Kind of strange that weapons procurement has gotten so much attention while the ability of the country to react to epidemics by creating medicines has essentially been disabled.
The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
331–340 of 527 posts
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Yep. You see this play out not only in war, but in business and software as well.
e.g.
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#333What has this got to do with accountants. In a normal control model the one thing accountants are not allowed to do is buy stuff, because they can also pay for stuff. This woyld make fraud all too easy.
Yes everything is easier without controls, until something goes wrong. Fast cars have the best brakes for a reason.
Removing budgetary controls makes development much easier. That is until you spent so much money on a space laser that you can no longer afford to feed your Navy.
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#334Given Hegseth's record of financial mismanagement I have deep misgivings about what's being done.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/02/pete-hegseth...
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#335Earlier 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…
> what value does the bureaucratic process add if it's the first thing that gets shitcanned when good results in good time matter? This is like asking what good do reserves do if you spend them down in a crisis. The bureaucracy aims to keep waste and corruption to a minimum during peacetime. In war, the aims change--you're now not only ramping up production, but the penalties for fucking with a war are typically more…
Think about the local implications of what you just said. If we toss the process when effective expenditure of resources toward results matter and consequences are the most serious then the process must be less efficient at producing good results for the expenditure than the corruption (or whatever else the process is replacing). So then why are we running it at all?
You can absolutely make an argument about accepting reduced efficiency to dilute concentrated harms (e.g. keep a test pilot from dying), but none of the peddlers of process dare even make that argument so I suspect the math is questionable without hand waving or subjective valuation (e.g. face saved avoiding errors).
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#336Earlier 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.
The American people have no appetite for war with Canada. Half the country think it's a deranged threat and the other half think it's a hilarious joke. There's no genuine support for it from the public.
Mexico is another story, but even then I don't think there's much in the way of public support for a ground invasion.
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#337Earlier 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.
The point about government waste is that some of the things government does save lives. So money wasted equates to lives that could have been saved. See value of a statistical life etc.
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#338Earlier 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.
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…
There is a market to buy a tank that originally cost $10m for $10k. You can drive it round fields and crush stuff for YouTube content.
I think there is a much smaller market for people wanting to pay the new price
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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 think that mostly means money is cheap in China. In America, if you try to start a humanoid robot company you'll immediately run into the "Why though?" question when you try to get money for it. The case for the economic relevance of humanoid robots is dubious at best, so to proceed with such a development program you need your own money or at least good friends with connections who don't care about money.
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#340Earlier 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…
> what value does the bureaucratic process add if it's the first thing that gets shitcanned when good results in good time matter? This is like asking what good do reserves do if you spend them down in a crisis. The bureaucracy aims to keep waste and corruption to a minimum during peacetime. In war, the aims change--you're now not only ramping up production, but the penalties for fucking with a war are typically more…
> The bureaucracy aims to keep waste and corruption to a minimum during peacetime.
This thread is discussing bureaucracy as the cause of waste and corruption during peacetime.