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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

#381

Post by stogot »

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…

the F35 isn’t a “move fast” counterpoint. That’s one of the slowest airframes I can think of

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

#382

Post by jonahbenton »

Given the pervasiveness of bribery across this admin, this smells like just eliminating the obstacles to a more direct and corrupt patronage and kickback system. Steve Blank might be wishing it will be LEAN when in reality it will be GREEN.

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

#383

Post by iamtheworstdev »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #279
canucker2016 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kelly Johnson, head of Lockheed's Skunk Works, worked on the P-38 (as well as U-2, Blackbird, and the F-117A). He had a list of rules for managing the design of aircraft. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Johnson_(engineer)#Kelly... . There's an unwritten 15th rule (from the above-mentioned webpage): "Starve before doing business with the damned Navy. They don't know what the hell they want and will drive you u…

Rule 14 is pretty interesting. Keep the teams small and reward performance with compensation. Don't just reward increasing headcount. Could improve things at so many tech companies today.

Rule 14 is why every government and large cooperation has an insane amount of bloat and middle managers, IMHO. People's power and pay are determined by two things - the number of people working under them, and their budget (which is often determined by the number of people working under them). It is rarely determined by positive outcomes, it seems, in the government world.

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

#384

Post by antonymoose »

dzink wrote: post #230

Wasn’t the son of the current president invested in one of the drone companies selling to the Pentagon? Speedy purchases with no consideration for cost are great are very handy for that kind of investment.

I’m unsure if his sons, but it was discussed on the Joe Rogan (Brian Redban) episode released yesterday that the Vice President has substantial holdings. His prior job had him investing in these companies, while I’m not sure the total sum, he himself holds a few hundred thousand in personal holdings.

Sorry I’m unable to link to the source time on the episode.

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

#385

Post by Hizonner »

beeflet wrote: post #256
netsharc wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sk…

The purpose of the "weird doublespeak" is to remind yourself what you're aspiring to.

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

#386

Post by potato3732842 »

scott_w wrote: post #370
potato3732842 wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> During wartime you need lots of materiel quickly, so value for money estimates, anti corruption practices all get reduced in the name of production numbers at all costs Everyone keeps saying this yet it seems to be the opposite, results for dollars tradeoffs are better in wartime. If anything it seems like the difference is that during wartime it's easier for the end users to tell the bureaucracy to get out of the…

> Everyone keeps saying this yet it seems to be the opposite, results for dollars tradeoffs are better in wartime. Do you understand what economies of scale are? Of course some production costs go down because you're producing far more. You're producing at this high level because the enemy is busy blowing up your equipment! This is also why it's easy to show results: you have live test subjects in the form of the ene…

>Do you understand what economies of scale are?

Do you understand what results are? Not having something because people lied and took money is no different to the guy in the foxhole or the guy ordering those guys around than not having something because nobody lied and the money got spent paying people to do work that did nothing to get that something closer to being actually available.

>Hell, the article also makes clear that this "low-bureaucracy nirvina" that you seem to believe in was costing the US taxpayer huge sums of money in waste and inefficiency.

The article literally spends approximately 1/3 of its scroll bar talking about the problems with the system and how all the steps, all the process, all the tangential work that must per the rules be done despite not being part of the critical path of fielding systems prevents said systems from being delivered on time or on budget.

>Are you seriously suggesting the optimal result is for NATO forces to find out our equipment never got manufactured right when we need it?

It speaks volumes that your responses are constantly attempting toward strawmen and false dichotomies rather than assess what the right amount of procurement process is.

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

#387

Post by djoldman »

My understanding is that one of the huge barriers to a lot of DoD projects is seemingly unending feature creep:

  1. let's make the "next-gen airplane"
  2. (work 5 years)
  3. ok now we want it to have better radar cloaking
  4. (work 5 years)
  5. ok now we want it to be faster
  6. (work 5 years)
  7. ok now we want it to lift off vertically
Eventually every vehicle has all capabilities as opposed to focusing on some limited number.

We saw the same thing with the new USPS vehicle.

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

#388

Post by herewulf »

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.

The conventional wisdom is that you need to buy several military vehicles in order to get and keep one up and running. Some things are going to come broken, some things will inevitably break, and the replacement parts aren't exactly at your local auto parts shop.

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

#389

Post by immibis »

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.

And, this page exists: https://www.whitehouse.gov/mysafespace

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

#390

Post by immibis »

hereme888 wrote: post #380
Loughla wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is a fact the democrats shut down government because they wanted to hide irrelevant provisions in the funding bill. Enough shady business from democrats!

If by "irrelevant provisions" you mean... funding. For things that were already being funded. Yes, hiding continuing funding in the continuing funding bill. Very devious.
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