Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

steveblank.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 527 posts

Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

#491

Post by vilhelm_s »

Alupis wrote: post #72
stackskipton wrote: post #47

As 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…

The F-22 itself was delayed because of the end of the cold war. The original plans were to have it enter service in 1995, and then this slipped by a year or two. They could have had it being pass produced from 1997, but they delayed it because of the peace dividend. (This is from Aronstein et al, "ATF to F-22 Raptor"). So one should not consider the 2005 date as "how long it took".

Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

#492

Post by w10-1 »

moregrist wrote: post #445
tsoukase wrote: post #408

There might be no 80 year long period in global history more peaceful than the current (measured by war fatalities per global population). And this happened due to a single reason: nuclear warheads. The super-powers USA, China, India whatever better go back to a cold war: stable balance, no casualties, only media fights. Every body, war guys and normal people, is happy. And in case the things escalate we are all to a…

This puts far too much emphasis on weapons and far too little on the diplomatic soft power that made the threat of these weapons effective. I don’t think we would have had decades of stability without the Marshall plan investing in western Europe. Similarly the US investment in post-WWII Japan and South Korea gave the US strong allies that had common purpose. It’s not separate; soft diplomacy made the extensive netwo…

Another factor is economic inter-dependence. Heck, Europe has been buying energy from Russia to fund the war in Ukraine. China has contained the US not through war or diplomacy but through US economic dependency (yet having enough of their own internal markets to ignore economic pressure).

Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

#493

Post by ntonozzi »

jandrese wrote: post #484
ntonozzi wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this goal documented by the Department of War somewhere? Or are you guessing that there has to be a strategic reason for what seems quite wasteful. It sure seems like there's more efficient ways to achieve this goal.

What would you suggest as a more efficient way to achieve this goal? Building thousands of advanced fighter jets for private citizens? Keeping highly skilled engineers up to date on the most modern technologies and maintaining specialized factories is inherently expensive. You can't leave the factories mothballed because you need to keep the skilled workers employed and practiced with manufacturing. Maybe there could…

My question is genuine.

Not really the point, but an idea that springs to mind is selling fighter jets to allied countries.

Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

#494

Post by AlotOfReading »

dgoldstein0 wrote: post #305
AlotOfReading wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Chinese laborers working in BYD and foxconn factories have higher wages than their equivalents in Mexico and Vietnam building products sold for 3-5x as much in the US. The cheapest labor in the world is found in Africa and yet Western industrial manufacturing has largely ignored the continent. The price of labor isn't the most important factor here.

> The Chinese laborers working in BYD and foxconn factories have higher wages than their equivalents in Mexico and Vietnam building products sold for 3-5x as much in the US. I'm having a hard time parsing this. Also, source? > The cheapest labor in the world is found in Africa and yet Western industrial manufacturing has largely ignored the continent. The price of labor isn't the most important factor here. ... Yeah…

Re: wages, we have info from reporting. BYD had protests last year when they cut worker overtime at one of their factories, dropping salaries that were previously 8.5k-11.5k USD to 5-6k. Foxconn offers base rate around $2.50/hr, so 5k USD without overtime (which you'll inevitably work). This used to be higher as well.

Mexican autoworker wages came up during the GM UAW negotiations. Those range from about $9/day (~3k USD) up. Higher paying positions tend to go to Americans crossing the border.

Vinfast pays about 100M dong (4k USD with bonus) to their factory workers in Vietnam, which is quite a decent wage locally from what I understand.

Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

#495

Post by rangestransform »

jandrese wrote: post #484
ntonozzi wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this goal documented by the Department of War somewhere? Or are you guessing that there has to be a strategic reason for what seems quite wasteful. It sure seems like there's more efficient ways to achieve this goal.

What would you suggest as a more efficient way to achieve this goal? Building thousands of advanced fighter jets for private citizens? Keeping highly skilled engineers up to date on the most modern technologies and maintaining specialized factories is inherently expensive. You can't leave the factories mothballed because you need to keep the skilled workers employed and practiced with manufacturing. Maybe there could…

Have legitimately successful aerospace companies that sell to other places, and create dual-use industries like autonomous driving with more DARPA challenge type stuff

Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

#496

Post by mapt »

Retric wrote: post #458
mapt wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The US sacrificed that a long time ago, when it first introduced supercarriers in the 50's. Too tall for the bridges, too wide for anything but the Third Locks era, and then only with some minor alterations.

Now that we do have the Third Locks, I think it would be reasonable to replace the bridges and make the alterations, a rounding error in the CVN budget.

Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

#497

Post by potato3732842 »

shadowpho wrote: post #456
potato3732842 wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm talking about changes on the order of hot vs cold weather optimized rubber dust boots.

Either works. One lasts longer. The "wrong" one was chosen originally because the default assumption at the time was Fulda and not Fallujah.

Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

#498

Post by Retric »

mapt wrote: post #496
Retric wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The US sacrificed that a long time ago, when it first introduced supercarriers in the 50's. Too tall for the bridges, too wide for anything but the Third Locks era, and then only with some minor alterations. Now that we do have the Third Locks, I think it would be reasonable to replace the bridges and make the alterations, a rounding error in the CVN budget.

Repositioning is far from the only concern but it is something they care about. For example the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower crossed the Suez Canal in 2021.

The much smaller Wasp-class amphibious assault ship on the other hand can carry as many as 20 F-35B’s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasp-class_amphibious_assault_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America-class_amphibious_assau...

Re: The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

#499

Post by scuff3d »

w10-1 wrote: post #489
scuff3d wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given there is apparently a large emphasis on the performance of these individual "portfolio" managers, and speed of delivery is made to be such a big deal, this is definitely going to get out own people killed.

> this is definitely going to get out own people killed. But the key feature making this a horrible decision is that the people responsible for getting our people killed will not be discoverable, and they will never face the consequences. Heck: they might not even know, because they're doing good by their standards. That's exactly how you make a broken but persistent and entrenched system: incentives without conseque…

There's also going to be a large lag. A lot of the protections are baked in and won't just disappear overnight, but as the system degrades it will get worse and worse. Decisions made today might not cause immediately visible damage for a decade, and by then the people responsible will be gone, even if you could find them.

If people think Boeing has been a shit show over the last 10 years, they ain't seen nothing yet.

Post reply on HN