I feel uneasy about the govt taking the "move fast and break things" approach.
The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
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Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#12Embarrassing regurgitation of propaganda. This is basically the military DOGE. Are these systems dysfunctional in some ways, could well-intended sweeping reforms improve them? Sure, maybe, I don't know much about it. Is that what's happening here? No, this a way to get the existing functions out from under the oversight and constraints of acquisition laws to reduce friction for corruption and war profiteering. If you…
It's also allowing for "good enough" solutions to enter the field of battle.
Which is fucking frightening. We don't want "good enough", we want weapons that are fully capable and best-in-class. After all, that's why the Department's budget is nearly a trillion dollars a year. We aren't paying for good enough, we're paying for the best of the best of the best.
We should first solve for why we've allowed massive scope creep in the development of our flagship fighters, and why that scope creep has come at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars to our nation. Yet we can't ask why the likes of Boeing or Lockheed Martin are allowed to function as entities that need to please Wall Street and lobbyists instead of scaring the living shit out of anyone who wishes to do us harm via pure technological prowess. We've allowed the management class to take over our defense manufacturing at great cost to our country.
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#13Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#14Based on this article alone, I can believe this is a good thing. The US military suffers incredibly from its monopsony position and without a doubt will get a heavy wakeup call (read: dead young people) next time it has to fight a real war. In addition the army should be the most accountable and results oriented branch of government, since it’s the only one that’s actively oppositional. If we can’t fix procurement there then what hope do we have for the rest of government?
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#15More weapons more quickly. This is what I want. I'm sure they will be used for good. /s I'm sure there are good reasons for this, and the approach doesn't seem totally unreasonable, to be fair. I'm just personally woefully unequipped to understand how to deploy weapons humanely and morally, and naively think less weapons is better. Thankfully there are adults in the room making these decisions for me...
>deploy weapons humanely and morally
A bit of an oxymoron there wouldn't you say?
>naively think less weapons is better
This I agree with. We should really only have a few dozen nuclear weapons, and nothing more. The whole point is to have a clear line of "DO NOT FUCKING CROSS AT ALL", and that's it. You cross us? We nuke you. We don't bother you, you don't bother us unless you want to face nuclear annihilation. Seems to work for North Korea.
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#16Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#17[flagged]
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#18A big assumption with this change is that the "Modular Open Systems Approach" (MOSA) [0] [1] will be adequate for integrating new systems developed and acquired under this "fast track". MOSA appears to be about 6 years old as a mandate [2] and is something that big contractors - SAIC, BAI, Palantir [3] - talk about. But, 6 years seems brand new in this sector. I'd be curious to see if LLM's have leverage for MOSA software system integrations.
[0] https://breakingdefense.com/tag/modular-open-systems-archite...
[1] https://www.dsp.dla.mil/Programs/MOSA/
[2] https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/USCODE-2016-title10/USCO...
[3] https://blog.palantir.com/implementing-mosa-with-software-de...
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#19So fast forward five years and 50% of our war materials are produced in foreign countries?
I can't help but believe this is going to weaken our war footing because the dumbest people in the room are behind it. Thirsty Pete does not inspire confidence in the Department of War Thunder.
I mean on the surface it sounds good, but LEAN is why we had no PPE on hand during covid.
In order to have off the shelf supplies we are going have an active international arms market by definition. Is this what we want?
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#20Embarrassing regurgitation of propaganda. This is basically the military DOGE. Are these systems dysfunctional in some ways, could well-intended sweeping reforms improve them? Sure, maybe, I don't know much about it. Is that what's happening here? No, this a way to get the existing functions out from under the oversight and constraints of acquisition laws to reduce friction for corruption and war profiteering. If you…
Steven Blank (the author) is a respected member of the startup community and is not partisan. He's been working with the defense department for 10 years (across both administrations) to modernize the way the military buys technology.
His work to create the "hacking for defense" project to modernize things is not at all like DOGE and preceeds it by many years