F-35 with B61-12

[sferrin]

As I told you before, W-80s are in the early stages of being upgraded and extended. They are the last of the nukes to be going through this, with programs for all the other active nukes being well advanced. Yet here you are, again, repeating the "our politicians thinks this stuff will last forever OMFG they are doing nothing!" line.

Yeah, and Joe Redneck can change a tire on his '72 Pontiac, but he damn sure isn't going to be designing cars for Ferrari any time soon. But you're right there, holding Joe's beer wondering at the miracle of him changing a tire. The best part is you're too blind to see it. Ta-ta.

This is sounding a lot like your hyperventilation on the sensor fused weapon thread.

"Hyperventilation"? I guess it's true what they say, "ignorance is bliss". No? Maybe you can explain why it's costing billions to modify the B61. (And please leave "evil MIC" nuttery out of it.)

[arian]

Sooo typical of you. Make one claim, get called on your BS, then you pretend you said no such thing.

What's typical is you creating a strawman, and then proceeding to knock it down. Not only did I never say anything...at all...in relation to your response, but no one else did either.

"No one in the air force has even dreamt of this need." Sure sweetie. If you say so.

THIS need being a nuclear armed JASSM. That wasn't clearly enough spelled out?

The amusing/sad thing is you actually believe that's suppose to amount to something. Apparently, in your tiny little world, anything more than nothing at all is all that is required, and is proof positive that our industrial base is humming right along. Your problem is you don't know what you don't know but are so arrogant you can't conceive that you might be completely out to lunch.

So, absolutely no response at all in here.

Yeah, and Joe Redneck can change a tire on his '72 Pontiac, but he damn sure isn't going to be designing cars for Ferrari any time soon. But you're right there, holding Joe's beer wondering at the miracle of him changing a tire. The best part is you're too blind to see it. Ta-ta.

So, yet another non sequitor that doesn't address the point. You're again making up some strawman which you again proceed to quickly knock down.

You made up the claim that, supposedly, people in government think nukes have unlimited shelf life. Yet when confronted with the fact, on numerous times and in numerous places, that there are billions of dollars and multiple programs to extend the life of several types of nukes in service, many of these programs being essentially creating whole new delivery systems (not just the warheads themselves but most of the missile components being entirely new updated designs...you just make some non-sequitor joke and call it a day.

[arian]

The question was simple: what is this "need" for a nuclear armed JASSM? No one in the air force has even dreamt of this need. Needs aren't just made up.

https://www.armscontrol.org/ACT/2015_05 ... e-Missiles

Updated May 2015
The U.S. Air Force is planning to build about 1,000 new nuclear-capable air-launched cruise missiles (ALCMs), several sources said last month.

...

The Air Force is aiming to receive approval later this year from the Office of the Secretary of Defense to go to the next stage of the acquisition process, which includes maturing the technology, refining requirements, and finalizing cost estimates for the new missile. The first new missile is slated for completion in 2026.

The Air Force does not currently plan to develop a conventional variant of the new missile, Jeter said. “There is currently no validated requirement” for a new conventional ALCM, “nor is there funding for such a variant,” she said.

Who cares what acronym you name it.. it is still a nuclear ACLM.

LRSO is currently funded.

http://www.dtic.mil/descriptivesum/Y201 ... B_2017.pdf

I completely agree with you and I said it in my earlier response as well: W-80s are slated to be upgraded for use in the future stealthy cruise missile, which may itself be a JASSM derivative.

This is my exact quote from yesterday:

As for W-80s, they're not just sitting around. W-80s are planned to be upgraded to W-80-4, with work starting last year, and are to be deployed in the new nuclear-capable cruise missile (which may well be a JASSM-ER derivative, for all we know). But the W-80s in storage now require upgrade to be useful weapons as they are nearing the end of their lifespan.

I said exactly what you said. My point was, JASSM as it currently stands isn't envisioned nor has any need been through of, for it being nuclear armed. Nor would there be warheads available for it. That's all I said, and somehow this turned into a discussion of the usual wild hypotheticals.

[arian]

"Hyperventilation"? I guess it's true what they say, "ignorance is bliss". No? Maybe you can explain why it's costing billions to modify the B61. (And please leave "evil MIC" nuttery out of it.)

Before you start accusing others of ignorance, reflect back a little bit on this thread. First you made factually incorrect claims on China's nuclear capabilities. Proven wrong. Then you made factually incorrect claims on W-80. Proven wrong. Then you made factually incorrect claims about the extension of life and upgrading of the US nuclear arsenal. Proven wrong.

Then you come back and accuse others of ignorance.

[count_to_10]

"Hyperventilation"? I guess it's true what they say, "ignorance is bliss". No? Maybe you can explain why it's costing billions to modify the B61. (And please leave "evil MIC" nuttery out of it.)

I would like to take this moment to state that the "Military Industrial Complex" has always been a sad myth, and it's power a failed prediction.
As to the cost of anything relating to nuclear weapons, that is going to have a lot to do with the Regulatory-Litigation Complex and the Hippie-Soviet Complex.

[sferrin]

"Hyperventilation"? I guess it's true what they say, "ignorance is bliss". No? Maybe you can explain why it's costing billions to modify the B61. (And please leave "evil MIC" nuttery out of it.)

I would like to take this moment to state that the "Military Industrial Complex" has always been a sad myth, and it's power a failed prediction.
As to the cost of anything relating to nuclear weapons, that is going to have a lot to do with the Regulatory-Litigation Complex and the Hippie-Soviet Complex.

It has mainly to do with the upgrade being stretched out as long as possible to keep people working. That and the on again, off again funding doesn't help. There are real problems in the nuclear industrial base and when people like Arian continue to practically brag about their own ignorance, it's not only difficult to take them seriously, it really shows the lack of awareness the general public has with the problem. We'll be seeing similar things with the new ICBM. Having to reinvent a LOT of wheels.

[botsing]

We'll be seeing similar things with the new ICBM. Having to reinvent a LOT of wheels.

Isn't this not only about reinventing the wheel but also about taking into account new technology and new thread vectors?

[sferrin]

We'll be seeing similar things with the new ICBM. Having to reinvent a LOT of wheels.

Isn't this not only about reinventing the wheel but also about taking into account new technology and new thread vectors?

New technology, possibly, if they want to go with terminally guided RVs and/or boost gliders. They'll have to look at both if they want to remain viable against future defenses. I've not heard of either being looked at in conjunction with GBSD though. It looks like they're looking at something somewhere between Minuteman and Peacekeeper in size, with your standard RVs. I'd be shocked if they did anything other than re-use Mk21s & Mk12As though. Again, they've lost a lot of knowledge and that will be time consuming and expensive to get back. As for the booster I'll be surprised if it's even as advanced as Peacekeeper. We'll see.

[arian]

There are real problems in the nuclear industrial base and when people like Arian continue to practically brag about their own ignorance, it's not only difficult to take them seriously

Dear Sferrin, I most certainly don't expect you to take anything seriously. God knows, when your argument shifts every day from one extreme down to "there's problems and it costs a lot"...no one can take you seriously.

From "the politicians are doing nothing!" down to "but it's costing so much!".

It would be funny, if it weren't so tiresome.

Now, as to the question of why does it cost so much to upgrade several hundred nuclear bombs from one role to a completely different role, I would guess you nor I have any idea of what is involved. I would guess, it involves a lot of things they don't share with the public as well. Not that not knowing what is involved in the project will necessarily stop you from coming to conclusions that are, predictably, aimed at pointing out that everything is always going wrong.

New technology, possibly, if they want to go with terminally guided RVs and/or boost gliders. They'll have to look at both if they want to remain viable against future defenses. I've not heard of either being looked at in conjunction with GBSD though. It looks like they're looking at something somewhere between Minuteman and Peacekeeper in size, with your standard RVs. I'd be shocked if they did anything other than re-use Mk21s & Mk12As though. Again, they've lost a lot of knowledge and that will be time consuming and expensive to get back. As for the booster I'll be surprised if it's even as advanced as Peacekeeper. We'll see.

So, because you haven't heard anything, and because the US military isn't in the habit of making up BS PR propaganda as other countries are, especially about a project that is relatively far off, the default conclusion must be "everything is going wrong".

I am always amazed by the "loss of expertise" argument that you and some others use on everything from nuclear weapons down to...the smallest things like gatling guns (really?) . Somehow, despite the fact that they essentially have replaced and modernized every component on a Minuteman, or on submarine ballistic missiles, or despite the fact that there's plenty of civilian industrial activity on all sorts of related fields, despite the fact that they make highly advanced maneuverable test targets to test ABM missiles on, you somehow come to the conclusion that knowledge has been lost, because apparently all this knowledge is magic and mysticism and somehow just can't be transmitted anywhere.

HOW do you know that? I mean, HOW? Please explain. BE SPECIFIC. Take the B-61-12 as an example, and in GREAT DETAIL, explain what exactly is the wheel they have to reinvent, what knowledge have the lost, when did this happen, and HOW do you know this?

Claims like this, needs support. Lets see yours.

I would GENUINELY be interested in knowing. I have several physics and engineering PhD friends working at Los Alamos right now, and they don't seem to be suffering from any brain drain or lack of knowledge. Quite the contrary, they are there to develop entirely new systems. HOW exactly do they create entirely new technologies for testing weapons, for example, if somehow all the old curmudgeons of the field went the way of the dinosaurs 30 years ago?

If only there was a way to transmit knowledge across people and time.

[arian]

Here's another, more believable, explanation why such a program may cost a lot of money:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 204631.htm

Basically, Sandia is replacing all the electronics of the bomb. So it's in essence designing a new bomb (which it also did for all the other upgrade programs in the past and undergoing). This just one of many things they are doing, many of which we have no idea of.

All this work needs to be in-house using dedicated facilities for, mainly, this purpose. So just an example of making new chips for the warheads, Sandia has its own 400,000 sq ft facility to design and produce the needed chips for this one application. So relatively tiny volumes of production, highly specialized and specific equipment, design and need. So massive fixed costs, and small volume production.

You can't escape economies of scale, so designing and building a whole new component for such a weapon will cost many many times more than a similar system for a civilian application or even conventional munition (which is probably, or almost certainly, outsourced to civilian fabs which have immense economies of scale).

So why this one component may cost so much has nothing to do with the US government being dumb, or the people at Sandia being ignorant and having to reinvent the wheel and not knowing anything...bla bla bla.

It has to do with economies of scale and the need to keep it all in-house. But the people at Sandia aren't running around like chickens without a head trying to figure out how to re-create the wheel. They almost certainly know a lot more than the people who designed the original systems did. Not almost certainly. Absolutely certainly.

[count_to_10]

Incidentally, on the cost of new technology, one of the things that has changed is the Insensitive Munition requirements. As fuzing tech has improved, those requirements have gotten tighter, so it isn't just a matter of re-manufacturing the same thing over again, it now has to include improvements that reduce vulnerabilities.

[arian]

Incidentally, on the cost of new technology, one of the things that has changed is the Insensitive Munition requirements. As fuzing tech has improved, those requirements have gotten tighter, so it isn't just a matter of re-manufacturing the same thing over again, it now has to include improvements that reduce vulnerabilities.

It is obviously not remanufacturing the same thing again. They are replacing just about every system in these weapons with completely new designs.

There's nothing the guy who designed some vacuum tube systems (I'm exaggerating) would be able to teach people today trying to make modern chips for these systems.

The whole argument of "reinventing the wheel" assumes that somehow knowledge in organizations like this is some secret sauce magical formula which the guy who figured it out refused to share with anyone else or somehow never transmitted that info to the organization. That is precisely what doesn't happen in such organizations.

These are scientists and engineers. The WHOLE point of any activity they do is to make something reproducible. If its not reproducible, then they haven't done jack s**t.

[count_to_10]

Incidentally, on the cost of new technology, one of the things that has changed is the Insensitive Munition requirements. As fuzing tech has improved, those requirements have gotten tighter, so it isn't just a matter of re-manufacturing the same thing over again, it now has to include improvements that reduce vulnerabilities.

It is obviously not remanufacturing the same thing again. They are replacing just about every system in these weapons with completely new designs.

There's nothing the guy who designed some vacuum tube systems (I'm exaggerating) would be able to teach people today trying to make modern chips for these systems.

The whole argument of "reinventing the wheel" assumes that somehow knowledge in organizations like this is some secret sauce magical formula which the guy who figured it out refused to share with anyone else or somehow never transmitted that info to the organization. That is precisely what doesn't happen in such organizations.

These are scientists and engineers. The WHOLE point of any activity they do is to make something reproducible. If its not reproducible, then they haven't done jack s**t.

While that's largely true, experience is a real thing. There are a lot of little things that never manage to be passed from teacher to student, and while we prize reproducibility, the reality is that it often takes years of practical experience to reproduce something based on reports.

[sferrin]

While that's largely true, experience is a real thing. There are a lot of little things that never manage to be passed from teacher to student, and we prize reproducibility, the reality is that it often takes years of practical experience to reproduce something based on reports.

Not "largely". More like "ideally". Pretty easy to see who's worked in the real world and who hasn't. As you allude to, it's not some magical construct where everything is documented, everything is tied up in a bow, and people just rolling out of college can make sense of it. This is especially true when you're only planning on keeping the system in service for 5-10 years tops (like the MMIII and B-52). Take the F-22 for example. They did everything they could possibly do to preserve the know how, tooling, etc. just in case they needed to restart production. First time they need to go back to make a part they hadn't planned on, they go to container "X" where the relevant tooling is suppose to be and whoops, it's empty. I've heard many horror stories from those personally involved in keeping the Minuteman fleet from falling to pieces. Same with the B-52.

[count_to_10]

Not "largely". More like "ideally". Pretty easy to see who's worked in the real world and who hasn't. As you allude to, it's not some magical construct where everything is documented, everything is tied up in a bow, and people just rolling out of college can make sense of it. This is especially true when you're only planning on keeping the system in service for 5-10 years tops (like the MMIII and B-52). Take the F-22 for example. They did everything the could possibly do to preserve the know how, tooling, etc. just in case they needed to restart production. First time they need to go back to make a part they hadn't planned on, they go to container "X" where the relevant tooling is suppose to be and whoops, it's empty. I've heard many horror stories from those personally involved in keeping the Minuteman fleet from falling to pieces. Same with the B-52.

I recently had some rather eye opening experiences in trying to re-create work that had been done by a predecessor.
However, as I wrote above, even if you had all of those old people still around, their experience frequently wouldn't help with the new weapons, because of all the new technology that has to be worked into them.