You’re about to find out how Russia’s military couldn’t beat a smaller force despite looking very fierce for decades.
The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
231–240 of 527 posts
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#232As 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…
Given there is apparently a large emphasis on the performance of these individual "portfolio" managers, and speed of delivery is made to be such a big deal, this is definitely going to get out own people killed.
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#233Prima Facie: probably good. The existing system is pure and simple money laundering, the legendary $900 toilet seat is absurd and this seems to be a step away from the supply-chain-for-everything system in place currently. I believe the defense budget could be cut in half with increased capability, at least in theory. There's that much cruft.
Nobody ever paid $900 for a toilet seat. That was a statistical artifact caused by an accounting method called "equal allocation".
"The equal allocation method calculates prices for large numbers of items in a contract by assigning "support' costs such as indirect labor and overhead equally to each item. Take a contract to provide spare parts for a set of radar tracking monitors. Suppose a monitor has 100 parts and support costs amount to a total of $100,000. Using the equal allocation method each part is assigned $1,000 in such costs, even though one item may be a sophisticated circuit card assembly, which requires the attention of high-salaried engineers and managers, and another item may be a plastic knob. Add $1,000 to the direct cost of the part and you get a billing price. This is what the government is billed, though not what the part is really worth--the circuit card being undervalued, the knob being overvalued. The need for billing prices arises because contractors want to be paid up front for items that are shipped earlier than others."
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#234> Design For Rapid Scale In a Crisis One of the things that I think Anduril (Palmer Luckey and other founders) is doing right is designing for manufacturability. The invasion of Ukraine has shown that future conflicts will use up weapons at a very high pace. And that the US capability to build them at the rate needed to sustain conflict isn't there anymore. But that one thing that could help is making them easier to…
What’s up with Maga people using LotR names for their military/panopticon companies? Anduril, Palantir, Lembas have I seen so far.
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Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Actually "good enough" is often actually superior to "best-in-class" and "fully capable" because they are simpler to make and as a result you can make more of them . It is often better to have 1000 things that are "good enough" then 100 things that are "best-in-class".
Right, do you want a King Tiger or 20 Shermans?
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
Manufacturing in western countries was gutted by the price of labor (read: rising standard of living relative to global averages). 1. It's difficult to manufacture competitively when a local living wage is in the upper echelons of global wages. 2. It's often cheaper to manufacture something semi-manually (e.g. 80% automated) than invest in buying and maintaining full automation.
No, it was gutted by what I said it was gutted by. The price of labor I include in workplace regulations but I could have called it out on its own too. If corporations could not have moved operations offshore to exploit workers and the environment in other countries for lower cost, then they would not have. They were permitted to. Where the old "labor costs did killed it" canard really falls over is when you look at…
> Mining, farming, forestry, fishing, things like that. Traditionally a lot of those industries have had high labor input costs too. They miraculously didn't all fall over like manufacturing though.
Mining has been dropping since the 80s [0].
Farming, forestry, fishing are estimated to decline by 3% in the next 10 years [1]. After having fallen from ~50% of the US population in 1870 already.
It's cheaper to do things where labor is cheaper, then ship them around the world by sea.
[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPUBN212W200000000#:~:tex...
[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/Farming-Fishing-and-Forestry/Agricul...
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#237Sad that Steve Blank of customer development fame now redirects his prodigious intellectual energies toward the security state.
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Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but rather massive layers of bureaucracy and committees that paralyzed the development pipeline. They decided to make one airframe in three variants for three different branches. They were trying to spend money they didn't have and thought this corner cutting would save it. > Something is very wrong if it takes 20+ years to field next-generation military technologies. It's the funding. The American appetite for new…
> The American appetite for new "war fighters" is exceptionally low when there's no exigent conflict facing us. That’s a problem easily solved. We have the menace of the Red Maple Leaf people to the north, and perhaps a buffer zone south of the Rio Grand would stave off the caravans, give Texans some breathing room, and make more room for real Americans. Remember, the anti-Christ may show up at any time.
Don't forget Belarus just today mentioning they have nukes in warm standby mode.
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#239The mere fact that the title says "Department of War" is a raging red flag...
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The US currently produces between 30,000-40,000 155mm artillery shells a month, but Ukraine (at peak) expended 10,000 per day[1]. Wars are incredibly expensive, and the US should not be producing weapons, in peacetime, at the rate they would be expended during an active war. What we should have the ability to rapidly scale production.
> 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…
We have scaled artillery shell production, it's about 3 times what production was prior to the conflict in Ukraine. And the Pentagon claims they'll double that again by next Spring.
Given that the actual peer conflict that matters to the US will almost certainly be decided by air and sea power, this all seems very much like pointless distraction.
But evidently it can be done, because it is being done. I suppose we are now more ready for some weird anti-matter goldilocks outcome where the PRC can somehow land and supply forces in Taiwan, while still somehow also being incapable of preventing the US from sending forces and supplies to the island. Seems like a weird fixation, but hey, it doesn't cost that many billions of dollars to accommodate Elbridge Colby.
Of course, our ally who actually needs artillery shells for counter battery fire, South Korea, can produce them in vast quantities. They are also conveniently located in the Pacific. It is one thing for them to be wary about doing too much help Ukraine. Russian can complicate their life quite a bit.It would be quite another thing if the US actually asked for shells in the middle of a war with China.