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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

#171

Post by trollbridge »

Alupis wrote: post #72
stackskipton wrote: post #47

As someone who has some familiarity with this process, just like safety regulations are written in blood, Federal Acquisition rules are written in misuse of money, sometimes criminally. Yes, we have swung too much towards the bureaucrats but I'm not sure throwing out everything is solution to the issue. Move fast works great when it's B2B software and failures means stock price does not go up. It's not so great when…

The F-35 was Lockheed's entry in the Joint Strike Fighter program. The JSF has roots going back to 1996. The X-35 first flew in 2000. The F-35 first flew in 2006, and didn't enter service until 2015(!!). That's nearly 20 years to develop a single airframe. Yes, it's the most sophisticated airframe to date, but 20 years is not trivial. The F-35 had many issues during trials and early deployment - some are excusable fo…

The F-35 has the equivalent of an 80486 in it because it is so old, and can’t be updated.

Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

#172

Post by LarsDu88 »

thereisnospork wrote: post #132
Retric wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn’t take 20 years to make an airframe it took 20 years to do lots of research which eventually resulted in a wide range of systems and multiple very distinct airframes. Hell F-35B does vertical takeoff and still mostly uses the same systems as the other designs, that should tell you something.

It doesn't take 20 years to do that, it takes 20 years to do that and wade through the bureaucratic morass. The SR-71 went from initiation to deployment in under a decade, more than half a century ago. With the myriad of advancements in everything from engineering, computation, to business development/management practices, building new cutting edge planes is the sort of thing we should be getting better and quicker a…

Agree, agree, agree.

New technologies should make iteration time on this stuff faster not shorter... even for complex things like fighter aircraft.

The fact that there are over a dozen Chinese humanoid robotics companies that have shipped working products in the past 12 months should be a big red flag.

I will say though that during WW2 and the Cold War, the amount of tolerance for killing test pilots was much greater given the number of people dying during active military conflicts at the time.

Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

#173

Post by marbro »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #71
thaunatos wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does. https://www.war.gov/

Considering the sheer amount of wars the CIA and DoD are responsible for that are ongoing; the rebranding is more honest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...

[dead]

Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

#174

Post by alephnerd »

astrange wrote: post #167
nradov wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ban on windowless bedroom is at least partly about fire safety. A window provides an escape route for low floors, or a means for firefighters to rescue the occupants.

[flagged]

> Windows aren't used for that in the US

Yes they are, and I say this as someone who eons ago lived in a shithole apartment that had a fire scare and needed the Fire Dept to help out. Egress windows and fire trucks with ladders exist for a reason.

Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

#175

Post by LarsDu88 »

stackskipton wrote: post #54
andrewmutz wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

He's also never worked on any project involving delivering physical goods to DoD. It's one thing to chuck software at DoD, it's another to try and put together a new IFV when a bunch of competing interests have their opinions and you are trying to balance it all.

I dislike Hegseth and MAGA as much as anything, but quite honestly what you are describing is just bureacracy, and it doesn't serve a country well in an actual armed conflict.

In the current Ukraine conflict, the US provided something like 50 M1 abrams tanks all of which have currently been destroyed or out of commission. Russia threw something on the order of 3500 tanks (around the same number Hitler threw at Operation Barbarossa, but with each tank far far more capable) and virtually all of those machines have been destroyed or put out of commission.

In a real war, you need to come up with new solutions rapidly as the situation changes, and that's a capability the United States seems to have lost. The quality of US tech is fantastic, but the quantity is probably not going to be there when it matters.

Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

#176

Post by HeinzStuckeIt »

gottorf wrote: post #156
tomrod wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like they want to add parts of South America to the hegemony, for reasons unknown.

The Monroe Doctrine goes back 200 years; the reasons are quite well known.

The Monroe Doctrine was about preventing monarchies from operating in the Americas in a time when the United States was heady with its eighteenth-century democratic framework. The USA was preindustrial, trade was much simpler, and there was an honest belief among political elites that American democracy was uniquely good and a flame worthy of spreading.

While the Monroe Doctrine persists, I think the actual reasons for it changed drastically by the twentieth century, when preventing foreign expansion in the Americas was so blatantly about protecting American economic interests, democracy in those countries be damned. And today geopolitical doctrine makes the other superpowers adversaries regardless of what political system they espouse.

Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

#177

Post by nradov »

astrange wrote: post #168
nradov wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can economically build buildings with windows on all the bedrooms. That has virtually zero impact on the final price to residents so complaining about it is a total red herring. The actual problem is high land prices, slow permit approval processes, and restrictive zoning codes.

You can easily build them without windowless bedrooms, yes. The problem is you can't easily convert office buildings to housing without these, because the floor plates are too different.

That's only one of many problems with converting office building to residential. While a few conversions have succeeded, usually it's cheaper to just demolish the building and start from scratch. Allowing windowless bedrooms won't change that.

Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

#178

Post by waste_monk »

aerostable_slug wrote: post #147
yesco wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weapons need to be replaced, even ones never used. To be capable of scaling production you need at least some degree of production constantly simmering in the background. Yet even then, there is a limit to how much you can scale up on demand. The best and cheapest weapons are the ones never used, but making no weapons at all is the most expensive choice in the end.

The problem is you have these hugely expensive facilities like the tank plant in Lima that's pretty much only good for making tanks. Transitioning manufacturing to production lines that can be economically kept online because they make non-tank products when we're not fighting anyone is the way to go. There's a ton of work going on in this area, and has been for a while (check out DARPA's AVM project for some of it).

Or, simply open up the sales of tanks to the civilian market.

That's a joke, of course, but even if they were demilitarised variants there'd probably still be a market for it.

Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

#179

Post by amluto »

aerostable_slug wrote: post #151
trenchpilgrim wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What we should have the ability to rapidly scale production. How should the US make the manufacture of, say, the primers for artillery shells "rapidly scalable" in a way that is different from building a large stockpile? Be specific. Would you nationalize factories but leave them idle? You certainly won't have time to build or retool factories and staff them during a peer conflict. How would you present this to Con…

Invest in technology that makes the facilities that manufacture primers useful for more than just that one product. One might do that by changing the nature of the manufacturing facility towards a multipurpose "forge", changing the nature of primers so they're more like commercially attractive products, or some combination. DARPA has been working pretty hard on these topics over the years. I was working on one when w…

I would even go one step back in the process. Make it possible to rapidly build factories in the US. And don’t idle that capacity — consider how quickly China brings factories online and how rapidly they could scale weapons production by shifting production of car factories to weapons factories.

This is, of course, a hard problem to solve, but solving it would be quite valuable for the US even without any wars.

Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

#180

Post by credit_guy »

carabiner wrote: post #81
Alupis wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The F-35 was Lockheed's entry in the Joint Strike Fighter program. The JSF has roots going back to 1996. The X-35 first flew in 2000. The F-35 first flew in 2006, and didn't enter service until 2015(!!). That's nearly 20 years to develop a single airframe. Yes, it's the most sophisticated airframe to date, but 20 years is not trivial. The F-35 had many issues during trials and early deployment - some are excusable fo…

It's peacetime engineering. These things would be developed 10x faster during a hot war. Look at COVID vaccine in 10 months vs. 7 years normally.

That is not a guarantee. We look at WW2 and think that what happened then will happen at any other time. But in WW1 the US had to borrow rifles from France. WW1 was a total disgrace as far as the US military industrial complex was concerned. I know I'm committing a bit of a sin, today marks the 107th anniversary of the end of WW1 and that end was possible because of the US involvement. But, uncharacteristically for the US, it was the manpower, not the arsenal of the US that decided the end of that war. And, yes, even at that time the US was the largest economy of the world.
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