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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

#291

Post by tucnak »

SpicyUme wrote: post #62
ACCount37 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is an off the shelf FPV drone with a grenade strapped to it a "best in class" weapon? No. By now, its battlefield lethality exceeds that of small arms and artillery shells. Take that as a lesson on "best in class" systems. The "best" system is often one that's barely "good enough", but can be manufactured at scale. And, what can US manufacture at scale today? Oh.

>By now, its battlefield lethality exceeds that of small arms and artillery shells. The war in Ukraine seems to be showing this to not be true. Drones are used as much as they are because they do not have enough artillery. Are they useful, yes. But they do not replace artillery. Maybe in another type of war, but that is another issue, what is the next war we expect to find ourselves in? For all the talk of China dete…

Ukrainian here, and you couldn't be more wrong.

The key advantage of the drone ecosystem is that it spans from tactical to strategic applications, from short to long distance, at very low-cost compared to traditional multiple platforms. It's not an artillery alternative, or at least not in the way you think. There are ambush-drones that go behind enemy lines, land on the ground, and wait. There are 10 flavours of FPV stuff, and by now none of it is "off-the-shelf." There are of course the fixed-wing stuff that would completely overwhelm enemy air defense and hit key strategic manufacturing and oil processing plants. There was operation Spider Web where a handful of FPV drones took out 20 or so russian strategic bombers (sic!) many thousand kilometers behind enemy lines. Most importantly, drones present a major advantage in that the operator does not have to be physically present in the target area. Moreover, the operator himself is no longer necessary in many modes of operation, like "last mile targeting"

Your opinion reads like it has been formed by exposure to some contrariant analysis by BigBrain western analyst that would go for soundbites like "drones are artillery."

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

#292

Post by pmyteh »

scandox wrote: post #277
mmooss wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's especially interesting because their philosophy is the opposite of Tolkien's. They seek power at all costs, trying to create 'rings' and dallying with bad people. One common rhetorical tactic, commonly used by their political allies, is to use their (perceived) enemies' most powerful words and ideas against them, to disarm and counter-attack. 'Woke' was a term on the left; racism became descrimination against wh…

I don't know what Tolkien's personal philosophy was but I think a reasonable reading of LOTR would put it at centre right. The culture it valorizes has military capability and heroism at its core.

His personal philosophy was very Catholic. My reading of LotR is that it is consistent with that, valorising faithfulness, the personal in place of the modern, and avoiding the temptation to sin for power. I agree it's centre-right (though idiosyncratically) but not about military capability: the orcs are the most modern military capability and they are decidedly not valorised. The central heros are a member of the rural gentry and his gardener, who barely fight. The Shire is defiantly non-military and pre-industrial.

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

#293

Post by scandox »

mmooss wrote: post #285
scandox wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what Tolkien's personal philosophy was but I think a reasonable reading of LOTR would put it at centre right. The culture it valorizes has military capability and heroism at its core.

The LoTR had a great distrust of power as dangerous and corrupting - the Ring corrupted everyone who tried to use it - and a rejection of those who abided with evil. The mission was to destroy the power, not build a super-army.

Well in fact the raising of a huge army is indeed one of the goals of the protagonists. Of course for them the goal is to defeat evil. I'm sure that the people behind Palantir, Anduril and other such companies also believe they are building a military capability that will allow the United States to defeat what they see as evil. Every centre right libertarian I've encountered also has a "great distrust of power".

All I'm saying is that it only takes a small shift of perspective to see how the LoTR will appeal broadly to anyone who believes in good vs evil narratives - whichever side they appear to be on from one's own point of view.

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

#294

Post by blitzar »

Libidinalecon wrote: post #160
tehjoker wrote: post #111

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

You have to be completely insane to think China is not an adversary. Personally, I think we are in WW3 right now and we have already lost. Americans are just too lazy and insular to read anything involving Chinese military strategy. I can't think of more basic Chinese military strategy than to avoid a head-on battle with a strong enemy. You beat the strong enemy by every means other than a head-on battle. We are wait…

You have to be completely insane, or so deep in propaganda you are about to drink the cool-aid and ascend to the next life, to think you are currently at war with China.

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

#295

Post by delfinom »

msabalau wrote: post #240
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…

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 ar…

The problem is, the US sea power is being dwarfed by China rapidly, who have now surpassed the size of the US Navy and are quickly going to be even larger.

And the US does not have enough missiles for a war with China or even Russia realistically.

It's why there's a panic for artillery shells. They realize any real symmetrical with an enemy that isn't some guys in caves would become a war of attrition through numbers fast.

Lobbing billion dollar missiles as a strategy fails when you run out of money for them.

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

#296

Post by somenameforme »

moomin wrote: post #271
waste_monk wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’ve never really understood how the logic of the second amendment doesn’t extend to tanks and nukes.

I'm not sure there is any law against owning an unarmed tank. But for "dangerous and unusual" weapons themselves, an important case is from 1939 - Miller vs USA. [1] And it's absurdly weird. Basically the defendant was a thug with a penchant for snitching on everybody.

In his final case, which he also snitched during, he argued that a law he had been charged under (a firearms regulation law) was unconstitutional. The judge who heard his case was very much in favor of the gun control law and had made numerous public statements as such, but he also likely knew that the law was on very shaky constitutional ground, and had been fishing for a test case to advance it. And he found that in Miller.

So he concurred with Miller about the law's unconstitutionality! That resulted in the case being appealed up to the Supreme Court. Conveniently for the state, neither Miller or his defense representation appeared. So it was argued with no defense whatsoever. And Miller was found shot to death shortly thereafter, which wasn't seen as particularly suspicious given his snitching habits. And that case set the ultimate standard that's still appealed to, to this very day.

This is made even more ironic by the fact that the weapon he was being charged for possession of as being 'dangerous and unusual' was just a short barrel shotgun, which was regularly used in the military.

[1] - https://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/ECM_PRO_060964.p...

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

#297

Post by krisoft »

pfannkuchen wrote: post #268
forgetfreeman wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ec…

> Do you say “killing” to mean “eliminating the job of”?

No. They mean killing as in ordering a pilot to fly an airplane with less cautious testing resulting in a crash and the death of the crew.

> I don’t see anywhere that mentioned “killing”.

It is there. This is what stackskipton said “Your primary concern is not spending a ton of money and not getting a bunch of people killed.” They even use the example of the F-4U Corsairs mentioning how during the program pilots died.

This is the comment potato3732842 replied to and this is the context their message should be interpreted in. They compared “fractional lives wasted” which they define as “man hours worked to pay the taxes to pay for unnecessary paper pushing labor” with “whole lives”. They don’t define what they mean by whole lives lost, but since they wrote it as a response to stackskipton‘s comment from context i think they mean pilot deaths.

To me it seems they are arguing that if we accept more mangled pilot bodies pulled out of burning wreckages then we can do the program cheaper. And to understand where they stand on the question they call the work needed to prevent those pilot deaths “unnecessary paper pushing”. Is your reading of the comment different?

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

#298

Post by scandox »

pmyteh wrote: post #292
scandox wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what Tolkien's personal philosophy was but I think a reasonable reading of LOTR would put it at centre right. The culture it valorizes has military capability and heroism at its core.

His personal philosophy was very Catholic. My reading of LotR is that it is consistent with that, valorising faithfulness, the personal in place of the modern, and avoiding the temptation to sin for power. I agree it's centre-right (though idiosyncratically) but not about military capability: the orcs are the most modern military capability and they are decidedly not valorised. The central heros are a member of the r…

> The Shire is defiantly non-military and pre-industrial.

The Shire stands as a symbol for a rural and peaceful life but their protected way of life is only possible because of the the military might of others and this is explicitly alluded to several times...for example in a conversation between Merry and Pippin (which I just happened to read to my kid yesterday!):

"Still there are things deeper and higher; and not a gaffer could tend his garden in what he calls peace but for them, whether he knows about them or not."

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

#299

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#300

Post by sebmellen »

navbaker wrote: post #63
sebmellen wrote: post #3

Out of all of the hires of this new administration, Hegseth is the most surprisingly competent.

A competent person does not summon every senior leader in his worldwide organization to be physically present for an hour in an auditorium while he blusters and attempts to deliver TV-ready one-liners. A competent person also does not take over a massive organization that relies on these senior executives’ decades of experience and immediately fire a non-trivial number of them because of their gender or skin color.

I’m no admirer and I’m speaking relatively here. That’s why I said surprising. I think we could agree he’s a level above Matt Gaetz or “special envoy” Witkoff.

This article kind of mirrors my thoughts about his speech https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/07/opinion/pete-hegseth-spee....

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