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Pentagon woos Silicon Valley to join ranks of arms makers

wsj.com

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Re: Pentagon woos Silicon Valley to join ranks of arms makers

#31

Post by kilroy123 »

photochemsyn wrote: post #15

The latest estimates of the military budgets of the USA and China are 768 billion and 270 billion, respectively - yet China seems to be equalling if not outpacing the United States on speed of technological innovation as well as on international trade arrangements. Calling on private capital to make risky investments in new technologies that only have one likely customer - the US government (well, maybe some Third Wo…

It's far more complicated than that.

https://www.sandboxx.us/blog/how-does-chinas-defense-spendin...

Re: Pentagon woos Silicon Valley to join ranks of arms makers

#32

Post by dredmorbius »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #2

Weird title. Silicon Valley was literally founded by military spending and as far as I know it never really stopped. Apparently the crux of the article is that the military wants more private capital to flow in the defense industry and an healthier ecosystems because the few large companies which have become keys to the military complex have become really inefficient. It’s interesting but a different point entirely.

Steve Blank's "Secret History of Silicon Valley" (2008/9) is an HN perennial:

https://steveblank.com/secret-history/>

Algolia search: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fsteveblank.com%2Fsec...>

Re: Pentagon woos Silicon Valley to join ranks of arms makers

#33

Post by imwithstoopid »

So far, the "defense 2.0" companies seem to be following the path of Anduril - very high grade drones and cams. I'm not trashing them - there is a huge market for military grade observation tech.

I'm just wondering when one of these startups commits to making things that kill people.

Even then, a company isn't just limited to selling to the military...way waaaay more Sig P320s have been sold to civilians than will ever be sold to the army, and I expect the Spear to likewise be much larger for civilian sales than government sales (yes, a civilian Spear is coming).

Re: Pentagon woos Silicon Valley to join ranks of arms makers

#34

Post by dredmorbius »

I thought I saw a very similar headline within the past month or so, also from WSJ if memory serves, though it could have been another publication, perhaps WaPo.

HN archive search-fu fails me.

Closest I'm finding is 5 months old, "State Department Urges Silicon Valley to Aid National Security Effort": https://archive.vn/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farticles%2Fst...>

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33215418>

Re: Pentagon woos Silicon Valley to join ranks of arms makers

#35

Post by imwithstoopid »

bell-cot wrote: post #25

The U.S. DoD needs to have more in-house capacity to produce weapons, equipment, and ammunition - as it did, very successfully, from ~1780 to ~1980. Outsourcing to a few far-too-consolidated and far-too-greedy defense contractors (and their well-paid-off friends in Congress) is just plain idiotic.

US DoD already makes its own ammo

Re: Pentagon woos Silicon Valley to join ranks of arms makers

#36

Post by bell-cot »

kilroy123 wrote: post #28
bell-cot wrote: post #25

The U.S. DoD needs to have more in-house capacity to produce weapons, equipment, and ammunition - as it did, very successfully, from ~1780 to ~1980. Outsourcing to a few far-too-consolidated and far-too-greedy defense contractors (and their well-paid-off friends in Congress) is just plain idiotic.

I just watched this the other day, and it was very eye-opening. They came to the same conclusion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEe_dJZtF1E

Wow - that's WSJ-branded content. Not the crowd that you'd expect to speak ill of corporate mergers and pricing power.

Re: Pentagon woos Silicon Valley to join ranks of arms makers

#37

Post by vegetablepotpie »

Acquisition Talk blog spends a lot of attention towards fixing the Planning, Programming, Budgeting, Execution process in defense. There are many barriers for startups, the big one is getting the right amount of funding at the right time. It looks like creating the office of strategic capital is an attempt to solve this problem. Expect the defense majors, Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon to lobby against this hard.

https://acquisitiontalk.com/2022/08/does-dod-not-actually-wa...

Re: Pentagon woos Silicon Valley to join ranks of arms makers

#38

Post by _huayra_ »

Does anyone work (or worked in the past) for a defense contracting company? I'm curious what the environment is like (e.g. is it a pressure cooker using ancient coding standards where everything requires a bunch of people with shiny metal on their work uniform to approve?).

I worked for a startup where DARPA had given a fairly generous grant when I started my career (they made a medical training device that the military was interested in). I was jr, so I wasn't privy to the financial details of things, but overall it was very "waterfall-y" and a lot of form filling and box checking. WLB was overall pretty fair, but the key thing is that processes really hamstrung everyone (think MISRA style of coding standards) and morale was rather low. Pay wasn't great either so I left.

I just wonder now that I am more senior and have more financial responsibilities, is defense a financially safe space in case more tech keeps RIFing, even if overall comp levels are low.

Re: Pentagon woos Silicon Valley to join ranks of arms makers

#39

Post by differingopinio »

Mizoguchi wrote: post #14

First they need to fix the visa lottery bs. Many of the brightest engineers educated at our top schools need to leave the US because they can't get a status that allows them to work, stay, reunite with their families and eventually become legal residents and citizens.

Why would you say this in time when people are getting laid off left and right? We need to provide jobs for everyone who is already here. The F visa is a non-immigration visa to begin with.

Additionally, we need to deal with people who come to our country and then only exclusively hire people from their country of origin. I can point to the page of multiple Chinese professors in the US who were trained by Americans in American universities, then start their own labs in American universities and only hire Chinese graduate students (and I’m not talking about labs of 2 students, I’m talking about massive labs of 15 - 20 students). Our country is getting taken advantage of and the last thing we need to do is give away more visas.

Re: Pentagon woos Silicon Valley to join ranks of arms makers

#40

Post by imwithstoopid »

photochemsyn wrote: post #15

The latest estimates of the military budgets of the USA and China are 768 billion and 270 billion, respectively - yet China seems to be equalling if not outpacing the United States on speed of technological innovation as well as on international trade arrangements. Calling on private capital to make risky investments in new technologies that only have one likely customer - the US government (well, maybe some Third Wo…

The gaps in US/China arms will never be closed by startups...no startup is going to start churning out Columbia-class subs or F35s.

We screwed up and lost decades on crap like the Zumwalt class, the LCS and numerous other boondoggles that easily cost us a decade and $100 bln++. The LCS really deserves special mention for a unique level of stupidity - we are scrapping them pretty much as they come off the line. Its crazy - we don't want these ships, have committed to scrapping them...and we're still ordering them! Only in America.

Let's not forget how much we built and burned in Iraq and Afghanistan. How many subs and carriers could have been built with the resources squandered? We sure did buy a lot of Humvees that never came back.

Even without those epic failures, it isn't clear we could beat the Chinese in manufacturing. Throwing bodies at a problem is definitely in their wheelhouse.

While we were bombing, they were building. Now we get to deal with it.

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