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Software United States

Lockheed Risks $800 Million Withheld Over New F-35 Software (bloomberg.com) 141

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Lockheed Martin may see more than $800 million in payments withheld through next June until it wins approval for the software powering its most advanced version of the F-35, according to newly disclosed delivery figures. From a report: The No. 1 US defense contractor is on tap to finish production of about 52 of the upgraded TR-3 model fighter jets by Dec. 31 and approximately 12 per month after that, or 72 more by June 30, for as many as 124 jets, according to the data released Monday by Russ Goemaere, the Pentagon's spokesman on the F-35.

The Pentagon is withholding $7 million per aircraft until the new software is validated because the aircraft are being placed in storage until then. At 124 jets, that's $868 million. Last month, the Defense Department withheld $7 million on each of the first four upgraded F-35s. The aircraft needs the delay-plagued software upgrade to function fully with new cockpit hardware before it can carry more precise weapons and gather more information on enemy aircraft and air defenses. The upgrade will increase processing power 37 times and memory 20 times over the F-35's current capabilities.
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Lockheed Risks $800 Million Withheld Over New F-35 Software More

Lockheed Risks $800 Million Withheld Over New F-35 Software

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  • Do not fret, Lockheed will be ok (Score:5, Insightful)

    by edi_guy ( 2225738 ) on Monday September 11, 2023 @06:03PM (#63840466)

    They will get their $868 million dollars ...and probably get interest or bonus fees on top of it.

    About $40 billion per year according to this site.

    https://www.defense.gov/News/R... [defense.gov]

    Also surprising/not-surprising is that the State of Virginia gets the most spending at the state level. Not CA, not TX, not NV (cough cough).
    I guess that's Arlington and/or Langley depending on whose books you are looking at.

    Aside from all the political theatre, it'd be nice if a group of bi-partisan legislators just made it their primary jobs to:
        -Simplify the tax code...flat tax, whatever. But start phasing out all the wacko deductions...even the ones I like.
        -Get the freakin' defense contractor welfare scam under control.
        -Destroy telemarketing /robo calls forever

    Is there anyone of any political stripe that objects to these (whose not in the pocket of the corp beneficiaries)?
      Once those are resolved we can move onto the FoxNews/MSNBC circus issues

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ihavesaxwithcollies ( 10441708 )
      Why not just tax the rich a lot more? Corporations more? Stop trying to remove deductions from people who need them the most.

      There is no both sides anymore with cable news. MSNBC has never been sued multiple times for billions because they lied repeatedly.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Pascoea ( 968200 )
        Make the standard deduction 25k for single, 50k for a family and that's it. The only other one I'd say "keep" on MIGHT be the EITC. Other than that, scrap every damn deduction, credit, and write-off on the books. After that, adjust tax brackets every year to whatever is needed to balance the budget.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by saloomy ( 2817221 )
          Why have tax brackets? Just put in a 22% tax rate at all sales across the board. Then, give everyone a $24k/year UBI. Reduce from the UBI 1/2 of your income.

          So: if you make $0 a year, you get $24k.
          if you make $10k a year, you get $19k in UBI, plus the $10k you made, making you a total of $34k.
          If you make $48k a year, you get no UBI.

          You just get your salary. and so on and so fourth until you buy something. Anything. Everything.

          Then, adjust that 22% based on the prior years' spending vs forecasted G

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by amorsen ( 7485 )

            So you want a 50% income tax on top of existing income taxes for incomes above $10k, until you hit $48k, where the tax rate drops by 50 percentage points.

            This creates exactly the problem that UBI was invented to solve: that lower incomes experience high effective taxation, sometimes above 100%.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Pascoea ( 968200 )

            Idk, I'm not opposed to some sort of UBI, but I'm not crazy about the idea either. My way just seems simpler.

            The idea of a VAT is intriguing as well, if you were to exempt things like food/clothing/utilities I'd be on-board. Basically, the entire driver behind my plan is to remove the tax burden as much as possible from the lowest earners, and simplify our tax code.

            • UBI is very much simpler than solutions which don't include it because it replaces many programs. Social security (which is really a whole bunch of programs under one banner itself), SNAP, TANF, SDI, UIB, GR, and a whole host of others can simply go away. It takes a huge number of people to administer these programs, and many of them are paid by the feds even when they work in your state. Excess payments will be recovered naturally via taxation and the IRS already exists, so the total required manpower take

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Pascoea ( 968200 )
                All fair points. As with anything else, devil is in the details. I could certainly be convinced that it's better.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 )

          Make the standard deduction 25k for single, 50k for a family and that's it.

          So if a family with four kids all file separately, they get $150k in deductions?

          Other than that, scrap every damn deduction, credit, and write-off on the books.

          You just put 99% of companies out of business. A grocery store can't operate if it can't deduct the wholesale cost of the goods sold. No factory can operate if it can't deduct the wages it pays employees.

          Oh, but that isn't what you meant. Of course they can keep the reasonable deductions! But who decides what is reasonable and what is not? Congress? You're right back to where you started.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Pascoea ( 968200 )

            So if a family with four kids all file separately, they get $150k in deductions?

            Where are you getting that? I said 25/50, and that's it. No more child tax credits, no more additional deductions. (I could have been clearer by saying " 50k for married", not "family") If the kids have their income, they report it just like they do now, but with a 25k (or 50k if they are married) deduction.

            You just put 99% of companies out of business.

            I was talking specifically about personal income tax, not businesses. That's a whole other ball of yarn that needs to be de-tangled.

            Oh, but that isn't what you meant

            Not my fault your reading between the lines doesn't match my opinion.

            But who decides what is reasonable and what is not? Congress? You're right back to where you started.

            W

            • I said 25/50, and that's it. No more child tax credits

              Nobody will use child tax credits anyway if the kid can get a $25k deduction by filing a separate return.

              I could have been clearer by saying " 50k for married", not "family"

              Marriage rates will immediately fall, while divorce rates soar.

              If the kids have their income, they report it just like they do now, but with a 25k ... deduction.

              So can I pay my kid $25k to mow the lawn?

              I was talking specifically about personal income tax, not businesses.

              Most businesses are sole proprietorships. They are individuals, not corporations.

              Not my fault your reading between the lines doesn't match my opinion.

              Tax advisors earn a lot of money by reading between the lines.

              Would starting over really be that bad of an idea?

              Perhaps not. But that's not what you're proposing.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Pascoea ( 968200 )

                Nobody will use child tax credits anyway if the kid can get a $25k deduction by filing a separate return.

                I'm confused by the pushback on this. If your kid has an income today they have to file a tax return. (I'm aware you CAN include their income on your return, but it seems extremely limited.) There's already a $12,950 (2022) standard deduction. All I'm proposing is increasing it, and canning other deductions.

                Marriage rates will immediately fall, while divorce rates soar.

                Lol, wtf are you talking about? You're gonna divorce your wife because your standard deduction went up? I genuinely don't understand the thought process here.

                So can I pay my kid $25k to mow the lawn?

                Can you do that today? No? Then why bring

      • There aren't enough rich people to make a dent in the entitlement bill and you can only confiscate all of their wealth once.

      • Why not just tax the rich a lot more?

        Rich money is mobile money. Raise taxes and it will flow out of the country, taking spending and jobs with it.

        Corporations more?

        Much of the taxes on corporations are passed on as higher prices, lower wages, fewer jobs, and lower returns to middle-class 401k accounts.

        If you want higher prices, a sales tax makes more sense. If you want lower wages, then higher payroll taxes make more sense. If you want to hit shareholders, then raise taxes on dividends and capital gains.

        But a direct tax on corporate profits makes little sense.

        • A carbon tax makes more sense than anything you listed.

          A carbon tax makes no sense, and you pointed out why.

          Rich money is mobile money. Raise taxes and it will flow out of the country, taking spending and jobs with it.

          The rising cost of natural gas in Europe has the same effect as a carbon tax, it makes business in North America look cheaper. There's factories being torn down in Germany right now, getting boxed up for a boat ride to Canada or USA, to get built where the natural gas pipelines are in place. Entire industrial sectors are moving out of Europe because the price of energy is climbing there. There are apologists for high energy prices in some parts of Euro

          • The rising cost of natural gas in Europe has the same effect as a carbon tax,

            Nope. A carbon tax hits coal, oil, and gas at the point of extraction. But it also hits imports that are taxed on the carbon used to produce them.

            So there's no benefit to shipping jobs overseas to produce products that are transported back.

            • Nope. A carbon tax hits coal, oil, and gas at the point of extraction. But it also hits imports that are taxed on the carbon used to produce them.

              So there's no benefit to shipping jobs overseas to produce products that are transported back.

              Who says that the products have to be transported back?

              Make it expensive to do business in the USA then then jobs leave the USA, the wealth leaves the USA, and we just see people making money somewhere else in the world to buy the products that could not be sold in the USA because the taxes got too high.

              You want to see carbon emissions lowered? Then maybe we need to do like so many other nations are doing and lift the self imposed ban on new nuclear power. There's no lack of people willing and able to bui

              • Well you are going to have to think real hard on which scares you more, global warming or nuclear power.

                Speaking for myself, neither. There may or may not be any significant global warming, but if there is it is not being significantly caused by human activities.

                And nuclear fission is obviously the best way of generating massive amounts of power cheaply and safely - if politicians would remove their heads from their colons and cut all the wholly unnecessary panic spending.

      • Why not just tax the rich a lot more? Corporations more?

        Because the corporations (owned by the rich) own Congress, both parties, and pretty much everyone in Washington.

        The US government works for the corporations. One of its main tasks is to minimise the amount of tax they pay.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by XXongo ( 3986865 )

      Simplify the tax code...flat tax, whatever. But start phasing out all the wacko deductions...even the ones I like.
      ...Is there anyone of any political stripe that objects to these...

      Yes, the rich people who got the deductions inserted in the first place.

  • That's a lot of money for a USB stick full of javascript with some ADA thrown in.

    Does anyone have a link to a schematic or block diagram of the overall jet that might explain what the hell all that software does and where it runs? This article has me curious now.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tailhook ( 98486 )

      might explain what the hell all that software does

      F-35s have $500,000 virtual reality helmets. There is stuff on an F-35 that you'll be lucky to experience before you're dead.

    • ADA = America Dental Association

      Ada = The programming language named after Ada Lovelace

      The F35 is programmed in C and C++, not Ada, and certainly not ADA.

  • We need a Truman-style purge of the MIC. (Score:3)

    by Eunomion ( 8640039 ) on Monday September 11, 2023 @06:42PM (#63840546)
    It is so epically corrupt and technologically incestuous, there is practically no chance that a war against a "near-peer" would go in our favor. Half the shit we bought in this century would just fall apart on contact with actual danger. And rather than trying to make it up for it, the contractors responsible would just salivate and make even more extravagant demands to fix the disaster they caused.
    • Which near peer enemy we may fight a war against do you think has a better-run military-industrial complex? :)

      • I don't know about a near peer, but in Vietnam a while ago, a bunch of little guys in black pyjamas, armed with second rate cast-off Russian and Chinese weapons, managed to give the US all it wanted and then some.

        • Actually, they knew they couldn't realistically win that war before they even started it. The amount of troops and money needed to actually win the war was so untenable that it would have caused a political crisis in the US that made the actual anti-war protests look like a tea party! So they decided to cause trouble because they chose to partner with Russia (after we snubbed and humiliated Ho Chi Man) because that was a no no in our books. The hubris on display during that whole war was remarkable. We

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jeremyp ( 130771 )

          The US failure in Vietnam wasn't a military failure. The weapons systems worked fine for the most part. What happened was a failure of political will.

          If the North Vietnamese had made an unprovoked attack on (say) a US naval base, before the US got involved, such that the entire US populace was behind the war effort, the USA would have rolled over North Vietnam with relative ease.

          • I'm not so sure about that. As has been demonstrated repeatedly elsewhere, creative use of simple technology can wreak havoc with sophisticated weapons. Remember when the Serbs figured out US targeting systems had difficulty discriminating between SAM radar and unshielded microwave ovens?

    • Re:We need a Truman-style purge of the MIC. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Monday September 11, 2023 @07:10PM (#63840596)

      there is practically no chance that a war against a "near-peer" would go in our favor.

      Haven't been paying attention to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, have you? Between Javelins, Stingers, HIMARS, M777 artillery, counter-battery radar, to name just a few, they've been wiping Russian equipment off the map. And that's just the American side. Throw in what the Europeans have developed such as the British Storm Shadow and the joint venture NLAW, and it's been no contest in head-to-head situations.

      The only reason Ukraine hasn't been doing better is because they can't get the equipment they need fast enough and in enough quantities. Zelensky is right when he said they wanted to go on the offensive in the Spring but couldn't because they lacked sufficient equipment. Had Ukraine been given what they needed, in an amount closer to what they needed, they would be through the Russian lines and at, or nearly at, the Crimean border. He and his staff either learned or did speed reading on Russian military tactics and knew they needed speed to overcome quantity. Since they don't have the necessary amounts they need they have to rely on quality and as we've seen, that quality outstrips what was the second largest army in the world.

      If Ukraine can inflict this much devastation while having to learn on the fly, imagine how fast things would be over if the U.S. had gone up against the Russians using all the resources at its disposal. The Black Sea fleet wouldn't have existed past the first day.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Hard to argue the point on the Black Sea Fleet but that isn't where the war will be won or lost. Unless one side loses political will, which doesn't currently seem likely, it will be won or lost with the logistics supplying the boots on the ground.

          No Black Sea Fleet = way less bombing (missiles, drones) over Kyiv, Odessa, Danube ports, airfields, Western parts of Ukraine in general, so more resources available for them to counter boots on the ground in the East.

          If the Russian Army had a land border with CONUS and tried it here, do you think we'd do appreciably better than Ukraine on the ground? Against an adversary willing to treat its own men as disposable? I'm not sure we would.

          With the long range weapons the US is withholding so far, much less Russian troops and ammunition would reach the battle lines. In a ground conflict, US would use long range weapons right away. The same about planes, Ukraine is still waiting for F16. They are also waiting for Abrams tanks and

        • the war has exposed a pretty nasty fact about western defense production.

          You are absolutely right, but I think the lesson is slightly different from what you are saying. I think the real lesson is: fancy, high-tech weapons are slow and expensive to produce. Western Europe plus the US are exhausting their stocks of weapons in a small conflict against an out-of-date, technologically backward Russian military.

          "Quantity has a quality all its own"

          The West seems to have forgotten this aphorism, but it is very true. The Russians are buying cheap Iranian drones by the hundreds, wh

          • I haven't heard anything about Russia building new tanks that fast. I did hear they were digging into their own mothballs..... as far as western equipment goes, I think the concern is balancing supply with maintaining our own readiness.

          • The US government, and the Republicans in particular, need to realize that the free market isn't the answer to everything. Emergency preparedness requires reserve capacity sitting idle. That's an anathema to the free market. And the Ukraine war has shown us that we need a mix of low-quantity high-tech weapons that can out-fight your enemy and high-quantity low-tech weapons that can be quickly and cheaply manufactured to out-last your enemy. And no free market solution is going to get us there. Now, I'm

      • None of those wonder-weapons you mention have had any impact against Russia at all, otherwise Ukraine wouldn't be constantly begging for ever more and different wonder-weapons.

        • They aren't magic and they aren't unlimited. Ukraine is conserving them. Possibly too much. But, they've had too little combined arms training and no air power to speak of, and yet they keep inching forward.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by quonset ( 4839537 )

          None of those wonder-weapons you mention have had any impact against Russia at all

          Really? Is that why Russia never made it to Kyiv in 3 days? You think those javelins and NLAWs were sent just for show? Those two weapons alone brought Russian columns to a halt because of their devastating capabilities.

          Stingers and the Polish variant have prevented Russian air superiority for a year and a half. You don't think they have an effect [youtube.com]?

          Right now, as Ukraine moves toward Tokmak, a recurring complaint from interc

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by eth1 ( 94901 )

        The problem is that NATO has entrenched their manufacturing and industry to fight a war according to their doctrine, which is heavy on high-tech air support, and not so much on conventional artillery. Ukraine, even with the small amounts of western equipment they have, has the capability to fire over 350,000 155mm shells per month. The US currently has the capacity to produce a measly 15k/mo, and all of the EU can only do something like 50-75k/mo, IIRC. We just can't keep up with that rate of expenditure. I

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • We're talking about China, not Russia. And they would make up for structural deficiencies by throwing people at the problem. We wouldn't.

        They were hard to deal with in the Korean War when their armament consisted of Soviet castoffs and their leadership was practically nonexistent. The near-peer modern version of China can only be managed when we're on our game. This bullshit where we spend a major fraction of our entire economy on paper weapons while the ground truth is a bunch of barely-functioning

        • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

          by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday September 11, 2023 @08:33PM (#63840702)
          Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • Also as a percentage of GDP the US is still spending "only" 3.3% which is not too out of whack with other nations and actually less than Russa (4.1%)

            But as you mentioned, with the American economy as it is that 3.3% is nearly $1T versus Russia at around $85B

            Not that money wins wars and America does overspend quite sloppily at times but what no other country has that the US military does is a global coordinated logistical machine capable of putting material nearly anywhere in the world in short order. Hell

          • Another thing to consider is that they're building a lot of new stuff from scratch, while we're still carrying both the technological, industrial, and managerial baggage of Cold War contractors who are able to insist that Washington fund weapons based on the ancient junk in their warehouses.

            We have glorified Maginot Lines in the air and sea, managed by stuffed-shirt generals promoted to that position because of their politically desirable mediocrity in low-intensity conflicts.
            • Comment removed based on user account deletion
              • What you don't seem to understand is that Congress does the bidding of the contractors, and the military does the bidding of Congress. A Senator doesn't know a tank from a Toyota, and cares even less than that. In the arrangement of our "system," if you can even call it that, legislative constituents are the major businesses in their states, not the voters of those states. The voters, and especially the ones who are soldiers, count for practically nothing.

                If the choice is between giving Lockheed Marti
                • Comment removed based on user account deletion
                  • There's not a single major weapons platform under procurement by the US military that is even adequate. When huge new contracts are signed, the default assumption is now that the result will be non-functional and the involved services will have to fall back on much older, much less capable equipment than even what the new thing was supposed to replace.

                    LCS are effectively non-functional. Zumwalt destroyers, too expensive and temperamental to do anything they were designed for. F-35 and F-22 were delibe

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bert64 ( 520050 )

      The potential adversaries also have their own share of corruption and incompetence, as russia are demonstrating every day.

      • We overestimated current Russian capability. But even in light of that, our estimates of China's capabilities continue to increase. I see no evidence of systemic reevaluation of how we do things in response: Just throwing more money down the same pits, into the pockets of the same 3 to 5 contractors who have repeatedly failed to deliver.

        And here's the kicker: They all know how incapable they've made the system, so it may not even come down to failure in battle. Our "leaders" might simply surrender beh

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by RobinH ( 124750 )
      The US only has two "pacing threats": Russia and China. Both are drastically behind the US in conventional arms. As an example, let's compare 5th generation fighters: the US has built 195 F-22 raptors and 965 F-35 lightning IIs. Russia is reported to have between 4 and 15 operational SU-57's (of perhaps 75 constructed), and China has about 210 J-20's. Let's look at aircraft-carriers: the US has 11 with plans to expand that to 14 by 2030. China has 2 and Russia has 1. And it's not like the US just thre

  • Accountability? From a military contractor? I'll believe it when they prove the money being withheld isn't quietly paid in full, with interest and "forgive me" gifts, a little down the road.

  • Perfectly normal process (Score:3)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Monday September 11, 2023 @08:22PM (#63840686)

    There's nothing wrong with that: that's a normal acceptance process. As long as whatever needs accepting isn't accepted, payments to the supplier are withheld.

    When I worked as a quality engineer, I would travel to our suppliers and perform acceptance tests on batches of products they made for us, and I remember they sweated waiting for me to sign the acceptance test report or grant a waiver in case of deviation, because if I didn't, some of them literally couldn't pay wages the next month. And quite a few times, when the acceptance tests would span several days, the supplier's CEO invited me to suspiciously expensive restaurants in the hope that it would help me sign on the right line.

  • I mean, whoever heard of a software project running late?

  • "Lightning" (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Tuesday September 12, 2023 @12:19AM (#63840962) Homepage

    Switzerland has, unfortunately, decided to order F-35s. We just recently were notified that the F-35 cannot fly within 40km of a thunderstorm, because it cannot survive a lightning strike. Which, for those who may not know, is a pretty basic requirement even for commercial aircraft.

    Sounds like they need to withhold a lot more than $800 million...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Saffaya ( 702234 )

      "We just recently were notified that the F-35 cannot fly within 40km of a thunderstorm"

      Then the order for F-35 is clearly a sabotage of Switzerland air defense force.
      I mean, this has been known for like, 10 years already?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jeremyp ( 130771 )

        There has been a fix in the pipeline for a while and it was supposed to have been implemented by now, but the restriction hasn't been lifted yet. Maybe the Swiss were told "we'll have fixed it by the time you take delivery" and now they are being told "it's not fixed yet".

    • The Swiss can recoup their costs by selling lightning-making equipment to NATO enemies. Just call it an "outdoor entertainment venue strobe light" for plausible deniability.

      Co's knew to sell Turing-complete calculators of the late 1960's as "advanced calculators" instead of "computers" because there were many export restrictions on computers. The inspectors probably didn't know the difference, as long as it looked like a calculator.

  • Wait, so the MIC actually managed to download more RAM onto the F35???

  • Hey where can I get a software upgrade that will increase my laptop's processing power 37 times and memory 20 times over current capabilities"?

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