraft. That's the best case scenario if you're looking for increased performance. That would literally just be a more modern F-22! The USAF would not have the money to buy enough of them, just as they had not for F-22. Whatever F-35 would have been was always going to be in this size range for USAF. Perhaps USN would've gotten a larger carrier fighter. It does not currently have a navalized analogue to the F-22, this is true. It has Super Hornets and Growlers. This hypothetical plane would've been very expensive (twice as many huge engines) even by f-35/F-22 standards. Perhaps internal fuel load and overall range would've been greater. USMC could not have possibly done better than F-35B. I doubt we'll ever see an equivalent again. F-35B has made it possible for a dozen countries that couldn't imagine having carrier aviation to actually get competitive carrier aviation with jets that can wipe 4th gens and enemy SAM networks clean off the face of the earth. South Korea is considering it Japan is going to buy F-35Bs and is modifying two carriers for it Italy is doing it with a carrier and the Italian Navy has already received F-35Bs Great Britain is doing it with two supercarriers and is going pure fleet F-35B even for RAF (this is the most questionable decision made by an F-35 partner) Spain could do it to replace its Harrier IIs and ground based F-18s Turkey wanted to do it, but we kicked them out of F-35 program for buying S-400. Their carrier is in service with no armed fighter jets, and at best expects to use UAVs and helicopters. Australia could do it with effort, but isn't currently planning to. In a world with three separate programs, F-35B probably withers, dies, and never happens, MASSIVELY weakening the navies of nearly a dozen American allies, and the US Navy's useful fighter-carrying carrier count is cut in half due to LHAs and LHDs only having AV-8B Harrier IIs until retired, which were both never as competitive as the F-35B is with its peers, and subsonic. The USAF has a small fleet of slightly more capable jets in range, speed, and payload, but not sensors or EW. USN may or may not get higher payload, higher range jets in very small numbers, because they're addicted to Super Hornets anyways.
A big thing that nobody touches on with the US military is personnel costs. Development overruns and the MIC is a problem, don't get me wrong. But a HUGE portion of the budget is spent on personnel. Housing, feeding, medical care, pay, retirement pensions, college tuition. All of this factors into the defense budget.
Contractors are not personnel. And it's is not realistic not to need manpower right now. And the military is actually below its manpower targets right now. Serving in the military as a career isn't as attractive as it once was, for various reasons. And the treatment of veterans isn't helping either. Just saying.
@@BigHenForthe treatment of the entire country isn't helping. Why fight for a military that won't fight for its own country's well being? That's its sworn responsibility.
@@HighLordComedianNot saying that contractors aren't expensive, but in a lot of cases they're far cheaper than hiring the equivalent number of needed engineers/scientists/programmers/managers as federal employees. Federal employees are entitled to a really good benefits package and salaries are also good. On top of that feds still get a pension. The hardest thing though, is that a federal employee can't (usually) just be fired when their project ends. There has to be a lateral move made available for them.
He slightly touched on it with the "sells its own brand of chicken at the base in Turkey" thing, but you're right. It is very much not cheap to pay 2 million troops and provide them base housing or allowance and food and benefits, but it's also politically impossible to touch that funding at all.
The first ship of the FFG-7 class was built and tested before the contract was let for the rest of the class. People begged the Navy to replace them with ships of similar capabilities - a jack of all trades, capable of detached operations. The LCS program was daring, but a failure before the first ships came off the slipways. Now they are going back to a tested hull for the new Constellation class.
Canada does not have a well funded military. Our navy is run down to the point of barely being able to deploy beyond our coast, and our air force is facing long delays for modern aircraft.
The reason the airforce doesn’t have modern aircraft is because the Trudeau government (justifiably) canceled the original order on the F-35s back in 2015. But that meant that the RCAF was stuck with the CF-18 and they still needed to be replaced. After another contract bidding war that happened this year, Lockheed Martin won and were awarded a $19B contract for the F-35s. Since Canadian law prohibits the exclusion of Lockheed Martin, the Canadian government has to buy F-35s despite vowing not to buy them back in 2015.
@@drksideofthewal Canada is going to need a strong navy and air force to protect the melting arctic trade routes opening up, they don't want to let the USA do everything and kill their own MIC.
Never become overly reliant on the US or any other major power for that matter. We may be brothers, but there are situations where they will not or cannot help us. I don't know what they are, but it's best we don't find out when they occur. Canada's armed forces need an upgrade and fresh coats of paint. This is a necessity not a want. The older things get, the more expensive and dangerous they are. The more likely they are to fail when needed and this puts both military and civilian life at risk. Our budget is fine, the fact we're WAY overspending on projects and procurement compared to similar equipment from our allies says a lot about what's going on behind closed doors. $100 million USD more for the F35 compared to the UK, and twice more on our Type 26 Frigates compared to the UK and Australia. Why are we being milked? We'll see if their costs end up ballooning to what we're paying, but I'm concerned as to where my tax dollars are really going when we look at our respected Armed Forces.
@@Nzombii I am very familiar with the differences between them, it was really just a remark on the poor choice of footage when talking specifically about LCS1 while showing an LCS2 class ship until it cuts away to the 3D model.
TLDR: Cutting edge technologies take a lot of money to create. The USA has a lot of cutting edge tech in its worldwide system of bases. You need a few of something so if it breaks you can apply fixes to the others. R&D is expensive.
F-35 does not deserve to be listed as a failure. Wildly capable aircraft at a great unit cost with massive interest from buyers and it's a very futureproof platform.
Except that the US air force doesn't want it, and not only did we have to restart the f22 program but we also have to develop a new aircraft. It failed its primary purpose, not a complete failure but not a success.
@@thewick-j1837 Do you mean the modernisation package? I cant find any info on new build production restarting. Mod packages are normal and happen to nearly all aircraft see F14-D for a very popular example. And I assume you're talking about NGAD for future aircraft? Also normal, this is like calling the f-15 & f-16 failures because the f-22 was developed shortly afterward. Superpower militaries like the US die in mediocrity, there's probably already a NGAD++ in development.
@@thewick-j1837 the F-22 is getting some upgrades, but afaik there are no plans to restart any kind of production given the incredible cost and limited need for them. I think it's fair to say the F-35 has been a success, it definitely wasn't right at the beginning and looked like it might never be but it's proven to be extremely capable, mass-producible, exportable and at a reasonable cost (now, early costs were very high). I guess the navy doesn't love them so much given the compromises they had to make for the whole STOVL thing but otherwise it's a damn good job
@@helplmchokingit was a failure because it cost over a trillion dollars and another trillion in repairs and retrofits. Thankfully everyone has their own 6th gen program
This actually isn't just the contractors because it happens for other agencies as well and internally in government. Government procurement rules get more and more complex with more and more middlemen, eroding value. The same is true in medicine.
We also think things should be cheaper because Corporations make products cheaper by taking shortcuts because they don’t have to work in wartime. Since there is no free lunch, they take short cuts which is why nothing you have lasts. If it has high quality and it lasts, you won’t want it after a whole because it will be obsolete by being old. The military had to do things as a system that lasts 30-100 years, which is why you see the frames of the B52s still being used.
@@StarbucksCoffey5280 A US solider knows what a kilometer is. Whenever you hear a US solider say something is so many "klicks" away, they are using slang for kilometer. The US Army uses metric linear measurements for interoperability with NATO allies. The USA may not use the metric system completely, but it is more prevalent than some people think. It is still used in parts of society like the scientific community, medicine, liters of soda, grams of marijuana, losing 10mm sockets, etc.
reminds me of that joke A headmaster needed to paint his school, so he asked the Janitor how much it would cost him, The Janitor said, well I can get the either the local traders or the municipal council for a quote The local traders offered £2500 to complete the job and the council offered £5000 to do the job When the Janitor heard the extreme price of the council he told the headmaster The headmaster ended up picking the council and the Janitor shocked, asked why he choose the council "Well the job itself only cost £2000, but they got an extra £1000, I needed £1000, and you can have £500 to keep your mouth shut"
Been a fan for a long time, and this is your best video imo. I used to work at Northrop Grumman (have since left the industry entirely) and this sums up so well why I left. When you said "the inefficiencies of government are moved into the contractors" that is 100% accurate. I think anyone who considers the government inefficient and bad and these contractors efficient private businesses would be in for a MASSIVE shock if they had seen what I've seen.
I think it’s also worth keeping in mind % GDP spent on the MIC too. The numbers are a little different depending on what time periods and what specifically you include, but in WWII the US spent around 36-40% gdp on defense. Currently the US only spends 3% on defense.
I think we should also consider the other costs that need funding allocated, e.g. aid for our own citizens (Maui, Puerto Rico, Flint), universal healthcare, forgiving student loan debt/universal tertiary education, infrastructure improvements, etc. Between US ‘defense’ and the humanitarian arm to Ukraine, Israel and who knows who else, we are not taking care of our OWN.
in what world does the double speak "defense" only consume 3 percent of gdp 😂😂😂 i would love for you to break down gdp spending, its def way more than 3 percent, maybe 10x that.
@@merrytunes8697 I agree, the us should absolutely be looking after aging infrastructure like that in Flint, and taking better care of our cities and territories, but for one point the aid sent to Ukraine is mostly military surplus that has already been purchased, has aged out of utility for the US, and would need to be decommissioned anyway, which is fairly expensive. It is a very economical way to get rid of our old stock, win international brownie points for helping, and actually help a country that was invaded defend itself. I completely agree that healthcare should be universal and that college education should be much more accessible without mountains of debt, but we should first look at the Americans who fill their pockets at other’s expense, and hold off on the military, which is admittedly not great at being economical, but is certainly more important than making the bank accounts of the 1% get just slightly larger.
@@ZentaBonYeah, but a dollar in the US doesn’t take you as far as other places. Better checking the Price Parity Index/PPP for a better measure. It does not look as good
Since the US military has a mission to be able to raid to anything anywhere almost instantly, it has warehouses status places around the world with preassembled modular kits for building temporary military bases of already any size, anywhere, within like 3 days or something ridiculous. This includes accomodations with everything, heating plants, water and electricity plants, communications and logistics, industrial kitchens, food storage, like complete towns for thousands of people dropped, assembled and ready for occupancy within hours. I couldn't believe it when i saw it. It's almost like a soldier can get orders to deploy and by the time they get their they've gone from bare ground to heated quarters with hot showers and toilets and everything else they need. If only we could ever win any objective ever for all this cost.
Never thought I'd hear "best funded militaries" and "Canada" in the same sentence. Seriously, our military sucks and we aren't even hitting the 2% GDP spending required by NATO (not like we're the only ones, but still).
i love our friendly neighbors to the north but this has to be one of my biggest pet peeves about the Canadian government lmao. i think trudeau said a few years back (?) something about how they're not at the 2% NATO spending and they won't be - it felt like giving up on that responsibility entirely. i don't remember what he said exactly, but it was something about how canada was around or under 0.5% of GDP for spending and he wasn't expecting any changes to fix that. he may have updated his stance on that or something bc it has been years, but i don't pay a ton of attention lmao i know that the US has the largest economy and population in NATO overall, and i know our military forces are larger than anyone in the world - by a LOT. but i am uncomfortable with what seems to be complacency from our NATO friends in regards to all of this.. like it feels like no one else is concerned about it bc they know the US will come in and help if they get into trouble - which is absolutely true, and we will bc that is our article 5 responsibility. we also spend insane money on research and development, and it feels like we make a lot of technological breakthroughs among our allies
There are also many instances of money being poured into random programs just to get a higher budget the next fiscal year. The mantra: “Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it” rings super true.
Yea this is basically an unsolvable problem that is only fixed by having a dictator owner running the company like Elon Musk. My parents used to run a little league, they built up many profitable revenue streams through a lottery, christmastree sales and an improved snackbar. They built brand new scoreboards. They left the organization with nothing to upgrade and still had like $50,000 left in the bank. That money was gone in 1 year after handing over control to people they thought they could trust. Those people that took over immediately stopped running the programs that made the organization money. My parents also think some embezzlement might have happened. Unsurprisingly that Little League doesn’t exist anymore. If an organization has money the employees are going to spend it, on anything that can make their life slightly easier. The idea of saving money for a rainy day is unthinkable by an organization.
I suspect the "Buy American" requirement does contribute quite a bit to the cost. The US rarely buys military equipment from foreign defence companies. Other militaries aren't generally so picky, so can "shop around" and negotiate deals from any contractors from a friendly country, many of which specialise in a particular industry like shipbuilding, aviation or armoured vehicles, and many also have sizable civilian divisions which allow them to share innovation and economies of scale. Also if you don't need the absolute bleeding edge of military technology and are willing to settle for something still sophisticated but more tried and tested, you can save a lot of money buying a prexisting design and customising it to meet your needs.
no other country has come even close to the level of technological sophistcation and prowess as US companies/universities, so even if that requirement was removed, we would buy American almost exclusively anyways. the US has 70% of the worlds top 100 biggest tech companies, for example. 1 country has 70 of the biggest 100 tech companies. just think about that for a sec.
@@theendurance I'm not sure the US military needs to for everything. The headline items like the F35 might be worth the money, but there's a lot of less sexy equipment out there that could be bought for cheaper from one of the many allies the US has. And I'm not talking about places like Mexico either, South Korea, Japan, France, Germany all have more cost effective military equipment. It's not quite as fancy, but the prices can be nearly half the US equivalent sometimes.
@Croz89 Right, but the benefit of having the vast majority of your military equipment produced in house is that, in the event of a war, you are guaranteed to have access to production of said equipment. That's why we don't even use batteries produced in China. It's expensive in the short and medium term, but well worth it in the long term. Not to mention the amount of civilian advances that have been made from military ones. GPS, for a major example. Radio as well, end to end encryption, etc. Sure, civilian markets get a lesser version of it, i.e. GPS being limited to 3 satellite triangulation, and also not working at certain speeds or altitudes to prevent homemade cruise missiles, but it's definitely nice to get that technology for virtually free.
@@andrewarnold9818 I think that line of argument might have made sense 50-60 years ago when most of the USA's allies were either dirt poor or still recovering from WWII. Back then as was pointed out the US was so dominant in the defence industry that there practically was no allied competition the US could choose from. But things have changed, Europe, Japan, South Korea, all have well developed defence industries of their own, not to mention many middle income allies like Turkey and Mexico which are building simpler and cheaper designs for the more budget conscious militaries of the world (though I don't think the US should be *that* cheap). The US doesn't need to give up its shiniest of military toys from its home grown defence industry, but being more flexible to foreign procurement for more mundane stuff, from trusted allied sources, could save a packet and still preserve enough defence capability to keep the world safe many times over even if the entire allied defence industry vanished overnight.
i served in the USAF, it's absolutely mind boggling at just how powerful and well equipped the US Military is and how our assets are located everywhere for forward force projection. I'm glad i was a part of it.
I agree, it's mind boggling, but what good does it do to the country? And please don't take it that I'm minimizing your service. I'm sure these forward force protections meant long assignments far away, and lots of hardship for you and your family. We can never forget that. I'm just questioning whether these inordinate costs and forced hardship are actually with it, or are they country productive to our future generations.
If a defense company is not effective, it is no longer necessary. The US government should remind the military industrial complex that while the complex is good (more or less) for the military, it can and should be changed up if some of those companies don't keep up their end of the deal.
It will never happen because it's literally a prisoners dilemma: US cuts spending > defense companies shut down > China defense companies overtake the US > China sells their higher tech weapons to all of the west's enemies > US realizes shutting down defense companies was stupid and rearms for the next 50 years while being economically devastated by terrorists who have their own F-35
Bro you have no idea how military precurment works. You can just not help your top dogs when is lacking because they will spiral down in to being bought up and then you'll have no competition and innovation will die. Ofc this is a very simplify but i recomend waching Perum to be more inform about MIC economics
The F-35 programme was a total success, albeit a very expensive and over budget one. The NGAD project is costing much less than estimated because of knowledge gained and infrastructure in place from the F35 development.
If it's so great, how come China can take remote control of it? China built many of the advanced electronics in the F-35 which is insane. Read General Robert Spaldings "Stealth War"...
The F35 has been a farce since inception! The Pentagon spent 2 billion over ten years think tanking the idea of a joint strike fight that could be used by all three services. Good thing that’s never been done before…(F4 Phantom) Then when they decided which two manufacturers would develop prototypes, each got another billion dollars to make two prototypes. So after $4 billion, we had 4 aircraft and they still chose the one that wasn’t as good.
The F-35 is actually a great case study into why defense projects are so difficult and easily run over budget. When the project started, only 20% of the technology needed for the F-35 actually existed. The other 80% had to be created and some of those new technologies proved to be extremely difficult to implement. When you also remember the major pieces of military equipment are giant death machines, it starts to make sense whey they cost so much. Another problem is that has an ahistorical and unrealistic understanding of innovation. Most of the innovation in the civilian sector is based on software. The great thing about software is that the main limitation is the talent and skill of the programmer. A great piece of code can revolutionize and industry without having to do many serious changes to the physical world. When you take a look a physical goods in the civilian sector, they have much less innovation than in the Defense Sector. The car has changed less in the last 70 years than tanks or airplanes. Washing machines haven't changed that much either. When you look at cars and washing machines more closely, the biggest innovation they've had the last decades is being computerized. Theoretically, there will be a point where software will push beyond the limits of the physical capabilities of computers and innovation will slow down, but who knows when that will ever happen if it even does.
My thought at the point where he said "The US military doesn't innovate anymore" was asking "At which point did they stop innovating?" and having to ask myself if you can cut it off at 30 years ago to make that decision before realizing that even immediately after that, those prime contractors have been making new stuff, and they're still making new products in order to try to sell to the government...
@@kingace6186 The F-35 really hasn't gotten much cheaper. The lower price is due to a different way to account for cost between defense contracts and civilian manufacturing. You can't attach R&D costs to production costs in regular business, but you do in defense contracts. The F-35 is fortunate that they plan to make over 3,000 planes that the R&D cost have been diluted to the point where most of what you're paying for is production.
The F-35 is useless. Future of air warfare is drones. Spending that much money on plane that will mostly be used to attack enemies that don't even have an airforce is absurd.
Yeah, I was a little taken aback when he compared release time for new automobiles and civilian aircraft to the development and production of new military aircraft, without making note of just how complicated military aircraft have become in the past few decades as well as the fact that we're practically inventing new stuff out of whole cloth for each major iteration of aircraft. They don't really do this with automobiles and civilian aircraft. It would be more fair to compare those release times to the production of new block variants and major upgrade programs for US military aircraft.
US-Military is such a blight on the world, but whatever. Supplemetary to this video and should-be-interesting if you watched it: The Military-Budget-Video by 'Second Thought', the Recruitment-Video by 'Renegade Cut' and the Military-Videos and Drone-Video by 'Some More News'
"It hasn't always been this way" He said, ignoring the vast British and French naval fleet development costs, and hundreds of botched experimental aircraft from WW1 to the modern day.
Wendover's point wasn't that there weren't tons and tons of failures in the past, but that those failures didn't take two decades to be built just to be a massive disappointment, with almost no competing designs. Both the US and the USSR created lots and lots of prototypes that went nowhere during the Cold War (and let's not even talk about the even higher amount of conceptual designs and blueprints), but that's precisely because things moved much quicker back then, probably due to perceived necessity and thanks to having way more companies working in parallel.
@@HarverTheSlayer Clearly you have never read about the history of weapons development. Everything from round battleships to ships of the line on the great lakes. Rocket planes that blew up to airships that....also blew up! The cold war design period was strange in that the designs were actually quite simple compared to modern technology. The programming required in an F-35 is far greater than the construction of say the F-105. The F-35 is more akin to a nuclear submarine, relying mostly on its electronic warfare suite rather than its guns. It's easy to make a plane fly, it's hard to turn it into a modern technological wonder.
@@stealth9639 Do you realize that nothing that you said contradicts my previous post? I never said that projects in the past weren't failures, quite the contrary: I precisely pointed out just how many prototypes during the Cold War era stayed as that, just prototypes that went nowhere. We could spend days listing how many weapons projects ended up forgotten just in the 20th century, and how many others became utter failures. The point I made was that, 70 years ago, projects wouldn't spend 20 years in the fridge. You used the F-35 as an example, very well, let's put that into perspective: it took them longer to put the F-35B into service (2016) since the first flight of the F-35A (2006) after already more than 10 years of development, than it took them to go from the failed MBT-70 project (1971) to the M1 Abrams entering service in 1980.
@@HarverTheSlayer The defense budget (in proportion to GDP) was way higher then, and designs were often simpler. Also, prototypes and development projects are very very very classified for hopefully obvious reasons. You have absolutely no idea how many there are and there are certainly many many more than are public.
I think that the one thing not mentioned is that while really expensive, the f35 program effectively produced 3 diffrent planes, and they're all THE ABSOLUTE BEST in their class in the world, and already nearly 1000 have been manufactured, making each plane cheaper as time goes on due to economies of scale. The f35 is a MASSIVE success
They're not the best, they're certainly up their with other gen of their class but a good analogy would be Cyberpunk 2077, it was a failure at launch but over time became fixed and became good
@@СергейСердюк94 How is it better? It will be detected and fired upon about 30-40 miles before it will detect the f35 - it's about as stealthy as a naked f18. It's got worse missiles and almost certainlt worse avionics. It has better dogfihting performance, sure, but it wilk almost certainly never come down to a dogfight
There's absolutely no way you referred to Canada as "largest" or "best-funded" in terms of military power. It seems like 3 arbitrary countries that are allied with the US.
Yeah that was a really weird combination of countries lol. Mexico as an example of an expeditionary military really came out of left field too. You can tell this area isn't his forte
@@silverhost9782I think he was trying to speak comparatively. Compared to most countries in the world Mexico’s military is well funded. It’s a perspective thing.
@@succulentsoccer43 well funded yes, but expeditionary capable? Not really. They're two different things, that was the weird part. France definitely has expeditionary capable military, Canada sort of does, but Mexico doesn't. Feels like a weird thing to say Mexico when the UK fits the criteria so much better and is also a US ally
@@silverhost9782and not to mention those countries are more technologically equipped than Mexico's military, the cartel stands on the same ground on land technologies
Yeah I don't like how wend forgot to mention that while these planes cost a lot to develop, they are 1. Massively superior to near peer forces 2. Being sold all around the world to make a return on investment 3. Crucial to securing the US's soft power through weapons sales For example when Turkey was vetoing Sweden's NATO membership, all the US had to do is dangle the f35 contract over their heads and they immediately caved.
@@XhumpersXthat's no the point, China has missiles that are on paper better than ours, the point is that we had to spend 4x what we were told it would actually cost
My dad went to Iceland once and was at dinner with a guy who said he was in the Icelandic Army - asked him, "how many people are there?" guy's answer - "Just me!"
Believe it or not, the whole situation is a lot better nowadays. Definitely not good, but if you want some info on how it worked in the Armored Force during WWII, id highly suggest watching some of “The Chieftain”s videos. Entire production lines and factories built for vehicles that never saw service, vehicles that got pushed through development and hindered actual projects for *years* because they were a certain General’s pet project despite being objectively a bad vehicle, etc. also, you mentioned how getting a vehicle or weapon or weapon’s system accepted for service takes decades now. That’s actually intentional and should be seen as an improvement in some respects; instead of throwing a half-a**ed (for lack of a better term) piece of equipment into combat, or fielding a piece of equipment that the military doesn’t actually need, the military will slow down, take its time, and make absolutely sure that what they’re giving to the troops is the very best option available for the task it’s intended to preform, that it’s reliable, and that it actually preforms a role that is deemed necessary. Heck, the Marine Corps has ballooned over the years into basically a second Army, and because of that they’ve been downsizing in recent years in order to focus on the tasks that it specifically is best suited for. This isn’t to say there still aren’t problems; there *definitely* are and anyone who knows anything about military procurement will tell you that it’s a nightmarish quagmire that you can’t wade into without wanting to pull the hair out of your head. But there are measures in place to try and make things better, and from the best of my knowledge we are moving (nightmarishly slowly) in the right direction
@@jero5703 Thought "The Chieftain" was the name of the channel, but if you look up "Inside the Chieftain's Hatch" that should pull up a bunch of videos from his main series
My father worked in Baghdad for over a decade at the embassy and he told me of seeing 1000's of unused laptops being smashed with sledge hammers and thrown in dumpsters, of entire fleets of armored cars left to rust, never having been driven, only to be replaced with new models that are never used, and just massive amounts of the worst amount of waste you can imagine.
@@jero5703 two of his best videos on this topic are “why the Sherman was what it was” and “The tank for 1945”. If you search them and see videos with titles to that effect, the posting channel should be “The Chieftain”
I mean some nations do (like just how the world responded to the Somalian piracy crisis) but the incentive for the US is a lot greater because international trade is done in US Dollars and if trade gets halted, the value of the dollar plummets.
A note, cost plus percentage of cost contracts are illegal. The closest is cost plus incentive fee type contacts which still have a maximum fee that can be applied and the fee is based on cost savings. There is no contract type under FAR type contracting that adds a fee that increases as costs increase. Otherwise, I think that the rest of the video makes some great points about some of the issues and pitfalls inherent to defense spending.
The zumwalt is being upgraded with VLS to fire the new hypersonic missiles. It takes more & more time to build aircrafts and ships because technology is getting more sophisticated with every advancement in various technologies used by the military.
Thankfully it seems some of these trends of delays and cost overruns have been reversing, the B-21 is an excellent example of this with it’s inflation adjusted airframe cost estimations having shrunk over time.
@@KcarlMarXs unless your health care is capable of penetrating chinese airspace and delivering several tons of explosive I doubt the US government cares.
You made me laugh when you said Canada. Because I knew it was coming but it's such an embarrassing point to how we keep failing commitments then cut costs further while promising more
@@hdjono3351Risk is not a video game, and threatening an ally is a pretty shitty way of doing foreign relations. This "'Murica Fuck Yeah" bullshit is why the rest of the world laughs at us.
Having worked at a company that deal mostly with military contractor this is really funny to me as they were always pushing on us to get thing on time or requiring a sooner deadline, of course they paid some hefty money for their urgency.
One word: Nationalize the companies, they can’t go bankrupt if there part of the government and interests would be aligned instead of the ubiquitous conflict of interests in this field
What is great is that despite these companies being so big, the exposure of these contracts means the govt has to underwrite overruns without the companies being on the hook. Plus with consolidation it means that they now need to prop up the companies to prevent even less competition.
My son works at a military golf course. There are MANY golf courses in the area but for some reason the military needs its own. They also pay him WAY more money than any other golf course in the area would pay, much higher than the market rate. Even my son will admit that he is over paid. They also have a ski rental shop despite the fact that there are ski shops all over this valley. Why?
Operational security, increased loyalty of forces, comfort. Take the time with a pen and write out your thoughts and their unintended consequences. Secured area means less/no press, better operational security combats swallows, restricted areas allows for a more relaxed posture for those involved. This in turn translates into less leaks, a higher morale among the participating troops, and a status symbol that may be used for recruiting.
@@Flight042 Your comment is a case study in why the US military can justify a budget approaching $1T. Golf courses, ski shops, bowling's alleys, etc. on military bases in the middle of the homeland surrounded by the same amenities. There is no end to what you can justify once you enter the "quality of life" arena.
@TrendyStone Most of the golf course and other welfare/recreational facility workers are "non-appropriated funds" employees. This means that they don't get paid through from the $900B DoD budget. Their wages come from the money taken in by recreational activities (e.g. the fee to play on the golf course).
@@TrendyStone Would you rather spend millions after an E4 from sigint accidentally spills top secret intel to a golfer or spend a few hundred thousand on a local golf course. Would you rather your troops be unproductive/unmotivated or just spend the money for them to get their jobs done. At the very core it is risk management. If you want to argue efficiency, the practice of providing amenities is hardly special with many tech giants such as Apple, Google, and others providing many such services as it has a positive impact not only on productivity, retention, but also recruitment. People think industry is a magical thing that if you throw money at it, it will magically be solved. The capacity for productive, innovation, and retention is far more valuable than most people fathom and is one of the key reasons as to why our current military is in a precarious position.
@@thelight3112 indeed, and without the need to pay a million dollar/year CEO, these golf /bowling/ movie theatre amenities more than carry their weight The other import thing is that these amenities also often employ locals not only during the construction but also maintenance and operations, forging a bond with the local economies that are difficult to break. Diplomatic bruhahas are smoothed over when a local govt minister realizes that 1/2 of his district benefits in some way from a US Base
Any welder could’ve told you making an entire ship’s hull out of aluminum was a bad idea to start with. I wish we could go back to when engineers worked on their own projects before designing others lol
@@juliuszkocinski7478 this is true. And to be fair, engineers are smart. It’s just when you have hands on experience, it eliminates a lot of potential missteps because you know the direction to pursue
Other commenter has a great point, but yeah, aluminum doesn’t look like a good material to build something sturdy. So malleable that we make sheets to cover stuff with it at scale.
Aluminium works great for hulls! Loads of boats around the world have them. They just aren't 400ft high speed combat ships, they're 40ft pleasure craft and sport fishing boats
The LCS with that "streetfighter" concept in mind may have led some engineers to think that it isnt supposed to go out in extreme weather conditions since the term implies more of a patrol ship on the coast, which was actually pretty good for it if only their sonars and shit worked properly.
Imagine how much of Amerika could be fixed with that kind of additional budget. At thus point, the military development should be halted and invested into maintenance only since it is already top-notch and anyone that may get faster rockets or whatever won't be able to compensate to the overall bulk of the US army anyway.
In Ireland, we had a TD (member of parliament), who said Ireland's military was the equivalent of driving without tax or insurance. But at least we have the money saved to do up the house :D I actually like it like that. Plus the UK would never let us fall to a foreign power, it's too close to their doorstep. They already patrol our airspace because we have no jets or ground based air defences.
I'm from Ireland too and I can tell you most Irish people don't understand war well. It isn't something that Ireland is familiar with. The thing,obviously no one is going to invade Ireland. That's not the question. However,Russian ships do play around with our data cables,which are very important for all Europe. That's just one use for the military.We need a better military,and to stop relying on foreign powers. Also,we are a tax haven which I don't like.
@@micahbonewell5994 Nope. The UK remains one of the best militaries in the world. It's still a Tier one. It still has a blue water navy. The Falklands war is a testimonial to the supremacy of the UK military.
@@xa-12musk8 An American, we learned about "the Troubles" between you in Britain. However, while so many of the deaths that happened during that roughly 30 year period were heartbreaking, it seemed like a street fight compared to the conflicts that we engage in (and often start). That's not a criticism towards Ireland at all, just that so much of our economy depends on us constantly being at war or occupying foreign lands (which is sad). Example: after 20 years of being in Afghanistan and Iraq, the last boots leave Kabul and in less than 48 hours, the Taliban takes control of the country. Within a year of the end of that 20-year occupation, the Crimea is attacked by Russia and we support Ukraine. That lasted for roughly a year and a half, with public interest fading fast, and then boom, October 7th happens with Hamas and Israel. It never ends...
@@xa-12musk8 With regards to being a tax haven, your not seeing the bigger picture, 275,000 who are mainly the highest paid in this country or 11% of our working population work for foreign multinationals. Also, there are conditions on a number of the profits having to be spent in Ireland for R&D. Theese foreign nationals would not be here if we had the same cooperation taxes as the UK (pre brexit) or any of our European neighbours simply because we are a small country, isolated with a much smaller employment pool than the vast majority of the EU states. Look it up, almost all small countries are tax havens, it's how we attract companies to set up shop here.
There's some major flaws in the analysis here. Most notably, two of the three examples of "failure" were not fundamentally caused by the contractors. The skyrocketing cost of the Zumwalts is primarily caused by the order being cut - the same development cost (which is divided among all of the units constructed under DOD accounting) was suddenly spread across only three ships instead of 32. The extreme cost of their ammunition is essentially the same thing - only a fraction as many shells were needed after the the ship order was slashed, which put more of the development cost on each unit and deprived the project of economies of scale. Most of the excessive expense and protracted development of the F-35, on the other hand, is primarily because of attempts to save money. With the US Air Force, US Navy's Air Force, and US Navy's Army's Air Force all needing to replace their aging fighter fleet (due to several of them reaching the "fall out of the sky" or (worse) the "Canada will buy these" stage in their lifespans, Congress pushed hard on replacing three different models of plane (the F-16, the F/A-18, and the AV-8B Harrier) with only one. In theory, doing so would have saved enormous amounts of money by allowing common spares, training, unified procurement, etc. In practice, the three services had fundamentally different needs and trying to produce a common platform was doomed to failure - in the end the F-35 is fundamentally three different aircraft with a common design ancestor, and only a portion of the parts are compatible. Producing three different models from the start would have saved immense amounts of time and money. Note also that the Zumwalts and F-35 have met almost all of their design goals - the Zumwalt's guns don't have any ammunition, but otherwise work fine, and their missile systems are the equal of any other DDG. Meanwhile the F-35 has been the winner of almost every evaluation it has faced, and the primary problem is that they can't be manufactured fast enough to meet demand.
From time to time, I go back to watch Eisenhower's Farewell Address on the dangers of the Military-Industrial Complex. After 60+ years, it's still so very relevant.
I know this wasn't the main topic of the video, but I'm a mexican and I was very surprised to see "the largest, best funded militaries like Mexico" when talking about large scale expeditionary capabilities
It’s a perspective thing compared to most countries Mexico military well funded and experienced.Also has the capability to deploy internationally if it wanted to as well as having the capability to quickly ramp up production.
Worth remembering that an F-15 can carry +20 missiles. An entire squadron of WWII piston powered fighters would be easily dealt with by a single modern jet. So next time you think advanced technology isn't worth it or is overpriced, think again.
There's a limit, in WWII Germany was wasting money with these advanced weapons that were on paper and practice better than the allies stuff but expensive and very long to mass produce, the US and USSR did well because their equipment was easily mass produced
As someone in the military, I can tell you a lot of that budget isn’t going to fancy tanks, planes, or helicopters. It’s going to keeping our asses fed, paid, and not trying to jump off a building. Everyone talks about how the F35 costs however many billions per unit, or whatnot, when the shit we wear around everyday costs us $200 to purchase, and probably cost just as much if not more to make. Now scale that up to the size of just the army and do the math. Then look at every branch of the military. Hell, the costs of just buying food to stock the dfacs that we all eat at every day is probably somewhere on the order of hundreds of billions accounting for every fort and post the us owns and operates around the world.
Russia has been threatening to wipe out the u.s since the Ukraine War broke out, saddam invaded Kuwait because he thought the u.s was weak, Osama was Osama, and China has been talk about invading Taiwan since the birth of the cccp
On the point about peacetime US spending being around WW2 spending levels. The US also has a significantly larger economy today than it did in the 1940s, so does every single other country. Perhaps defence spending as a % of either GDP or federal spending would be a better indicator of total resource prioritisation.
I think looking at inflation adjusted numbers are better for comparison. In 1943 the US spent about 75 billion. Adjusted for inflation it comes out to 1.3 trillion in 2023 dollars. That is only 350 billion less than what is in the current budget for FY 2024. This is in spite that we only have a tenth of the personnel, and the Navy has only a fraction of the number of ships, and the Army-Airforce has a fraction of combat units when compared to 1943, Two things that have changed, One we spend more on admin overhead and procurement plus personnel costs are higher in real dollars. The US military spends about 25% of the budget on personnel today. That's an increase from about 10% in WWII.
Even though the F-35 development program was an absolute mess, it's weird to use the plane as an example of failure. The unit cost has come down a LOT and the plane has become a successful export. As of 2023, almost a thousand F-35s have been built, more than half of which for export.
Well done video and I agree with many of your points. However, I think you are also giving a skewed perspective by only focusing on military programs that have been failures. For every LCS, there's the Virginia class submarines. For every RAH-66 Comanche, there's the C-17 Globemaster. For every Zumwalt class Destroyer, there's the Arleigh Burke Class destroyer. As you mention, developing cutting edge technology that has to operate in the harshest and most hostile environments is extremely tough. This video would feel more balanced if you didn't only focus on those programs that failed while excluding those that are successful. As for the F-35, it did indeed have a very troubled development period and also has issues with operational ready rates but it is still a very successful program with praise from the pilots who fly it as well as the huge vote of confidence that it's been purchased by the militaries of numerous other countries who each evaluated it and decided it was the best option to meet their military needs.
One bit of insight related to the idea that contractors are incentivized to perform poorly so they profit more on cost-plus contracts...well in most cases, companies don't make most of their money from development contracts. The big money is usually on production/manufacturing contracts, which do tend to be fixed price. Development contracts are often viewed as investments for the opportunity to get future production contracts, and if performance is poor on the development contract, it puts getting future work from that customer at risk. So yes, in a vacuum, contractor want to make as much as possible from any given contract; but in context, most of the time profit from a single cost plus development job is not enough to actually drive intentionally worse performance
I think a major cause is the lack of real competition. Since there are 6 branches (army, navy, airforce, marine, coast guard, and space force) each with different needs, having 5 major defense companies, less than 1 per branch, there is just not enough competition and innovation to drive efficiency (like the video said, most contracts only have 1 bidder). So the solution is more competition. Building tanks and aircraft are complex, so you can't expect smalls start ups to compete. But what you could do is set a small % (say 5%) of the budget just to fund innovative small companies that came up with new design/ideas. If the design wins the first phase, then the major defense contractor that wins the bid to build prototypes and later serial production will pay the small company a royalty. This will grow the small company, and if they continue to come up with good designs, they will eventually grow into a major defense contractor itself and increase the competitions in the industry.
Paying 5% to some small no no-name company to design a weapon you'll buy $100 billion worth of ??? Sounds interesting. Gonna suggest to the organization managing such a contract ... make sure that the 5% design company are experts in """ design for manufacturability """ of products they never make.
What you're talking about already happens. Except what usually happens is the small company with potential ends up being bought by one of the 5 large defense contractors (LMT, Boeing, Raytheon, etc)
@@eshankulkarni2843 Acquired or not, it is an interesting idea to first fund technology demonstrators to prove the tech one wants actually works before mandating their usage on the next contract. Maybe if there was a small scale aluminum ship test, Northrup would've realized it was a bad idea early on and not chosen it. Kinda like how there's a bunch of X-planes to test various aeronautical ideas before determining whether it was a good idea or not. Forward swept wings seem cool but turns out the extra rigidity required wasn't worth the effort.
Stop thinking like a Capitalist. The US Government should own all R&D and give out grants to various universities, organizations, and contractors and the corp of Engineers should build all the stuff the military uses based off these designs. Every major medication of the last 100+ years has come from government funded grants to universities and other research oriented organizations; in other words NOT big Pharma who just come in at the end and buy up the patents and occasionally update the patents in superficial ways.
![เขามัทรี - เอ็กซ์ ศุภกฤต - จอนนี่มิวสิค [ Official MV ]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/AS9ufKuQIVs/mqdefault.jpg)
Fun fact: cost overruns below 150% are considered a great economic success among militaries all over the world.
Setting up and protecting regions that use the US dollar also helps protect the demand/ strength of the dollar.
If 150% over budget is actually seen as under budget, why not just make the 150% number the budget? Might as well just claim the budget was eleven thousand fairy dollars if the budgeted number is meaningless.
@@pullt because then it will be 150% over the new already increased budget
B21 is actually under budget
@@vyobukhov So fairy dollars. Got it.
Iceland sent a small contingent to Afghanistan with NATO. We had a culture day and they served fermented shark meat. A very powerful deterrent.
The other contingents were looking through the book of acronyms for "S.H.A.R.K." Only to find out they were getting. . . . ."shark".
I've traveled around the world and that shark is one of the most God awful things ever
Well it's the thought that counts I guess
@@esotericcommonsense6366salted shark with congee tastes damn good though
@@esotericcommonsense6366 I wonder if it has anything to do with Sharks piss being absorbed by their flesh before being expelled through skin or gills. That would tend to give their meat an ammonia smell and taste.
I am one of the designers who worked on the Comanche at Boeing. The Government kept changing the specifications so often it required several complete redesigns of the air-frame. We spent lab time developing new ways of making composite structures had large shops to make mock ups and I wound up flying across the country on a biweekly basis. There was so much paralysis from the Pentagon on decision making that we often had to stop work of hundreds of skilled craftsman engineers, technicians, and other scientists and wait for a decision to be made. If we could have been given a specification and turned out a prototype, even if that prototype failed it would have been cheaper to do three or four iterations than the two prototypes built.
Sounds like a Pentagon Wars scenario haha. Seems like the problem is more on the procurement side; industry can (within reason, no AI-controlled hovertanks with railguns and force fields) build whatever the military wants, the military just has a tough time deciding just what the heck it actually wants.
On a related note, do you think this has something to do with vastly changing mission requirements? For the better half of two or three decades the US military has been focusing on asymmetrical counter-insurgency fighting, then we’ve done a 180 and are now focusing on peer or near-peer adversaries as our most likely main threat. And recently we’ve got both as possible threats at the same time. The lessons being learned from Ukraine are incredibly difficult from the lessons being learned from Gaza, for example, and I wonder how the military hopes to address both concerns simultaneously. My worst fear is we start getting “compromise” vehicles/weapons systems that are okay at both tasks but great at neither. Take the new Abrams they’re developing, for example. The impetus for the tank is to lower the weight by integrating as many new (but proven) systems as possible, instead of just bolting them onto a new tank. So will we see a TUSK-like system on this new tank? It would be dead weight and next-to useless on the open fields of Eastern Europe, but it would be a vital piece of kit in places in the Middle East like Gaza city.
Really is a shame the Comanche didn't come through--it was sooooo cool, full of so many amazing capabilities...
If only they could keep the requirements fixed from their side but change them as the design proceeds and it becomes evident that some things were not thought through.
Safety considerations are another source of pain, unless they were very well considered and put in clear writing they will become a show stopper.
That's the nature of our political system and is where dictatorial authoritarian governments have an advantage over democracies.
I would be happy to be spending 10% of GDP on the military to ensure we stay ahead of our adversaries who wish to take away our freedom
@@A_R_B_GIgnorant comment.
I used to be a manager at Disney World, if I wanted a sign that said stroller parking, I would have to contact Walt Disney Imagineering and make sure it goes through the process it would cost $15,000. If I called the Orlando sign shop, sent them the picture, and have them come install it (which is what Imagineering would do anyway) it would be like $250. Disney operates just like the military, massive amounts of wasted money.
In theory, this is why the US military has shifted some functions to contractors. In practice, the contractors will charge $12,000, claiming that they saved the US taxpayer thousands of dollars, but it actually costs $20,000 if you account for various hidden expenses.
Well yes, but what if that sign was produced with conflict country paint? Disney ensures it doesn’t by sending a team to inspect the facility which will produce the sign, check county codes to ensure the facility is current with all requirements, and have a personal conversation with the team delivering the sign. That way… idk doesn’t make a lot of sense doesn’t it?
But, but I was guaranteed that the free market is way more efficient, next you will tell me that they would skimp on maintenance to reduce cost in the short term.
Bigger an org is, the more cumbersome it is to move money around.
@@Andyliberty0923 Moving money around is easy. Producing discernable value is where the challenges lie.
As someone who worked in acquisition while in the military, I can say I've seen multimillion dollar items sit in storage until they were completely obsolete and deemed trash without ever being used.
What kind of items?
@@Nick-ve1kglikely tanks, missiles etc
@@Nick-ve1kg Pretty much anything you can think of. Only small part of eguipment will be used while wast majority is waiting in the storage, awaiting a global conflict that never comes
Better than not having them
This can be generalized to game theory. If there is at least 1 nation that keeps trying to invent the next nuke, we all have to stay in the competition otherwise we're risking global dominance
As someone who’s worked for one of the largest defense contractors in the world, I was happy with you bringing to light some of the biggest, most insidious, and most common problems with defense contracting practices; but I was also happy to hear you say that this was only scratching the surface of the insidiousness of these practices. It’s one of the big reasons why I had to leave the industry. Some of our bidding practices were just plain morally terrible that I could no longer let myself be a part of it.
Thank you for having a conscience and for following it.
That’s all around in government. In construction there’s always someone who wants their back scratched and was actively discouraged from doing things cheaper. I’ve built luxury apartment buildings that were over three times the size cheaper than public housing and it was all built into the design. From a draftsman perspective, I’ve seen things down in ways you would only see done with government and any attempt to cut costs were hard rejected. That also doesn’t take into account of policy too. There’s a “woman owned” erection company that’s only viable because tax “incentives” of using a minority owned company. I would personally declare them incompetent from bidding to project management but because of the city’s tax code everyone has to use them unless the GC already has the contract and they specified they don’t want to work with them. Which does happen on the big projects.
Why do Whites like war so much?
@@fortyninehikethis is crazy
You are a good man but don't be so hard on yourself. The same stuff redesign BS happens in Corporate because they want to keep their jobs. If people weren't so crazy about laying people off all the time then you wouldn't have this pretend to be busy redesigns. You have to take a step back and realize a few things. Once I became a parent and had my kid play as a pitcher on a baseball team, I realized the truth of the military. You ALWAYS have to spend the money aka work or train. Because if you don't, you will soon suck. My tiny son could pitch that ball anywhere he wanted in the strike zone. He'd strike out batters that other pitchers couldn't. After a few weeks or month of goofing off and thinking he's so good and can avoid practice, we'd discover his skills were no longer sharp. The money I paid a 1 on 1 coach was a lot, but if you are serious like war, you better stay on your best game. It's expensive because you can't take your money with you to heaven. Other parents didn't want to spend the money for batting practice and it was my tiny son that hit the home run against a top California team and their parents then realized they had 1 chance to have spent that money wisely and didn't. You can't spend the money after you are dead from war.
Without doubt, this industry in the US needs MAJOR overhaul. The level of incentivized waste is staggering.
Guess who contributes a crap ton to congress and senate campaigns? Take a look at Dubya Bush, VP Cheney and Trump's cabinet appointees; what their jobs were pre executive branch, its all oil or defense industry. Any 'solution' would have to lead to higher returns for defense industry shareholders. Really we should all just buy defense stock our taxes are firing up their share price anyway. Its not one party, blue senators can't win without defense dough. Thank supreme court for citizens united; corporations can't be 'silenced' of their 'free speech right' to buy elections.
It is own by elites
1) American war is a racket.
2) American finance is a sick joke.
3) 800 military bases across the planet, with enough arms dealing & support to maintain foreign proxies in every hemisphere.
You know, to ensure nobody tries to take over the world, or something. Think bigger than waste. Vast waste is only possible because the truth is infinitely worse.
@@SerPapus The political elites.
@@GiRR007the political elites that are bought out by US industries to be exact.
The US military faces 3 issues from my perspective: scope creep, lack of tier 1 contractor competition, and requirements based on unproven technologies.
More like lack of competition in general. Last I heard, the US Navy is larger than EVERY other nation's navy combined? That's insane.
GPS, night fighting, guided missile defence, stealth, air to air refuelling etc. were once unproven technologies. Now they are the backbone of NATO. The only way to stay ahead is to innovate.
@@Ultimatebubs China has more total ships, but the US has more tonnage since the ships are bigger and of course the most aircraft carriers by far.
More like corruption, requitment shortages and redtape issues.
Money wouldn’t be wasted if people couldn’t benefit from it and project wouldn’t be extra costly if it wouldn’t be handled as a prestige question with so much redtape that by the time they abandon the program it costed another few dozen billions.
The newly kinda shut down shoreline patrol ships are a great example. Bad idea, 2 bad designs (they chose the worst), awful lot of problems with the made ships, super costly to run due to bad designs and maintinance, yet they made more bc a governor would have had to lose prestige over a closed naval dockyard and it was already financed, so why not waste the money.
@@UltimatebubsIf you take all money spent on military, the US is 40% of it
I think there's a good argument to be made that the f35 is actually relatively successful now that the problems with it have been worked out. The unit price isn't bad at all and there's a ton of international buyers lining up for it. Combat capability wise, it also looks like a great platform.
I was surprised at its inclusion with zumwalt and lcs programs. If anything I think the f35 has turned out to be well worth it, Honestly the future combat army program not being included was more surprising
The twin facts that it is one, being bought by so many other nations (lots of countries are having their F-16s replaced with F35s), and that it replaces so previous planes speaks to it success. The fact that it is able to cover so many combat and mission roles will speak to long term savings for the US Military, and its sales to other nations will help alleviate its high costs.
@@sarge994I think the point was that it took 20 years and countless amount of money to make it "worth it". If U.S government didnt pose such limitations for the companies, they would be incentivized to make working products cheaper, and not half baked stuff for 4x price.
@@carrotplox But that's just it It's not 4x the price. The current price of an F-16V is within $20m of the F-35. The F-35 is cheaper than Eurofighter and the Raf. The flightaway cost F-35A is incredibly competitive price wise for what you get that's why everyone's buying it.
@@carrotplox F-15 program still cost far more than the f-35 did.
I took a tour of an Independence class LCS once and the concept is a great idea when you see what it looks like in person, but the issues are pretty obvious as well. Aluminium is not as fire resistant as it's melting point is half of steel's melting point, so every inch of the interior of the hull has fire proofing blankets on it. As mentioned in the video it's also more brittle than steel, aluminium will not flex if impacted by a shell, just shatter and penetrate like paper. But one of the most embarassing parts I learned was the ability to change its armaments. There is the physical ability to carry cruise missiles in a vertial launch container, except the exhaust from the rockets will MELT THE ALUMINIUM AROUND IT.
Such goofy design.
lmfao that’s actually insane. i know VLS systems have that issue so russia uses cold launch systems but youd think the US who ONLY USES HOT LAUNCH would solve that lol
It's so frustrating to see what happened with the LCS programs. We clearly had the capability to build some awesome ships, but somewhere along the line the whole thing went off the rails. I agree with this video, that the culprit at least partially lies with asking one ship design to do too much. With the Zumwalt, it was trying to reach too far, too fast, tacking a bunch of experimental tech onto a new ship class only to realize it either wouldn't work as well as expected, or was just too expensive to justify. Now we're building a new flight of Arleigh Burkes, hopefully applying some of the lessons learned from those mistakes.
Oh My God
Ffs 🤦♂️ 😂
@@jeremywerner9489yeah same with the Zumwalt ships
Keep in mind back in 2014 (roughly, going from memory) France had to call in US support for logistical help to support less than 20 troops in Mali.
This is nonsense, the European Union is the strongest military power on earth.
If that's true there was a reason for it likely US was near by, the European Union would likely crush the USA in an open conflict, especially a naval conflict
A key piece of context that missing is that US military spending as a share of overall government spending or GDP has fallen massively. During the Cold War highs of the 1960s, 9% of the US GDP went to military spending. Now it's 3%. Defense spending was 51% of overall federal spending in the 1960s. Now it's 14%.
But even that amount is nearly half of the US discretionary budget. When choosing where to spend, we throw half at our military as if we don't have better uses for it.
True, but that misses the point.
The incentive structures are perverse, and apply to numerous government functions (prisons, telecommunications, etc.).
Remember the USSR pioneered titanium welding without the private sector (which claimed it couldn't be done).
@@JustinAZ The US's federal discretionary budget is the smallest part of the US federal budget, it's inconsequential
@@JustinAZdoes that mean from all the budget assigned to different projects/services military budget is still bigger by a mile than other essential services?
@@JustinAZ That is literally because we label everything "nondiscretionary". Seriously look into some of the things labeled nondiscretionary and you will quickly realize that the labels are completely arbitrary. Yes that is a exaggeration but not by much as it is impressive some of the things that would logically be discretionary that are put in nondiscretionary and vice versa.
The obvious problem is that the defense contractors' job is not to make a warship that works. Their job is to make money. Whether or not they manage to make a functional warship, one thing is sure: they are making money.
Spot on
Well, there's your problem.
But what's the alternative? Have a government owned company/agency build it? Well, NASA's space ships are over budget and inefficient, that's why they contract SpaceX to launch for a small fraction of the price.
@@xiphoid2011 idk that doesnt seem so bad lol
If the us gov spends more on lockheed than on nasa, why not just buy them out?
Not fully accurate. If the contractor delivers a shit product at inflated prices, it won't be purchased in as much quantity. Thus the contractor won't sell as much, profit overall will be much lower as initial R&D costs don't get spread over large unit numbers (if it cost 1 billion to develop, only one purchase will have to cover that entire 1 bil whereas 10 purchases will need 100 mil covered from each purchase)
This can be seen in the examples Wendover brings up. LCS and Zumwalt ships were bought in puny numbers compared to initial expectations.
B 24's broke in half. B29 engines overheated. B seventeen's had a poor payload and a poor range. P 51's started with the wrong engine. P47 couldn't taxi because of poor visibility. Sherman tank had a stabilization system that nobody used. M 16 had ammunition supply problem that caused malfunctions. However it's the greatest battle rifle ever created and 60 years later the army still uses it.
Well, propaganda is one hell of a drug
M16/M4/AR-15 has been fixed with running changes over time. It was a failure on launch not cause of the ammo but because it was wrongfully thought to be self-cleaning. Combined with the harsh environment of Vietnam
@@Schimml0rd yes my comunist friend look in the mirror
Part of the issue with the M-16 is that when it was first introduced it was claimed it didn’t need to clean it. Once they figured out it did it worked better…
@@fabricebarbon5886leftists calling others leftists is humrous. We know you’d prefer the innefficient state wasting all the money, but you’ll have to do better than that lol
My favorite fact about the US military goes like this:
The US Air Force has the strongest Air Force in the world, and the US Navy has the second strongest Air Force in the world.
Yes, I'm being completely serious.
Edit: I have since been informed that the RAF is not in fact the third strongest Air Force in the world and have changed this comment to reflect that.
strongest?
RAF 3rd strongest?
@@KarldorisLambley I could have said the largest, or I could have said the most amount of money was used on it, and it would still be accurate, but I figured this would be the simplest way of putting it.
The Royal Air Force is not even close to being the third strongest.
USAF #1
US Navy and Marine Corps #2
Probably the PLAAF (China) in third.
The Royal Air Force is lagging even behind Australia in capability lol. Australia has strong EW assets like the Growler, and Wedgetail, Super Hornets and the F-35A. Britain has the Naval capable F-35B that sacrifices range and payload, old E-3 Sentry’s and the Typhoon which arguably is less capable than the Super Hornet.
@@everythingman987 yeah, but it's pretty difficult to determine how accurate any figures about China's military actually is since it's well documented the government lies about the size of its economy for example.
Iceland: has 4 ships and can't declare war.
Also Iceland: Wins 3 Wars against Great Britain over fish.
[Shittyfluted Rule Britannia intensifies]
Also Iceland: depends on US and UK naval defence and the sosus network.
@@henghistbluetooth7882 Canada is an Iceland ally also.
Well, Iceland is in NATO I'm pretty sure, so it is defended by canada and other nations. They only have a police force.
Cost-plus contracts are often written with a Guaranteed Maximum Price (GMP) with split savings. It incentivizes accurate budgeting and scheduling. It's wild that defense contracts don't have a GMP.
Perun has done a videos on different country's defense structures. An issue with the US is that it's purchasing power parity is low, meaning it's soldiers need to be paid higher than in other countries: a Lt. in the US can be paid more than a highly trained Polish Spec ops guy.
The reason why the US's purchasing power parity is low is partly because the US is literally used as the base to measure purchasing power parity
The other big thing he brought to the table, scale. The f-35 per unit costs have come down enormously since everybody else has adopted it as a standard platform. If you only build two ships, all the development costs are included in those ships, instead of something that can be iterated on, improved, and distributed across 20 or 50 ships.
This is largely inaccurate. US PPP is top 10 in the world. All countries above it are small nations with less than a 1/10th of the population.
I mean, china is an exception to that?@@reclassified_
@@reclassified_ What do you mean? Do you think it would be cheaper to pay same number of soldiers in US or in contries like India, China or in eastern Europe?
There's a mistake in your video here, you said that Canada has a well funded military.
No they do, it's called the US military, the Canadian military is just an expeditionary force for the US.
@@StarbucksCoffey5280 Sounds like an older sibling having their younger sibling do their chores for them.
There's a mistake in your comment here, you used "their" instead of "there."
@stuartwithers8755 yeah it pretty much is
I mean Canada is big in territorial but we have to treat them like it’s out attic cause their population smaller than California.
The F-35 isnt a good example, yes it went way over in development but has since dropped in per unit price to about 80 mil for the A unit which is cheaper than the new f-15 ex at 115 mil. Plus alot the new tech is being incorporated into new equipment.
cmon, its like the most succesful fighter jet program since F-16
@@bloodygekkon It's worthless.
If we're being honest, military spending as a share of the economy has never been lower for America and the rest of the world. For U.S. it's 3.5% of its GDP and the world average is 2 2%. We think that the world today is so full of violence and hate because we are more exposed to it through social media, but in reality the last 78 years has been the most peaceful period in human history.
100% truth fact brother
most peaceful for you and me. Some people aren't so lucky.
@darkpixel1128 Some people, yes, but most people are very lucky
@@darkpixel1128 also most peaceful for most of the world.
of course due to higher populations than ever before, when there is violence, the numbers are large, but in general what you are saying is accurate especially for western countries
The huge issue the US military has is that it has to be ready for. . . . . .everything. Most nations construct their armed forces around a limited set of scenarios based on their local conditions. America can, and not infrequently does, get involved anywhere in the world in almost any kind of conflict against almost any kind of enemy. That increases costs exponentially.
*chooses to be
@@British_Rogue The military doesn't get to choose, it's Congress and the politicians. The military is just told to be able to fight anyone, anywhere, any time.
@@British_Rogue The military doesn't make that choice - the politicians do.
@@thelight3112 It doesn't have to be ready for anything. It chooses to be. Militaries should be in their home country and nowhere else.
@@British_Roguelol someone doesn’t understand how international trade works.
the LCS was spectacularly successful at delivering profit to those with stakes in defense companies, just like those missiles that cost $40k to build but are bought by the pentagon for $600k each. back in the day the military used to say what they needed and companies used to compete to meet them, doing their own R&D. now we cover their R&D costs so not only are they not incentivized not to mess up, they're incentivized to mess up because it produces more profit.
Comparing a 747 to an f35B is kinda unfair considering Boeing didn't have to invent a way for the 747 to take off and land vertically on a moving ship
Boeing did have to built the world's largest building from scratch to make the 747 and the whole program nearly bankrupted the company.
That is a problem because many experts now agree it would have been better to have separate programs rather than a unified Joint program. In pursuit of "simplifying" logistics and lowering costs by purchasing similar aircraft for Navy, Marine and Air Force, it forced each of their requirements to get jammed with each other. That increased complexity of development as the F-35B's special requirements influenced the others and in the end, there ended being not as much logistics compatibility between each other.
Edit: for people who doubt my claim that logistics weren't simplified THAT much. RAND (US gov think tank) published a report in 2008 saying that F-35A has 43% parts compatibility, F-35B 27%, F-35C 30%. The % has only gone down since, in 2017, USAF Lt. Gen Christopher Bogdan said parts commonality was at only 20%.
F-35 is the most hated fighter in service but it never fails to best reasonable expectations. The hate is not justified.
@@chinguunerdenebadrakh7022 Aside from literally all of the expensive parts, which are shared among the three aircraft... Yeah, totally no simplified logistics. The variants definitely don't all use the same engine, radar, avionics, EOTS, DAS, helmet display, gun, weapons...
All that's different is that the F-35B has extra parts connected to the engine, a different fuselage, and no gun. The Navy variant has extra big wings.
The most you can say is that, perhaps, if F-35 were separate USAF and USMC and USN programs, the USAF may have a much larger twin engine aircraft. That's the best case scenario if you're looking for increased performance. That would literally just be a more modern F-22! The USAF would not have the money to buy enough of them, just as they had not for F-22. Whatever F-35 would have been was always going to be in this size range for USAF.
Perhaps USN would've gotten a larger carrier fighter. It does not currently have a navalized analogue to the F-22, this is true. It has Super Hornets and Growlers. This hypothetical plane would've been very expensive (twice as many huge engines) even by f-35/F-22 standards. Perhaps internal fuel load and overall range would've been greater.
USMC could not have possibly done better than F-35B. I doubt we'll ever see an equivalent again. F-35B has made it possible for a dozen countries that couldn't imagine having carrier aviation to actually get competitive carrier aviation with jets that can wipe 4th gens and enemy SAM networks clean off the face of the earth.
South Korea is considering it
Japan is going to buy F-35Bs and is modifying two carriers for it
Italy is doing it with a carrier and the Italian Navy has already received F-35Bs
Great Britain is doing it with two supercarriers and is going pure fleet F-35B even for RAF (this is the most questionable decision made by an F-35 partner)
Spain could do it to replace its Harrier IIs and ground based F-18s
Turkey wanted to do it, but we kicked them out of F-35 program for buying S-400. Their carrier is in service with no armed fighter jets, and at best expects to use UAVs and helicopters.
Australia could do it with effort, but isn't currently planning to.
In a world with three separate programs, F-35B probably withers, dies, and never happens, MASSIVELY weakening the navies of nearly a dozen American allies, and the US Navy's useful fighter-carrying carrier count is cut in half due to LHAs and LHDs only having AV-8B Harrier IIs until retired, which were both never as competitive as the F-35B is with its peers, and subsonic.
The USAF has a small fleet of slightly more capable jets in range, speed, and payload, but not sensors or EW.
USN may or may not get higher payload, higher range jets in very small numbers, because they're addicted to Super Hornets anyways.
No us Brits had already done that for you with the Harrier :)))
A big thing that nobody touches on with the US military is personnel costs. Development overruns and the MIC is a problem, don't get me wrong. But a HUGE portion of the budget is spent on personnel. Housing, feeding, medical care, pay, retirement pensions, college tuition. All of this factors into the defense budget.
btw most of it is overpriced because of contractors
Contractors are not personnel. And it's is not realistic not to need manpower right now. And the military is actually below its manpower targets right now. Serving in the military as a career isn't as attractive as it once was, for various reasons. And the treatment of veterans isn't helping either. Just saying.
@@BigHenForthe treatment of the entire country isn't helping. Why fight for a military that won't fight for its own country's well being? That's its sworn responsibility.
@@HighLordComedianNot saying that contractors aren't expensive, but in a lot of cases they're far cheaper than hiring the equivalent number of needed engineers/scientists/programmers/managers as federal employees.
Federal employees are entitled to a really good benefits package and salaries are also good. On top of that feds still get a pension. The hardest thing though, is that a federal employee can't (usually) just be fired when their project ends. There has to be a lateral move made available for them.
He slightly touched on it with the "sells its own brand of chicken at the base in Turkey" thing, but you're right. It is very much not cheap to pay 2 million troops and provide them base housing or allowance and food and benefits, but it's also politically impossible to touch that funding at all.
The first ship of the FFG-7 class was built and tested before the contract was let for the rest of the class. People begged the Navy to replace them with ships of similar capabilities - a jack of all trades, capable of detached operations. The LCS program was daring, but a failure before the first ships came off the slipways. Now they are going back to a tested hull for the new Constellation class.
Canada does not have a well funded military. Our navy is run down to the point of barely being able to deploy beyond our coast, and our air force is facing long delays for modern aircraft.
Considering Canada’s population and the fact that they will never, ever, be invaded from overseas, they’re still spending a lot.
The reason the airforce doesn’t have modern aircraft is because the Trudeau government (justifiably) canceled the original order on the F-35s back in 2015. But that meant that the RCAF was stuck with the CF-18 and they still needed to be replaced. After another contract bidding war that happened this year, Lockheed Martin won and were awarded a $19B contract for the F-35s. Since Canadian law prohibits the exclusion of Lockheed Martin, the Canadian government has to buy F-35s despite vowing not to buy them back in 2015.
You have your BIG brother down south to protect you, no need to waste money on "defense".
@@drksideofthewal Canada is going to need a strong navy and air force to protect the melting arctic trade routes opening up, they don't want to let the USA do everything and kill their own MIC.
Never become overly reliant on the US or any other major power for that matter. We may be brothers, but there are situations where they will not or cannot help us. I don't know what they are, but it's best we don't find out when they occur.
Canada's armed forces need an upgrade and fresh coats of paint. This is a necessity not a want. The older things get, the more expensive and dangerous they are. The more likely they are to fail when needed and this puts both military and civilian life at risk.
Our budget is fine, the fact we're WAY overspending on projects and procurement compared to similar equipment from our allies says a lot about what's going on behind closed doors. $100 million USD more for the F35 compared to the UK, and twice more on our Type 26 Frigates compared to the UK and Australia. Why are we being milked? We'll see if their costs end up ballooning to what we're paying, but I'm concerned as to where my tax dollars are really going when we look at our respected Armed Forces.
3:00 "Take for example the USS Freedom" while showing multiple shots of the Independence class LCS instead of the Freedom Class
That's pretty much the entire video. Lots of errors. The freedom class is fine. It's the Independence class with the problems anyway.
who gives a shit
@@Khurosnah freedom has the issues
He's talking about both if you keep watching, he explains the difference and everything
@@Nzombii I am very familiar with the differences between them, it was really just a remark on the poor choice of footage when talking specifically about LCS1 while showing an LCS2 class ship until it cuts away to the 3D model.
TLDR: Cutting edge technologies take a lot of money to create. The USA has a lot of cutting edge tech in its worldwide system of bases. You need a few of something so if it breaks you can apply fixes to the others. R&D is expensive.
But other countries have cutting edge stuff but don't have ridiculous budgets
@@СергейСердюк94other countries claim to have cutting edge tech
@@sababugs1125 you have no idea what you're talking about
That's not the TLDR. You lied.
F-35 does not deserve to be listed as a failure. Wildly capable aircraft at a great unit cost with massive interest from buyers and it's a very futureproof platform.
Except that the US air force doesn't want it, and not only did we have to restart the f22 program but we also have to develop a new aircraft.
It failed its primary purpose, not a complete failure but not a success.
@@thewick-j1837 Do you mean the modernisation package? I cant find any info on new build production restarting. Mod packages are normal and happen to nearly all aircraft see F14-D for a very popular example. And I assume you're talking about NGAD for future aircraft? Also normal, this is like calling the f-15 & f-16 failures because the f-22 was developed shortly afterward. Superpower militaries like the US die in mediocrity, there's probably already a NGAD++ in development.
@@thewick-j1837 the F-22 is getting some upgrades, but afaik there are no plans to restart any kind of production given the incredible cost and limited need for them. I think it's fair to say the F-35 has been a success, it definitely wasn't right at the beginning and looked like it might never be but it's proven to be extremely capable, mass-producible, exportable and at a reasonable cost (now, early costs were very high). I guess the navy doesn't love them so much given the compromises they had to make for the whole STOVL thing but otherwise it's a damn good job
@@helplmchokingit was a failure because it cost over a trillion dollars and another trillion in repairs and retrofits.
Thankfully everyone has their own 6th gen program
"Wildly capable aircraft"
Name three real world examples.
This actually isn't just the contractors because it happens for other agencies as well and internally in government. Government procurement rules get more and more complex with more and more middlemen, eroding value. The same is true in medicine.
Infrastructure too. Holy crap building anything costs so damn much now. So many middle men.
We also think things should be cheaper because Corporations make products cheaper by taking shortcuts because they don’t have to work in wartime. Since there is no free lunch, they take short cuts which is why nothing you have lasts. If it has high quality and it lasts, you won’t want it after a whole because it will be obsolete by being old. The military had to do things as a system that lasts 30-100 years, which is why you see the frames of the B52s still being used.
kick backs
Thanks! I really enjoy the work and variety of topics! Keep going!!
USA: Where military spending is our national pastime, and GDP is just a side hustle."
What the fuck is a kilometer?!?!?! HUA!
@@StarbucksCoffey5280 A US solider knows what a kilometer is. Whenever you hear a US solider say something is so many "klicks" away, they are using slang for kilometer. The US Army uses metric linear measurements for interoperability with NATO allies. The USA may not use the metric system completely, but it is more prevalent than some people think. It is still used in parts of society like the scientific community, medicine, liters of soda, grams of marijuana, losing 10mm sockets, etc.
@@stuartwithers8755the joke flew over your head
reminds me of that joke
A headmaster needed to paint his school, so he asked the Janitor how much it would cost him,
The Janitor said, well I can get the either the local traders or the municipal council for a quote
The local traders offered £2500 to complete the job and the council offered £5000 to do the job
When the Janitor heard the extreme price of the council he told the headmaster
The headmaster ended up picking the council and the Janitor shocked, asked why he choose the council
"Well the job itself only cost £2000, but they got an extra £1000, I needed £1000, and you can have £500 to keep your mouth shut"
Send me the other £500
damn where the other 500 at
Been a fan for a long time, and this is your best video imo. I used to work at Northrop Grumman (have since left the industry entirely) and this sums up so well why I left. When you said "the inefficiencies of government are moved into the contractors" that is 100% accurate. I think anyone who considers the government inefficient and bad and these contractors efficient private businesses would be in for a MASSIVE shock if they had seen what I've seen.
I think it’s also worth keeping in mind % GDP spent on the MIC too. The numbers are a little different depending on what time periods and what specifically you include, but in WWII the US spent around 36-40% gdp on defense. Currently the US only spends 3% on defense.
I think we should also consider the other costs that need funding allocated, e.g. aid for our own citizens (Maui, Puerto Rico, Flint), universal healthcare, forgiving student loan debt/universal tertiary education, infrastructure improvements, etc. Between US ‘defense’ and the humanitarian arm to Ukraine, Israel and who knows who else, we are not taking care of our OWN.
Looking at military spending in absolute terms instead as a % of GDP is rather miss leading to the viewer.
in what world does the double speak "defense" only consume 3 percent of gdp 😂😂😂 i would love for you to break down gdp spending, its def way more than 3 percent, maybe 10x that.
@@merrytunes8697 I agree, the us should absolutely be looking after aging infrastructure like that in Flint, and taking better care of our cities and territories, but for one point the aid sent to Ukraine is mostly military surplus that has already been purchased, has aged out of utility for the US, and would need to be decommissioned anyway, which is fairly expensive. It is a very economical way to get rid of our old stock, win international brownie points for helping, and actually help a country that was invaded defend itself. I completely agree that healthcare should be universal and that college education should be much more accessible without mountains of debt, but we should first look at the Americans who fill their pockets at other’s expense, and hold off on the military, which is admittedly not great at being economical, but is certainly more important than making the bank accounts of the 1% get just slightly larger.
@@Foxxactt agreed, I thought this too
Y'all forget just how freaking rich the USA is. All of the money the US throws at the military is just a mere 3% of the USA's GDP.
But about 20% of tax revenue goes to it.
@anguschandler4482Free healthcare would legit be cheaper than what we have now for the taxpayers
@anguschandler4482that shit makes money for the country. Our healthcare costs could cut in half at least.
@@thedapperdolphin1590we spend $12k per capita on healthcare right now. Zalmost double other countries including those with universal healthcare
@@ZentaBonYeah, but a dollar in the US doesn’t take you as far as other places. Better checking the Price Parity Index/PPP for a better measure. It does not look as good
Since the US military has a mission to be able to raid to anything anywhere almost instantly, it has warehouses status places around the world with preassembled modular kits for building temporary military bases of already any size, anywhere, within like 3 days or something ridiculous.
This includes accomodations with everything, heating plants, water and electricity plants, communications and logistics, industrial kitchens, food storage, like complete towns for thousands of people dropped, assembled and ready for occupancy within hours.
I couldn't believe it when i saw it. It's almost like a soldier can get orders to deploy and by the time they get their they've gone from bare ground to heated quarters with hot showers and toilets and everything else they need.
If only we could ever win any objective ever for all this cost.
Never thought I'd hear "best funded militaries" and "Canada" in the same sentence. Seriously, our military sucks and we aren't even hitting the 2% GDP spending required by NATO (not like we're the only ones, but still).
I swear Canada's Armed Forces is budget cut after budget cut, Im surprised you can still afford the F-35 lmao
Mexico too 😂
It's so bad, soldiers need to buy their own boots and some live in their cars because housing is so expensive.
i love our friendly neighbors to the north but this has to be one of my biggest pet peeves about the Canadian government lmao. i think trudeau said a few years back (?) something about how they're not at the 2% NATO spending and they won't be - it felt like giving up on that responsibility entirely. i don't remember what he said exactly, but it was something about how canada was around or under 0.5% of GDP for spending and he wasn't expecting any changes to fix that. he may have updated his stance on that or something bc it has been years, but i don't pay a ton of attention lmao
i know that the US has the largest economy and population in NATO overall, and i know our military forces are larger than anyone in the world - by a LOT. but i am uncomfortable with what seems to be complacency from our NATO friends in regards to all of this.. like it feels like no one else is concerned about it bc they know the US will come in and help if they get into trouble - which is absolutely true, and we will bc that is our article 5 responsibility. we also spend insane money on research and development, and it feels like we make a lot of technological breakthroughs among our allies
There are also many instances of money being poured into random programs just to get a higher budget the next fiscal year. The mantra: “Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it” rings super true.
Yea this is basically an unsolvable problem that is only fixed by having a dictator owner running the company like Elon Musk.
My parents used to run a little league, they built up many profitable revenue streams through a lottery, christmastree sales and an improved snackbar. They built brand new scoreboards. They left the organization with nothing to upgrade and still had like $50,000 left in the bank. That money was gone in 1 year after handing over control to people they thought they could trust. Those people that took over immediately stopped running the programs that made the organization money. My parents also think some embezzlement might have happened.
Unsurprisingly that Little League doesn’t exist anymore.
If an organization has money the employees are going to spend it, on anything that can make their life slightly easier. The idea of saving money for a rainy day is unthinkable by an organization.
This is overall true with any government organization.
Nasdaq please buy picture 0:25
The fact that we get free videos from Wendover Productions on TH-cam is priceless.., keeping the education and knowledge alive. 🙏🙏🙏
Knowledge.
@@hellyeah7403 Hell yeah!
Cheer!
I suspect the "Buy American" requirement does contribute quite a bit to the cost. The US rarely buys military equipment from foreign defence companies. Other militaries aren't generally so picky, so can "shop around" and negotiate deals from any contractors from a friendly country, many of which specialise in a particular industry like shipbuilding, aviation or armoured vehicles, and many also have sizable civilian divisions which allow them to share innovation and economies of scale. Also if you don't need the absolute bleeding edge of military technology and are willing to settle for something still sophisticated but more tried and tested, you can save a lot of money buying a prexisting design and customising it to meet your needs.
no other country has come even close to the level of technological sophistcation and prowess as US companies/universities, so even if that requirement was removed, we would buy American almost exclusively anyways. the US has 70% of the worlds top 100 biggest tech companies, for example. 1 country has 70 of the biggest 100 tech companies. just think about that for a sec.
@@theendurance I'm not sure the US military needs to for everything. The headline items like the F35 might be worth the money, but there's a lot of less sexy equipment out there that could be bought for cheaper from one of the many allies the US has. And I'm not talking about places like Mexico either, South Korea, Japan, France, Germany all have more cost effective military equipment. It's not quite as fancy, but the prices can be nearly half the US equivalent sometimes.
@Croz89 Right, but the benefit of having the vast majority of your military equipment produced in house is that, in the event of a war, you are guaranteed to have access to production of said equipment. That's why we don't even use batteries produced in China.
It's expensive in the short and medium term, but well worth it in the long term. Not to mention the amount of civilian advances that have been made from military ones. GPS, for a major example. Radio as well, end to end encryption, etc. Sure, civilian markets get a lesser version of it, i.e. GPS being limited to 3 satellite triangulation, and also not working at certain speeds or altitudes to prevent homemade cruise missiles, but it's definitely nice to get that technology for virtually free.
@@andrewarnold9818 I think that line of argument might have made sense 50-60 years ago when most of the USA's allies were either dirt poor or still recovering from WWII. Back then as was pointed out the US was so dominant in the defence industry that there practically was no allied competition the US could choose from. But things have changed, Europe, Japan, South Korea, all have well developed defence industries of their own, not to mention many middle income allies like Turkey and Mexico which are building simpler and cheaper designs for the more budget conscious militaries of the world (though I don't think the US should be *that* cheap). The US doesn't need to give up its shiniest of military toys from its home grown defence industry, but being more flexible to foreign procurement for more mundane stuff, from trusted allied sources, could save a packet and still preserve enough defence capability to keep the world safe many times over even if the entire allied defence industry vanished overnight.
Kc-46 best example, I'm a Boeing fan but what a shambles that program is
i served in the USAF, it's absolutely mind boggling at just how powerful and well equipped the US Military is and how our assets are located everywhere for forward force projection. I'm glad i was a part of it.
I agree, it's mind boggling, but what good does it do to the country?
And please don't take it that I'm minimizing your service. I'm sure these forward force protections meant long assignments far away, and lots of hardship for you and your family. We can never forget that. I'm just questioning whether these inordinate costs and forced hardship are actually with it, or are they country productive to our future generations.
Yet it can't win a war. Curious
@@EdReed-r8n schizo bot
If a defense company is not effective, it is no longer necessary. The US government should remind the military industrial complex that while the complex is good (more or less) for the military, it can and should be changed up if some of those companies don't keep up their end of the deal.
The MIC has the Politicians in their Pockets, there's alot of corruption and politicians getting paid to keep it as it is.
It will never happen because it's literally a prisoners dilemma: US cuts spending > defense companies shut down > China defense companies overtake the US > China sells their higher tech weapons to all of the west's enemies > US realizes shutting down defense companies was stupid and rearms for the next 50 years while being economically devastated by terrorists who have their own F-35
There has been so much consolidation in the industry over the last 60 years that there's only a handful of companies.
Bro you have no idea how military precurment works. You can just not help your top dogs when is lacking because they will spiral down in to being bought up and then you'll have no competition and innovation will die. Ofc this is a very simplify but i recomend waching Perum to be more inform about MIC economics
The military industrial complex is the Government.
The F-35 programme was a total success, albeit a very expensive and over budget one. The NGAD project is costing much less than estimated because of knowledge gained and infrastructure in place from the F35 development.
Point being, it could have been way cheaper and finished sooner if not for the industry's horrendous practices.
@@facuigua12is it industry practices or the fact that the military wanted three different variants, all of which have different moving parts?
Yeah, such a success, that the US govt puts pressure on other countries to purchase F35
If it's so great, how come China can take remote control of it? China built many of the advanced electronics in the F-35 which is insane. Read General Robert Spaldings "Stealth War"...
The F35 has been a farce since inception! The Pentagon spent 2 billion over ten years think tanking the idea of a joint strike fight that could be used by all three services.
Good thing that’s never been done before…(F4 Phantom)
Then when they decided which two manufacturers would develop prototypes, each got another billion dollars to make two prototypes. So after $4 billion, we had 4 aircraft and they still chose the one that wasn’t as good.
The F-35 is actually a great case study into why defense projects are so difficult and easily run over budget. When the project started, only 20% of the technology needed for the F-35 actually existed. The other 80% had to be created and some of those new technologies proved to be extremely difficult to implement. When you also remember the major pieces of military equipment are giant death machines, it starts to make sense whey they cost so much.
Another problem is that has an ahistorical and unrealistic understanding of innovation. Most of the innovation in the civilian sector is based on software. The great thing about software is that the main limitation is the talent and skill of the programmer. A great piece of code can revolutionize and industry without having to do many serious changes to the physical world. When you take a look a physical goods in the civilian sector, they have much less innovation than in the Defense Sector. The car has changed less in the last 70 years than tanks or airplanes. Washing machines haven't changed that much either. When you look at cars and washing machines more closely, the biggest innovation they've had the last decades is being computerized. Theoretically, there will be a point where software will push beyond the limits of the physical capabilities of computers and innovation will slow down, but who knows when that will ever happen if it even does.
Plus, economies of scale matter. The F-35 has already started to gotten substantially cheaper than when it was first being rolled out.
My thought at the point where he said "The US military doesn't innovate anymore" was asking "At which point did they stop innovating?" and having to ask myself if you can cut it off at 30 years ago to make that decision before realizing that even immediately after that, those prime contractors have been making new stuff, and they're still making new products in order to try to sell to the government...
@@kingace6186 The F-35 really hasn't gotten much cheaper. The lower price is due to a different way to account for cost between defense contracts and civilian manufacturing. You can't attach R&D costs to production costs in regular business, but you do in defense contracts. The F-35 is fortunate that they plan to make over 3,000 planes that the R&D cost have been diluted to the point where most of what you're paying for is production.
The F-35 is useless. Future of air warfare is drones. Spending that much money on plane that will mostly be used to attack enemies that don't even have an airforce is absurd.
Yeah, I was a little taken aback when he compared release time for new automobiles and civilian aircraft to the development and production of new military aircraft, without making note of just how complicated military aircraft have become in the past few decades as well as the fact that we're practically inventing new stuff out of whole cloth for each major iteration of aircraft. They don't really do this with automobiles and civilian aircraft. It would be more fair to compare those release times to the production of new block variants and major upgrade programs for US military aircraft.
Still can’t believe that McDonald’s is a government contractor
Correction, Ireland does not have a U.S. Military base, as that would invalidate our military neutrality
the U.S. military does use the Shannon Airport for stopovers and layovers for military and transport aircraft
@@Zach476 True but Shannon Airport is an international airport that Ireland controls. So not a military base at all.
maybe not in iceland ... but they have a base in 90 % of all countries in the world.
my country even stores american nukes
US-Military is such a blight on the world, but whatever. Supplemetary to this video and should-be-interesting if you watched it: The Military-Budget-Video by 'Second Thought', the Recruitment-Video by 'Renegade Cut' and the Military-Videos and Drone-Video by 'Some More News'
@@slevinchannel7589cry me a river tankie
"It hasn't always been this way" He said, ignoring the vast British and French naval fleet development costs, and hundreds of botched experimental aircraft from WW1 to the modern day.
Wendover's point wasn't that there weren't tons and tons of failures in the past, but that those failures didn't take two decades to be built just to be a massive disappointment, with almost no competing designs. Both the US and the USSR created lots and lots of prototypes that went nowhere during the Cold War (and let's not even talk about the even higher amount of conceptual designs and blueprints), but that's precisely because things moved much quicker back then, probably due to perceived necessity and thanks to having way more companies working in parallel.
@@HarverTheSlayer Clearly you have never read about the history of weapons development. Everything from round battleships to ships of the line on the great lakes. Rocket planes that blew up to airships that....also blew up! The cold war design period was strange in that the designs were actually quite simple compared to modern technology. The programming required in an F-35 is far greater than the construction of say the F-105. The F-35 is more akin to a nuclear submarine, relying mostly on its electronic warfare suite rather than its guns. It's easy to make a plane fly, it's hard to turn it into a modern technological wonder.
@@stealth9639 Do you realize that nothing that you said contradicts my previous post? I never said that projects in the past weren't failures, quite the contrary: I precisely pointed out just how many prototypes during the Cold War era stayed as that, just prototypes that went nowhere. We could spend days listing how many weapons projects ended up forgotten just in the 20th century, and how many others became utter failures.
The point I made was that, 70 years ago, projects wouldn't spend 20 years in the fridge. You used the F-35 as an example, very well, let's put that into perspective: it took them longer to put the F-35B into service (2016) since the first flight of the F-35A (2006) after already more than 10 years of development, than it took them to go from the failed MBT-70 project (1971) to the M1 Abrams entering service in 1980.
@@HarverTheSlayer The defense budget (in proportion to GDP) was way higher then, and designs were often simpler. Also, prototypes and development projects are very very very classified for hopefully obvious reasons. You have absolutely no idea how many there are and there are certainly many many more than are public.
I think that the one thing not mentioned is that while really expensive, the f35 program effectively produced 3 diffrent planes, and they're all THE ABSOLUTE BEST in their class in the world, and already nearly 1000 have been manufactured, making each plane cheaper as time goes on due to economies of scale.
The f35 is a MASSIVE success
They're not the best, they're certainly up their with other gen of their class but a good analogy would be Cyberpunk 2077, it was a failure at launch but over time became fixed and became good
@@СергейСердюк94 lmao what do you mean they're not, what's better? the su57? XD
@@janekfan666 Su-57 is a better air superiority fighter for sure, depends on the mission
@@СергейСердюк94 How is it better? It will be detected and fired upon about 30-40 miles before it will detect the f35 - it's about as stealthy as a naked f18.
It's got worse missiles and almost certainlt worse avionics.
It has better dogfihting performance, sure, but it wilk almost certainly never come down to a dogfight
@@janekfan666 you have no idea what you're talking about
There's absolutely no way you referred to Canada as "largest" or "best-funded" in terms of military power. It seems like 3 arbitrary countries that are allied with the US.
Canada put a end to US invasions twice. Lets be honest here! Never underestimate em BLUD !!
Yeah that was a really weird combination of countries lol. Mexico as an example of an expeditionary military really came out of left field too. You can tell this area isn't his forte
@@silverhost9782I think he was trying to speak comparatively. Compared to most countries in the world Mexico’s military is well funded. It’s a perspective thing.
@@succulentsoccer43 well funded yes, but expeditionary capable? Not really. They're two different things, that was the weird part. France definitely has expeditionary capable military, Canada sort of does, but Mexico doesn't.
Feels like a weird thing to say Mexico when the UK fits the criteria so much better and is also a US ally
@@silverhost9782and not to mention those countries are more technologically equipped than Mexico's military, the cartel stands on the same ground on land technologies
the f35 is actually gotten so much better, especially the block 4 coming out
Yeah I don't like how wend forgot to mention that while these planes cost a lot to develop, they are
1. Massively superior to near peer forces
2. Being sold all around the world to make a return on investment
3. Crucial to securing the US's soft power through weapons sales
For example when Turkey was vetoing Sweden's NATO membership, all the US had to do is dangle the f35 contract over their heads and they immediately caved.
@@XhumpersXthat's no the point, China has missiles that are on paper better than ours, the point is that we had to spend 4x what we were told it would actually cost
@@chrisrides2203those Chinese missiles are useless if they can't even find the US fighter because it's too stealthy.
@@alecjones4135 has it ever been proven that they would survive a confrontation in China? this is not fighting the Taliban in the mountains anymore
Yeah and their cost has dramatically gone down. Purchase cost is about as much as previous generation fighters like US F-16 or Eurofighter.
A ship can have range, it can have payload, it can have speed; but not all three.
American supercarriers: hold my beer.
My dad went to Iceland once and was at dinner with a guy who said he was in the Icelandic Army - asked him, "how many people are there?" guy's answer - "Just me!"
Believe it or not, the whole situation is a lot better nowadays. Definitely not good, but if you want some info on how it worked in the Armored Force during WWII, id highly suggest watching some of “The Chieftain”s videos. Entire production lines and factories built for vehicles that never saw service, vehicles that got pushed through development and hindered actual projects for *years* because they were a certain General’s pet project despite being objectively a bad vehicle, etc.
also, you mentioned how getting a vehicle or weapon or weapon’s system accepted for service takes decades now. That’s actually intentional and should be seen as an improvement in some respects; instead of throwing a half-a**ed (for lack of a better term) piece of equipment into combat, or fielding a piece of equipment that the military doesn’t actually need, the military will slow down, take its time, and make absolutely sure that what they’re giving to the troops is the very best option available for the task it’s intended to preform, that it’s reliable, and that it actually preforms a role that is deemed necessary. Heck, the Marine Corps has ballooned over the years into basically a second Army, and because of that they’ve been downsizing in recent years in order to focus on the tasks that it specifically is best suited for.
This isn’t to say there still aren’t problems; there *definitely* are and anyone who knows anything about military procurement will tell you that it’s a nightmarish quagmire that you can’t wade into without wanting to pull the hair out of your head. But there are measures in place to try and make things better, and from the best of my knowledge we are moving (nightmarishly slowly) in the right direction
What’s the channel called? I searched up The Chieftain and only got a band back lol
@@jero5703no idea what you are using to search but the channel is literally The Chieftain
@@jero5703 Thought "The Chieftain" was the name of the channel, but if you look up "Inside the Chieftain's Hatch" that should pull up a bunch of videos from his main series
My father worked in Baghdad for over a decade at the embassy and he told me of seeing 1000's of unused laptops being smashed with sledge hammers and thrown in dumpsters, of entire fleets of armored cars left to rust, never having been driven, only to be replaced with new models that are never used, and just massive amounts of the worst amount of waste you can imagine.
@@jero5703 two of his best videos on this topic are “why the Sherman was what it was” and “The tank for 1945”. If you search them and see videos with titles to that effect, the posting channel should be “The Chieftain”
"Pentagon Wars" its free to watch HBO movie with movie stars. It's this video in comedy form and true story
The F-35 has been a massive success with a relatively low build cost.
Yea cause a roughly 1 trillion dollar delevopment is not to ezpensive
US NAVY also protects global shipping lanes. Making sure global trade stays functioning. Other countries don't really do any of that.
I mean some nations do (like just how the world responded to the Somalian piracy crisis) but the incentive for the US is a lot greater because international trade is done in US Dollars and if trade gets halted, the value of the dollar plummets.
A note, cost plus percentage of cost contracts are illegal. The closest is cost plus incentive fee type contacts which still have a maximum fee that can be applied and the fee is based on cost savings. There is no contract type under FAR type contracting that adds a fee that increases as costs increase.
Otherwise, I think that the rest of the video makes some great points about some of the issues and pitfalls inherent to defense spending.
The zumwalt is being upgraded with VLS to fire the new hypersonic missiles. It takes more & more time to build aircrafts and ships because technology is getting more sophisticated with every advancement in various technologies used by the military.
Thankfully it seems some of these trends of delays and cost overruns have been reversing, the B-21 is an excellent example of this with it’s inflation adjusted airframe cost estimations having shrunk over time.
How does my healthcare projections look cost wise?
@@KcarlMarXs unless your health care is capable of penetrating chinese airspace and delivering several tons of explosive I doubt the US government cares.
@@KcarlMarXssir that hospital visit costs more than your house. We’re going to need a kidney for payment as well, thanks 😊
We're all pretending we didn't see the word "BOOB" in the thumbnail.
You made me laugh when you said Canada. Because I knew it was coming but it's such an embarrassing point to how we keep failing commitments then cut costs further while promising more
My dad worked at Lockheed for around 40 years and had a top-secret security clearance. Feds actually interviewed our neighbors about my dad.
How does it feel to work for Lockheed Martin?
Lying
Dude, no complaints about spending in Military. The US NEEDS this we're #1 in the world.
Damn Iceland seems pretty strong at the moment😢 glad they are friendly with the us
Everybody dunking on Iceland until we start playing Risk =)
@@VeroTestavideo games have no basis in reality. America can and would happily absolutely shit stomp Iceland into the Stone Age! Don’t tempt us!
@@hdjono3351I dunno, man. people said Ukraine would be pounded to a pulp by Russia and here we are.
@@hdjono3351Risk is not a video game, and threatening an ally is a pretty shitty way of doing foreign relations. This "'Murica Fuck Yeah" bullshit is why the rest of the world laughs at us.
@@bibblyboing brainless take
Having worked at a company that deal mostly with military contractor this is really funny to me as they were always pushing on us to get thing on time or requiring a sooner deadline, of course they paid some hefty money for their urgency.
One word: Nationalize the companies, they can’t go bankrupt if there part of the government and interests would be aligned instead of the ubiquitous conflict of interests in this field
What is great is that despite these companies being so big, the exposure of these contracts means the govt has to underwrite overruns without the companies being on the hook. Plus with consolidation it means that they now need to prop up the companies to prevent even less competition.
Because we are NUMBER ONE, THE GOAT RAHHHHHHHH🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅
It’s supposed to be whoorah
The ability to field two whole armies to fight two separate wars on opposite sides of the globe does not come cheaply.
My son works at a military golf course. There are MANY golf courses in the area but for some reason the military needs its own. They also pay him WAY more money than any other golf course in the area would pay, much higher than the market rate. Even my son will admit that he is over paid. They also have a ski rental shop despite the fact that there are ski shops all over this valley. Why?
Operational security, increased loyalty of forces, comfort. Take the time with a pen and write out your thoughts and their unintended consequences. Secured area means less/no press, better operational security combats swallows, restricted areas allows for a more relaxed posture for those involved. This in turn translates into less leaks, a higher morale among the participating troops, and a status symbol that may be used for recruiting.
@@Flight042 Your comment is a case study in why the US military can justify a budget approaching $1T. Golf courses, ski shops, bowling's alleys, etc. on military bases in the middle of the homeland surrounded by the same amenities. There is no end to what you can justify once you enter the "quality of life" arena.
@TrendyStone Most of the golf course and other welfare/recreational facility workers are "non-appropriated funds" employees. This means that they don't get paid through from the $900B DoD budget. Their wages come from the money taken in by recreational activities (e.g. the fee to play on the golf course).
@@TrendyStone Would you rather spend millions after an E4 from sigint accidentally spills top secret intel to a golfer or spend a few hundred thousand on a local golf course. Would you rather your troops be unproductive/unmotivated or just spend the money for them to get their jobs done.
At the very core it is risk management. If you want to argue efficiency, the practice of providing amenities is hardly special with many tech giants such as Apple, Google, and others providing many such services as it has a positive impact not only on productivity, retention, but also recruitment.
People think industry is a magical thing that if you throw money at it, it will magically be solved. The capacity for productive, innovation, and retention is far more valuable than most people fathom and is one of the key reasons as to why our current military is in a precarious position.
@@thelight3112 indeed, and without the need to pay a million dollar/year CEO, these golf /bowling/ movie theatre amenities more than carry their weight
The other import thing is that these amenities also often employ locals not only during the construction but also maintenance and operations, forging a bond with the local economies that are difficult to break.
Diplomatic bruhahas are smoothed over when a local govt minister realizes that 1/2 of his district benefits in some way from a US Base
Any welder could’ve told you making an entire ship’s hull out of aluminum was a bad idea to start with. I wish we could go back to when engineers worked on their own projects before designing others lol
Difficult != bad
I mean they nailed titanium machining. In hindsight it might be obvious, but mankind engineered around much bigger obstacles
@@juliuszkocinski7478 this is true. And to be fair, engineers are smart. It’s just when you have hands on experience, it eliminates a lot of potential missteps because you know the direction to pursue
Other commenter has a great point, but yeah, aluminum doesn’t look like a good material to build something sturdy. So malleable that we make sheets to cover stuff with it at scale.
Aluminium works great for hulls! Loads of boats around the world have them. They just aren't 400ft high speed combat ships, they're 40ft pleasure craft and sport fishing boats
The LCS with that "streetfighter" concept in mind may have led some engineers to think that it isnt supposed to go out in extreme weather conditions since the term implies more of a patrol ship on the coast, which was actually pretty good for it if only their sonars and shit worked properly.
Imagine how much of Amerika could be fixed with that kind of additional budget.
At thus point, the military development should be halted and invested into maintenance only since it is already top-notch and anyone that may get faster rockets or whatever won't be able to compensate to the overall bulk of the US army anyway.
In Ireland, we had a TD (member of parliament), who said Ireland's military was the equivalent of driving without tax or insurance. But at least we have the money saved to do up the house :D
I actually like it like that.
Plus the UK would never let us fall to a foreign power, it's too close to their doorstep. They already patrol our airspace because we have no jets or ground based air defences.
I'm from Ireland too and I can tell you most Irish people don't understand war well. It isn't something that Ireland is familiar with. The thing,obviously no one is going to invade Ireland. That's not the question. However,Russian ships do play around with our data cables,which are very important for all Europe. That's just one use for the military.We need a better military,and to stop relying on foreign powers. Also,we are a tax haven which I don't like.
Except the UK will soon have a tier 3 military instead of tier 2 military, as it seems to enter an economic and military decline.
@@micahbonewell5994 Nope. The UK remains one of the best militaries in the world. It's still a Tier one. It still has a blue water navy. The Falklands war is a testimonial to the supremacy of the UK military.
@@xa-12musk8 An American, we learned about "the Troubles" between you in Britain. However, while so many of the deaths that happened during that roughly 30 year period were heartbreaking, it seemed like a street fight compared to the conflicts that we engage in (and often start). That's not a criticism towards Ireland at all, just that so much of our economy depends on us constantly being at war or occupying foreign lands (which is sad). Example: after 20 years of being in Afghanistan and Iraq, the last boots leave Kabul and in less than 48 hours, the Taliban takes control of the country. Within a year of the end of that 20-year occupation, the Crimea is attacked by Russia and we support Ukraine. That lasted for roughly a year and a half, with public interest fading fast, and then boom, October 7th happens with Hamas and Israel. It never ends...
@@xa-12musk8 With regards to being a tax haven, your not seeing the bigger picture, 275,000 who are mainly the highest paid in this country or 11% of our working population work for foreign multinationals. Also, there are conditions on a number of the profits having to be spent in Ireland for R&D.
Theese foreign nationals would not be here if we had the same cooperation taxes as the UK (pre brexit) or any of our European neighbours simply because we are a small country, isolated with a much smaller employment pool than the vast majority of the EU states.
Look it up, almost all small countries are tax havens, it's how we attract companies to set up shop here.
Great video, sad that TH-cam won't let you edit the previous one, I thought it was really well done.
There's some major flaws in the analysis here. Most notably, two of the three examples of "failure" were not fundamentally caused by the contractors. The skyrocketing cost of the Zumwalts is primarily caused by the order being cut - the same development cost (which is divided among all of the units constructed under DOD accounting) was suddenly spread across only three ships instead of 32. The extreme cost of their ammunition is essentially the same thing - only a fraction as many shells were needed after the the ship order was slashed, which put more of the development cost on each unit and deprived the project of economies of scale.
Most of the excessive expense and protracted development of the F-35, on the other hand, is primarily because of attempts to save money. With the US Air Force, US Navy's Air Force, and US Navy's Army's Air Force all needing to replace their aging fighter fleet (due to several of them reaching the "fall out of the sky" or (worse) the "Canada will buy these" stage in their lifespans, Congress pushed hard on replacing three different models of plane (the F-16, the F/A-18, and the AV-8B Harrier) with only one. In theory, doing so would have saved enormous amounts of money by allowing common spares, training, unified procurement, etc. In practice, the three services had fundamentally different needs and trying to produce a common platform was doomed to failure - in the end the F-35 is fundamentally three different aircraft with a common design ancestor, and only a portion of the parts are compatible. Producing three different models from the start would have saved immense amounts of time and money.
Note also that the Zumwalts and F-35 have met almost all of their design goals - the Zumwalt's guns don't have any ammunition, but otherwise work fine, and their missile systems are the equal of any other DDG. Meanwhile the F-35 has been the winner of almost every evaluation it has faced, and the primary problem is that they can't be manufactured fast enough to meet demand.
What do you expect from someone who has never served using crap from online info that is wrong big time.
From time to time, I go back to watch Eisenhower's Farewell Address on the dangers of the Military-Industrial Complex. After 60+ years, it's still so very relevant.
I know this wasn't the main topic of the video, but I'm a mexican and I was very surprised to see "the largest, best funded militaries like Mexico" when talking about large scale expeditionary capabilities
It’s a perspective thing compared to most countries Mexico military well funded and experienced.Also has the capability to deploy internationally if it wanted to as well as having the capability to quickly ramp up production.
Worth remembering that an F-15 can carry +20 missiles.
An entire squadron of WWII piston powered fighters would be easily dealt with by a single modern jet.
So next time you think advanced technology isn't worth it or is overpriced, think again.
There's a limit, in WWII Germany was wasting money with these advanced weapons that were on paper and practice better than the allies stuff but expensive and very long to mass produce, the US and USSR did well because their equipment was easily mass produced
Since when are Mexico or Canada known for large scale expeditionary warfare capabilities?
As someone in the military, I can tell you a lot of that budget isn’t going to fancy tanks, planes, or helicopters. It’s going to keeping our asses fed, paid, and not trying to jump off a building. Everyone talks about how the F35 costs however many billions per unit, or whatnot, when the shit we wear around everyday costs us $200 to purchase, and probably cost just as much if not more to make. Now scale that up to the size of just the army and do the math. Then look at every branch of the military. Hell, the costs of just buying food to stock the dfacs that we all eat at every day is probably somewhere on the order of hundreds of billions accounting for every fort and post the us owns and operates around the world.
No wonder why a medical bills are so expensive because the military engineers has a higher salary 💀
Three steps process
1. Make an imaginary enemy
2. Increase defense spending
3. Repeat step 1
Russia has been threatening to wipe out the u.s since the Ukraine War broke out, saddam invaded Kuwait because he thought the u.s was weak, Osama was Osama, and China has been talk about invading Taiwan since the birth of the cccp
man i just want healthcare
How about Ukraine aid instead
@@levismith7444I love my medicinal m1 Abrams and F16, it’s really been improving my health conditions
You can and should have both. I’m a lefty but the US military is important
@@levismith7444
How about sending money to israel?
( and h )
@@Jason-gq8fo I'm definitely not a lefty, but I agree with you.
No free Healthcare
No free education
No free housing
No free food
...but many super expensive weapons that are not going to be used at all
Get out of here commie
US general Smedley Butler wrote the book 'War is a Racket'. After he had left the army.
Butler was a Marine, but yea, very relevant book
There's a free audiobook of it on youtube. Everyone should hear/read it. It's only about an hour long.
On the point about peacetime US spending being around WW2 spending levels.
The US also has a significantly larger economy today than it did in the 1940s, so does every single other country. Perhaps defence spending as a % of either GDP or federal spending would be a better indicator of total resource prioritisation.
I think looking at inflation adjusted numbers are better for comparison. In 1943 the US spent about 75 billion. Adjusted for inflation it comes out to 1.3 trillion in 2023 dollars. That is only 350 billion less than what is in the current budget for FY 2024. This is in spite that we only have a tenth of the personnel, and the Navy has only a fraction of the number of ships, and the Army-Airforce has a fraction of combat units when compared to 1943, Two things that have changed, One we spend more on admin overhead and procurement plus personnel costs are higher in real dollars. The US military spends about 25% of the budget on personnel today. That's an increase from about 10% in WWII.
11:40 past military powers have relied on "technology" as well. Greek fire, phalanx spears, horse archery, gunpowder, you name it...
Its that 'no registered views, I just got on lunch, perfect timing' feeling today!!! Thanks Wendover
Even though the F-35 development program was an absolute mess, it's weird to use the plane as an example of failure. The unit cost has come down a LOT and the plane has become a successful export. As of 2023, almost a thousand F-35s have been built, more than half of which for export.
very true
Including f35 in that list is crazy ngl.
1000+ built with 2000+ more planned aint really a failure...
Well done video and I agree with many of your points. However, I think you are also giving a skewed perspective by only focusing on military programs that have been failures. For every LCS, there's the Virginia class submarines. For every RAH-66 Comanche, there's the C-17 Globemaster. For every Zumwalt class Destroyer, there's the Arleigh Burke Class destroyer. As you mention, developing cutting edge technology that has to operate in the harshest and most hostile environments is extremely tough. This video would feel more balanced if you didn't only focus on those programs that failed while excluding those that are successful. As for the F-35, it did indeed have a very troubled development period and also has issues with operational ready rates but it is still a very successful program with praise from the pilots who fly it as well as the huge vote of confidence that it's been purchased by the militaries of numerous other countries who each evaluated it and decided it was the best option to meet their military needs.
great point
One bit of insight related to the idea that contractors are incentivized to perform poorly so they profit more on cost-plus contracts...well in most cases, companies don't make most of their money from development contracts. The big money is usually on production/manufacturing contracts, which do tend to be fixed price. Development contracts are often viewed as investments for the opportunity to get future production contracts, and if performance is poor on the development contract, it puts getting future work from that customer at risk. So yes, in a vacuum, contractor want to make as much as possible from any given contract; but in context, most of the time profit from a single cost plus development job is not enough to actually drive intentionally worse performance
It's that military industrial complex George Carlin was always "joking" about
“There are no victories gained at bargain prices.”
-Dwight Eisenhower
I think a major cause is the lack of real competition. Since there are 6 branches (army, navy, airforce, marine, coast guard, and space force) each with different needs, having 5 major defense companies, less than 1 per branch, there is just not enough competition and innovation to drive efficiency (like the video said, most contracts only have 1 bidder). So the solution is more competition. Building tanks and aircraft are complex, so you can't expect smalls start ups to compete. But what you could do is set a small % (say 5%) of the budget just to fund innovative small companies that came up with new design/ideas. If the design wins the first phase, then the major defense contractor that wins the bid to build prototypes and later serial production will pay the small company a royalty. This will grow the small company, and if they continue to come up with good designs, they will eventually grow into a major defense contractor itself and increase the competitions in the industry.
Paying 5% to some small no no-name company to design a weapon you'll buy $100 billion worth of ??? Sounds interesting. Gonna suggest to the organization managing such a contract ... make sure that the 5% design company are experts in """ design for manufacturability """ of products they never make.
What you're talking about already happens. Except what usually happens is the small company with potential ends up being bought by one of the 5 large defense contractors (LMT, Boeing, Raytheon, etc)
@@eshankulkarni2843 Acquired or not, it is an interesting idea to first fund technology demonstrators to prove the tech one wants actually works before mandating their usage on the next contract. Maybe if there was a small scale aluminum ship test, Northrup would've realized it was a bad idea early on and not chosen it. Kinda like how there's a bunch of X-planes to test various aeronautical ideas before determining whether it was a good idea or not. Forward swept wings seem cool but turns out the extra rigidity required wasn't worth the effort.
Didn't you just describe DARPA?
Stop thinking like a Capitalist. The US Government should own all R&D and give out grants to various universities, organizations, and contractors and the corp of Engineers should build all the stuff the military uses based off these designs. Every major medication of the last 100+ years has come from government funded grants to universities and other research oriented organizations; in other words NOT big Pharma who just come in at the end and buy up the patents and occasionally update the patents in superficial ways.
0:57 What in the world are you talking about😂😂 did i slip into an alternate universe??
You don't mention the b21 raider... like 8 years from nothing to flying.