Oh ALIS, don't keep us waiting: F-35 jet's software 'delayed' Key software for the troubled F-35 fighter jet has been repeatedly delayed, causing problems for the British armed forces as they wait for Americans to iron out the bugs. The F-35’s Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) is the heart of the support offering bundled with the F-35 by its manufacturer, Lockheed Martin. …
Germany did not, strangely enough, really fully go to a war economy until fairly late in the game,
The German mentality at the beginning of the war did create a lot of problems. They tied fighter production to the number of pilots that could be trained. Thus, no spares. When the air war moved to Europe and Germany, this hurt them badly as they could recover pilots but had no planes for them to use.
"Musta sucked big time gang-rushing Tigers, using flammable petrol/gasoline-burning M4s mounting short 75s..."
The Germans called the Sherman the Tommy Cooker, and the British crews of the sherman called it the Ronson, an advert for a popular lighter which was advertised with the catchphrase "lights first time, every time". Rushing a Tiger was only really a problem if you were American though as a British troop of 4 shermans had a Sherman Firefly attached, armed with a 17 pound gun that could punch holes through the front of a King Tiger at a mile. US forces were offered the Firefly and turned it down since such a heavy gun was "not invented here" and also "unnecessary". Oops.
re. the tank production figures. Germany did not, strangely enough, really fully go to a war economy until fairly late in the game, 43?
Germany really had no reason to go all out until around 1943. Look at it from their point of view. They had beaten and conquered everybody other than Britain by 1941, and by the start of 1942 were they were sitting outside Moscow stopped as much by the weather as by the Russians. By modern Russian figures up to 40% of the tanks facing the Germans at Moscow were British, supplied via the artic convoys. The Germans are choking off those convoys with surface ships and the Luftwaffe.
If your in charge of Germany, are you panicking about your tank production at this point? That Russia is outproducing America(!) in tanks despite the loss of large areas of industry that you've captured doesn't become obvious midway through the year, at which point you simply place bigger orders for your own tanks. That there is need for desperate and drastic measures doesn't become obvious until later on.
Ok. Problem admitted, let's ramp up production. You've also got a problem mein Furher. Britain is hellbent on blockading you and is merrily sinking your freighters from Norway and Sweeden left right and centre. Russia was supplying a lot of your iron that was getting through to you, but you've now attacked them and they are using that Iron to build tanks with and aren't interested in selling it to you. The British are also putting massive diplomatic pressure on overland sources of supply to Nazi Germany such as Turkey with dire threats about "AFTER THE WAR!". Where does the additional material come from?
Add to this the bombing offenses steaily bombing infrastructure flat into 1943 and the position becomes hopeless. Oh yes, and your critically low on fuel as the best sources are in the Middle East, and Britain is has more troops facing Rommel than it has in the UK and appears quite determined to keep Rommel away from the oil. Italy is complaining that they haven't even got enough fuel for their Battleships to go and sink the convoys carrying fuel from Egypt past their coast. The Luftwaffe are complaining that they are running out of fuel for their fighters, and the 25% of your petrol stocks are being generated by turning coal into fuel by the Fischer–Tropsch process.
When the American's add an extra 50% (by bomb weight dropped) to the RAF's efforts to systematically bomb german oil flat then the result is dire. Luftwaffe Field Marshal Erhard Milch, referring to the consequences of the Oil Campaign, claimed that "The British left us with deep and bleeding wounds, but the Americans stabbed us in the heart." and Albert Speer, writing in his memoir, said that "It meant the end of German armaments production."
So the war could have been shortened by dropping battalions of management consultants and marketing executives to persuade the Germans to take a customer focussed agile manufacturing process - where the military changes their mind all the time and the kit is delivered late, obsolete and in much smaller numbers?
So the war could have been shortened by dropping battalions of management consultants and marketing executives to persuade the Germans to take a customer focussed agile manufacturing process - where the military changes their mind all the time and the kit is delivered late, obsolete and in much smaller numbers?
Not, it was over very much earlier.
Check out this infographic
So the war could have been shortened by dropping battalions of management consultants and marketing executives to persuade the Germans to take a customer focussed agile manufacturing process - where the military changes their mind all the time and the kit is delivered late, obsolete and in much smaller numbers?
The war was shortened this way. Both the Panther and Tiger arrived about two years too late to swing the war, were hopelessly and chronically unreliable (very important when your retreating constantly as breaking down means you lose the tank) and delivered in relatively tiny numbers compared to somewhat crap tanks the allies fielded which had the virtues of being cheap, reliable and capable of being delivered in truly immense numbers.
Another point which I suspect is relevant - the Tiger was comparatively ponderous, and by the last years was effectively a semi-mobile pillbox that most effectively lurked in defensive ambush mode. Whereas, the Allied tanks were used in advancing armies and were more optimised for mobility.
Buggy software means plugging in and syncing [...] sometimes takes so long that impatient crews disconnect them halfway through the process. This results in [...] having to reset the affected laptops.
Who the heck designed a system that can't cope with connection loss? These things aren't going to be working in an idealised lab, but out in the field where things break.
My understanding of things military indicates that the solution to these connection issues is to design a very expensive proprietary plug to address the issue.
Maybe a special USB connection with a screw in security latch that takes techs a minute to screw in/unscrew and thus avoid premature disconnection?
How many millions you say? I'll sell them to you for the low low price of US$500k a plane to cover the specialised nature of the design and manufacturing process...
Who the heck designed a system that can't cope with connection loss? These things aren't going to be working in an idealised lab, but out in the field where things break.
I think the pervasiveness of this kind of sophomoric crap in commercial (and also open-source systems cough) now has progressed to the point where it is acceptable to see it in high-reliability systems.
(The whole RPC paradigm is basically a testament to connection optimism in the service of self-serving convenience)
ALIS sounds like a good idea in principle, but if there's one thing that I've learned from my (far too) many years in the software development business, it's this: don't be clever - cleverness always gets you into trouble one way or another.
With ALIS it's not as though it's solving a problem that needs to be solved. Every air force in the world has a way of managing logistics which works well enough for them to operate. Is something as clever as ALIS really needed? Maybe, but probably not...and there has to be a point where it's starting to look like such a nightmare that it ought to be canned in favour of a simpler, less techy approach
One of the good bits about ALIS is
"This, warned the director, would result in key functionality being released as updates to v3.0 instead of being baked into the “final” software package deployed to F-35 customers – including the UK."
I can just see an RAF pilot on the start of an attack, everything freezes but suddenly a window opens on the HUD, "Continue flying in a straight line.
Installing Update 4 of 7"
SIRIUS CYBERNETICS CORPORATION PRODUCTS
It is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all
In other words - and this is the rock solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation's Galaxy-wide success is founded - their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws.
SHARE AND ENJOY
The company motto of the hugely successful Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Complaints division, which now covers the major land masses of three medium sized planets and is the only part of the Corporation to have shown a consistent profit in recent years.
The motto stands - or rather stood - in three mile high illuminated letters near the Complaints Department spaceport on Eadrax. Unfortunately its weight was such that shortly after it was erected, the ground beneath the letters caved in and they dropped for nearly half their length through the offices of many talented young complaints executives - now deceased.
The protruding upper halves of the letters now appear, in the local language, to read "Go stick your head in a pig", and are no longer illuminated, except at times of special celebration.
http://www.sput.nl/~rob/sirius.html nicked from the late Douglas Adams.
Back in the day a UK company called Husky computers used to make rugged laptops. One of the more novel accessories they provided was a 19pin plug to connect to the Rapier SAM for on board checkout (AFAIK Rapier was the only design win for the Ferranti designed F100 bipolar microprocessor)
Never saw any stories about connection failure.
Do you get the feeling the LM design, coding and test process is FUBAR?
In BG the Cylons disabled all modern battle ships by injecting a virus. Only the old decomissioned ships, and a few that were out of contactable range (remembering liberally here), avoided paralysis.
Now, if the laptop needs to communicate to a central, and then be hooked up to the aircraft..
I'm sure there is a lesson here somewhere..
Non-fictional examples would include Israel's mucking about with Iran's centrifuges.
Someone in procurement needs to be shown the door and their gold-plated final salary pension frozen until they retire.
However, I'd suggest that the minister who took the advice from whatever military team will escape completely unscathed, along with the posh lads who went on all the 'paid jolleys' to Lockheed Martin, but I stand to be corrected.
The F111 started out as a do-all, for everyone fighter/strike. It was even supposed to be on carriers*. In finale, you can see that it got kinda semi-deployed, but quickly ended up in specialized roles and in limited numbers and other planes ended up doing its jobs.
That this plane was a dud was mostly in my memory and wikipedia entries on military gear mostly tend to be sanitized as regards to failures. Then I went and found this little opinion piece that just screamed "F35".
http://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.ca/2010/11/weekend-wings-37-f-111-aardvark-part-1.html
Basically, he posits that the project's main point of failure was that it pursued too many technological breakthroughs on the F111's development.
"""
Five new technologies caused the greatest difficulties. They were:
Variable geometry wings incorporating high lift devices;
Turbofan powerplants and associated systems and structures;
The need for new metal alloys;
A sophisticated, automated navigation and weapons delivery system; and
A novel crew escape system.
"""
Remind you of anything? New helmet, new engine setup for multiple configuration, jack of all trades, a weird new approach to monolithic logistics software...
At least the F35 ground crews have it easy. F111 fuel tanks had to be crawled into to clean them from the inside, breathing vapors all the while. Many of the mechanics have consequently been extremely sick.
* No Marines STOL version sought, a regrettable oversight.
that so many El Reg readers were WW II buffs....
thanks @JLV, @Mark 85, @Peter2
As to the concept of having everything centralized? Yea... Brilliantly Stupid... (BS)
The danger of security being an add on, rather then designed in from the start... is that the security can be bypassed.....
The danger is that we have all the brilliant people wanting to work for the "G" company... Not General Dynamics... but Google... so GD gets the people that couldn't get a job elsewhere... or... worse, if they get a smart dedicated guy, he is crushed by the bureaucratic incompetence that passes for infrastructure in GD.
Another issue, is that fresh kids these days are taught using frameworks and other high level concepts... and just miss the details of what is really going on... or... in the case of real life... what FAILS to work reliably.... and ... we have a cascading set of failures....
The good news is when they move to the new version of Windows X (Sorry Windows 10), there shall be no more blue screens... Rumor has it that a bonus depended on the number of blue screens in win X.... so now they are ..... GREEN...... and... BLUE SCREENS are now GONE!
Let me go sailing while the world falls apart..... :(
So (I am making the generous assumption that the didn't just try connecting the same one several times and found that worked eventually) the specialised laptops essential for support don't have a standard hardware/software build?
Or is the software so crap that once the standard build has connected to one aircraft and been used successfully then it is borked for some/all future use unless rebuilt?
I have the (possibly unworthy) suspicion that there may be several (many?) variants of the airframe interface and several (many?) builds of the laptop interface which could lead to interesting times.
Whatever, for those wondering what idiot could design a system which was broken by an unplanned disconnect I would respectfully point to the humble external drive.
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