Multipurpose Is Mostly A Bad Idea

The DefenseOne website carries an article predicting the next generation of fighter aircraft will not be shared among the three services which fly them. Thus, it will not follow in the footsteps of the F-35 program whose A, B, and C variants are designed for the Air Force, Marines, and Navy respectively. I write to say I’m not surprised.

When the F-35 was conceived in the 1990s, it was thought that three variants for Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force might share about 70 percent of their parts, saving money. Almost 30 years later, the jets are only about 20 percent the same.

In other words, the compromises are still there causing trouble and the supposed savings basically are not. No service got exactly what they wanted or, more to the point, needed.

The F-35 program has been fraught with difficulties, and isn’t completely solid at this writing. That is the problem with systems which are ‘cleverly’ designed to do several things. Inevitably, they do none of them as well as a purpose-built device designed to do one thing and do it well.

This is a lesson the DrsC have learned the hard way ... twice. The first was a mini motor home, a so-called Class C that we bought over 40 years ago. It had a sofa that folded out into a bed and became our dining nook with the deployment of a fold-up table. The sofa was okay, the dining somewhat iffy, and the bed was pretty bad, but we used it.

It also had a fold-up toilet in a room that was also a shower. The toilet was a joke, totally unsuited for ‘solids’ and semi-okay for urine. The shower worked okay if you remembered to take the toilet paper out before showering.

You’d think we would have learned our lesson but a couple of decades later we bought a Shopsmith, another “does everything” device loaded with compromises. It was supposed to function as a table saw, a lathe, a drill press, and a disk sander, and with attachments which we bought as a bandsaw and a joiner-planer.

Well, too good to be true describes our experience. It was a semi-okay table saw, a not good lathe, an okay disk sander, and I don’t think we ever tried the drill press. The bandsaw kind of worked on relatively thin stock and the joiner-planer wasn’t much either. We’d have been far better equipped if we’d bought a good table saw, and perhaps a bandsaw, which is about what we needed. We recently gave the Shopsmith away.

The moral of the story is this: something designed for one specific task will almost always do it better than something designed to do many different tasks. The Navy has different fighter needs than the Air Force and the Marines do mostly close ground support missions. Each need aircraft designed for their set of tasks.