It was never in doubt that Boeing was in line for a major bailout. Confirmation came last week with Trump’s announcement that the prime contract for the Next Generation Air Dominance fighter would go to the ailing corporation. Just to make sure, Boeing toadied to the 47th president by dubbing its offering the “F-47.” (Back in 2020 the Navy announced it would name a future carrier“Doris Miller,” honoring a black Pearl Harbor hero, hardly acceptable to an administration busy purging minority heroes from the official record. So expect the admirals to hop to and rename the flattop “Donald Trump”. Can an Army “Fort Trump” be far behind?) The contract projects $20 billion in development costs alone, with no official projection of what the full program acquisition cost might run to. But the F-47 will not fly alone. Supposedly it will operate in conjunction with “Collaborative Combat Aircraft,” drones, costing a mere $30 million or so a pop, that will operate as unmanned fighters under the overall direction of the F-47 pilot. Two smaller defense contractors, General Atomics and Anduril, are currently contending for the CCA contract and have been touting models of their candidates at trade shows. Prototypes are meant to take to the air this summer, following which the air force will select the lucky winner (or maybe both). Should the Anduril offering, the “Fury,” win the race, it will represent a remarkable achievement, since the vehicle started life as a jet-powered target drone developed by Blue Force, a small North Carolina corporation for a program subsequently cancelled by the air force. Anduril thereupon bought Blue Force on the cheap and the humble target drone was reborn as a futuristic CCA. What could go wrong? Most likely everything. Despite glib air force pronouncements about “loyal wingmen” - the CCA drones - no one, so I am reliably informed from the inside, has the slightest notion as to how the manned plane will communicate with and direct the drones, which will be operating semi-autonomously. Bear in mind that, following a quarter-century of development, the F-35 is still struggling to get its software system to work, and that’s just for a plane operating on its own. According to the Pentagon’s Director of Operating Test and Evaluation, “Technology Refresh-3”, the latest effort to make the software perform adequately, “has shown no improvement in meeting schedule and performance timelines for developing and testing software designed to address deficiencies and add new capabilities.” Boeing’s historic record in the combat aircraft business does not inspire confidence. Back in World War 2 Army Air Force commander General Henry “Hap” Arnold, a fanatical proponent of air power and the service independence that would come with it, selected the company to build the B-29, designed for high altitude precision bombing. Development and production was beset with disasters. Two thirds of the 414 B-29s lost in World War 2, went down due to engines catching fire and other mechanical failures, rather than enemy action. A crash program to build the planes at a specially constructed Boeing plant in Wichita became known as “The Battle of Kansas,” absorbing a huge proportion of U.S. manufacturing capacity. Workmen laboring in the open to meet Arnold’s frantic demands in the subzero Kansas winter developed frostbite. The program ultimately cost $4 billion in 1944 dollars - twice that of the Manhattan Project. The high altitude precision mission proved a chimera, thanks to the powerful jet stream over Japan that inexorably blew planes and bombs far off target. Deployed at low altitude, B-29s did succeed in burning down multiple Japanese cities along with their civilian populations, and of course it dropped the atom bombs that purportedly brought about the Japanese surrender. Boeing’s B-52 bomber, which first flew in 1952, was on the other hand a technical success, attested by the fact it is still raining bombs on cities three quarters of a century later while intended replacements have been discarded. The KC-135 aerial refueling tanker, which first flew in 1956, a sibling of the wildly successful 707 airliner, was another technical triumph. After that it was all downhill so far as military aircraft were concerned. Notably, Boeing senior management long took care to keep the company’s military and civil teams apart. An unwritten rule precluded defense-side executives ever being shifted to civilian projects lest their ingrained habits of untrammelled cost growth, out-sourcing (to spread sub-contracts across the political landscape) and ill-judged technological initiatives infect their commercial peers. That sensible policy went by the board once Boeing merged with McDonnell-Douglas, a purely defense operation, in 1997. The results were plain to see. The first major Boeing airliner initiative under the merged regime, the 787 Dreamliner, was outsourced to an unprecedented degree, with foreseeable effects on schedule (the plane entered service three years late) and cost (it exceeded an initial development estimate of $5 billion by at least $12 billion — an impressive overrun, even by defense standards). There followed the 737 MAX, a lethal disaster propelled by management greed and obeisance to Wall Street. On the defense side, Boeing got the contract for a tanker to replace the venerable KC-135 (after a bribe to air force official Charlene Druyun, as part of an earlier tanker bid, earned her an eleven month prison term when revealed). Whereas existing tankers relied on a crewman at the back of the plane guiding the refuelling boom onto the recipient aircraft with hand and eye, a surefire method that has worked impeccably for decades, the KC-46 design involves the crewman performing this exacting task via a video screen. Despite billions lavished on attempted fixes, it has never worked properly - a perfect example of the folly, now pervasive across all defense development initiatives, of inserting technology between a human operator and the real world, a trend currently reaching its apogee with the AI frenzy. (“The AI developers that we work with didn't even realize that they needed to integrate with sensors to feed the machine,” a friend involved in weapons development recently told me. “They thought they could do everything alone and unafraid. Now they all say, ‘these sensors suck!’”) None of this has or will impede the torrent of dollars destined to flow into the F-47 over the years and decades to come. The project is already slated for “low rate initial production,” meaning the political engineering is already in place, with sub-contracts larded across enough states and congressional contracts, rendering the program impossible to kill. Hang onto your wallets. Invite your friends and earn rewardsIf you enjoy Spoils of War, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe. |