When you have an effectively infinite supply of money, what is the need for accountants?
The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
451–460 of 527 posts
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#452Article has LLM-stank on it. Hard to tell how much is actually Steve Blank's original thoughts, and how much is just AI slop. TBH, it fits the philosophy - why write a good article yourself, when you can get a 70% article for 5% of the effort?
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#453As 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…
You are missing the criminals for tge policy discussion. Idiocracy vs kleptocracy.
Stir in a little kakistocracy there to get it just right ...
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#454As 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…
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 maintain. By dragging out the development for decades they can keep the engineers employed without burdening themselves with enormous O&M costs.
Obviously this will have to change if war breaks out for real, but in theory they won't be scrambling to hire people and will have at least some production capability. They will be scrambling to expand the production lines, but they won't be starting from 0.
A lot of people see defense contractors as an enormous waste of money, but to the government it is a strategic investment.
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#455We don’t need more weapons. We also don’t have real adversaries, that’s war propaganda.
You have to be completely insane to think China is not an adversary. Personally, I think we are in WW3 right now and we have already lost. Americans are just too lazy and insular to read anything involving Chinese military strategy. I can't think of more basic Chinese military strategy than to avoid a head-on battle with a strong enemy. You beat the strong enemy by every means other than a head-on battle. We are wait…
Out of curiosity, I'd love if you'd expand a bit on this comment.
Not meant sarcastically, and not because I want to refute anything, I'm genuinely curious what these tactics have been and why the US has already lost.
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
The contractors cheer because there are fewer limitations on poor quality products, project management, and fraud.
I'm talking engineering teams supporting already fielded equipment. They just "know things" like which basically free tweaks ought to be made as a result of knowledge gained from the assembly being in the field. They don't stand to gain from the product being crap. Most of the fixes are basically free BOM tweaks that don't really matter but provide incremental improvements/refinements if made and the cumulative nicke…
>Most of the fixes are basically free BOM tweaks that don't really matter
From my experience there are very few BOM tweaks that don’t need a whole lot of validation, there’s no free lunch here
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#457As 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.
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#458Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that the F-22 is gorgeous, but it is also extremely expensive to operate, couldn’t be exported, can’t do carrier launch or VTOL so the demand was inherently lower. That said, we could have made more than 195 of the them, but even at 750 it would have still been significantly more expensive per aircraft than the F-35 and it wouldn’t have let us cancel the F-35 program.
I feel like we got locked into the aerodynamic & airframe structural limitations of a particular CVN format with the USS Enterprise and are doing some wacky things, like not navalizing the F-22 or the C-130 or the B-21, because we can't dream any larger without assuming that such a ship would cost infinity dollars. South Korea, Japan, and China build larger container, tanker, and bulk ships all the time for ~1% of th…
The US military doesn’t want to sacrifice the capacity to go through the Panama Canal without getting a large benefit.
As to cost, in many ways a cruise ship is a better comparison than a cargo ship. The giant crew needed to maintain and operate a large aircraft fleet themselves need support staff, supplies, housing, etc. Carriers are expensive because of the people and systems onboard not the size of the ship.
Even just moving aircraft up and down from the flight deck requires a massive and thus expensive system. Civilian nuclear reactor are hideously expensive to build and operate let alone a system designed to ramp up and down more quickly, operate on a moving ship etc. Close in weapon systems have limited field of fire when you want a clear flight deck etc.
So sure, in theory you could just say we want a larger flight deck and are going to just have a number of empty components to pad out the ship but it’s not so simple.
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#459The 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
Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
You, and people like you, are a part of the problem.
By recognizing that both teams take away my autonomy at every opportunity? How does that make me part of the problem?
You don't recognize that, which is why your point of comparison to a random thing Trump did openly his first week in office had to be a secret program started 18 years ago and revealed 12 years ago. You just feel obligated to make it a both-sides thing, because you've internalized the idea that a wise or savvy person will always diagnose a problem as systemic rather than blaming specific individuals.
I genuinely don't mean this as an insult! I know what you're thinking because I've been in your shoes, and that's why I can so confidently encourage you to step out of them before it's too late. Donald Trump thinks everyone in the country, including you, should be required to support him and acknowledge his greatness; if you haven't yet felt that pressure, it just means he hasn't gotten around to your interests yet.