On Sat, 14 Jun 2008 20:16:45 -0700, tankfixer
wrote:


In 1930 Germany was a semi stable democracy that was no danger to her
neighbors.
No one really believe she would be a danger again.
Over the next ten years she build up her airforce and army to the point
that by 1940 she had taken Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, France,
Belgium and the Netherlands.
Back then a fighter or tank could be designed and produced in under a
year.
To suggest that any country can do that now is absurd.

Not at all. Remember the Boeing Bird of Prey demonstrator? They did that
plane in roughly a year. And going full scale development without a lot of
change orders from Wright Patterson, they'd have been able to do in less
than another year.

Here's something for you to factor into your assessment. Back in 1960,
Herman Kahn, of Hudson Institute, (Sort of an East Coast RAND Corporation)
wrote a neat little book called On Thermonuclear War. One of the things
that he noted, that I've always kept in mind, is that by 1960, the primary
business of the Aircraft Industry wasn't designing and building
airplanes-- it was research and development. Lots of paper studies, loads
of really cool artwork, but if you really wanted to screw things up, tell
em to build what they designed.

You can, design airplanes fast. What it takes is shops where a designer
can design, build and test a plane, (I've got Kelly Johnson's rules for
operating a Skunk Works someplace and he is emphatic on the point) and
then the builders need to be able to sell them so that they can build more
planes. An aeronautical engineer these days gets to work on maybe one
project, and because of an insanely long, twenty plus years long product
development cycle, his experience stops there. And he doesn't get to
design more than that because the business is R&D, not building and
selling airplanes.

The Air Force doesn't work that way, because Stewart Symington made the
decision that the atomic bomb made the ability to maintain and expand
aircraft manufacture in wartime, irrelevant. According to him and to
subsequent generations of Air Force Generals, we go with what we have, and
hopefully we win before we run out of goodies.

The real world has pretty much invalidated that assumption.
Unfortunately, we don't have the technological defense in depth that we
once had, because of around sixty years of Merge & RIF as Air Force policy.

What that means is that we buy boutique airplanes that are so expensive
that we don't dare hazard them and if we do, we can't replace them when
they're lost. And we can't in a timely way, replace aircraft that are
irrelevant to our current situation because either conditions are changed
or the situation estimate on which their specifications are based were
found to be in error. The original B-17 was a coast defense weapon. By the
time that the Air Force really got going over Germany, that plane was in
the E model, was a virtually different airplane and was in expanded mass
production. We can't do that anymore.

We also can't supplement or replace planes that aren't relevant to our
situation with new ones, and when we get a bad design, we're stuck with
it, rather than shifting it off to some secondary job and replacing it
with a better one, not least of which because our designer's bench is
very, very short staffed. In the old days, when Donovan Berlin hit his
slump, guys like Lee Atwood and Ed Heinemann and Kelly Johnson could pick
up. And that kind of technological defense in depth is lost to us.

So, in the meantime, we're stuck. And that's scary. If the F-22 and the
F-35 turn out to be either bad or not what we need, what do we replace
them with? Our current situation has us stuck going to war flying the
Brewster Buffalo rather than using the Wildcat and developing the Hellcat.

Its not just the individual platforms that are of concern here. We've got
to change the way that we do business and get back to where we're in the
business of designing and building and flying airplanes, not doing R&D and
substituting paper studies for real world experience.

Rumor has it that Boeing's Phantom Works is designing a new bomber as a
private initiative to compete with something that Northrop's working on
now. I hope that we encourage them and basically encourage everybody to
get back to building and flying airplanes. Right now, the only place you
see any activity like that is in the Drone & UAV business because the Air
Force never got to set that end of the market in concrete. Hopefully what
they're doing will spread to the manned aircraft game.

In the meantime. I think that we can design and build combat capable
aircraft in a year and that's a good time frame to aim for. It imposes
some dicipline on the designers and forces them to look at flight hardware
rather than paper studies and cool artwork.

BTW, speaking of cool artwork, does anybody know where I can get an image
of what the guys at Wright Patterson said that Burton's Blitzfighter was
supposed to look like?

--
"Implications leading to ramifications leading to shenanigans"-- Admiral
Elmo Zumwalt, USN.