Department of Defense... unless Congress changes the name.
Yeah… just in the use of those glorified nicknames tells me a lot about the author’s standpoints, and dictates the size of the grain of salt I take their opinions with.
The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
31–40 of 527 posts
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#32Embarrassing 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…
If the SNAP and Healthcare debate didn't convince you that they don't care about people or soldiers then perhaps this will...
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#33Embarrassing 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…
> We don't want "good enough", we want weapons that are fully capable and best-in-class.
OK...
> 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.
Because we want best-in-class, and best-in-class means "better than everything else that currently exists", and that's really hard.
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#34Embarrassing 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…
In case of a conventional land-war against either Russia or China (or both at the same time) good-enough will be best, because you'll need quantity, and you can't have quantity while also maintaining the "best-in-class" attribute. I think this war in Ukraine has been a great wake-up call for the Western military establishment, one which had become way too enamoured with the tech-side of things.
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#35Embarrassing 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 https://www.h4d.us/
Steve is great, but everyone is partisan.
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#36So 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 ar…
from the reading I have done, something along the lines of 'bump up 155mm production' is more what is needed
not as sexy as drones, but ask the ukranians if they'd rather have drones or artillery
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#37More 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. Seem…
> 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.
I think this is interesting on a few levels.
One issue with North Korea is that they have an enormous number of uneducated, malnourished citizens that no country can reasonably absorb. I feel that the potential chaos from the fall of NK was part of the brinkmanship that led to them getting nuclear capabilities.
Second, if you only have nuclear weapons then you lose a lot of tactical possibilities (bunker busting bombs for example) and you lose the ability to dial up/down aggression as we've seen with Russia.
In all, I think have a continuum of force options is rational. What is scary is that this continuum may no longer involve soldiers - and if there's no risk of soldiers' dying, force projection becomes a lot 'cheaper' in a political sense.
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#38Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#39[flagged]
Don't shoot down good ideas just because Hegseth is an idiot.
US procurement is utterly broken and if they are taking lessons from Ukraine wrt drone operations it is an extremely good thing and will save our ass and many lives in the next war.
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#40Out of all of the hires of this new administration, Hegseth is the most surprisingly competent.
At leaking war plans on Signal?