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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

#431

Post by potato3732842 »

amfarrell617 wrote: post #406
potato3732842 wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> no different to the guy in the foxhole In peacetime, the American in the foxhole doesn’t die nor does the American or Brit across from him. Everyone merely has simulated results.

What happens if we go to war? We just gonna build a new fast procurement process from scratch when we decide we need it? How do you even decide that for a low intensity conflict?

You ever heard the phrase "you fight how you train"? We're training our suppliers to be crap.

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

#432

Post by mindslight »

scandox wrote: post #293
mmooss wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Every centre right libertarian I've encountered also has a "great distrust of power".

While they may be wary of others with power, right "libertarians" are often attracted to wielding the power themselves - falling to the same exact "I will do good" fallacy as wielders of the Ring. Truly being disinterested in concentrated power means acknowledging that larger non- "government" entities are capable of coercing individuals (eg informal force or even just economic stickiness), not definitionally ruling it out to remain ignorant of it.

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

#433

Post by stocksinsmocks »

dfxm12 wrote: post #415
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…

Yes, we have swung too much towards the bureaucrats Is this truly the case or are the criminals and other people who misuse money dragging people towards this position?

Were you under the impression that federal procurement was all above board before? I’ve got some bad news.

Your options are corrupt procurement or corrupt procurement with a 15% administrative surcharge of make-work patronage jobs for someone’s mistress or friends. I think that we’re in the “let’s pay our centurions in salt because the treasury is empty” stage of administrative innovations to allow the dead empire to linger. Personally, my hope is the next thousand year dark age we are stepping into comes with a knightly aesthetic.

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

#434

Post by Night_Thastus »

djoldman wrote: post #387

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 nu…

Yep. No matter what industry, you cannot make a miracle product that accounts for every use case and is amazing at everything. You can burn trillions trying and still come up short.

The better way is focused products/specialization. Make something that fills a specific niche very well at a good price.

You'll might need more products to get complete (or close to complete) coverage, but you'll end up paying FAR less in the long run on R&D, maintenance, delays, etc.

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

#435

Post by weberer »

Hizonner wrote: post #385
beeflet wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, its to make it more comfortable for citizens to support and fund the military industrial complex. Are people really this naive?

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

#436

Post by mapt »

potato3732842 wrote: post #197
stackskipton wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of time, this delay is in peacetime, it makes sense to do a ton of testing, wait until testing results then go to full production. Your primary concern is not spending a ton of money and not getting a bunch of people killed. It's basically waterfall in fighter development. Wartime is more agile, you quickly close the loop but downside is sometimes does not work and when it does not work, there might be a people…

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…

If most of the losses in your military are training disasters based on the current strategic outlook of maintaining highly effective deterrence, then you go for safety. If most of the losses in your military are (hypothetically) getting slaughtered by a superior enemy who has failed to be deterred, then you go for experimentation, iteration, try quickly and fail quickly. Life is just cheaper in wartime.

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

#437

Post by mapt »

Retric wrote: post #349
eggsome wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair the F22 would have been closer to the F35 in price if the number produced were larger so that the R&D was spread over a larger number of airframes. Such a pretty plane.

I agree that the F-22 is gorgeous, but it is also extremely expensive to operate, couldn’t be exported, can’t do carrier launch or VTOL so the demand was inherently lower. That said, we could have made more than 195 of the them, but even at 750 it would have still been significantly more expensive per aircraft than the F-35 and it wouldn’t have let us cancel the F-35 program.

I feel like we got locked into the aerodynamic & airframe structural limitations of a particular CVN format with the USS Enterprise and are doing some wacky things, like not navalizing the F-22 or the C-130 or the B-21, because we can't dream any larger without assuming that such a ship would cost infinity dollars. South Korea, Japan, and China build larger container, tanker, and bulk ships all the time for ~1% of the price of a supercarrier; It's not that adding tens of thousands of tons of steel is going to break the bank, it's that a carrier group encompasses most functions of the military. The larger a ship gets the easier it is to move quickly through the wind, and the slower effective landing approaches are. The longer the catapult, the lower the necessary acceleration. CATOBAR takeoff and landing that works a little more like normal runway takeoff and landing means more of the USAF R&D ends up being projectable power.

It would cost an insane amount of money.... but... It already does cost an insane amount of money, and then we have to run three separate military aviation programs for different regimes.

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

#438

Post by wildzzz »

t1234s wrote: post #399
Alupis wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The F-35 was Lockheed's entry in the Joint Strike Fighter program. The JSF has roots going back to 1996. The X-35 first flew in 2000. The F-35 first flew in 2006, and didn't enter service until 2015(!!). That's nearly 20 years to develop a single airframe. Yes, it's the most sophisticated airframe to date, but 20 years is not trivial. The F-35 had many issues during trials and early deployment - some are excusable fo…

Programs like the F35 might possibly be used funnel money into other LM black projects over the years

In an indirect way, yes, some of the profit LM makes on the F-35 contracts does flow to internal R&D projects that may ultimately contribute to a black program. But actual black programs are funded by Congress. Even the most secretive, unacknowledged special access programs still have someone on the intelligence or defense committees giving the thumbs up to allocate money towards some department or agency's black budget. There would simply be no need to illegally launder money through another program unless LM was intent on using that money for criminal activities.

I'm sure it's been done elsewhere, look at Iran-Contra, but it just wouldn't be done for something like a defense contractor building planes. It would be completely unnecessary and likely illegal.

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

#439

Post by bootsmann »

busterarm wrote: post #426
cm2012 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The F35 is the most in demand military plane in the world for the price. They spent 20 years iterating on it and its now the best plane for the cost with its capabilities.

And a truck full of low cost drones can swarm your airfield and take all your F35s out while they're still on the ground. The future isn't in pilot-in-seat aircraft at all.

“Drones will make xyz technology obsolete” is probably the most naive armchair conclusion you can draw from the Ukraine war. Food for thought: Russias most impactful innovation of this war so far has been building more precise glide bombs, which notably are dropped by fighter planes (and the reason why Ukraine went after those planes with their drones).

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

#440

Post by Y-bar »

conn10mfan wrote: post #428
scandox wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

well, this assumes that the person who created Palantir identifies with the protagonists and not with mordor, and this issue with your interpretation is that peter thiel very explicitly identifies with mordor “Gandalf’s the crazy person who wants to start a war… Mordor is this technological civilization based on reason and science. Outside of Mordor, it’s all sort of mystical and environmental and nothing works.” - T…

This is the most "I'm going to build the Torment Nexus" I have seen from a tech billionaire.
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