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The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

responsiblestatecraft.org

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Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#271

Post by itairall »

cushychicken wrote: post #58
goodoldneon wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Military spending is good for the economy” is basically the same as the broken window fallacy. There’s a massive opportunity cost

There's also massive benefits which are hard to directly measure. Doing advanced, completely unprofitable basic research, for one thing. These are the sorts of projects that spawned GPS, the Internet, and IC manufacturing. Wasn't super profitable at the time of conception, but the military doesn't care. They need capability, irrespective of price. All of these technologies are now keystones of numerous gigantic Ameri…

I am sorry but this is a ridiculous argument.

What is hard to measure is what could have been done with the money to make the US military stronger but was wasted instead.

The worst part is all these inefficiencies are going to add up over the coming decades when we have to keep up with the PLA/China.

A PLA colonel makes less than a private first class marine and manufacturing anything is an order of magnitude difference.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#272

Post by mynameisvlad »

ceejayoz wrote: post #200
jabradoodle wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had already developed it. How much do you think it costs to design a bin..

How much do you think it costs to restart the production line for a component of an aircraft last made in 1979?

It’s. A. Trash. Can.

This isn’t some specialized part that the plane requires to fly. It’s just a trash can.

Hell, just go to Target and buy one that’s similarly sized. It would be cheaper to fly across the country to find one at this point.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#274

Post by culi »

cushychicken wrote: post #143
mcdonje wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Until 2010, Boeing charged an average of $300 for a trash container used in the E-3 Sentry, a surveillance and radar plane based on the 707 civilian airliner. When the 707 fell out of use in the United States, the trash can was no longer a “commercial” item, meaning that Boeing was not obligated to keep its price at previous levels, according to a weapons industry source who spoke to RS. That's the 2nd paragraph of…

Also means that there are way fewer airframes to spread development costs across. Looks like we both read it, but not all of us understood the implications of it.

Ok, well just a few more paragraphs down is:

> The investigation also revealed that Raytheon Technologies had raised the price of Stinger missiles from $25,000 to more than $400,000 per unit. “Even accounting for inflation and some improvements, that’s a seven-fold increase,” Shay Assad, a former Pentagon acquisitions official, told 60 Minutes.

The US ramped UP how many stinger missiles it bought so how could your explanation lead to an increase in price? Especially one so dramatic?

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#275

Post by a2tech »

Have you ever tried to actually work with the government? Even with internal champions the paperwork is staggering. Even with all the laws that are supposed to encourage smaller companies to work with the government, the paperwork and systems you have to navigate to land, let alone, complete a contract is insane. It’s driving the smaller, more focused contractors right out of business/government contracts. When those small, honest, firms close all that is left are the huge firms. And those companies are quite adept at wringing every dollar out of the government and establishing contracts that pay over years and years.

It’s so frustrating.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#276

Post by hef19898 »

hospitalJail wrote: post #264
hef19898 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All nice and dandy. And now imagine doing all that according to some obscure military aviation certification standards from the 50s. For a handful of parts. When you are the only reasonably available supplier. Aerospace is different from automotive, just how different is only apparent by actually suffering through it. And as I said elsewhere, 200k to keep four highly specialized military planes in the air is, as stup…

>200k to keep four highly specialized military planes in the air is, as stupid as it sounds, almost a no brainer. That implies that the trashcan designed for less would cause failures. Also the cost of the program was 1.3M or something.

That actually depends on how you define failure.

Now we come to a peculiarity of aerospace, so excuse the tangent. All aircraft have to be airworthy to be allowed to fly. Those airworthiness criteria are set during initial Type Certification, and more or less set in stone. Changing them requires various amounts of testing, re-certification and abton of paper work nobody in their right minds does voluntarily. One reason one does it is obsolescence of parts or technology.

One of things I insist on, for that very reason, is in being smart in defining begnin things like BoMs and maintenance plans. Because deviating from those grounds a plane.

So, if (I have no idea of the E-3 specifics as those arw most likely classified to a certain degree) said trash bins are part of the airworthiness requirements, not having them (and them being up to spec) grounds the plane. Because the absence of said trash bin is a defect in itself.

Whether or not the trash bins are a signigicant safety problem is, decades after the E-3 got certified, no longer relevant.

Aerospace is fun sometimes.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#277

Post by birdyrooster »

ajmurmann wrote: post #227
DropInIn wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sort of business sounds like what we want in milsec and government suppliers, no? Reliable even down to the bug behaviors...

The reliable bug behavior is an underappreciated point and can be hard to understand. I work on software that gets deployed on-prem by customers and had very powerful capabilities for deploying your own code to it etc. There have been a few discussions about some bug fixes and in particular security fixes being appropriate in a patch release when following SemVer. Something might be unintentional or insecure, but cus…

Yes this happens all the time, I’ve seen it everywhere I’ve every been an engineer. Bug fix roll back due to causing an outage because it broke the defacto API being depended on.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#278

Post by culi »

kylecazar wrote: post #13

There was an interesting article going around explaining accounting artifacts in the DoD from the late '90s. See 'the myth of the $600 hammer': https://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-the...

A quick look at an example of the big-ticket items immediately shows that's not what's going on here. From the article:

> The investigation also revealed that Raytheon Technologies had raised the price of Stinger missiles from $25,000 to more than $400,000 per unit. “Even accounting for inflation and some improvements, that’s a seven-fold increase,” Shay Assad, a former Pentagon acquisitions official, told 60 Minutes.

See also,

> Experts say much of that contractor price gouging has worsened over the past few decades as the military sector has experienced dramatic consolidation. In the 1990s, there were more than 50 “prime” DoD contractors capable of competing for major contracts. Now, there are only five.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#279

Post by jliptzin »

sneak wrote: post #247
jliptzin wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have encountered a situation a few times where a bug that went unnoticed for a while was actually keeping another, more serious bug from surfacing. So when the first bug was fixed, it caused more serious problems elsewhere in the system. I could see where they're coming from where any kind of "fix" needs to trigger a careful reevaluation of the whole system. That being said, I don't see a need for the Kafkaesque mo…

> That being said, I don't see a need for the Kafkaesque months of planning and budgeting that follow. It's a method for transferring billions of dollars from public tax revenues to private companies which are cozy with the state. It has nothing to do with safety or reliability. All other methods of stealing tax money are illegal.

Would be nice if we spent some time cracking down on that kind of tax theft rather than wasting time on drag shows and the 3 dozen teens in the whole country on puberty blockers

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#280

Post by ceejayoz »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #272
ceejayoz wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much do you think it costs to restart the production line for a component of an aircraft last made in 1979?

It’s. A. Trash. Can. This isn’t some specialized part that the plane requires to fly. It’s just a trash can. Hell, just go to Target and buy one that’s similarly sized. It would be cheaper to fly across the country to find one at this point.

It is a trash can that must contain a waste fire so it doesn't burn through the wall of the plane or suffocate the crew.

It is a trash can that must not fly around the E-3's cabin if they're making evasive maneuvers.

It is a trash can that must fit in a specific spot in a plane first made in 1957 and ended production in the 1970s.

It must have been confirmed via a vigorous process to fulfill all these requirements and approved for aviation use.

You can not buy one of these at Target. They are not putting little plastic bins by the workstations in an AWACS plane.

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