Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

steveblank.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 527 posts

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

#261

Post by throwaway173738 »

appreciatorBus wrote: post #205
amluto wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, this is absolutely part of it. Even if you had unlimited funding, unlimited trained workers, and a defect free, perfect weapon/product design, the urban planning regime would force you to spend 12 years in consultations before you could put one shovel in the ground to build the factory. Through p it all they would be trying to negotiate the size down and down and down until it finally was a factory the size of a…

If we needed it for war, I suspect everyone involved would be eager to eliminate the restrictions.

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

#262

Post by kakacik »

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).

What is more critical as Ukraine has shown is ammunition, ie artillery shells, and of course any anti-drone ammunition (missiles are extremely expensive solution that should be reserved for ballistic missiles and not cheap drones).

More tanks on Ukraine's side wouldn't change current battlefield massively, drones limit how much use from tanks you can get. If you can scale your production to 10-50x within weeks then all is fine but thats almost impossible practically.

If anybody thinks we are heading for a peaceful stable decade without need of such items in massive numbers must have had head buried in the sand pretty deep.

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

#263

Post by Terr_ »

Hizonner wrote: post #102
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re telling me “Obamacare” isn’t politically charged? It was originally a political slur.

1. It's not politically charged now . 2. It's not all over government Web sites. In fact I doubt it's on them at all. 3. Cabinet-level officials aren't giving stupid speeches about how important the name is in reflecting a Whole New Approach. 4. I don't remember Obama objecting to it at the time... nor did Obama go on TV and say "It will now be called OBAMACARE in honor of me, the greatest and only competent Presiden…

> I don't remember Obama objecting to it at the time...

I remember that Democrats were accusing Republicans of violating the Hatch Act by using their official congressional mailers to say "Obamacare".

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

#264

Post by kakacik »

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.

US ammo for civilian use isn't magically much more expensive than in cheaper places around the globe. Could be many factors ie economies of scale but at the end it doesn't matter - price of labor isn't a deciding factor, definitely not when you have US military budget.

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

#265

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

senkora wrote: post #244
pjdesno wrote: post #239

The mere fact that the title says "Department of War" is a raging red flag...

Do you mean a red flag for the quality of the article, or for the actions of the department? "Department of War" is currently a real name for the department: > On September 5, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order authorizing "Department of War" and "secretary of war" as secondary titles to the main titles of "Department of Defense" and "secretary of defense." The terms must be accommodated by federa…

No, it's not. As your quote says, the Department of Defense was created by Congress; the President has no authority whatsoever to rename it or designate a secondary name for it. Writing the words "executive order" on a document doesn't make it legally effective.

Any citizen, of course, can use whatever fake names they'd like for people or places or government organizations. It's a free country. But I don't see any reason to choose this particular fake name except for the purpose of delivering propaganda to your readers.

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

#266

Post by beeflet »

tomrod wrote: post #127
tehjoker wrote: post #111

We don’t need more weapons. We also don’t have real adversaries, that’s war propaganda.

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

What does venesuela have that we want? Consider the reasons known.

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

#267

Post by almosthere »

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…

> brand new jet acts up and results in crashes

The thing is, we waste so much money it's better to crash 15 jets but build 2000 of them than waste the same amount of money and build 5 jets.

Even us SWEs out in the wild, we sometimes... disable tests (gasp heard everywhere) so that a refactor can work.

I mean it's why we have the expression "sometimes you have to crack a few eggs".

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

#268

Post by pfannkuchen »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #206
potato3732842 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So then what value does the bureaucratic process add if it's the first thing that gets shitcanned when good results in good time matter? At the end of the day it's all people cost. Just because it's fractional lives wasted in the form of man hours worked to pay the taxes to pay for unnecessary paper pushing labor instead of whole lives doesn't actually make the waste less (I suspect it's actually more in a lot of cas…

You just, without a hint of irony, compared killing service personnel with civil service office work. Giving someone a job isn't what wasted tax money looks like.

I don’t know what your first sentence means. Do you say “killing” to mean “eliminating the job of”? I don’t see anywhere that mentioned “killing”.

If your second sentence is correct, then let’s allocate taxes to digging holes and filling them in? Ad absurdum but I think it applies? Like it seems reasonable to have an opinion on whether a function should continue to be funded by tax dollars. In a properly operating economy this would open up skilled labor to work somewhere more useful. Unless they weren’t actually skilled, in which case yes you have a problem hmm…

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

#269

Post by efnx »

almosthere wrote: post #267
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…

> brand new jet acts up and results in crashes The thing is, we waste so much money it's better to crash 15 jets but build 2000 of them than waste the same amount of money and build 5 jets. Even us SWEs out in the wild, we sometimes... disable tests (gasp heard everywhere) so that a refactor can work. I mean it's why we have the expression "sometimes you have to crack a few eggs".

That’s putting a pretty low price on human life.

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

#270

Post by almosthere »

efnx wrote: post #269
almosthere wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> brand new jet acts up and results in crashes The thing is, we waste so much money it's better to crash 15 jets but build 2000 of them than waste the same amount of money and build 5 jets. Even us SWEs out in the wild, we sometimes... disable tests (gasp heard everywhere) so that a refactor can work. I mean it's why we have the expression "sometimes you have to crack a few eggs".

That’s putting a pretty low price on human life.

No, it's putting a high price on human life, but it depends on how you look at it. We can be a nation that gets bombed into nothingness, or the only country that can defend our own or another one. But we can't do that unless we're willing to actually build weapons of war.

It's why WWII vets did what they did knowing not every bomb, aircraft or handheld weapon was perfect but still ran in to stop Hitler. I would say that put a high price on human life. These last few generations won't get it until it gets its WW.

Post reply on HN