How The US Military Spends $800B Per Year On War Machines | True Cost | Business Insider

In 2021, the US

military

budget surpassed the $800 billion mark - that's more than the next nine largest militaries combined - so it's no surprise that the United States, with all that money to spend, have the most expensive war

machines

on the planet, like your latest arriving aircraft carrier. At a

cost

of $13.3 billion, it has taken so long to build that five

year

s after it was commissioned, the USS Ford is still not completely ready for battle and what about the 1999 F-35 fighter program? .7 billion dollars? The US Air Force recently grounded its entire fighter fleet. for the broken ejection seats, some of the American war

machines

are currently in action in Ukraine, such as Javelin anti-tank missiles, howitzer artillery guns and drones like these, switchblades made in California, loitering munitions, the bill for the latest technology of American war could run into trillions of dollars, but take a closer look at its real

cost

.

These 40,000-pound underwater bombs are just another test before the U.S. Navy's largest and most expensive aircraft carrier is declared combat-ready. The USS Gerald R Ford is the first of a new class of aircraft carriers with more firepower and a smaller crew, the previous class entering service in 1975. The Ford was designed to save billions over a service life of 50

year

s, but the Ford cost twice as much as the last aircraft carrier built and has been plagued by unexpected costs and delays just by unclogging the toilets. It cost four hundred thousand dollars to climb aboard the USS Ford to find out why America's most advanced aircraft carrier still can't deploy nearly two decades after plans to build it began.

These sailors are moving Ordnance to a new type of weapons elevator that allows them to do what would be impossible on any other aircraft carrier, we are avoiding the mess deck area, we are completely independent, you wouldn't even see us move an ordinance during the day, so it's safer, more survivable and we can store more on board. it is the only way to move munitions from deep within the Ford to rearm aircraft on its flight deck. Less advanced carriers move weapons in a more dangerous manner through hangars to the flight deck. There are 11 elevators on board and the last one will only be certified in December. 2021.

Advanced weapons elevators are just one example of nearly two dozen important new technologies that make the USS Ford groundbreaking and a great floating experiment. Tal Manville is a retired Navy captain who served as the first project manager on this new class of aircraft. carrier the ship was supposed to begin construction in o4 they moved it o5 they made an adjustment They delayed it for the second time they delayed it for the third time removing that the ship just because of those delays went from 6.4 billion dollars to 10 billion dollars the Ford It is the first of four new aircraft carriers that are already in different stages of design and construction.

Navy plans to replace entire supercarrier fleet with Ford. US law requires its Navy to operate 11 aircraft carriers at all times, but with all the delays, the US is down to 10. The reason we have 11 is due to the fact that the US Navy The US is a sort of two-ocean Navy, so to speak, of the 22 aircraft carriers in the world, half are American, while China, Italy and the United Kingdom have only two of this class of aircraft carriers. If we build 10, 11 or 12 we could easily make it to the 22nd century, more than 5,000 shipbuilders worked approximately 49 million hours to build the Ford, that's seven times the hours recorded to build the Empire State Building, said Admiral Mike Gilday, chief of naval operations.

It was a mistake to introduce more than one or two technologies into any complex platform at a time. Admiral Gilday is right. What you want to do is just use one or two new technologies on a new ship and this is why ships are the only weapon that the prototype of the first of the class goes to war with on the ship was christened in 2013. The Navy accepted delivery of the ship in 2017 without everything working as a way to stay within that year's budget requirements, four years later and the Navy was still conducting final testing before Ford's first full deployment .

Go see. Pilots can take off and land, but kinks are still being worked out before it's ready to go to war. It's pretty clear that you know how to put so many new technologies into one. The ship was a mistake from a program management perspective because it caused the program to be delayed. Delays, testing, and fixes are so costly that each new piece of technology goes over budget. Two of the technologies that distinguish the fort from any other carrier are the aircraft takeoff and landing systems, some of them are very large, you know, they are not incremental changes, but I would say revolutionary changes in terms of the aircraft launch system Electromagnetic, other carriers use steam-powered catapults to propel their planes off the deck, but Ford uses Electromagnetic Linear Induction Motors similar to a high-speed Maglev train or a roller coaster.

The research and design of the electromagnetic aircraft launch system alone cost more than $1 billion. Installing it on the USS Ford cost more than twice what the steam catapult system was supposed to cost. She had thousands. For moving parts, there are less than a hundred moving parts in an electromagnetic catapult, so it was a big improvement. Fewer moving parts mean fewer sailors to operate and maintain the smaller crew, and the new technologies were projected to save four billion dollars over their 50 years of operation. Compared to the previous class of aircraft carriers, the new system places less stress on the aircraft, so they last longer and more types of aircraft can use it, including those still in design.

Landing and takeoff are also easier for pilots, since a computer does the work. the pilot hands control over to the computer, it automatically pilots the plane to the deck of the aircraft carrier and then when it hits that advanced arresting mechanism, it smoothly brings it to a stop, so it's a dramatically different experience for the pilot, it's much safer and It's also going to make the plane last longer overseas Ford's computer systems allow lighter and heavier planes to take off and land something that limited older carriers Ford's combination of new technologies means a more variety wide range of aircraft can land on it is more fluid Investments for aircraft that is our goal here on board for the future of naval aviation flying drones and the F-35.

Oddly enough, the new launch system can't handle the newer fighter jet, so Ford will need an upgrade to handle Ford's next F-35 stealth fighter. A world-class aircraft carrier is being built at the shipyard, but is already being modified for the F-35 at an additional cost of $315 million. Many of Ford's delays can be traced back to politics. Five American presidents over two decades had a hand in the planning and construction. From Ford, the Department of Defense made the aircraft carrier program much more expensive than necessary and that can be taken to the bank so far, the actual cost of building this warhorse is $13.3 billion, a a figure that has increased almost every year since then.

Construction began Even the most basic functions on board can be tremendously expensive The ship has 750 bathrooms connected through vacuum pressure like the system on commercial airplanes When one toilet clogs the entire system can be affected Repair requires a flush acid that costs four hundred thousand dollars and the Navy has said it does not know how often it will need to be done. The Navy changed its shipbuilding programs when the Ford problems arose. Began designing and testing ground takeoff systems in 2011, while the Ford was under construction, advanced weapons elevators are now also being tested prior to installation;

However, that program will only benefit the next Ford-class aircraft carrier built as a deterrent. The Ford's

true

value is likely to be in the wars it helps prevent rather than the ones it fights, yes. The US

military

expects to spend $1.7 trillion on this revolutionary stealth fighter aircraft, the F-35 Lightning II. In 2022 it will be 16 years since the first flight of this controversial aircraft, but high costs could sink the plan to build almost 2,000 more F-35s that it still has. some problems need to be resolved and, fundamentally, the cost of operating the aircraft and flying it today is too high.

Every hour the F-35 is in the air costs about thirty-five thousand dollars compared to about $22,000 for an older F-16. So are the plane's advancements worth it? We went to Hill Air Force Base in Utah to find out how this aircraft ended up being the largest weapons program in American history. This is the ghost of Captain Spencer Whitey's callsign, he flies one of the 78 F-35s. Parked here, the F-35 overall is just a tipping point between stealth and fusion, and the entire suite's sensors alone make it much easier to fly this aircraft tactically than any other aircraft.

There are nearly 500 F-35s in service in the US military and in recent years the F-35 has carried out airstrikes against Isis in Iraq and Syria. Probably the best compliment you can pay this plane is that if I wanted to go to war, this is the plane I want. In many ways, the plane is a success. You know the F-35 has often had a kind of bad reputation in the media. There was bad press from the beginning, but even in 2021 criticism followed the revelation that operating this fleet of aircraft could cost taxpayers $1.7 trillion, which is equivalent to the entire amount of student debt in the United States. .

Just buying the planes costs $400 billion, but what are called maintenance costs really add up, including developing test flights and maintaining the nearly 2,500-strong U.S. fleet. F-35 over a 66-year life cycle ending in 2070. Lockheed Martin sent Insider a statement saying there is clearly work to be done to reduce maintenance costs and we are working tirelessly with our customers to achieve this. label we have to see how it was born in 2001, the Department of Defense awarded Lockheed Martin the contract to design and build a new generation of fighter jets, but part of the problem was the same thing that made it look cool in the first place: It was supposed to The F-35 would meet the needs of the Navy and Air Force Marines all in one, so the military had to build three different models, the F-35a B and C.

They are very close cousins ​​and look very similar. , but the Air Force had its own requirements, the Navy needed a tailhook, the Marine Corps variant needed the jump jet, so it was a mistake to sell the F-35 as a single aircraft, they are actually three planes in one, the Marine Corps wanted to replace the Harrier Jets. so it needed short takeoff and vertical landing capabilities for amphibious aircraft carriers, that's what became the f-35b model at a cost of $101 million per aircraft. The Navy wanted a stealth aircraft that could take off and land on super carriers to replace the FA-18. enters the $94 million f-35c model that the Air Force was seeking to replace the A-10 and F-16.

I have flown against f-16s in this plane. You can end up appearing behind them and they never knew you were on the way you were invisible you saw them from very far away they never saw you ghost fly the most conventional version of the fighter-bomber the f-35a is also the least expensive of the three at $78 million per The original plan was for all F-35s A B and C to be nearly identical, but packaging everything into a single aircraft type created all sorts of problems. The first B model was intended to float, but was significantly overweight due to all the functionality the designers packed into it.

Lockheed Martin had to redesign the F-35b and because the three aircraft were being developed together, it also resulted in a redesign of the A model and the C model. This was a major setback for the program and ended up costing the program a lot of money. It took time and a huge amount of money to redesign the Navy's Model C, which needed stronger landing gear and larger wings to be able to land on a traditional aircraft carrier. Retired Lt. Gen. Chris Bogdan took over the F-35 joint program office in 2012. The program had run under some significant cost and schedule overruns, was billions of dollars over budget, andyears late.

The original design had about 75 percent in common between the versions that were intended to reduce costs, but General Bogdan says that in the end the planes only share about a third of their design was part of the mass that Bogdan inherited because in 2006 the Department of Defense decided to go into production before tests showed acceptable performance. We were going to take all these new technologies that weren't very mature and we were going to integrate them into one big explosion. on the plane and basically expected it to work, the problem is that if any of those technologies are not mature or do not work, it will delay the entire program to October 2022.

Lockheed Martin delivered more than 550 F-35s to the US military. with Lockheed built more than 200 F-35s for other governments around the world and orders are in the works for 600 more. The F-35 is being mass produced, but the Pentagon has delayed a crucial milestone called full production that would officially mark the end of F-35 testing a decade and a half after its first flight, the F-35 still has more than 600 known problems related mainly to computer software and hardware, so maintaining an F-35 turns out to be much more expensive than anyone expected, the estimated lifetime cost for maintaining the F fleet -35 increased 15 percent between 2018 and 2021 to a total of more than $400 billion, just like you get a new iPhone every two years, we're going to get new computers. on the plane with more capability and then new sensors and improved avionics on the plane, the F-35 is a flying computer with 8 million lines of code for the plane itself and another 16 million lines of diagnostic tools that help discover At any given moment, the biggest advantage of the F-35 is the fact that it diagnoses itself correctly and, if it doesn't tell us exactly what is wrong, it gives us a general direction to take, which saves a lot of time. in the rear when it comes to maintenance, eliminates a lot of guesswork and there are benefits inside the cockpit as pilots get more information than in any other fighter aircraft, the helmet The four hundred thousand dollar custom fit model combines the display front of older aircraft with night vision, as well as a signal from infrared cameras mounted on the body of the aircraft.

My consciousness is projected onto the visor of this helmet and it is very expensive. Because it's binocular, IT is projected into both eyes, so they have to be perfectly aligned so you don't see twice. The stealthy design absorbs radar waves and hides the huge heat signature emitted by its supersonic engine. I see everything that happens out there and they don't see me because I'm stealthy, which allows me this position to just sit back and be a quarterback in a calm environment instead of the chaos you have to go through if you're in Other Jets where They see older fighters on the radar, the F-35s are hardly an issue of course, the same can't be said for cost and without better affordability the military will likely cut back on purchases from the original plan and believe it or not, The current plan is for the Air Force to purchase 1,763 f-35s as no one really believes they will be available as the military buys planes and lots.

Future production could stop at almost any time, but that most likely won't be the case. You'll get maybe 11 or 1,200, in which case you'll have to retain a legacy Force of fourth-generation Fighters that work with you and depend on you, the F-35, as well as the force that breaks down the door, so two decades into the program . With less than a third of the planned aircraft built, that $1.7 trillion figure is just an educated guess. In the Ukraine war, both sides have deployed armies of lethal drones against each other, some more sophisticated like this one, hand-adapted to lob grenades at the enemy.

In positions there is usually a human who decides where and when a drone attacks, but some are capable of operating in fully autonomous mode, meaning the drone can be programmed to make the decision between life and death on its own, but what? what happens if the technology fails and what if? falls into the wrong hands, the war we are seeing now will only accelerate this move towards lethal, autonomous weapons on the battlefield, but are we ready for Killer Robots and what would be the

true

cost of taking human hands off the fire? The trigger is known as loitering ammunition.

They can fly around waiting for a target to be identified before crashing into the ground to destroy it, so it's actually a combination of artillery and a drone that has the capabilities of both. John Aldana manages the loitering munitions program. At Aero Environment on the west coast of the US, the company has been producing missiles like this one, the Switchblade 300, and this one, the larger 600, for more than two decades. They actually fold up like this and are inside a launch tube that's a little bigger than this one. throw the razor, the wings open like this, that's why we call it razor, the propellers here because of the air will start spinning and the battery inside activates and is off, the 300 cans hang around for about 15 minutes and it is designed to eliminate small targets such as enemy soldiers and trucks, while the larger 600 can wait up to 40 minutes and attack armored vehicles.

Operators can control the switchblades from up to 40 kilometers away. You have the ability to salute so you can cancel the mission until the end go back to slacking off find another target of interest and attack a different entry target that you may not even have known about United States sent 700 of these to Ukraine in early 2022 Ukrainian forces already They have shared videos of what they claim to be knife attacks on the ground. Each 300 played switch supposedly costs around six thousand dollars and can only be used once. That's more than an off-the-shelf drone equipped to carry a grenade, but much less than the cost. of a drone like the MQ-9 Reaper, which can fly back to base once it has fired on a target, and switchblades are being designed to increasingly think for themselves.

Autonomous and semi-autonomous drones will be used to carry out these operations. types of conflicts that mean tracking and recognizing a target, even one that is moving, we will continue to invest heavily in autonomy and AI and computer vision algorithms and software that essentially make these things more and more. I don't want to call it 100 autonomous but more and more autonomous and with its own thinking, call it that Waheed nawabi always sees a human being kept in the loop when making decisions, but in his opinion, sometimes it is the human that is the problem more and more in the analysis and the load on the soldier will be taken or replaced by these algorithms that make it more reliable, more precise and safer for operators.

Human error during drone strikes has caused a large number of civilian casualties in recent years, as Kabul fell to the Taliban in 2021 in the US. The MQ-9 Reaper drone fired a missile that killed 10 civilians , including seven children. The drone team mistook an aid worker's white Toyota for that of a potential terrorist. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the United States has killed at least 300 civilians in drone and covert strikes. operations in Afghanistan between 2015 and 2020, but artificial intelligence systems designed to facilitate difficult decisions are also getting it wrong, as we will see later. Ukraine is one of the first major conflicts in which drones have played such a prominent role, but experiments with unmanned flights are underway.

Missiles began over a hundred years ago. This is the Kettering bug, an unmanned aerial torpedo designed by the US military during World War I. Their wings were designed to fall off before the bomb fell on its intended target, but it wasn't until the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan that we saw high-tech drones like the MQ-9 Reaper and even some loitering munitions that started to make a difference. on the battlefield. In 2020, the world saw the first large-scale use of drones in the Nagorno-Karabakh war between Azerbaijan. and Armenia Azerbaijan deployed Israeli-made knife-like loitering drones, but one of the things we are seeing in Ukraine is that the Drone was used quite effectively on both sides when Russia invaded Ukraine, many experts predicted an easy victory for the forces from Putin, but Russia Drones that miscalculated the level of Ukrainian resistance have given Ukrainian forces the ability to fuel cheap and persistent air power that brings quite significant threats to Russian ground forces and for a time its troops badly prepared were trapped in a 40-mile-long convoy heading north. of kyiv were easy targets for Turkish-made tb2 weapons and drones, the Ukrainian government launched an appeal to finance a drone army because the Ukrainian service has adapted all the simplest drones used for shooting into nature and equipment of civil engineers in large numbers.

Since then, social media has transformed the Drone into a symbol of the heroic Ukrainian resistance. Aerial images of attacks on Russian targets are often accompanied by rock music, the impression is of an agile David killing the Russian Goliath, but reality is more nuanced: drones and marauders. The munitions certainly helped, but Russia quickly ramped up its defenses and used its own drones. They weren't prepared for it, but now it's the Russians. I think they've really compensated and now they've built up their air defenses, shot down these TB2s and really surrendered them and almost neutralized that technology to stay one step ahead.

Big budget militaries like the US and alliances like NATO continue to innovate in the air, but also Underwater and on land, this video from 2019 shows NATO testing submersible drones and this is a swarm of drones that flies through bamboo forests in China. Several militaries around the world are already using palm-sized Hornet drones to monitor this ability to loiter over a target and gather intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance is really powerful and deploying a drone in combat is much cheaper and entails fewer risks for pilots than a manned aircraft, but there are fears that drone operators working thousands of kilometers from a potential target are too disconnected from reality.

However, studies show they can suffer from PTSD and depression just like frontline troops, but the next phase in drone warfare promises to change the rules of engagement entirely. What happens when military powers allow the drone itself to decide who? who is friend and who is foe and then pull the trigger, are we comfortable handing over life and death decisions to machines on the battlefield? That's the question, the answer is complicated, it may seem like a paradox that on the battlefield we still have rules until Now, those rules usually meant that humans made decisions to attack an identified military target, but there is no consensus between countries on what to do about it in 2020, according to a UN report.

Libyan government forces deployed a Turkish-made Cargo 2 drone against an opposition group. It can identify a target and fire autonomously, but it is unclear whether the drone itself fired the shots. The porosity of this line between fully autonomous and semi-autonomous and with life and death in the hands of AI. What happens if that same technology fails? The risk that AI allowed. Autonomous systems can target the wrong forces and cause civilian casualties or even attack enemy forces, but at the wrong time and place escalating or triggering a conflict is a serious concern that nation-states must take seriously and the ability to AI to recognize faces. and the objects are still a work in progress.

Computer algorithms can get confused due to changes in weather patterns or objects with similar shapes. This has proven to be a problem with some self-driving cars. Between July 2021 and May 22, nearly 400 car crashes in the US were attributed to partially automated driver assistance systems, some fear the same could happen to armed drones without an international consensus on how to monitor and regulate. autonomous weapons many see war with AI as inevitable. Countries are discussing these issues, but technology is certainly advancing at a faster pace. that diplomacy, either we have passed the point of no return or we are at this point where it is so important that we must be careful, especially now, to ensure that there are rules on the prohibition of autonomously attacking these Munitions, the Secretary General The UN called for a complete ban on lethal autonomous weapons, as international human rights organizations have done.

The public's fear in this area is legitimate, it is something that society should questionand asking these questions is natural, it is expected and it is not. I don't see anything wrong with that air environment. The CEO grew up in Afghanistan and knows all about Russian aggression. I also saw the war. I saw people die. He was a teenager when his family was forced to flee the Soviet invasion, so I lived and experienced exactly the same thing. kind of things Ukrainians are experiencing today the war in Ukraine continues to push the boundaries of the Rules of Engagement there appears to be little concern for civilian casualties but, worse, the cruelty of man or the fallibility of machines