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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

#461

Post by almosthere »

poulpy123 wrote: post #325
almosthere wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> We can be a nation that gets bombed into nothingness There is literally no one that can bomb the US into nothingness. Even if the US decided to stop develop new weapons, they cannot be invaded. They are too big, too rich and too protected by the ocean and weak neighbors for that

It would sound extremely surreal but Russia could invade Alaska and also attack California, these are actual threats that exist right now that we may not be able to stop.

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

#462

Post by jvanderbot »

fpoling wrote: post #457
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…

There is an observation that any organization or a process becomes totally bureaucratized over span of several decades. The only solution to this is to make things explicitly time-bound like 20-30 years and dismantle the whole thing at the end replacing it with something new and new people at management positions.

I somewhat agree with this. It can be true that all the overwatch was a good idea. And it can be true that the process becomes the point, which is bad. It's hard to tell the difference, but I've personally been bogged down by review processes for months, just to get 2FTE from the government itself while working on the government's approved and funded projects while sitting at the government's desk. It's really silly how bad these things are sometimes. It'll take years to do the thing that even the "fast" programs want you to do.

And the solution to date has been to "start another program". That program promises to move fast, and often does, but it will eventually metastasize with process and review.

I just don't think we can add any more "same but faster" programs. It is time to cut back a lot of process, and thereby bring these programs back to parity so we can then cut down the number of programs.

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

#463

Post by diognesofsinope »

potato3732842 wrote: post #196
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…

As everyone with functioning eyeballs and more memory than a goldfish who has hung around a large organization more than a year knows, you quickly run out of blood to write in and start writing in "well that could've been worse if the starts had aligned, let's write a rule about it". I used to work for a defense contractor. My former coworkers are probably cheering right now.

> you quickly run out of blood to write in and start writing in "well that could've been worse if the starts had aligned, let's write a rule about it".

I'm also convinced this is a primary driver of "emergency/urgency culture".

Everything is hyped as an emergency to justify bureaucratic meetings/rule writing

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

#464

Post by _yb2s »

mmooss wrote: post #247
Y-bar wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s up with Maga people using LotR names for their military/panopticon companies? Anduril, Palantir, Lembas have I seen so far.

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…

Their philosophy is in LOTR, as Morgoth.

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

#466

Post by ntonozzi »

jandrese wrote: post #454
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…

You're looking at this all wrong. Taking 20 years to develop an airframe is fully intentional. The whole point of that project is to keep military contractors in business in peacetime because if war breaks out it will be much harder to start a company from scratch. If the company were efficient and pumped out aircraft like a normal company the government would be stuck with thousands of otherwise useless machines to…

Is this goal documented by the Department of War somewhere? Or are you guessing that there has to be a strategic reason for what seems quite wasteful. It sure seems like there's more efficient ways to achieve this goal.

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

#467

Post by IncreasePosts »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #459

The Department of Defense has never actually completed an audit anyways, despite it being a Congressional requirement. The last time they tried it everyone just agreed to stop after spending millions of dollars on an audit that revealed what everyone already knew. There's not much reason to follow FAR when you don't have to account for cash flows in the first place

An audit is about the journey, not the destination. Auditing an organization spending almost $1T/year is going to be difficult no matter what, let alone dealing with all of the compartmentalization that exists there

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

#468

Post by empath75 »

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…

> Do you mean a red flag for the quality of the article

Yes, it's a sign that they are writing for partisan political reasons and aren't an impartial observer.

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

#469

Post by ntonozzi »

bootsmann wrote: post #328
chiph wrote: post #41

> Design For Rapid Scale In a Crisis One of the things that I think Anduril (Palmer Luckey and other founders) is doing right is designing for manufacturability. The invasion of Ukraine has shown that future conflicts will use up weapons at a very high pace. And that the US capability to build them at the rate needed to sustain conflict isn't there anymore. But that one thing that could help is making them easier to…

Is this just their marketing language or have they independently verified this? IIRC their interceptors got absolutely rinsed at trials in Alaska so I’d be very wary of their claims at this point.

Could you share more information about the trials in Alaska? I can't track down the results you're talking about.

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

#470

Post by dfxm12 »

stocksinsmocks wrote: post #433
dfxm12 wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Were you under the impression that federal procurement was all above board before?

No, the only impression I had was from the earlier post, which is light on details, which is why I was asking for clarification.

Your options are corrupt procurement or corrupt procurement with a 15% administrative surcharge of make-work patronage jobs for someone’s mistress or friends.

This is an obvious false dichotomy.

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