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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

#251

Post by burnt-resistor »

Perhaps if the Department of Whatever engineered and built things they needed themselves*, or at least controlled the program management and knew all of the sub-sub-sub-sub-contractors, they wouldn't be incorporating improperly acquired metals or ballooning programs into mega pork projects for all 50 states. The DoD is a jobs program and wastes money that could be used for housing, healthcare, and food instead of lining the pockets of "defense" contractors as the larger budget in the world compared to the next 9 countries combined and maintaining 750 bases in 80 nations.

* They and the private sector ran out of TNT because of UA-RU and Israel's flattening of Gaza and so they won't have enough for 2 years from now because corporate consolidation leads to unpreparedness because it's more profitable than keeping essential supply chain infrastructure alive. (It used to cost $0.50/kg but now it's $20/kg.) OTOH, they forge the barrels for tanks and artillery mostly themselves. This inconsistency and creeping of megacorp profiteering never lends itself to security or capital efficiency.. privatization isn't "flexibility" or "efficient", it's price-gouging and risky.

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

#252

Post by AlotOfReading »

ethbr1 wrote: post #193
stinkbeetle wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Manufacturing in western countries was gutted by treasonous politicians bribed by corporations to do an end-run around the environmental laws, workplace regulations, and human rights that had been hard-won by the people over the previous 50-100 years, by allowing these abuses to continue elsewhere without even being required to pay commensurate tariffs or penalties.

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.

The Chinese laborers working in BYD and foxconn factories have higher wages than their equivalents in Mexico and Vietnam building products sold for 3-5x as much in the US. The cheapest labor in the world is found in Africa and yet Western industrial manufacturing has largely ignored the continent. The price of labor isn't the most important factor here.

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

#253

Post by mmooss »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #33
NickC25 wrote: post #12

Earlier 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…

> 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…

It's hard and hardly guaranteed, but the US has the largest budget by far, the best technology, and that has created organizations geared toward R&D on that level.

Much of what the US deploys is best-in-class: ships, planes, subs, etc.

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

#254

Post by themafia »

nradov wrote: post #101
themafia wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's the question of how to allocate money for secret things. In the history of war I find very few examples where an obscure secret technology was the key to military victory.

Cryptography, radar, proximity fuses, and nuclear bombs are all examples of obscure secret technologies that were keys to military victory in WWII.

We weren't the only nation using any of those technologies. The Germans, for their part, were trying all of that. It was neither obscure or secret. Technical acumen in using commonly shared technologies was the difference.

It's why people like to forget there were three distinct phases to that war. Russia was not always on our side. The outset was bleak, the middle was indeterminate, and the end, the part we like to remember, was when the tide really started going our way.

In any case, we weren't invested in any of those things _before_ the war, so even if you do believe your premise, there's no reason to suspect that we wouldn't be able to do the same in the next conflict. Trying to prognosticate what the next war will look like has led to some embarrassing military defeats throughout history. The military fails to be egalitarian.

Speaking of proximity fuses you should look into what it took to _actually_ get them used on the battlefield as I think it highlights this point. In concert with that I like to think about the "Millennium Challenge 2002." War is won by skilled soldiers not by lavish spending or deep secret technologies.

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

#255

Post by themafia »

HPsquared wrote: post #92
themafia wrote: post #79

Earlier 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…

Lack of funding? My impression is that the F-35 program is the most expensive in history.

The original estimate was $250b. They undershot that by 10x. The expense is all "overages."

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

#256

Post by beeflet »

netsharc wrote: post #78
Hizonner wrote: post #67

The United States does not have a "Department of War".

Funny how we can tell now whether the other person is a Kool-Aid drinker by how they refer to things. Gulf of Mexico, or Gulf of America?

Gulf of Mexico, Department of War.

"Department of Defense" has always been a weird doublespeak term. I welcome the new old name.

"Gulf of America" is a stupid way to antagonize the world and accomplish nothing. Even if we controlled some area on a map, we ought to disguise our control through proxies rather than attract attention and to it and all that comes with the evil eye. If I was a trump supporter I would be skeptical of even accepting this as a "win", considering it is just words on paper and doesn't reflect a change in material conditions for the demographic.

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

#257

Post by p_l »

mmooss wrote: post #243
p_l wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

F-35B was added to JSF to ensure Lockheed (who had been working on exactly that since 1980s even to the point of licensing designs from USSR ) was the only company that could win the contract.

What evidence is there of that? And without the F-35B, what would be flown by the US Marines, and by most other countries' aircraft carriers, all of which require vertical take-off and landing?

Late addition of VTOL variant on mandates common airframe when it was well known that only Lockheed had anything in pipeline that could match the requirements and even then -B meant delays and issues due to inherent complexity of VTOL (to the point Britain nearly canceled the order for -B, only finding out it was too late to refit Queen Elizabeth carriers with CATOBAR kept the purchase afloat)

Reality is that VTOL model is ultimately a niche variant whose mandated commonality with air force and CATOBAR carrier variants impacted negatively both non- and VTOL options.

However, slapping supersonic VTOL requirement on what was supposed to be F-16 replacement in the given timeframe meant Lockheed would automatically get ahead as every other vendor had to scramble nearly from scratch while L-M had fresh supersonic VTOL data from both their own lab work and experimental work on Yak-141

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

#258

Post by degamad »

Loughla wrote: post #115
Hizonner wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad news. Trump and Hegseth do not have the authority to rename the Department of Defense, no matter what they put on a Web site. That requires an act of Congress, which hasn't happened. And probably won't, because even if they could convince Congress to do it, that would require them to ask ... and their whole modus operandi is based around pretending to have authority they don't have. Calling it the Department of W…

The ada.gov website has a banner that reads, "Democrats have shut down the government. Department of Justice websites are not currently regularly updated." Trump is the king. Edit: To be clear, I think it's complete and utter garbage. I'm assuming people think I think it's a good thing? It's not a good thing. At all.

Farmers.gov goes even further:

> Due to the Radical Left Democrat shutdown...

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

#259

Post by dmoy »

HWR_14 wrote: post #214
marssaxman wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There definitely is a market for such vehicles: http://www.exarmyvehicles.com/offer/tracked-vehicles/tanks https://mortarinvestments.eu/ArmouredVehicles https://miltrade.com/pages/military-vehicles-for-sale-in-eur... https://tanksales.co.uk/sales/ Ten or fifteen years back, I had an ambition to buy such a vehicle and drive it around at Burning Man. I eventually settled for a deuce-and-a-half, which caused enough stru…

What was frustrating about it? From time to time your exact plan sounded appealing to me.

If we're talking actual functional tanks, then they're expensive as shit to buy, and expensive as shit to drive.
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