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The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

responsiblestatecraft.org

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Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#381

Post by hef19898 »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #349
hef19898 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reas…

My background is medical devices (21CFR), not aerospace. The "story" I like to tell about how much procedures matter is the stack of $1,200 single board computers I was offered because when they arrived on the loading dock, the person from Receiving didn't follow the proper procedure, so they couldn't be sent to Manufacturing to be assembled into the $700,000 instrument we sold but were instead heading for the dumpst…

Lately I saw quite some mobility from aerospace to the medical world, since basic processes are similar enough. The message behind your example was driven home to me almost on day one by grizzeled, old ops procurment collegue of mine: parts without proper documentation are basically worthless.

Lucky for you so being able to reuse that hardware!

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#382

Post by hef19898 »

nonethewiser wrote: post #379
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…

All roads lead to "the situation is completely fucked up." The more immovable the reasons are for the $50,000 trashcan, the more evidence we have that something is systemically wrong. The best case scenario is that this was fraud and without it the trashcan would cost a reasonable price. But if it just "has to be this way" then it's clear that the existing processes are terrible.

The existing processes made modern aerospace and aviation the only Six Sigma save industry in existence. Processes are just fine as they are, things like 50k trash cans are the edge cases of said very safe environment.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#383

Post by radiator »

This also shows once more how you cannot measure military strength of nations by budget. For example, US military spending is X times that of Russia, therefore the US army must be stronger. Or F35 costs so many mamy dollars, it has to be a super duper aircraft.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#384

Post by quickthrowman »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #304
ceejayoz wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

> You can not buy one of these at Target. They are not putting little plastic bins by the workstations in an AWACS plane. You do realize there are multiple trash cans available, right? Some that are metal. Of many different sizes. It would take less time to go store to store across the country and source 4 trash cans than it would to do this ludicrous process.

You will not find a trash can in a store that meets the specifications document that defines an acceptable 707 trash can. There aren’t any being made by anyone that fit the precise military specification, so they must be manufactured at very low volumes, which spreads the overhead across far fewer units, resulting in eye-popping unit prices.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#385

Post by schemester »

DropInIn wrote: post #192
david422 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I worked for a company that had loads of process for even the smallest changes. It was frustrating, but what I came to realize was that the company was not interested in fixing bugs or building features - they were primarily interested in not breaking things/keeping the status quo. This was an established business that was concerned with keeping the business running, not chasing the latest and greatest. Perhaps a…

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

No, of course not, if your military doesn’t develop tech faster than the competition then you lose.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#386

Post by ajmurmann »

fivre wrote: post #302
ajmurmann wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have had this concern raised, and I'm unclear how, if you adhere to that model of compatibility, that you don't effectively dispense with semver altogether and make every release a major version bump, as every change is breaking if you relied on broken or insecure behavior in earlier versions. IMO it makes more sense to communicate the expected impact of the changes, so that downstream can read a patch bump as unli…

Yeah, it gets fuzzy and loses clear meaning. Unfortunately, major releases are expensive in that support contacts are typically guarantee support durations for major or minor releases. Having dozens of versions that all require separate patches quickly can absorb much of your orgs productivity.

Re: The Pentagon’s $52k trash can

#387

Post by d-man »

TrackerFF wrote: post #124

I had the pleasure of being involved in a software project where the contractor was one of the usual suspects (Raytheon, Lockheed, etc.). Prior to this, I had no idea why defense projects were so expensive and slow. You have to understand, there are so many levels of negotiation, over the smallest changes imaginable. There's no such thing as "open source code" in these projects, everything is either modified off-the-…

s/defense/regulated industry/ I found a bug in my company’s software product once. The code was using the user’s display name in a lookup rather than the username. I grabbed a QA engineer, he agreed it was a bug, and he put the wheels in motion. I don’t think that fix ever made it into a release.

Our software was part of the stack that our regulated customers were using to document their compliance. Every year or two, they would audit our development process to insure that untoward code wasn’t slipping into the release. Getting the fix into a release would have required that the bug be prioritized, fixed and qa’ed. Never became important enough. It burned me at first, but I’m not sure it was the wrong outcome.

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