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How billions vanish into the security industry

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Re: How billions vanish into the security industry

#31

Post by PatentTroll »

secfirstmd wrote: post #5

Part of the problem is that genuinely innovative ideas from small businesses find it impossible to navigate the mess that is EU related funding. Meaning only the big players can access them. Also, the amount of unnecessary duplication and crap sold in the security industry is unbelievable. If you go to the Counter Terrorism Expo in London, you can see this. Dozens of organisations selling effectively the same stuff.…

This is no doubt true, but I don't think this is compatible with capitalism. Just nationalize BAE and Northrop and General Dynamics, etc. Keep the engineers on the payroll and keep the R&D going without the farce of procurement and contracts. And maybe, just maybe, we could use some of their spare capacity in peacetime for peaceful projects that would have military applications if war arises. Improving communications, transportation, computing, water treatment, power generation, etc. all could benefit the military and civilian worlds. Of course not everything would fit into that rubric, but at lest some could. Didn't Ford convert car factories into tank factories during one of the world wars, why can't we have an electric car factory set up and running that could be configured to churn out tanks at a moments notice? Same with planes too I'd imagine.

Re: How billions vanish into the security industry

#32

Post by hectorr »

Spooky23 wrote: post #30
colechristensen wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They are effectively a hidden British government job scheme. There is inherent value in simply having an existing capable defense contractor in your own nation. It isn't about dollars and cents, it's about being capable of fighting a war without outside help (or not being wholly dependent). So you throw money at the local defense contractor to keep it alive. It's expensive to do this, but if you don't you pay for it…

No, it's all a farce. If there's ever a global conflict where the scope and scale disrupts those global supply lines, it will go nuclear and not matter anymore.

It's not just about a massive conflict kinetically disrupting those supply lines. Influcencing those supply lines is a key tactic in the day-by-day posturing and low-level conflicts of geopolitics.

Re: How billions vanish into the security industry

#33

Post by Spooky23 »

hectorr wrote: post #32
Spooky23 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's all a farce. If there's ever a global conflict where the scope and scale disrupts those global supply lines, it will go nuclear and not matter anymore.

It's not just about a massive conflict kinetically disrupting those supply lines. Influcencing those supply lines is a key tactic in the day-by-day posturing and low-level conflicts of geopolitics.

That's what we have now in this cyber warfare stuff.

The reality is that we always have to push conflict to the fringes with "Tier 1" states (which I define as people with Nukes). The cold war answer was to fight using proxies indirectly. The modern answer is cyber/information warfare.

Re: How billions vanish into the security industry

#34

Post by secfirstmd »

ceejayoz wrote: post #15
secfirstmd wrote: post #5

Part of the problem is that genuinely innovative ideas from small businesses find it impossible to navigate the mess that is EU related funding. Meaning only the big players can access them. Also, the amount of unnecessary duplication and crap sold in the security industry is unbelievable. If you go to the Counter Terrorism Expo in London, you can see this. Dozens of organisations selling effectively the same stuff.…

> There are many cases where UK tax payer would actually save money by firing the people in the jobs, giving them golden payoffs and buying more effective equipment elsewhere. The UK learned their lesson on that approach decades ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassau_Agreement#Skybolt_Crisi...

It's been burnt by many joint projects also though...F111 etc

Re: How billions vanish into the security industry

#35

Post by pavement »

nnq wrote: post #23
pavement wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet even the almighty US cannot certify that most of their tech is built at home. Probably only the shit that matters. The nuclear weapons, first and foremost, and then an exponential decay in validation as you get less and less lethal. I gotta figure the F-35 is cover for several substantial black budgets at this point, and that it's actually much cheaper than the paper trail would have us believe, simply because…

> the F-22's and the F-35's avionics both were controlled over a firewire bus ...and what problem would a firewire bus seem to indicate? (But overall I'd agree that the widely trumpeted F-35 blunder is kind of a PR stunt from the US military for the rest of the world: "look, we've just spent so many billions on top secret military capabilities you know nothing about, so we have super dope secret weapons that will blo…

Mostly, the use of a standard interface like firewire (IEEE 1394) seems to hint at economical choices being made somewhere in the supply chain, in that it probably allowed lockheed to source off-the-shelf parts, when wiring up the planes and loading software packages.

They didn't spend extra to develop or patent custom avionics superior to civilian technologies, or even try to lock secret intellectual property into the designs, to create a barrier around the fly-by-wire systems. This is a rare event when it comes to corporations interacting with government programs. Especially when fielding niche high technology line items with decades-long lifecycles.

Whether it was stipulated as part of the government program or one of lockheed's design decisions, there's a sense that the economical option provides breathing room for false compartments, without reducing superficial complexity.

Re: How billions vanish into the security industry

#36

Post by colechristensen »

pavement wrote: post #35
nnq wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the F-22's and the F-35's avionics both were controlled over a firewire bus ...and what problem would a firewire bus seem to indicate? (But overall I'd agree that the widely trumpeted F-35 blunder is kind of a PR stunt from the US military for the rest of the world: "look, we've just spent so many billions on top secret military capabilities you know nothing about, so we have super dope secret weapons that will blo…

Mostly, the use of a standard interface like firewire (IEEE 1394) seems to hint at economical choices being made somewhere in the supply chain, in that it probably allowed lockheed to source off-the-shelf parts, when wiring up the planes and loading software packages. They didn't spend extra to develop or patent custom avionics superior to civilian technologies, or even try to lock secret intellectual property into t…

Defense contractors talk a whole lot about COTS (commercial off the shelf) these days (and in the past few decades). It's a big deal to be able to not spend money reengineering something equivalent to an existing technology. It would take _years_ to create a new data comms interface (like FireWire, USB 1,2,3, ThunderBolt, etc etc) and why? The signaling physical layer and cabling design don't need to be redone do they?

They'll surely have reengineered cables and connectors to survive the aircraft environment, but who wouldn't rather buy a FireWire PHY from Mouser than design and manufacture something similar from the ground up?

Decisions like this will have happened at Lockheed and high up / early in the design phase. (i.e. it's not some subcontractor finding efficiencies but a fundamental block of the system design)

Re: How billions vanish into the security industry

#37

Post by colechristensen »

Spooky23 wrote: post #33
hectorr wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just about a massive conflict kinetically disrupting those supply lines. Influcencing those supply lines is a key tactic in the day-by-day posturing and low-level conflicts of geopolitics.

That's what we have now in this cyber warfare stuff. The reality is that we always have to push conflict to the fringes with "Tier 1" states (which I define as people with Nukes). The cold war answer was to fight using proxies indirectly. The modern answer is cyber/information warfare.

There were proxy wars sure, but the cold war clandestine ... er spycraft or whatever you'd like to call it has just embraced computers. The CIA and friends and the KGB/FSB and friends just got some new tricks in addition to the old ones.
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