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 brand new jet acts up and results in crashes.
Oh yea, F-35 was built with move fast, they rolled models off the production line quickly, so Lockheed could get more money, but it looks like whole "We will fix busted models later" might have been more expensive. Time will tell.
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 for a new airframe and some were not. I suspect the issue wasn't "move fast, break things" but rather massive layers of bureaucracy and committees that paralyzed the development pipeline.
The F-22 was part of the Advanced Tactical Fighter (ATF) program which dates back to 1981. It's prototype, the YF-22 first flew in 1990, and the F-22 itself first flew in 1997. It entered production in 2005. Again, 20+ years to field a new airframe.
Something is very wrong if it takes 20+ years to field new military technologies. By the time these technologies are fielded, a whole generation of employees have retired and leadership has turned over multiple times.
Most of time, this delay is in peacetime, it makes sense to do a ton of testing, wait until testing results then go to full production. Your primary concern is not spending a ton of money and not getting a bunch of people killed. It's basically waterfall in fighter development.
Wartime is more agile, you quickly close the loop but downside is sometimes does not work and when it does not work, there might be a people cost. US has done it with fighters before, F-4U Corsair was disaster initially in carrier landings and killed some pilots in training. However, this was considered acceptable cost to get what was clearly very capable fighter out there.
I think this is the crux of it. The article discusses Ukraine but they weren't making millions of drones, the private capital wasn't there and the bureaucracy that coordinates it wasn't primed until the war.
So then what value does the bureaucratic process add if it's the first thing that gets shitcanned when good results in good time matter?
At the end of the day it's all people cost. Just because it's fractional lives wasted in the form of man hours worked to pay the taxes to pay for unnecessary paper pushing labor instead of whole lives doesn't actually make the waste less (I suspect it's actually more in a lot of cases).
> what value does the bureaucratic process add if it's the first thing that gets shitcanned when good results in good time matter?
This is like asking what good do reserves do if you spend them down in a crisis.
The bureaucracy aims to keep waste and corruption to a minimum during peacetime. In war, the aims change--you're now not only ramping up production, but the penalties for fucking with a war are typically more drastic than lining one's pockets during peacetime.
Think about the local implications of what you just said. If we toss the process when effective expenditure of resources toward results matter and consequences are the most serious then the process must be less efficient at producing good results for the expenditure than the corruption (or whatever else the process is replacing). So then why are we running it at all?
You can absolutely make an argument about accepting reduced efficiency to dilute concentrated harms (e.g. keep a test pilot from dying), but none of the peddlers of process dare even make that argument so I suspect the math is questionable without hand waving or subjective valuation (e.g. face saved avoiding errors).
War and peacetime are two different things. During wartime you need lots of materiel quickly, so value for money estimates, anti corruption practices all get reduced in the name of production numbers at all costs. Verification is easier because you go directly from the assembly line to the front line. If it doesn’t work, you find out and make changes quickly. You know what you need because you’re in the process of using it.
In peacetime, everything is different. You don’t know who your next opponent is going to be, so you need to keep options open. You don’t know if you’ll have a war before the equipment you just bought rots away. You don’t want wartime production levels and stifling your wider economy. You also don’t want a Russia situation where you ignore value for money estimates and audits only to find the money you spent on missiles went in the back pocket of a random colonel.
> During wartime you need lots of materiel quickly, so value for money estimates, anti corruption practices all get reduced in the name of production numbers at all costs
Everyone keeps saying this yet it seems to be the opposite, results for dollars tradeoffs are better in wartime.
If anything it seems like the difference is that during wartime it's easier for the end users to tell the bureaucracy to get out of the way and as a result value for money is unchanged or even improved.
>You also don’t want a Russia situation where you ignore value for money estimates and audits only to find the money you spent on missiles went in the back pocket of a random colonel.
There is no difference to the taxpayer or the soldier in the trench whether the money went into one specific colonel's back pocket or got pissed away on running organizational process. The money is gone and the missile isn't there.
At you can least throw colonel in jail (or out a window, because Russia). Imagine if instead of a colonel's pocket the money was spent pushing papers around to no end? It would be the Spiderman pointing at Spiderman meme and nobody would be held responsible except perhaps an unlucky scapegoat.
> Everyone keeps saying this yet it seems to be the opposite, results for dollars tradeoffs are better in wartime.
Do you understand what economies of scale are? Of course some production costs go down because you're producing far more. You're producing at this high level because the enemy is busy blowing up your equipment!
This is also why it's easy to show results: you have live test subjects in the form of the enemy you're trying to blow up and who's trying to blow you up.
Hell, the article also makes clear that this "low-bureaucracy nirvina" that you seem to believe in was costing the US taxpayer huge sums of money in waste and inefficiency.
> At you can least throw colonel in jail (or out a window, because Russia).
What planet are you on? Russia only found out because their tanks ran out of diesel and got towed away by Ukrainian farmers! Are you seriously suggesting the optimal result is for NATO forces to find out our equipment never got manufactured right when we need it?
Every comment I've seen from you has been "bureaucracy bad!" without any clear knowledge beyond some handwaving, usually ignoring the topic at hand.
Do you understand what results are? Not having something because people lied and took money is no different to the guy in the foxhole or the guy ordering those guys around than not having something because nobody lied and the money got spent paying people to do work that did nothing to get that something closer to being actually available.
>Hell, the article also makes clear that this "low-bureaucracy nirvina" that you seem to believe in was costing the US taxpayer huge sums of money in waste and inefficiency.
The article literally spends approximately 1/3 of its scroll bar talking about the problems with the system and how all the steps, all the process, all the tangential work that must per the rules be done despite not being part of the critical path of fielding systems prevents said systems from being delivered on time or on budget.
>Are you seriously suggesting the optimal result is for NATO forces to find out our equipment never got manufactured right when we need it?
It speaks volumes that your responses are constantly attempting toward strawmen and false dichotomies rather than assess what the right amount of procurement process is.
>> Do you understand what economies of scale are?
> Do you understand what results are?
So I take it, no, you don't understand. You're comparing costs and processes that exist outside of wartime to costs and processes that exist during wartime and haven't considered why, despite being told.
> It speaks volumes that your responses are constantly attempting toward strawmen and false dichotomies
I find it hilarious that you state this after your first 2 paragraphs.
> the right amount of procurement process is.
This childish fixation on a flat number is why you don't seem able to understand the problem.
Let's go back to the top, where you said:
> If we toss the process when effective expenditure of resources toward results matter and consequences are the most serious then the process must be less efficient at producing good results for the expenditure than the corruption (or whatever else the process is replacing). So then why are we running it at all?
This was in the context of comparing wartime to peacetime procurement processes. My entire comment addressed the difference between those environments, which you completely ignored to have a childish rant about "too much process." This isn't the first time you've responded to my comments by ignoring the substance and instead trying to (badly) strawman it.
The process aims to minimize risk. This goes for process in general - that's why process exists.
Okay, let's think about what risks might be associated with making a fighter plane. The plane could blow up. The plane could be hard to maintain. The plane could get fighter pilots killed.
In a war, death is already on the table and soldiers are, more or less, expendable. In peacetime, this is not the case.
It's not that when we are in war, everything goes lovey dovey and great. No. Shit goes wrong constantly.
But we don't have time to care, we have bigger fish to fry: war.
> The bureaucracy aims to keep waste and corruption to a minimum during peacetime
This is the problem though - the bureaucracy is guaranteed to add a lot of cost, both in its own personnel, the personnel in the companies employed to deal with the bureaucracy, and the additional time taken for all bids to be evaluated. This is guaranteed to slow down everything, with the promise that it will try to prevent issues. Which, if the bureaucracy is badly run, weaponised, or captured, is a terrible trade.
You just, without a hint of irony, compared killing service personnel with civil service office work. Giving someone a job isn't what wasted tax money looks like.
The point about government waste is that some of the things government does save lives. So money wasted equates to lives that could have been saved. See value of a statistical life etc.
I don’t know what your first sentence means. Do you say “killing” to mean “eliminating the job of”? I don’t see anywhere that mentioned “killing”.
If your second sentence is correct, then let’s allocate taxes to digging holes and filling them in? Ad absurdum but I think it applies? Like it seems reasonable to have an opinion on whether a function should continue to be funded by tax dollars. In a properly operating economy this would open up skilled labor to work somewhere more useful. Unless they weren’t actually skilled, in which case yes you have a problem hmm…
> Do you say “killing” to mean “eliminating the job of”?
No. They mean killing as in ordering a pilot to fly an airplane with less cautious testing resulting in a crash and the death of the crew.
> I don’t see anywhere that mentioned “killing”.
It is there. This is what stackskipton said “Your primary concern is not spending a ton of money and not getting a bunch of people killed.” They even use the example of the F-4U Corsairs mentioning how during the program pilots died.
This is the comment potato3732842 replied to and this is the context their message should be interpreted in. They compared “fractional lives wasted” which they define as “man hours worked to pay the taxes to pay for unnecessary paper pushing labor” with “whole lives”. They don’t define what they mean by whole lives lost, but since they wrote it as a response to stackskipton‘s comment from context i think they mean pilot deaths.
To me it seems they are arguing that if we accept more mangled pilot bodies pulled out of burning wreckages then we can do the program cheaper. And to understand where they stand on the question they call the work needed to prevent those pilot deaths “unnecessary paper pushing”. Is your reading of the comment different?
The argument was literally about pilots dying because of war-time cutting of costs to ensure fast deployment of new tech. Then somebody misread the room and suggested office work was just as much of a waste of life as dying in a horrible accident due to canning of safety testing.
> but rather massive layers of bureaucracy and committees that paralyzed the development pipeline.
They decided to make one airframe in three variants for three different branches. They were trying to spend money they didn't have and thought this corner cutting would save it.
> Something is very wrong if it takes 20+ years to field next-generation military technologies.
It's the funding. The American appetite for new "war fighters" is exceptionally low when there's no exigent conflict facing us. They're simply building the _wrong thing_.
The problem clearly is, once a need is identified - it can be costly or ruinous to wait 20+ years to realize the solution. The DoW is clearly signaling they want the "Need -> Solution" loop tightened, significantly, sacrificing cost for timeliness.
That puts the US on good footing, ready to face peer and near-peer, next-generation warfare.
If Ukraine has taught us anything, it's off-the-shelf - ready today - weapons are needed in significant quantity. Drone warfare has changed almost everything - we're seeing $300 off-the-shelf drones kill millions of dollars of equipment and personnel. If the military needs anti-drone capabilities, it can't wait 20+ years to field them.
We don't just need to pick on new/next-generation military technologies either. The US currently produces between 30,000-40,000 155mm artillery shells a month, but Ukraine (at peak) expended 10,000 per day[1]. The loop is far too long...
> The US currently produces between 30,000-40,000 155mm artillery shells a month, but Ukraine (at peak) expended 10,000 per day[1].
Wars are incredibly expensive, and the US should not be producing weapons, in peacetime, at the rate they would be expended during an active war. What we should have the ability to rapidly scale production.
Weapons need to be replaced, even ones never used. To be capable of scaling production you need at least some degree of production constantly simmering in the background. Yet even then, there is a limit to how much you can scale up on demand.
The best and cheapest weapons are the ones never used, but making no weapons at all is the most expensive choice in the end.
The problem is you have these hugely expensive facilities like the tank plant in Lima that's pretty much only good for making tanks. Transitioning manufacturing to production lines that can be economically kept online because they make non-tank products when we're not fighting anyone is the way to go.
There's a ton of work going on in this area, and has been for a while (check out DARPA's AVM project for some of it).
I'm not sure there is any law against owning an unarmed tank. But for "dangerous and unusual" weapons themselves, an important case is from 1939 - Miller vs USA. [1] And it's absurdly weird. Basically the defendant was a thug with a penchant for snitching on everybody.
In his final case, which he also snitched during, he argued that a law he had been charged under (a firearms regulation law) was unconstitutional. The judge who heard his case was very much in favor of the gun control law and had made numerous public statements as such, but he also likely knew that the law was on very shaky constitutional ground, and had been fishing for a test case to advance it. And he found that in Miller.
So he concurred with Miller about the law's unconstitutionality! That resulted in the case being appealed up to the Supreme Court. Conveniently for the state, neither Miller or his defense representation appeared. So it was argued with no defense whatsoever. And Miller was found shot to death shortly thereafter, which wasn't seen as particularly suspicious given his snitching habits. And that case set the ultimate standard that's still appealed to, to this very day.
This is made even more ironic by the fact that the weapon he was being charged for possession of as being 'dangerous and unusual' was just a short barrel shotgun, which was regularly used in the military.
People can and do own tanks. Since they are giant (hard to park), slow moving, consume a lot of fuel, tend to need expensive maintenance, and can't be operated on many roads due to weight / vehicle restrictions, few people want to do this.
As far as nuclear bombs go... there are restrictions on owning fissile material in general that would preclude owning enough to have a working bomb.
> I’ve never really understood how the logic of the second amendment doesn’t extend to tanks and nukes.
Probably because if people could buy tanks to protect themselves, then the police would also need tanks to deconflict a situation where someone with a tank is upset and the damages are a bit higher when tank rounds start flying around. Imagine two neighbors getting into it in a a town, not to mention a city.
Even portable nukes are a stretch in the logic of "I need to protect my home" from intruders, not to mention the hundred kiloton yield ones.
Ten or fifteen years back, I had an ambition to buy such a vehicle and drive it around at Burning Man. I eventually settled for a deuce-and-a-half, which caused enough struggle and frustration that I'm glad I never actually bought a tank.
The conventional wisdom is that you need to buy several military vehicles in order to get and keep one up and running. Some things are going to come broken, some things will inevitably break, and the replacement parts aren't exactly at your local auto parts shop.
What is more critical as Ukraine has shown is ammunition, ie artillery shells, and of course any anti-drone ammunition (missiles are extremely expensive solution that should be reserved for ballistic missiles and not cheap drones).
More tanks on Ukraine's side wouldn't change current battlefield massively, drones limit how much use from tanks you can get. If you can scale your production to 10-50x within weeks then all is fine but thats almost impossible practically.
If anybody thinks we are heading for a peaceful stable decade without need of such items in massive numbers must have had head buried in the sand pretty deep.
> What we should have the ability to rapidly scale production.
How should the US make the manufacture of, say, the primers for artillery shells "rapidly scalable" in a way that is different from building a large stockpile? Be specific. Would you nationalize factories but leave them idle? You certainly won't have time to build or retool factories and staff them during a peer conflict. How would you present this to Congress vs. running those factories in peacetime as a jobs program?
> Would you nationalize factories but leave them idle?
Yes. Historically, these would be the national armories, Navy Yards, and Air Force plants. You know, Springfield Armory (of .30-06 Springfield fame, now a museum), Watertown Arsenal (now a fucking Home Depot, among other things), Charlestown Navy Yard(Boston, now largely a museum), Philadelphia Navy Yard (redeveloped? not my area), Air Force Plant 42 (near LA, still in use by Skunk Works among others), and others.
Having the capital idle/underutilized but maintained and a core group of people with the institutional knowledge ready to pass on during that rapid scaling up is what would make the factories able to scale up. Gun barrels (of all sizes) are relatively specialized from a manufacturing standpoint. Nobody is seriously arguing for having capacity to scale up to build 16" guns for battleships, but 5" guns are extremely common in naval use and 155mm guns are common for artillery. Being able to surge production of those without having to go through a learning curve would be a really great ability to have.
Interestingly, Goex, maker of black powder, is located on a military facility (Camp Minden) because that process remains both hazardous and surprisingly relevant to modern military use.
Better to keep things running at a low level than fully idle I'd think. Even if the outputs are consumed by testing, development, or even just stockpiled. Lots of things can get lost by not making parts for a while, including the knowledge involved in troubleshooting or replacing parts.
Of course then people would complain about all the money wasted not utilizing the equipment/space enough.
Also the DoE having to figure out how to make Fogbank again (a classified material used in weapons which they lost the manufacturing documentation for)
Invest in technology that makes the facilities that manufacture primers useful for more than just that one product. One might do that by changing the nature of the manufacturing facility towards a multipurpose "forge", changing the nature of primers so they're more like commercially attractive products, or some combination. DARPA has been working pretty hard on these topics over the years.
I was working on one when we got shut down due to a political squabble resulting in sequestrations. Reminds me of our recent shutdown in many ways.
I would even go one step back in the process. Make it possible to rapidly build factories in the US. And don’t idle that capacity — consider how quickly China brings factories online and how rapidly they could scale weapons production by shifting production of car factories to weapons factories.
This is, of course, a hard problem to solve, but solving it would be quite valuable for the US even without any wars.
Yes, this is absolutely part of it. Even if you had unlimited funding, unlimited trained workers, and a defect free, perfect weapon/product design, the urban planning regime would force you to spend 12 years in consultations before you could put one shovel in the ground to build the factory. Through p it all they would be trying to negotiate the size down and down and down until it finally was a factory the size of a single-family house.
We have scaled artillery shell production, it's about 3 times what production was prior to the conflict in Ukraine. And the Pentagon claims they'll double that again by next Spring.
Given that the actual peer conflict that matters to the US will almost certainly be decided by air and sea power, this all seems very much like pointless distraction.
But evidently it can be done, because it is being done. I suppose we are now more ready for some weird anti-matter goldilocks outcome where the PRC can somehow land and supply forces in Taiwan, while still somehow also being incapable of preventing the US from sending forces and supplies to the island. Seems like a weird fixation, but hey, it doesn't cost that many billions of dollars to accommodate Elbridge Colby.
Of course, our ally who actually needs artillery shells for counter battery fire, South Korea, can produce them in vast quantities. They are also conveniently located in the Pacific. It is one thing for them to be wary about doing too much help Ukraine. Russian can complicate their life quite a bit.It would be quite another thing if the US actually asked for shells in the middle of a war with China.
The problem is, the US sea power is being dwarfed by China rapidly, who have now surpassed the size of the US Navy and are quickly going to be even larger.
And the US does not have enough missiles for a war with China or even Russia realistically.
It's why there's a panic for artillery shells. They realize any real symmetrical with an enemy that isn't some guys in caves would become a war of attrition through numbers fast.
Lobbing billion dollar missiles as a strategy fails when you run out of money for them.
> The problem is, the US sea power is being dwarfed by China rapidly, who have now surpassed the size of the US Navy and are quickly going to be even larger.
The thing is that size matters in wars of attrition, but experience almost always wins.
China's problem is that they lack the experience the US Navy gained over decades of pretty much non-stop war even if they did not go up any significant adversary since the Vietnam war.
Sure because we decided to gut manufacturing in this country. It was deliberate decision made not by DoD following Federal Acquisition rules but by beancounters who didn't want to spend money on keeping manufacturing alive. Since we don't have civilian manufacturing base in this country and military does not want to buy a ton of artillery shells just for them to go idle, here we are.
Manufacturing in western countries was gutted by treasonous politicians bribed by corporations to do an end-run around the environmental laws, workplace regulations, and human rights that had been hard-won by the people over the previous 50-100 years, by allowing these abuses to continue elsewhere without even being required to pay commensurate tariffs or penalties.
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.
Western countries wouldn't have moved manufacturing to China in the past if wages weren't cheaper.
I think the cost of labour now is kind of irrelevant. It was the cost of labour (and China being a stable country with favourable rule of law) that drove offshoring in the 90s and 2000s. The Chinese manufacturers chose to invest in process improvement and automation rather than just chasing the cheapest labour - and so now they've got a massive technical advantage.
> 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 this seems fair. I think a lot of Africa has an infrastructure problem - it doesn't matter how cheaply you can manufacture if you can't move large volumes of raw materials/parts to the factory and finished goods from the factory. Plus many areas in Africa have security issues which make them less attractive places to do business. Geographically, a lot of the continent is cursed with hard to navigate rivers as well (the upper Nile being an exception), so only coastal shipping is really viable.
No, it was gutted by what I said it was gutted by. The price of labor I include in workplace regulations but I could have called it out on its own too.
If corporations could not have moved operations offshore to exploit workers and the environment in other countries for lower cost, then they would not have. They were permitted to.
Where the old "labor costs did killed it" canard really falls over is when you look at primary industry and things that physically can't be packed up and moved off shore in western countries. Mining, farming, forestry, fishing, things like that. Traditionally a lot of those industries have had high labor input costs too. They miraculously didn't all fall over like manufacturing though.
Labor costs are a cost, same as compliance with other workplace regulations and environmental laws of course. They are not the reason manufacturing was offshored though, they are the reason that corporations bribed treasonous politicians to allow this offshoring to occur with no penalty. As I said.
> Mining, farming, forestry, fishing, things like that. Traditionally a lot of those industries have had high labor input costs too. They miraculously didn't all fall over like manufacturing though.
Mining has been dropping since the 80s [0].
Farming, forestry, fishing are estimated to decline by 3% in the next 10 years [1]. After having fallen from ~50% of the US population in 1870 already.
It's cheaper to do things where labor is cheaper, then ship them around the world by sea.
> Farming, forestry, fishing are estimated to decline by 3% in the next 10 years [1]. After having fallen from ~50% of the US population in 1870 already.
You're linking to employment. Like manufacturing, these industries have been significantly automated and mechanized. So yes they have been employing fewer people. Corporations can't move the land and minerals and oil and gas offshore though, so those industries have not been killed. The cost of labor didn't kill them. That's despite all these minerals and petrochemicals and farmland available all around the global south too.
US ammo for civilian use isn't magically much more expensive than in cheaper places around the globe. Could be many factors ie economies of scale but at the end it doesn't matter - price of labor isn't a deciding factor, definitely not when you have US military budget.
$300 drones are not doing much of anything in Ukraine. Maybe some light weight ISR, but they don't even go-to the front line before having several grand of hardened radio equipment put on them - at which point they're not $300 anymore...
The flippant commentaries about drones help no one: they're a significant change in the intel environment, but nobody carefully inspects assumptions about cost efficiency or on the ground conditions.
Expensive drones are being used to fulfill roles which artillery fires could fulfill far more effectively, except both sides of the conflict don't have enough artillery but for vastly different reasons (whereas significant amounts of supplies are coming from a party which is more or less arming both of them: China's factories).
It should be noted that Ukraine has invested significant effort attempting to acquire US spec long range weapons like ATACMS and Tomahawk, and F-16 and HIMARS were both a big deal which took significant effort to get. Drones have created a new warfare dimension, but I find the way they're often discussed lacks of a lot of rigor or bearing on how they're actually being used.
> The American appetite for new "war fighters" is exceptionally low when there's no exigent conflict facing us.
That’s a problem easily solved.
We have the menace of the Red Maple Leaf people to the north, and perhaps a buffer zone south of the Rio Grand would stave off the caravans, give Texans some breathing room, and make more room for real Americans. Remember, the anti-Christ may show up at any time.
The American people have no appetite for war with Canada. Half the country think it's a deranged threat and the other half think it's a hilarious joke. There's no genuine support for it from the public.
Mexico is another story, but even then I don't think there's much in the way of public support for a ground invasion.
More than half the country was against the wars in Vietnam or in Iraq (2003), but they still happened. And if the current administration decides they want to invade Canada, Canada will be invaded no matter what the country thinks. Same goes for Mexico. How it ends, it is a completely different story and another administration's problem.
A great deal changed after Vietnam. Iraq was only possible because the country had a general blood lust against Muslims after 9/11, who were easy for a mostly white christian country to "other".
Nothing like that exists for Canada. Proposals to invade Canada aren't taken seriously by the public. Those who pretend to support it are just trying to piss people off with how stupid they can be.
> Something is very wrong if it takes 20+ years to field new military technologies.
Is it? By what criteria? IMHO the point is to get new tech out quickly enough that you aren't falling behind other major powers in the international arms race. The F35 seems to be ahead of the competition because countries around the world are lining up to buy it over much cheaper alternatives from Russia (Su57) and China (J35).
Not to mention that the Su57 also had about a 20 year development cycle. Maybe that's just how long takes to develop a new stealth fighter?
It didn’t take 20 years to make an airframe it took 20 years to do lots of research which eventually resulted in a wide range of systems and multiple very distinct airframes.
Hell F-35B does vertical takeoff and still mostly uses the same systems as the other designs, that should tell you something.
F-35B was added to JSF to ensure Lockheed (who had been working on exactly that since 1980s even to the point of licensing designs from USSR) was the only company that could win the contract.
And without the F-35B, what would be flown by the US Marines, and by most other countries' aircraft carriers, all of which require vertical take-off and landing?
Late addition of VTOL variant on mandates common airframe when it was well known that only Lockheed had anything in pipeline that could match the requirements and even then -B meant delays and issues due to inherent complexity of VTOL (to the point Britain nearly canceled the order for -B, only finding out it was too late to refit Queen Elizabeth carriers with CATOBAR kept the purchase afloat)
Reality is that VTOL model is ultimately a niche variant whose mandated commonality with air force and CATOBAR carrier variants impacted negatively both non- and VTOL options.
However, slapping supersonic VTOL requirement on what was supposed to be F-16 replacement in the given timeframe meant Lockheed would automatically get ahead as every other vendor had to scramble nearly from scratch while L-M had fresh supersonic VTOL data from both their own lab work and experimental work on Yak-141
You'll never find evidince hard enough to fashion the sort of club people who ask such questions ought to be bludgeoned with.
Do you really think anyone would be so stupid as to leave hard evidince? That's the magic of the whole process, they can do those things fully within the bounds of the process. They decide (or don't), often at the urging of lobbyists, or non-lobbyists parties who themselves typically aren't completely impartial, what they want. And often they have a specific product in mind that they want, but they can't say that so they write the requirement to all but say it.
Often times this is very reasonable and comes as the result of the end user having used multiple products or having used multiple contractors and knowing from experience with near certainty what or who they want.
In the alternate case where it's pork, this is often how upstarts get their start. Whoever the prime is doesn't wanna pay out the ass for someone else's pork that's been inserted into the requirements so connections get leveraged and several dominoes later a subcontractor to someone is under contract + NDA to buy a controlling stake in an idling paper mill and refit as necessary the small town's wastewater plant it dumps into because that is how they are going to provide the filter media meeting the performance specified in the requirements without being forced to pay out the ass for the product the lobbyists ghost wrote into it. The prime has basically entered into contract to create a company making a competing product out of thin air. There are many funny stories like this kicking around the beltway.
The "special casing" of "operational capability" is public fact - USMC decided to claim initial operational capability on aircraft that didn't even have complete SMS (stores management system), something that was missing even after first "front line" USAF units got theirs. Block 2 software had only minimal air-to-air and air-to-ground capabilities implemented. Block 3 was the infamous one with constant reboots, with Block 3F the first planned to provide full not just weapons capability, but even flight envelope. Heck, in 2015, they barely lifted limitations on attitude and acceleration/wing loading after finally testing them in flight.
Conflicts between requirements of -A/-C and -B, among other reasons due to weight, were discussed as far and wide as GAO reports, because like with F-111, there was strong political push for maximum commonality, which resulted in cascading issues - for example, -B added 18 months around 2004 to -A and -C when the fuselage ended up too heavy for -B to operate with any equipment, and extensive rework had to be done on all models to shave ~1200kg. By 2010 there was discussion to cancel -B altogether.
On a topic closer to typical fare on HN, ALIS (IIRC now renamed to ODIN, but awarded back to the same team...), the ground support system critical to even running the airplane, was close to useless in 2015. Something that anyone with experience with that part of Lockheed probably expected and were not listened to.
Ultimately the aircraft is probably pretty good (I am saying probably because some crankiness isn't much talked unless you're actually embedded with users of such hardware, and is secret - there I have only my suspicions), but the road there was more painful than it should be - and ofc I would not trust it if I was foreign buyer for reasons of not just software black boxes but also dependency on US-located labs to provide mission data updates - at least I have not heard of that aspect changing. We used to joke it was first aircraft with "phone home" license system...
It doesn't take 20 years to do that, it takes 20 years to do that and wade through the bureaucratic morass. The SR-71 went from initiation to deployment in under a decade, more than half a century ago. With the myriad of advancements in everything from engineering, computation, to business development/management practices, building new cutting edge planes is the sort of thing we should be getting better and quicker at.
Design iteration cycle-times should be decreasing due to CAD, experimental cycles-times reduced due to the proliferation of rapid-turn 5-axis CNC mills, experimental cycles reduced due to simulation, business processes streamlined due to advancements in JIT manufacturing and six-sigma/kaizen/etc, and so on and so forth. That this isn't occurring is a giant blinking red light that something is wrong, and that we are going to get our lunch eaten by someone who researches, designs, and manufactures with a modicum of competence. Ostensibly China.
The SR-71 had a strait forward mission well suited to a specialized airframe, and again you’re focusing on the airframe.
Just the software for the helmet alone provides a huge technical advantage that has little to do with how the aircraft is manufactured other than having the appropriate sensors, communication systems, and computing power. Yet through all that bureaucracy what would normally be 3 different airframes all get to leverage the same systems without the need for retrofits etc. It’s inherently a two step process to figure out what you need before you can finalize the design.
By comparison vs the F-35, the B-2 spirit was vastly more expensive and far more limited. The F-35 also costs less than the more specialized F-22, but that versatility takes time.
To be fair the F22 would have been closer to the F35 in price if the number produced were larger so that the R&D was spread over a larger number of airframes. Such a pretty plane.
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.
New technologies should make iteration time on this stuff faster not shorter... even for complex things like fighter aircraft.
The fact that there are over a dozen Chinese humanoid robotics companies that have shipped working products in the past 12 months should be a big red flag.
I will say though that during WW2 and the Cold War, the amount of tolerance for killing test pilots was much greater given the number of people dying during active military conflicts at the time.
> The fact that there are over a dozen Chinese humanoid robotics companies that have shipped working products in the past 12 months should be a big red flag.
I think that mostly means money is cheap in China. In America, if you try to start a humanoid robot company you'll immediately run into the "Why though?" question when you try to get money for it. The case for the economic relevance of humanoid robots is dubious at best, so to proceed with such a development program you need your own money or at least good friends with connections who don't care about money.
But it's not the technologies that are a problem most of the time. It's that:
- DoD / DoW is a chaotic project owner, trying to squeeze in colossal and sometimes self-contradictory lists of requirements, which it wants to change often.
- The US government is a poor customer, which runs out of money from time to time.
- The US Congress is a cantankerous financier, which haggles for the money every year, and demands the production to be distributed all over the place, to bring jobs to the constituencies which voted for the congresspersons.
- The companies that produce this stuff are few and mostly cannot be easily replaced, and they know it. This is because in the late 1980s the US government decided that it has won the Cold War and will not need the many competing manufacturers of military gear any more. That proved to be a bit shortsighted, but now it's a bit late.
> Something is very wrong if it takes 20+ years to field new military technologies. By the time these technologies are fielded, a whole generation of employees have retired and leadership has turned over multiple times.
Conversely, the Navy's first SSBN went start to finish in something like 4 years.
And unlike the F-35, which could easily have been an evolution of the existing F-22 design, the Navy had to develop 4 major new pieces of technology, simultaneously, and get them all integrated and working.
1. A reduced-size nuclear warhead (the missile would need to fit inside the submarine for any of this to matter)
2. A way to launch the nuclear missile while submerged
3. A way to reliably provide the nuclear missile with its initial navigation fix at launch
4. A way to fuel the nuclear missile with a safe-enough propellant to be usable on a submerged submarine without significant risk to the crew
The USAF's Century series of fighters were turned around quick. So was the B-52.
Having been involved in defense innovation efforts during my time in uniform, I cannot overemphasize how much the existing acquisition system is counter-productive to the nation's defense, despite 10+ years of earnest efforts dating back to before Trump's first term.
Most of the aspects to it are well-intentioned and all, but as they say the purpose of the system is what it does, and what America's defense acquisition system does is burn up tax dollars just to get us a warmed-over version of something grandma and granddad's generation cooked up during the Cold War.
Its turned into a death spiral because as these programs get more onerous the cost goes up, and who in their right mind thinks it's a good idea to just let people go off on a $1B effort with less oversight?
Until it's even possible to deliver things cheaply through the DAS (or WAS or whatever it will be now) we'll never be able to tackle the rest of the improvements. I look forward to reviewing the upcoming changes but Hegseth isn't the first one to push on this, it's a huge rat's nest of problems.
That is not a guarantee. We look at WW2 and think that what happened then will happen at any other time. But in WW1 the US had to borrow rifles from France. WW1 was a total disgrace as far as the US military industrial complex was concerned. I know I'm committing a bit of a sin, today marks the 107th anniversary of the end of WW1 and that end was possible because of the US involvement. But, uncharacteristically for the US, it was the manpower, not the arsenal of the US that decided the end of that war. And, yes, even at that time the US was the largest economy of the world.
> But in WW1 the US had to borrow rifles from France. WW1 was a total disgrace as far as the US military industrial complex was concerned
Up until WW1, the US were not a global military power, and because of their location, they had little reason do become one. Additionally they were not involved directly in ww1, so they had little reason to develop quickly a military industry that was at the level of western europe
You’re right of course, but there’s another important way the US contributed. Who do you think paid for those French rifles in the first place? The Entente was financed by Wall Street for years, until Wall Street ran out of money and the federal government took over the loans. The British Empire was close to insolvent at the end of the war—the main reason they were so insistent on receiving reparations from Germany was because of their own debt to the United States, a debt they ultimately defaulted on.
They borrowed (or rented for $1 for the duration of the war) binoculars from US citizens for WWI. Then returned them after the war was over. Patriotic people sent them in.
That wasn’t a heroic effort, it was a straightforward application of mRNA technology paired with an FDA Emergency Use Authorization to bypass the onerous approval process. And even that 10 month process could have been significantly faster if they performed human challenge trials.
Experts generally expected that there would be effective COVID vaccines by the end of 2020, because vaccine development is not magic. There are several known approaches to creating vaccines, and it was reasonable to expect that some of them would work.
What set COVID vaccines apart was government commitment. Governments around the world bought large quantities of vaccines before it was known whether that particular vaccine would be effective. (Regulatory approval was also expedited, but that it business as usual during serious disease outbreaks.)
The equivalent with fighter jets would be the government committing to buy 200 fighter jets, with an option for many more, from everyone who made a good enough proposal. And paying for the first 200 in advance, even if it later turns out that the proposal was fundamentally flawed and the jets will not be delivered.
As everyone with functioning eyeballs and more memory than a goldfish who has hung around a large organization more than a year knows, you quickly run out of blood to write in and start writing in "well that could've been worse if the starts had aligned, let's write a rule about it".
I used to work for a defense contractor. My former coworkers are probably cheering right now.
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 nickels and dimes really do add up.
The paper pushers on both sides that will do many rounds in order to make that happen are the only people benefitting from the make-work here as does anyone who skims their existence off of the paper pushers.
I have seen considerable fraud in corporation. Contractors love to take money and not deliver, report more hours then they workee, and then they get more money from allied managers.
Back in the day, Lockheed could move very quickly. The P-38 went from proposal to working prototype between February 1937 and January 1939. But there was a cost. Test pilots died
The top American fighter pilot of WW2, Richard Bong was killed test piloting the Lockheed P80 jet fighter.
There's an unwritten 15th rule (from the above-mentioned webpage):
"Starve before doing business with the damned Navy. They don't know what the hell they want and will drive you up a wall before they break either your heart or a more exposed part of your anatomy."
Rule 14 is pretty interesting. Keep the teams small and reward performance with compensation. Don't just reward increasing headcount. Could improve things at so many tech companies today.
Rule 14 is why every government and large cooperation has an insane amount of bloat and middle managers, IMHO. People's power and pay are determined by two things - the number of people working under them, and their budget (which is often determined by the number of people working under them). It is rarely determined by positive outcomes, it seems, in the government world.
Today's societal war is a philosophical one - do you think everything sucks and it's a matter of lesser evil, or do you think everything sucks and we "just" need to find the perfect solution.
The F35 is the most in demand military plane in the world for the price. They spent 20 years iterating on it and its now the best plane for the cost with its capabilities.
> but it looks like whole "We will fix busted models later" might have been more expensive. Time will tell.
Time has already told us. Historically it means it was more expensive. If it wasn't, it would be such a rare an interesting case, that it would deserve a documentary on the surprising result.
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.
> 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.
This already started. "Trump Jr.-Linked Unusual Machines Lands Major Pentagon Drone Contract Amid Ethics Concerns"[1]
It's for drone motors for FPV drones, which are usually cheap.
The terms of the contract are undisclosed "due to the shutdown".
In the timescales of some of our military planes, cars have gone from metal dashboards to collision avoidance in cars with cocoons of safety with 10 airbags.
I think moving faster might also move faster with safety equipment.
The reality is that developing bespoke solutions with bleeding edge technology is going to result in brand new jets crashing, no matter how much bureaucrats and processes slow down the process. Nothing can substitute for using it.
> Federal Acquisition rules are written in misuse of money, sometimes criminally.
Where "misuse of money" means money not being spent a manner convenient to those who wrote the rules. Which means starting illegal wars, cost-plus contracts, lies about WMDs, no-bid contracts, arms trafficking to dictatorships, pork barreling, and *nudge* *wink* 7 figure do-nothing "consulting" gigs for bureaucrats and generals after they leave the government. Nothing is going to solve that, but if you threw out the whole rule book and started again, it would require a monumental effort to do worse than things have been.
The goal of these rules is to reduce corruption and theft. A lot of these rules go out the window when there is a need for speed. The goals have obviously changed: the US Gov believes the world is on a path to war again, and is reforming on that assumption.
What is perhaps more important is how this transition will be managed. Are the old methods just being halted and all projects halted and the new methods will take over whenever they start producing products? Switching horses midstream could end up destroying both old and new acquisitions without a good plan. This seems like something the Trump administration has continually failed at, they break things first, then try to figure out what to replace it with while chaos ensues. Possibly they will have to fund much of the existing plans while simultaneously funding the ramp up of the new plan, perhaps doubling the cost of acquisition for a while. Even if the new plan is faster overall, there may still be a five year delay before products start to appear from factories.
No, it's putting a high price on human life, but it depends on how you look at it. We can be a nation that gets bombed into nothingness, or the only country that can defend our own or another one. But we can't do that unless we're willing to actually build weapons of war.
It's why WWII vets did what they did knowing not every bomb, aircraft or handheld weapon was perfect but still ran in to stop Hitler. I would say that put a high price on human life. These last few generations won't get it until it gets its WW.
> We can be a nation that gets bombed into nothingness
There is literally no one that can bomb the US into nothingness. Even if the US decided to stop develop new weapons, they cannot be invaded. They are too big, too rich and too protected by the ocean and weak neighbors for that
Although Israel is committing genocide, it is not a threat to worldwide stability. NK is not threat to world wide stability either, as evil they are, they are no where near to that. USA half switched alliance to Russia, so yeah. Current American leadership admires how Russia does things and wants to be more like them.
There is a reason why USA is currently seen as the biggest threat to stability - because USA is intentionally trying to make the world unstable.
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 sudden death than to a painful recovery.
My understanding is that one of the huge barriers to a lot of DoD projects is seemingly unending feature creep:
1. let's make the "next-gen airplane"
2. (work 5 years)
3. ok now we want it to have better radar cloaking
4. (work 5 years)
5. ok now we want it to be faster
6. (work 5 years)
7. ok now we want it to lift off vertically
Eventually every vehicle has all capabilities as opposed to focusing on some limited number.
Given the pervasiveness of bribery across this admin, this smells like just eliminating the obstacles to a more direct and corrupt patronage and kickback system. Steve Blank might be wishing it will be LEAN when in reality it will be GREEN.
One of the things that I think Anduril (Palmer Luckey and other founders) is doing right is designing for manufacturability. The invasion of Ukraine has shown that future conflicts will use up weapons at a very high pace. And that the US capability to build them at the rate needed to sustain conflict isn't there anymore. But that one thing that could help is making them easier to build. (the decline of US manufacturing is a related but separate topic)
Is this just their marketing language or have they independently verified this? IIRC their interceptors got absolutely rinsed at trials in Alaska so I’d be very wary of their claims at this point.
Here's a 2022 from Quartz article that might have some context on this. Anduril isn't on the list according to the footnote, but Thiel and Lucky have since had a history collaborating on projects with the same naming scheme.
It's especially interesting because their philosophy is the opposite of Tolkien's. They seek power at all costs, trying to create 'rings' and dallying with bad people.
One common rhetorical tactic, commonly used by their political allies, is to use their (perceived) enemies' most powerful words and ideas against them, to disarm and counter-attack. 'Woke' was a term on the left; racism became descrimination against white people, diversity becomes affirmative action for conservatives, banning and mocking and even embracing discussions of Nazis, etc.
I don't know what Tolkien's personal philosophy was but I think a reasonable reading of LOTR would put it at centre right. The culture it valorizes has military capability and heroism at its core.
His personal philosophy was very Catholic. My reading of LotR is that it is consistent with that, valorising faithfulness, the personal in place of the modern, and avoiding the temptation to sin for power. I agree it's centre-right (though idiosyncratically) but not about military capability: the orcs are the most modern military capability and they are decidedly not valorised. The central heros are a member of the rural gentry and his gardener, who barely fight. The Shire is defiantly non-military and pre-industrial.
> The Shire is defiantly non-military and pre-industrial.
The Shire stands as a symbol for a rural and peaceful life but their protected way of life is only possible because of the the military might of others and this is explicitly alluded to several times...for example in a conversation between Merry and Pippin (which I just happened to read to my kid yesterday!):
"Still there are things deeper and higher; and not a gaffer could tend his garden in what he calls peace but for them, whether he knows about them or not."
This is not entirely correct. The hobbits were very good with slings and spears and bows according to Tolkien.
Before the events of The Lord of the Rings, hobbits maintained a tradition of archery and other martial skills, partly due to past conflicts such as the Battle of Greenfields (1). By the time of the Scouring off the Shire, Merry, Pippin, and other veterans of the War of the Ring organized quickly taking up arms. According to the appendices, they managed to eliminate nearly two-thirds of Saruman’s invading force , displaying both tactical coordination and surprising courage. (Treebeard also notes this in The two towers) It’s a powerful reminder that, in Tolkien’s world, even the humblest people are capable of heroism when defending their home.
The LoTR had a great distrust of power as dangerous and corrupting - the Ring corrupted everyone who tried to use it - and a rejection of those who abided with evil. The mission was to destroy the power, not build a super-army.
Well in fact the raising of a huge army is indeed one of the goals of the protagonists. Of course for them the goal is to defeat evil. I'm sure that the people behind Palantir, Anduril and other such companies also believe they are building a military capability that will allow the United States to defeat what they see as evil. Every centre right libertarian I've encountered also has a "great distrust of power".
All I'm saying is that it only takes a small shift of perspective to see how the LoTR will appeal broadly to anyone who believes in good vs evil narratives - whichever side they appear to be on from one's own point of view.
This is an excellent interpretation but I would put forth that it is also possible that these people simply want to use "cool names" and get on with their business without any kind of deep understanding of the literature.
> One common rhetorical tactic, commonly used by their political allies, is to use their (perceived) enemies' most powerful words and ideas against them, to disarm and counter-attack. 'Woke' was a term on the left; racism became descrimination against white people, diversity becomes affirmative action for conservatives, banning and mocking and even embracing discussions of Nazis, etc.
Heresy is at truth taken too far, or a virtue emphasised to the detriment of others - paraphrasing Chesterton whom Tolkien almost certainly read given their similar locations/religions. It's a theme you see with Sauron's love of order in particular.
I think a lot of the Maga people pretty much take this view of DEI or Nazi hate. That diversity was originally good when it was about helping minorities but not when hurting whites, however tricky those are to separate in zero sum environments.
I'm not so sure, JD Vance created a company called Narya after Gandalf's ring and Viggo Mortensen has more than once had to call out far-right groups trying to co-opt the fandom or litterature:
> James J.D. Vance and Colin Greenspon have co-founded a new venture firm called Narya Capital and have already raised $93 million toward a target of $125 million.
Thiel gave Vance his first real job. Thiel introduced Vance to Colin Greenspon (who was the managing director at Thiel's VC firm and now runs Narya with Vance). Thiel supported Vance's book. Thiel supported Vance's governor run. Thiel introduced Vance to Donald Trump. Thiel supported Vance's VP run.
It's not an employer/employee relationship, so maybe patronage is a better word.
In particular Anduril is designing its weapons such that they could be manufactured in many other existing civilian factories using common tools and equipment. This should allow for rapidly scaling production in a crisis.
>The invasion of Ukraine has shown that future conflicts will use up weapons at a very high pace. And that the US capability to build them at the rate needed to sustain conflict isn't there anymore.
China has no issue with manufacturing so they will be happy to sell weapons to US at better prices than US manufactured weapons. :)
>The invasion of Ukraine has shown that future conflicts will use up weapons at a very high pace.
That has been shown even in WWII. And the war was won by US/UK/USSR specifically because their mass production of weapons were several times higher than Germany/Japan/Italy.
The war in Ukraine actually haven't yet reached the levels of weapons use of WWII. (for example 500K-1M/day artillery shells in WWII vs. 20-60K/day in Ukraine war)
These days i so far see only China capable and ready to produce weapons, say drones, at that scale. And i so far don't see anybody, including Anduril with their anti-drone systems, able, or even preparing, to deal with 1M/day (my modest estimate of what China would unleash even in a small conflict like say for Taiwan) of enemy drones. No existing anti-drone systems/approaches are scalable to that level, and we can only hope that something new is being developed somewhere in top secret conditions, and that is why we don't know about it.
There's no need to welcome me to war. I'm not in one, despite the fact that the powers that be are hellbent on getting me (and everyone else) into one.
Oh, yes. That's exactly how it works. No one would ask you "do you want to get into a war"? Ukraine didn't want to get into a war. Turns out it wasn't their call to make!
Least you can do is be prepared. If a hostile country believes "oh, they can't handle a war, it's going to be so easy", the risk of that country trying shit goes up. And if you really can't, the war would be more devastating than if you can.
Wasn’t the son of the current president invested in one of the drone companies selling to the Pentagon? Speedy purchases with no consideration for cost are great are very handy for that kind of investment.
I’m unsure if his sons, but it was discussed on the Joe Rogan (Brian Redban) episode released yesterday that the Vice President has substantial holdings. His prior job had him investing in these companies, while I’m not sure the total sum, he himself holds a few hundred thousand in personal holdings.
Sorry I’m unable to link to the source time on the episode.
A big assumption with this change is that the "Modular Open Systems Approach" (MOSA) [0] [1] will be adequate for integrating new systems developed and acquired under this "fast track". MOSA appears to be about 6 years old as a mandate [2] and is something that big contractors - SAIC, BAI, Palantir [3] - talk about. But, 6 years seems brand new in this sector. I'd be curious to see if LLM's have leverage for MOSA software system integrations.
Bad news. Trump and Hegseth do not have the authority to rename the Department of Defense, no matter what they put on a Web site. That requires an act of Congress, which hasn't happened. And probably won't, because even if they could convince Congress to do it, that would require them to ask... and their whole modus operandi is based around pretending to have authority they don't have.
Calling it the Department of War is accepting that Trump's the King.
The ada.gov website has a banner that reads, "Democrats have shut down the government. Department of Justice websites are not currently regularly updated."
Trump is the king.
Edit: To be clear, I think it's complete and utter garbage. I'm assuming people think I think it's a good thing? It's not a good thing. At all.
It's garbage and also illegal. He probably won't get what he deserves since nature will likely get to him first at this rate. Hut there will be a reckoning one day when this alls shifts.
I think that's the most likely scenario, but I'm open to two others:
- this escalates and we enter Civil War. How things play out from there is unimaginable since there's so many other attack vectors in a civil war with a super power.
- things shift and everyone accointable simply flees. Not the ideal outcome, but I'll take mass resignations at this point. The focus will need to be on rebuilding either way.
Something being illegal only has a meaning if somebody prosecutes it and has the power to stop it. With the DOJ head’s main qualification being loyal to the president there is nothing that will be done.
My other concern is that Congress will spend the next few decades prosecuting, investigating and impeaching each other without doing anything useful for the country. I thought impeaching Trump while knowing that it would never succeed was a big distraction and basically show business. I would like to see much more focus on actual problems of citizens. Trump being in prison won’t improve my life.
The high level corruption is core reason why nothing can be done for actual problems of citizens. And the more corruption, the less will be done. Impeaching Trump would be first step toward word where lives of citizens can be improved.
What happened was the opposite and lives of citizens will be worst off.
... and the most probable scenario - this is new normal, US slides mildly into fascist dictatorship ruled by elite who doesn't even try to hide its status and control, but maintains enough momentum of the past to keep it afloat at/around the top with China as a cca peer. Less actual military power but better overall economy shape. Its not like US is a champion of real democracy for decades, not if you compare it to places like Switzerland.
Lets not forget half of US population knew pretty well what they voted for and went on ahead full speed, in 'fuck it' or 'fuck'em' mentality.
It is a fact the democrats shut down government because they wanted to hide irrelevant provisions in the funding bill. Enough shady business from democrats!
If by "irrelevant provisions" you mean... funding. For things that were already being funded. Yes, hiding continuing funding in the continuing funding bill. Very devious.
No, Trump has a minor fiefdom district and some authority for services the states and their representatives agreed to let the federal government execute.
If Congress tells the Executive: "Here's some money, spend it on USAID to stabilize regions in which the US Army operates and are of strategic importance". And the Executive says, "thanks for the money! I will spend it on whatever the hell I choose." And congress just belly flops over the next time they pass a budget, without checking that overreach of power, the Executive looks more and more like a king.
You voted for congress, but apparently congress doesn't matter anymore.
My point was that he is acting like a king. And if he's allowed to act like a king, checks and balances don't mean anything.
Which makes him the king.
Turns out, letting government operate on a system of agreements that require appropriate behavior instead of clear consequences for this type of behavior is a bad idea.
I thought the executive had the power to rename existing departments and map landmarks. That's why we got "DOGE" disgused under the USDS and the "Gulf of America".
If that's not legal, I'll do my best to act shocked.
> (a) The Secretary of Defense is authorized the use of this additional secondary title — the Secretary of War — and may be recognized by that title in official correspondence, public communications, ceremonial contexts, and non-statutory documents within the executive branch.
> (b) The Department of Defense and the Office of the Secretary of Defense may be referred to as the Department of War and the Office of the Secretary of War, respectively, in the contexts described in subsection (a) of this section.
> Within 60 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of War shall submit to the President (...) a recommendation on the actions required to permanently change the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War. This recommendation shall include the proposed legislative and executive actions necessary to accomplish this renaming.
It may currently be a second name, but the explicit intention is for it to become the only one. In HN terms I'd argue that saying "there is no Department of War" is akin to arguing that a piece of software doesn't have feature X because it's only available in the beta release.
AKA - it’s the department of defense in the same way Robert Kennedy was named Robert but went by Bobby sometimes. Trump doesn’t get to change the name, just assign an unofficial nickname that he thinks sounds more tough. Sort of like his pretend tough guy Secretary of defense that dresses up as a Secretary of war for TV moments. The fact they drag along the entire military and its leadership in their charade is embarrassing, and the asinine nickname is expensive and likely causes operational confusion.
In this case, the executive had the power to add a secondary title, Department of War. It does not override the primary name of Dept of Defense but it appears to be the proper amount of appeasement.
In my eyes, Gulf of America is really stupid and useless.
But calling it "Department of War" clearly states their intent, contrary to his campaign as the "no new wars" president. We renamed it 70 years ago for a reason, and such reason completely flew over the admins' heads.
The Department of Defense DID NOT used to be called the Department of War. Before there was no central department for the entire military. Instead, there was the Department of the Navy and the Department of War (which was for the Army).
Nobody uses statutory titles for anything to be honest; when’s the last time you referred to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act instead of “Obamacare”? When’s the last time you referred to the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance program instead of “Social Security”? I’ve never heard anyone say Title XIX of the Social Security Act instead of “Medicaid,” or Title XVIII of the Social Security Act instead of “Medicare,” or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act instead of “Welfare.”
> when’s the last time you referred to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act instead of “Obamacare”
I refer to it as "the ACA", which is short and avoids an unofficial moniker first introduced as an insult.
It's not just a personal preference, it's civically important: There are still morons out there who have spent the last 15 years simultaneously gushing about how the ACA is awesome while demonizing "Obamacare."
You're kind of proving their point: People seem to use common names (ACA, Obamacare, DoD) regardless of whether they abide by statute (PPACA) or executive meme-forcing (DoW).
There's a difference between an informal name that catches on organically and isn't politically charged, and an highly visible, ostentatiously political renaming specifically intended to make a point.
2. It's not all over government Web sites. In fact I doubt it's on them at all.
3. Cabinet-level officials aren't giving stupid speeches about how important the name is in reflecting a Whole New Approach.
4. I don't remember Obama objecting to it at the time... nor did Obama go on TV and say "It will now be called OBAMACARE in honor of me, the greatest and only competent President ever".
5. Actually I don't remember it even being a "slur". The first draft was based on Romneycare. There was also "Hillarycare", which might have actually been pejorative. In any case it wasn't anything like on the level of the President or the Secretary of anything making a bunch of noise about it.
I say ACA, Obamacare is politically charged. And the cases you've mentioned all shorten a long name into a colloquial name. This is not the case for Department of War/Defense.
That said, let's call it what it is... it's a war machine. Just as we should refer to Israeli Occupation Forces and not "Defense" forces, since genocidal occupation is just about the furthest thing from defense.
Negative, the Department of War was the predecessor to the Dept of the Army. There used to be a Secretary of the Navy and a Secretary of War, both of whom rolled up direct to the president.
Following post-WWII reorgs, the DoD was created and the Secretary of War became the Secretary of the Army, reporting to the Secretary of Defense.
"Department of Defense" has always been a weird doublespeak term. I welcome the new old name.
"Gulf of America" is a stupid way to antagonize the world and accomplish nothing. Even if we controlled some area on a map, we ought to disguise our control through proxies rather than attract attention and to it and all that comes with the evil eye. If I was a trump supporter I would be skeptical of even accepting this as a "win", considering it is just words on paper and doesn't reflect a change in material conditions for the demographic.
It is a “joke” insofar as it’s an asinine undertaking.
It’s not a “joke” in the sense of being lighthearted or unserious: there was a press conference at the White House. Official US maps have been updated. Google Maps has been updated.
It's not a joke and I don't know it. Trump is gradually demanding the authority to control every aspect of American life, and you're enabling it by not taking his entry-level steps seriously. I hope you'll realize your mistake while he's still stuck on relatively harmless things.
It is not joke. He punished companies for not obeying. "It was just a joke bro" is stupid manipulative excuse in normal situations, but in the case of Trump, it is a complete unambigous lie.
It was not a joke, no one laught. It is what republican leader said in all seriouaness and insisted on. And his voters seen it as a show of strength.
I think we use the same PPBE process at NASA. Many of the systems and procedures that NASA uses are are defense-derived. If it's anything like what we do, then it's a total mess and we mostly just go through the motions with it, knowing it doesn't actually reflect reality and it's kind of a waste of time for everybody.
However, it's risky to assume that scrapping a crappy system will result in things being better. The current shitty system was almost certainly the result of scrapping and replacing something else that had some problems.
Anyway, hopefully this works well, because we'll probably end up copying it at NASA.
Prima Facie: probably good. The existing system is pure and simple money laundering, the legendary $900 toilet seat is absurd and this seems to be a step away from the supply-chain-for-everything system in place currently. I believe the defense budget could be cut in half with increased capability, at least in theory. There's that much cruft.
Nobody ever paid $900 for a toilet seat. That was a statistical artifact caused by an accounting method called "equal allocation".
"The equal allocation method calculates prices for large numbers of items in a contract by assigning "support' costs such as indirect labor and overhead equally to each item. Take a contract to provide spare parts for a set of radar tracking monitors. Suppose a monitor has 100 parts and support costs amount to a total of $100,000. Using the equal allocation method each part is assigned $1,000 in such costs, even though one item may be a sophisticated circuit card assembly, which requires the attention of high-salaried engineers and managers, and another item may be a plastic knob. Add $1,000 to the direct cost of the part and you get a billing price. This is what the government is billed, though not what the part is really worth--the circuit card being undervalued, the knob being overvalued. The need for billing prices arises because contractors want to be paid up front for items that are shipped earlier than others."
Based on this article alone, I can believe this is a good thing. The US military suffers incredibly from its monopsony position and without a doubt will get a heavy wakeup call (read: dead young people) next time it has to fight a real war. In addition the army should be the most accountable and results oriented branch of government, since it’s the only one that’s actively oppositional. If we can’t fix procurement there then what hope do we have for the rest of government?
> In addition the army should be the most accountable and results oriented branch of government
The army isn't a branch of government - and if you then wish for Defense to be accountable, there's the question of how to allocate money for secret things.
I don't know how other countries do this and if there are better ways to structure this.
We weren't the only nation using any of those technologies. The Germans, for their part, were trying all of that. It was neither obscure or secret. Technical acumen in using commonly shared technologies was the difference.
It's why people like to forget there were three distinct phases to that war. Russia was not always on our side. The outset was bleak, the middle was indeterminate, and the end, the part we like to remember, was when the tide really started going our way.
In any case, we weren't invested in any of those things _before_ the war, so even if you do believe your premise, there's no reason to suspect that we wouldn't be able to do the same in the next conflict. Trying to prognosticate what the next war will look like has led to some embarrassing military defeats throughout history. The military fails to be egalitarian.
Speaking of proximity fuses you should look into what it took to _actually_ get them used on the battlefield as I think it highlights this point. In concert with that I like to think about the "Millennium Challenge 2002." War is won by skilled soldiers not by lavish spending or deep secret technologies.
The secrecy definitely played a major role when it comes to cryptography. It was not known to the Axis how far Allied codebreaking technology had come, and how much of their communications was being regularly monitored.
The Manhattan project is a pretty obvious example. The past world wars were full of technological advances that world powers were trying to keep away from enemies.
Not sure, but to me this sounds a lot like the song from Paint your Wagon. (I was thinking that it came from The Way the West was Won, which would be more ironic.)
Where am I goin'? I don't know!
Where am I headin'? I ain't certain!
All I know is I am on my way.
When will I be there? I don't know.
When will I get there? I ain't certain.
All that I know is I am on my way.
‘Two organizations ought to be very concerned – China and the defense prime contractors.’
the department was not built with a single country as their focus, and their target will come and go with the times. would have read the whole article the blatant bias is off putting.
China is the only country that is not aligned with the US and has the military might and production capacity to go toe to toe with the US in an all-out war. Russia would drain their coffers within a year. China is likely to start out producing the US on a similar timeframe. It is pretty reasonable to assume that China is top of mind for any war planning.
Do you mean a red flag for the quality of the article, or for the actions of the department? "Department of War" is currently a real name for the department:
> On September 5, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order authorizing "Department of War" and "secretary of war" as secondary titles to the main titles of "Department of Defense" and "secretary of defense." The terms must be accommodated by federal agencies and are permitted in executive branch communications, ceremonial settings, and non-statutory documents. However, only an act of Congress can legally and formally change the department's name and secretary's title, so "Department of Defense" and "secretary of defense" remain legally official.[10][11] Trump described his rebranding as an effort to project a stronger and more bellicose name and said the "defense" names were "woke".[12]
I'm 99 percent sure that executive orders are not at all legally binding. They're just ways of setting out policy. But the president does not have the authority to override congress with an executive order. An executive order can say whatever the president wishes.
No, it's not. As your quote says, the Department of Defense was created by Congress; the President has no authority whatsoever to rename it or designate a secondary name for it. Writing the words "executive order" on a document doesn't make it legally effective.
Any citizen, of course, can use whatever fake names they'd like for people or places or government organizations. It's a free country. But I don't see any reason to choose this particular fake name except for the purpose of delivering propaganda to your readers.
Damn. Didn't know about this until now but it looks like, at least, he sure put in the effort.
"exploited the intelligence for illicit profit, brazenly ordering his moles to redirect aircraft carriers, ships and subs to ports he controlled in Southeast Asia so he could more easily bilk the Navy for fuel, tugboats, barges, food, water and sewage removal."
The devil works hard but apparently Fat Leonard works harder.
"Directing the government to spend money at places you control" isn't a scandal anymore. It's how Donald Trump directing like a hundred million dollars of taxpayer money to his businesses
So fast forward five years and 50% of our war materials are produced in foreign countries?
I can't help but believe this is going to weaken our war footing because the dumbest people in the room are behind it. Thirsty Pete does not inspire confidence in the Department of War Thunder.
I mean on the surface it sounds good, but LEAN is why we had no PPE on hand during covid.
In order to have off the shelf supplies we are going have an active international arms market by definition. Is this what we want?
Drones all the way, they go through roughly 1 million a year and this number keeps increasing as time goes.
Artillery was more decisive till cca 2023 when switch to new warfare model happened. Its still important, but not #1. You have (ukraine-made since US switchblades proved inefficient overpriced piece of shit) drones now that have 2-3x the reach, can carry same/bigger payload, steer them till last second, some can come back home for reload. Drone teams are much smaller and more agile compared to artillery, they can drive around in normal SUVs.
Sure, why not? The USA is already a leading international arms dealer. Demand is growing rapidly as countries like Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea make aggressive moves against their neighbors so we might as well get a piece of the sales.
The lack of PPE manufacturing in the US after 2021 is a travesty that does not simplify to LEAN is why we didn't. Dismantling the pandemic response unit didn't help. Not replenishing a stockpile of masks that existed for that specific reason didn't help. A lack of tooling supply base didn't help, Straight up corruption; no bid government contracts going to friends of the administration with no. proven capability to deliver (and they didn't). By the time this was discovered, months that could have been used to build and certify actual factories had been wasted.
Worse though, is 3M and Honeywell built factories to make masks, only to get fucked on it. Factories (must grow but also) take time to build. In the 6-9 months it took for them to build those factories after the initial delay, China started allowing exports again, and those factories folded basically before we got any use out of them. I wouldn't expect 3M to build needed factories a second time we need them to save our asses.
Cursory searching says in 2020 they created a new production line in Wisconsin and moved it to 3M Aberdeen.[1][2]
If you look on Google street view dates for the Aberdeen factory and compare 2019 to 2023 it had a big expansion that's still there.
The other major 3M PPE factory, 3M Valley, was expanded in 2024. [3]
Edit: For the curious, Honeywell did fire their pandemic mask factory workers, closed a pandemic mask factory, and then exited the PPE business entirely. [4][5][6]
Thanks for calling me out. You're right, it wasn't 3M. (Why do I feel like an LLM writing that. Anyway...)
Yeah so 3M got kinda fucked, Honeywell got a little bit fucked, but it was the med/small timers that got turbo fucked, but they're smaller names that noone recognizes unless we're on similar rabbit hole adventures. Places like Patriot Medical Devices or Cleveland Veteran Business Solutions are descriptive names vs, say, HomTex or Halcyon Shades, but names aside, some people, in true American fashion, saw a problem, built a company, and then a factory. Hired employees, and then had to fire them all and fold, because globalization. Meanwhile Jared Kushner walks free.
What has this got to do with accountants. In a normal control model the one thing accountants are not allowed to do is buy stuff, because they can also pay for stuff. This woyld make fraud all too easy.
Yes everything is easier without controls, until something goes wrong. Fast cars have the best brakes for a reason.
Removing budgetary controls makes development much easier. That is until you spent so much money on a space laser that you can no longer afford to feed your Navy.
We had... the cheap version of procurement? I mean... that's just fucking not true.
My ship threw tools and parts overboard before pulling into a long shipyard overhaul because they knew they would get more.
I knew shipyard workers who got told to come to work and do nothing so they could mark billable hours (worker gets paid, contract is making money on the workers hourly, so who loses? Not counting the dipshit American taxpayer, of course)
New equipment installed with copy and pasted filters, except new equipment has 100x flowrate so filters last weeks instead of years.
Whole system overhauls descoped from the shipyard maintenance plan so the ship could be delivered "early" and bonuses paid.
Cheney and Halliburton?
Stories too numerous to mention. Only someone who's never seen this up close could think we're doing the cost efficient, safe thing.
I don't care either way, but if there is something that cannot be said about the US it is that they are bad at creating and producing weapons. I bet it's some scheme to get more money from the taxpayer for the friends of Donald Trump.
Also I cannot take serioulsy someone saying that the US cannot match ukraine production of drones
Kind of strange that weapons procurement has gotten so much attention while the ability of the country to react to epidemics by creating medicines has essentially been disabled.
You're only allowed to be mad because he called it the "department of war". The premise that the US always needs more weapons and should be fighting constant wars must go unchallenged.
>DoW will prioritize buying off-the-shelf things that already exist
Hey Hegseth. You could use SAP - that's off the shelf & I'm reliably informed by an army of consultants that they can customize it to fit the exacting needs of the department of war!
(psst China - if I pull this off you better slide me a couple billion as thanks)
Perhaps if the Department of Whatever engineered and built things they needed themselves*, or at least controlled the program management and knew all of the sub-sub-sub-sub-contractors, they wouldn't be incorporating improperly acquired metals or ballooning programs into mega pork projects for all 50 states. The DoD is a jobs program and wastes money that could be used for housing, healthcare, and food instead of lining the pockets of "defense" contractors as the larger budget in the world compared to the next 9 countries combined and maintaining 750 bases in 80 nations.
* They and the private sector ran out of TNT because of UA-RU and Israel's flattening of Gaza and so they won't have enough for 2 years from now because corporate consolidation leads to unpreparedness because it's more profitable than keeping essential supply chain infrastructure alive. (It used to cost $0.50/kg but now it's $20/kg.) OTOH, they forge the barrels for tanks and artillery mostly themselves. This inconsistency and creeping of megacorp profiteering never lends itself to security or capital efficiency.. privatization isn't "flexibility" or "efficient", it's price-gouging and risky.
This reads like a propaganda piece. (Cautiously) Great that we're attempting modernization, but maybe don't huff the press release like a stick of finely aged glue
But what's the limit, especially when there is no sign "the next big war" is imminent or big?
If we assume that we'll have a Ukraine-like scenario, then we might as well start with nationalizing industries like US steel, snatching "untrustworthy" residents to put them into internment camps, start rationing how much food people can eat, and... Heyyyyy waitaminute...
If you listen to generals and admirals for the past few years, much of the US military force alignments and procurements have been around fighting on islands in the Pacific...
This is why the US Marines don't have tanks anymore.
Does anyone believe these changes are being made for some sort of pragmatic reason? I feel like I'm insane. This administration is doing so many grifts how does anyone take what they say at face value anymore?
I skimmed this and want everyone to be aware of the danger in articles like this- it sounds like the author is knowledgeable but there are some real conceptual problems. I’ll list a few so that maybe you won’t read this and think that it’s time to jump into defense contracting. Before I start I’ll state that I’m a statistics professor but also worked in acquisitions for the USAF for 10 years, which is apparently 10 years more experience than the author has. Not to denigrate the author’s service in Vietnam, but it looks like he got out and jumped into Silicon Valley and never actually worked in government acquisitions, all his experience seems to be from the side of the contractor. If you’re looking for a tl;dr (or a BLUF), it’s that nothing has actually changed.
Issue 1: “using fast-track acquisition processes, rather than the cumbersome existing Federal Acquisition Regulations.” This is just plain wrong. The FAR always applies. It has special considerations for buying COTS products, but you’re still required to follow the FAR.
Issue 2: “Instead of buying custom-designed weapons, the DoW will prioritize buying off-the-shelf things that already exist” this isn’t something that Hegseth thought up, it has been a priority since at least the late 2000s, it’s in my FAM training material. The issue is that there are no COTS fighter jets or tanks. So we might prioritize COTS but the big ticket items are going to be custom.
Issue 3: (paraphrasing) “We’ve created PAEs, and there so much different than the clunky PEOs!” They actually sound like almost the exact same thing to me. The General Officer, whatever you call him, might notice a few different people showing up to his meetings. He’s still calling the shots. There is a slight difference that we seem to be trimming the number of portfolios, which means that each GO will have a few more programs to be responsible for.
Issue 4: (paraphrasing) “The PAEs will be able to trade cost, schedule, and performance!” This has literally always been the only job of acquisition. This isn’t new.
Issue 5: “Companies selling to the DoW previously had to comply with the impenetrable DFAR and FAR – the Defense and Federal Acquisition Regulations – with over 5,000 pages of complex rules. …
Now the DoW is telling PAEs to toss those and use Non-FAR regulations like OTAs (Other Transaction Authorities).” I researched options for OTAs for my program director during the Biden administration. They are a great way to do research and possibly even get a prototype made with significant participation by a non-traditional contractor. Unfortunately you can’t get anything mass produced under an OTA, so it allows you to speed by without a contract until you actually need to order a production run, and then the FAR applies. So any contractor that hopes to get a big order has to be planning for FAR compliance during development anyway. The profit isn’t in the prototype.
“Weapons Will Be Able to Talk to Each Other” Yup, we’ve had that one since at least the late 2000s. This is just rewording the “Net-ready KPP” that all major systems have to meet. Modular open systems aren’t new. (Okay, a few years ago this was downgraded from a KPP, but literally all modern weapons systems are still networked on common standards).
“To retrain/reeducate contracting and acquisition officers, the “Defense Acquisition University” will become the “Warfighting Acquisition University.” Fine. I’ll start using the word sex instead of gender and I’ll start sprinkling the word “merit” in my reports. It doesn’t change the end product.
“In JCIDS’ place the Secretary of War created three new organizations…” Holy shit, I thought we were streamlining this process! You cut off one dysfunctional organization and three grew in its place! Is this Hegseth or the Hydra?
Anyway, nothing has actually changed until Congress changes the laws that we have to follow. Until then it’s all window dressing.
> The DoW is being redesigned to now operate at the speed of Silicon Valley, delivering more, better, and faster. Our warfighters will benefit from the innovation and lower cost of commercial technology, and the nation will once again get a military second to none.
So move fast and break things, and now the thing we’re breaking is our national defense?
Embarrassing regurgitation of propaganda. This is basically the military DOGE. Are these systems dysfunctional in some ways, could well-intended sweeping reforms improve them? Sure, maybe, I don't know much about it.
Is that what's happening here? No, this a way to get the existing functions out from under the oversight and constraints of acquisition laws to reduce friction for corruption and war profiteering.
Steven Blank (the author) is a respected member of the startup community and is not partisan. He's been working with the defense department for 10 years (across both administrations) to modernize the way the military buys technology.
His work to create the "hacking for defense" project to modernize things is not at all like DOGE and preceeds it by many years
He's also never worked on any project involving delivering physical goods to DoD.
It's one thing to chuck software at DoD, it's another to try and put together a new IFV when a bunch of competing interests have their opinions and you are trying to balance it all.
I dislike Hegseth and MAGA as much as anything, but quite honestly what you are describing is just bureacracy, and it doesn't serve a country well in an actual armed conflict.
In the current Ukraine conflict, the US provided something like 50 M1 abrams tanks all of which have currently been destroyed or out of commission. Russia threw something on the order of 3500 tanks (around the same number Hitler threw at Operation Barbarossa, but with each tank far far more capable) and virtually all of those machines have been destroyed or put out of commission.
In a real war, you need to come up with new solutions rapidly as the situation changes, and that's a capability the United States seems to have lost. The quality of US tech is fantastic, but the quantity is probably not going to be there when it matters.
1. If you've been in business for 10 years, you're not a "startup".
2. The "startup community", such as it is, is loaded with hucksters and not particularly respectable.
3. What he wrote is partisan.
4. Putting "Department of War" in the title is heavily partisan.
Sadly if he called it the Department of Defense he would also be expressing a partisan preference. Even the name of that arm of the government is "partisan" right now.
I think the setup is that our society needs a lot of reforms, and everyone has their pet reforms they've focused on the need for. But rather than have any sort of coherent constructive plan, the fascists will shamelessly say multiple contradictory things that each sound good in isolation. So then people get drawn into playing "4d chess" trying to pick out signal from the noise, assuming that there must be some kind of higher goals in there beyond embezzlement and deprecation of the Constitutional government in favor of some corporate oligarchy.
It's also allowing for "good enough" solutions to enter the field of battle.
Which is fucking frightening. We don't want "good enough", we want weapons that are fully capable and best-in-class. After all, that's why the Department's budget is nearly a trillion dollars a year. We aren't paying for good enough, we're paying for the best of the best of the best.
We should first solve for why we've allowed massive scope creep in the development of our flagship fighters, and why that scope creep has come at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars to our nation. Yet we can't ask why the likes of Boeing or Lockheed Martin are allowed to function as entities that need to please Wall Street and lobbyists instead of scaring the living shit out of anyone who wishes to do us harm via pure technological prowess. We've allowed the management class to take over our defense manufacturing at great cost to our country.
>By now, its battlefield lethality exceeds that of small arms and artillery shells.
The war in Ukraine seems to be showing this to not be true. Drones are used as much as they are because they do not have enough artillery. Are they useful, yes. But they do not replace artillery. Maybe in another type of war, but that is another issue, what is the next war we expect to find ourselves in? For all the talk of China deterrence, we're seeing a pivot away from China now.
The key advantage of the drone ecosystem is that it spans from tactical to strategic applications, from short to long distance, at very low-cost compared to traditional multiple platforms. It's not an artillery alternative, or at least not in the way you think. There are ambush-drones that go behind enemy lines, land on the ground, and wait. There are 10 flavours of FPV stuff, and by now none of it is "off-the-shelf." There are of course the fixed-wing stuff that would completely overwhelm enemy air defense and hit key strategic manufacturing and oil processing plants. There was operation Spider Web where a handful of FPV drones took out 20 or so russian strategic bombers (sic!) many thousand kilometers behind enemy lines. Most importantly, drones present a major advantage in that the operator does not have to be physically present in the target area. Moreover, the operator himself is no longer necessary in many modes of operation, like "last mile targeting"
Your opinion reads like it has been formed by exposure to some contrariant analysis by BigBrain western analyst that would go for soundbites like "drones are artillery."
Actually "good enough" is often actually superior to "best-in-class" and "fully capable" because they are simpler to make and as a result you can make more of them.
It is often better to have 1000 things that are "good enough" then 100 things that are "best-in-class".
> We don't want "good enough", we want weapons that are fully capable and best-in-class.
OK...
> We should first solve for why we've allowed massive scope creep in the development of our flagship fighters, and why that scope creep has come at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars to our nation.
Because we want best-in-class, and best-in-class means "better than everything else that currently exists", and that's really hard.
It's hard and hardly guaranteed, but the US has the largest budget by far, the best technology, and that has created organizations geared toward R&D on that level.
Much of what the US deploys is best-in-class: ships, planes, subs, etc.
In case of a conventional land-war against either Russia or China (or both at the same time) good-enough will be best, because you'll need quantity, and you can't have quantity while also maintaining the "best-in-class" attribute. I think this war in Ukraine has been a great wake-up call for the Western military establishment, one which had become way too enamoured with the tech-side of things.
>Which is fucking frightening. We don't want "good enough", we want weapons that are fully capable and best-in-class. After all, that's why the Department's budget is nearly a trillion dollars a year. We aren't paying for good enough, we're paying for the best of the best of the best.
We pay a lot of money because we want a giant fuck off Navy (literally by doctrine required to be able to "Take on the next two largest world navies and win) and because we spend a lot of money on training the human resources in our military. Pilots cost millions of dollars a year to keep proficient, and we do not shirk from doing ten times the training of other air forces. Russian pilots at the start of the Ukraine war for example had very few yearly training flights, and that applies to maintenance crews as well, and several planes were lost on takeoff from system failures and similar.
America actually has a great history of winning wars with average equipment. The Sherman tank wasn't the most fancy or had the biggest gun or the most armor. It was ergonomic, survivable, and we made like 80k of them and gave them to anyone willing to shoot germans. The B-17 bomber was not exactly good, but hey they bombed a lot of Europe.
>We should first solve for why we've allowed massive scope creep in the development of our flagship fighters
This is primarily because the theory of "Actually planes are a great item to gold plate" has proven true. The fighter mafia that insisted missiles were a fad and we want cheap planes was just wrong. BVR fighting is the norm. Large radars are required. "Tech" pays huge dividends. If you still think the F35 is anything other than a very very good plane after China has demonstrated they intend to follow in its design footsteps and our 26 year old stealth bomber was able to fly over Iran and drop munitions with no real threat to speak of, I don't know what to tell you.
>why that scope creep has come at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars to our nation.
The massive numbers you have seen are for the entire F35 program, which is thousands of planes over 50 years or so. Currently, the per plane cost of an F35A in July 2024 was $100 million. A fully upgraded F16 is about $70 million. An F35 costs about $40k to fly per hour, which is a lot, but is also about what the F14 cost to fly per hour
The "military industrial complex" is overstated. Raytheon does about $70 billion revenue a year. Walmart, by comparison, does over $650 billion. FedEx does over $80 billion. Pepsico does $98 billion. Raytheon's revenue isn't even all government related. They used to own Otis Elevators.
The actual military dollars spent on "Procurement" of guns and tanks and missiles is about 1/6th the total military budget.
> We've allowed the management class to take over our defense manufacturing at great cost to our country.
The management class is the exact group of morons that are currently elected. Insisting they are magically brilliant even though they have no real track record, insisting that everyone else is at fault, and absolutely cracking down on any and all mention of their imperfections, and sure that if they just vaguely push hard, magic will happen, because that's just how good they are.
The department that DOGE brainslugged and killed was a government department for building that skill and hiring talent so they could use fewer shitty software contractors. They built software to replace TurboTax and save americans money. That wasn't getting the right people rich so Musk and Trump killed it.
Yeah… just in the use of those glorified nicknames tells me a lot about the author’s standpoints, and dictates the size of the grain of salt I take their opinions with.
De facto vs de jure. The Trump admin can create any .gov domain they want (doge.gov, trumpcard.gov) and use whatever terminology they want but it doesn't adhere to the law necessarily.
I'll be honest with you: every time I see a link to his blog here I go "oh no why is a post of mine on HN I didn't even write anything" and then realize it isn't me. Ha!
I'm sure there are good reasons for this, and the approach doesn't seem totally unreasonable, to be fair. I'm just personally woefully unequipped to understand how to deploy weapons humanely and morally, and naively think less weapons is better. Thankfully there are adults in the room making these decisions for me...
This I agree with. We should really only have a few dozen nuclear weapons, and nothing more. The whole point is to have a clear line of "DO NOT FUCKING CROSS AT ALL", and that's it. You cross us? We nuke you. We don't bother you, you don't bother us unless you want to face nuclear annihilation. Seems to work for North Korea.
> You cross us? We nuke you. We don't bother you, you don't bother us unless you want to face nuclear annihilation. Seems to work for North Korea.
I think this is interesting on a few levels.
One issue with North Korea is that they have an enormous number of uneducated, malnourished citizens that no country can reasonably absorb. I feel that the potential chaos from the fall of NK was part of the brinkmanship that led to them getting nuclear capabilities.
Second, if you only have nuclear weapons then you lose a lot of tactical possibilities (bunker busting bombs for example) and you lose the ability to dial up/down aggression as we've seen with Russia.
In all, I think have a continuum of force options is rational. What is scary is that this continuum may no longer involve soldiers - and if there's no risk of soldiers' dying, force projection becomes a lot 'cheaper' in a political sense.
It's a nice theory, but it works only if every act of war is clearly an act of total war and there's a responsible party to nuke. Who were we supposed to nuke after 9/11? Who do we nuke if the next big North Korean hack takes out Microsoft instead of Sony? Or if it disrupts the US power grid for a week? Who do we nuke if Russia props up the regime in Iran and Iran props up a terror group that attacks our close ally?
That's the thing: nuclear wars appear to have a good track record of preventing conventional war in the mold of "we show up at your border with tanks". But it doesn't prevent the kinds of conflicts in which nuking another country might not be a defensible reaction.
The threat only works in an existential crisis. As in, if you legitimately attempt to destroy our government then we will nuke you. Using nuclear weapons successfully in a war that doesn't result in a full exchange between all super powers demonstrates the feasibility of limited nuclear war which is just nuclear armageddon in slow motion. Nations (and the earth) want to avoid that just as much as a full nuclear exchange.
A competent person does not summon every senior leader in his worldwide organization to be physically present for an hour in an auditorium while he blusters and attempts to deliver TV-ready one-liners. A competent person also does not take over a massive organization that relies on these senior executives’ decades of experience and immediately fire a non-trivial number of them because of their gender or skin color.
I’m no admirer and I’m speaking relatively here. That’s why I said surprising. I think we could agree he’s a level above Matt Gaetz or “special envoy” Witkoff.
Well compared to countries that don't have these checks and balances, not overly corrupt. But it's not possible to have a government without corruption at least at some level.
But if you take these checks and balances away, say goodbye to "good" governance.
There's just no comparison. The current administration routinely, publicly, accepts literal bars of gold as bribes for favorable treatment. Trump just got a new one from Switzerland this week.
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 waiting for another battle of Normandy that will never come as we slowly bleed out.
You have to be completely insane, or so deep in propaganda you are about to drink the cool-aid and ascend to the next life, to think you are currently at war with China.
Yet so many Americans really do believe that China is the boogey man de jour, out to steal their freedom.
How many armed conflicts or foreign coups has China started or supported in the past 50 years? What about America? How many people has China executed with drone strikes in the past 15 years? And America?
It's absolute madness that people are buying into this war-mongering FUD.
> We also don’t have real adversaries, that’s war propaganda.
Granting for the sake of argument the (gravely-unrealistic) premise, we have to "skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it is" — the father of hockey legend Wayne Gretzky, a.k.a. The Great One.
The Monroe Doctrine was about preventing monarchies from operating in the Americas in a time when the United States was heady with its eighteenth-century democratic framework. The USA was preindustrial, trade was much simpler, and there was an honest belief among political elites that American democracy was uniquely good and a flame worthy of spreading.
While the Monroe Doctrine persists, I think the actual reasons for it changed drastically by the twentieth century, when preventing foreign expansion in the Americas was so blatantly about protecting American economic interests, democracy in those countries be damned. And today geopolitical doctrine makes the other superpowers adversaries regardless of what political system they espouse.
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 brand new jet acts up and results in crashes.
Oh yea, F-35 was built with move fast, they rolled models off the production line quickly, so Lockheed could get more money, but it looks like whole "We will fix busted models later" might have been more expensive. Time will tell.
Yes, we have swung too much towards the bureaucrats
Is this truly the case or are the criminals and other people who misuse money dragging people towards this position?
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 for a new airframe and some were not. I suspect the issue wasn't "move fast, break things" but rather massive layers of bureaucracy and committees that paralyzed the development pipeline.
The F-22 was part of the Advanced Tactical Fighter (ATF) program which dates back to 1981. It's prototype, the YF-22 first flew in 1990, and the F-22 itself first flew in 1997. It entered production in 2005. Again, 20+ years to field a new airframe.
Something is very wrong if it takes 20+ years to field new military technologies. By the time these technologies are fielded, a whole generation of employees have retired and leadership has turned over multiple times.
Most of time, this delay is in peacetime, it makes sense to do a ton of testing, wait until testing results then go to full production. Your primary concern is not spending a ton of money and not getting a bunch of people killed. It's basically waterfall in fighter development.
Wartime is more agile, you quickly close the loop but downside is sometimes does not work and when it does not work, there might be a people cost. US has done it with fighters before, F-4U Corsair was disaster initially in carrier landings and killed some pilots in training. However, this was considered acceptable cost to get what was clearly very capable fighter out there.
I think this is the crux of it. The article discusses Ukraine but they weren't making millions of drones, the private capital wasn't there and the bureaucracy that coordinates it wasn't primed until the war.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
So then what value does the bureaucratic process add if it's the first thing that gets shitcanned when good results in good time matter?
At the end of the day it's all people cost. Just because it's fractional lives wasted in the form of man hours worked to pay the taxes to pay for unnecessary paper pushing labor instead of whole lives doesn't actually make the waste less (I suspect it's actually more in a lot of cases).
> what value does the bureaucratic process add if it's the first thing that gets shitcanned when good results in good time matter?
This is like asking what good do reserves do if you spend them down in a crisis.
The bureaucracy aims to keep waste and corruption to a minimum during peacetime. In war, the aims change--you're now not only ramping up production, but the penalties for fucking with a war are typically more drastic than lining one's pockets during peacetime.
Think about the local implications of what you just said. If we toss the process when effective expenditure of resources toward results matter and consequences are the most serious then the process must be less efficient at producing good results for the expenditure than the corruption (or whatever else the process is replacing). So then why are we running it at all?
You can absolutely make an argument about accepting reduced efficiency to dilute concentrated harms (e.g. keep a test pilot from dying), but none of the peddlers of process dare even make that argument so I suspect the math is questionable without hand waving or subjective valuation (e.g. face saved avoiding errors).
War and peacetime are two different things. During wartime you need lots of materiel quickly, so value for money estimates, anti corruption practices all get reduced in the name of production numbers at all costs. Verification is easier because you go directly from the assembly line to the front line. If it doesn’t work, you find out and make changes quickly. You know what you need because you’re in the process of using it.
In peacetime, everything is different. You don’t know who your next opponent is going to be, so you need to keep options open. You don’t know if you’ll have a war before the equipment you just bought rots away. You don’t want wartime production levels and stifling your wider economy. You also don’t want a Russia situation where you ignore value for money estimates and audits only to find the money you spent on missiles went in the back pocket of a random colonel.
> During wartime you need lots of materiel quickly, so value for money estimates, anti corruption practices all get reduced in the name of production numbers at all costs
Everyone keeps saying this yet it seems to be the opposite, results for dollars tradeoffs are better in wartime.
If anything it seems like the difference is that during wartime it's easier for the end users to tell the bureaucracy to get out of the way and as a result value for money is unchanged or even improved.
>You also don’t want a Russia situation where you ignore value for money estimates and audits only to find the money you spent on missiles went in the back pocket of a random colonel.
There is no difference to the taxpayer or the soldier in the trench whether the money went into one specific colonel's back pocket or got pissed away on running organizational process. The money is gone and the missile isn't there.
At you can least throw colonel in jail (or out a window, because Russia). Imagine if instead of a colonel's pocket the money was spent pushing papers around to no end? It would be the Spiderman pointing at Spiderman meme and nobody would be held responsible except perhaps an unlucky scapegoat.
> Everyone keeps saying this yet it seems to be the opposite, results for dollars tradeoffs are better in wartime.
Do you understand what economies of scale are? Of course some production costs go down because you're producing far more. You're producing at this high level because the enemy is busy blowing up your equipment!
This is also why it's easy to show results: you have live test subjects in the form of the enemy you're trying to blow up and who's trying to blow you up.
Hell, the article also makes clear that this "low-bureaucracy nirvina" that you seem to believe in was costing the US taxpayer huge sums of money in waste and inefficiency.
> At you can least throw colonel in jail (or out a window, because Russia).
What planet are you on? Russia only found out because their tanks ran out of diesel and got towed away by Ukrainian farmers! Are you seriously suggesting the optimal result is for NATO forces to find out our equipment never got manufactured right when we need it?
Every comment I've seen from you has been "bureaucracy bad!" without any clear knowledge beyond some handwaving, usually ignoring the topic at hand.
>Do you understand what economies of scale are?
Do you understand what results are? Not having something because people lied and took money is no different to the guy in the foxhole or the guy ordering those guys around than not having something because nobody lied and the money got spent paying people to do work that did nothing to get that something closer to being actually available.
>Hell, the article also makes clear that this "low-bureaucracy nirvina" that you seem to believe in was costing the US taxpayer huge sums of money in waste and inefficiency.
The article literally spends approximately 1/3 of its scroll bar talking about the problems with the system and how all the steps, all the process, all the tangential work that must per the rules be done despite not being part of the critical path of fielding systems prevents said systems from being delivered on time or on budget.
>Are you seriously suggesting the optimal result is for NATO forces to find out our equipment never got manufactured right when we need it?
It speaks volumes that your responses are constantly attempting toward strawmen and false dichotomies rather than assess what the right amount of procurement process is.
> no different to the guy in the foxhole
In peacetime, the American in the foxhole doesn’t die nor does the American or Brit across from him. Everyone merely has simulated results.
>> Do you understand what economies of scale are? > Do you understand what results are?
So I take it, no, you don't understand. You're comparing costs and processes that exist outside of wartime to costs and processes that exist during wartime and haven't considered why, despite being told.
> It speaks volumes that your responses are constantly attempting toward strawmen and false dichotomies
I find it hilarious that you state this after your first 2 paragraphs.
> the right amount of procurement process is.
This childish fixation on a flat number is why you don't seem able to understand the problem.
Let's go back to the top, where you said:
> If we toss the process when effective expenditure of resources toward results matter and consequences are the most serious then the process must be less efficient at producing good results for the expenditure than the corruption (or whatever else the process is replacing). So then why are we running it at all?
This was in the context of comparing wartime to peacetime procurement processes. My entire comment addressed the difference between those environments, which you completely ignored to have a childish rant about "too much process." This isn't the first time you've responded to my comments by ignoring the substance and instead trying to (badly) strawman it.
The process aims to minimize risk. This goes for process in general - that's why process exists.
Okay, let's think about what risks might be associated with making a fighter plane. The plane could blow up. The plane could be hard to maintain. The plane could get fighter pilots killed.
In a war, death is already on the table and soldiers are, more or less, expendable. In peacetime, this is not the case.
It's not that when we are in war, everything goes lovey dovey and great. No. Shit goes wrong constantly.
But we don't have time to care, we have bigger fish to fry: war.
> The bureaucracy aims to keep waste and corruption to a minimum during peacetime.
Sorry, but is this sarcasm ? Pity that HN doesn't alow limited emojis to convey intent.
> The bureaucracy aims to keep waste and corruption to a minimum during peacetime
This is the problem though - the bureaucracy is guaranteed to add a lot of cost, both in its own personnel, the personnel in the companies employed to deal with the bureaucracy, and the additional time taken for all bids to be evaluated. This is guaranteed to slow down everything, with the promise that it will try to prevent issues. Which, if the bureaucracy is badly run, weaponised, or captured, is a terrible trade.
> The bureaucracy aims to keep waste and corruption to a minimum during peacetime.
This thread is discussing bureaucracy as the cause of waste and corruption during peacetime.
You just, without a hint of irony, compared killing service personnel with civil service office work. Giving someone a job isn't what wasted tax money looks like.
The point about government waste is that some of the things government does save lives. So money wasted equates to lives that could have been saved. See value of a statistical life etc.
I don’t know what your first sentence means. Do you say “killing” to mean “eliminating the job of”? I don’t see anywhere that mentioned “killing”.
If your second sentence is correct, then let’s allocate taxes to digging holes and filling them in? Ad absurdum but I think it applies? Like it seems reasonable to have an opinion on whether a function should continue to be funded by tax dollars. In a properly operating economy this would open up skilled labor to work somewhere more useful. Unless they weren’t actually skilled, in which case yes you have a problem hmm…
> Do you say “killing” to mean “eliminating the job of”?
No. They mean killing as in ordering a pilot to fly an airplane with less cautious testing resulting in a crash and the death of the crew.
> I don’t see anywhere that mentioned “killing”.
It is there. This is what stackskipton said “Your primary concern is not spending a ton of money and not getting a bunch of people killed.” They even use the example of the F-4U Corsairs mentioning how during the program pilots died.
This is the comment potato3732842 replied to and this is the context their message should be interpreted in. They compared “fractional lives wasted” which they define as “man hours worked to pay the taxes to pay for unnecessary paper pushing labor” with “whole lives”. They don’t define what they mean by whole lives lost, but since they wrote it as a response to stackskipton‘s comment from context i think they mean pilot deaths.
To me it seems they are arguing that if we accept more mangled pilot bodies pulled out of burning wreckages then we can do the program cheaper. And to understand where they stand on the question they call the work needed to prevent those pilot deaths “unnecessary paper pushing”. Is your reading of the comment different?
The argument was literally about pilots dying because of war-time cutting of costs to ensure fast deployment of new tech. Then somebody misread the room and suggested office work was just as much of a waste of life as dying in a horrible accident due to canning of safety testing.
Programs like the F35 might possibly be used funnel money into other LM black projects over the years
> but rather massive layers of bureaucracy and committees that paralyzed the development pipeline.
They decided to make one airframe in three variants for three different branches. They were trying to spend money they didn't have and thought this corner cutting would save it.
> Something is very wrong if it takes 20+ years to field next-generation military technologies.
It's the funding. The American appetite for new "war fighters" is exceptionally low when there's no exigent conflict facing us. They're simply building the _wrong thing_.
The problem clearly is, once a need is identified - it can be costly or ruinous to wait 20+ years to realize the solution. The DoW is clearly signaling they want the "Need -> Solution" loop tightened, significantly, sacrificing cost for timeliness.
That puts the US on good footing, ready to face peer and near-peer, next-generation warfare.
If Ukraine has taught us anything, it's off-the-shelf - ready today - weapons are needed in significant quantity. Drone warfare has changed almost everything - we're seeing $300 off-the-shelf drones kill millions of dollars of equipment and personnel. If the military needs anti-drone capabilities, it can't wait 20+ years to field them.
We don't just need to pick on new/next-generation military technologies either. The US currently produces between 30,000-40,000 155mm artillery shells a month, but Ukraine (at peak) expended 10,000 per day[1]. The loop is far too long...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/ukraine-...
> The US currently produces between 30,000-40,000 155mm artillery shells a month, but Ukraine (at peak) expended 10,000 per day[1].
Wars are incredibly expensive, and the US should not be producing weapons, in peacetime, at the rate they would be expended during an active war. What we should have the ability to rapidly scale production.
Weapons need to be replaced, even ones never used. To be capable of scaling production you need at least some degree of production constantly simmering in the background. Yet even then, there is a limit to how much you can scale up on demand.
The best and cheapest weapons are the ones never used, but making no weapons at all is the most expensive choice in the end.
The problem is you have these hugely expensive facilities like the tank plant in Lima that's pretty much only good for making tanks. Transitioning manufacturing to production lines that can be economically kept online because they make non-tank products when we're not fighting anyone is the way to go.
There's a ton of work going on in this area, and has been for a while (check out DARPA's AVM project for some of it).
Or, simply open up the sales of tanks to the civilian market.
That's a joke, of course, but even if they were demilitarised variants there'd probably still be a market for it.
I’ve never really understood how the logic of the second amendment doesn’t extend to tanks and nukes.
I'm not sure there is any law against owning an unarmed tank. But for "dangerous and unusual" weapons themselves, an important case is from 1939 - Miller vs USA. [1] And it's absurdly weird. Basically the defendant was a thug with a penchant for snitching on everybody.
In his final case, which he also snitched during, he argued that a law he had been charged under (a firearms regulation law) was unconstitutional. The judge who heard his case was very much in favor of the gun control law and had made numerous public statements as such, but he also likely knew that the law was on very shaky constitutional ground, and had been fishing for a test case to advance it. And he found that in Miller.
So he concurred with Miller about the law's unconstitutionality! That resulted in the case being appealed up to the Supreme Court. Conveniently for the state, neither Miller or his defense representation appeared. So it was argued with no defense whatsoever. And Miller was found shot to death shortly thereafter, which wasn't seen as particularly suspicious given his snitching habits. And that case set the ultimate standard that's still appealed to, to this very day.
This is made even more ironic by the fact that the weapon he was being charged for possession of as being 'dangerous and unusual' was just a short barrel shotgun, which was regularly used in the military.
[1] - https://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/ECM_PRO_060964.p...
People can and do own tanks. Since they are giant (hard to park), slow moving, consume a lot of fuel, tend to need expensive maintenance, and can't be operated on many roads due to weight / vehicle restrictions, few people want to do this.
As far as nuclear bombs go... there are restrictions on owning fissile material in general that would preclude owning enough to have a working bomb.
> I’ve never really understood how the logic of the second amendment doesn’t extend to tanks and nukes.
Probably because if people could buy tanks to protect themselves, then the police would also need tanks to deconflict a situation where someone with a tank is upset and the damages are a bit higher when tank rounds start flying around. Imagine two neighbors getting into it in a a town, not to mention a city.
Even portable nukes are a stretch in the logic of "I need to protect my home" from intruders, not to mention the hundred kiloton yield ones.
This movie is for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_(film)
There definitely is a market for such vehicles:
http://www.exarmyvehicles.com/offer/tracked-vehicles/tanks
https://mortarinvestments.eu/ArmouredVehicles
https://miltrade.com/pages/military-vehicles-for-sale-in-eur...
https://tanksales.co.uk/sales/
Ten or fifteen years back, I had an ambition to buy such a vehicle and drive it around at Burning Man. I eventually settled for a deuce-and-a-half, which caused enough struggle and frustration that I'm glad I never actually bought a tank.
There is a market to buy a tank that originally cost $10m for $10k. You can drive it round fields and crush stuff for YouTube content.
I think there is a much smaller market for people wanting to pay the new price
What was frustrating about it? From time to time your exact plan sounded appealing to me.
The conventional wisdom is that you need to buy several military vehicles in order to get and keep one up and running. Some things are going to come broken, some things will inevitably break, and the replacement parts aren't exactly at your local auto parts shop.
If we're talking actual functional tanks, then they're expensive as shit to buy, and expensive as shit to drive.
What is more critical as Ukraine has shown is ammunition, ie artillery shells, and of course any anti-drone ammunition (missiles are extremely expensive solution that should be reserved for ballistic missiles and not cheap drones).
More tanks on Ukraine's side wouldn't change current battlefield massively, drones limit how much use from tanks you can get. If you can scale your production to 10-50x within weeks then all is fine but thats almost impossible practically.
If anybody thinks we are heading for a peaceful stable decade without need of such items in massive numbers must have had head buried in the sand pretty deep.
> The best and cheapest weapons are the ones never used, but making no weapons at all is the most expensive choice in the end.
As a big part of Europe is learning at great cost.
A related article https://archive.is/2024.12.17-161126/https://www.theatlantic...
Our scaling is human oriented - add more shifts. Maybe we can adapt new manufacturing methods like screw extrusion mentioned in the article
> What we should have the ability to rapidly scale production.
How should the US make the manufacture of, say, the primers for artillery shells "rapidly scalable" in a way that is different from building a large stockpile? Be specific. Would you nationalize factories but leave them idle? You certainly won't have time to build or retool factories and staff them during a peer conflict. How would you present this to Congress vs. running those factories in peacetime as a jobs program?
> Would you nationalize factories but leave them idle?
Yes. Historically, these would be the national armories, Navy Yards, and Air Force plants. You know, Springfield Armory (of .30-06 Springfield fame, now a museum), Watertown Arsenal (now a fucking Home Depot, among other things), Charlestown Navy Yard(Boston, now largely a museum), Philadelphia Navy Yard (redeveloped? not my area), Air Force Plant 42 (near LA, still in use by Skunk Works among others), and others.
Having the capital idle/underutilized but maintained and a core group of people with the institutional knowledge ready to pass on during that rapid scaling up is what would make the factories able to scale up. Gun barrels (of all sizes) are relatively specialized from a manufacturing standpoint. Nobody is seriously arguing for having capacity to scale up to build 16" guns for battleships, but 5" guns are extremely common in naval use and 155mm guns are common for artillery. Being able to surge production of those without having to go through a learning curve would be a really great ability to have.
Interestingly, Goex, maker of black powder, is located on a military facility (Camp Minden) because that process remains both hazardous and surprisingly relevant to modern military use.
> Springfield Armory
Side note, if you're ever in central Mass, the Springfield Armory is a great tour.
Agile, vertically-integrated weapons manufacturing... in 1820.
They've got an original wooden copying lathe: traces a finished master rifle stock with a contacting friction wheel, then carves the same shape onto a blank. https://www.nps.gov/spar/learn/historyculture/thomas-blancha...
It was finally closed in 1968.
Better to keep things running at a low level than fully idle I'd think. Even if the outputs are consumed by testing, development, or even just stockpiled. Lots of things can get lost by not making parts for a while, including the knowledge involved in troubleshooting or replacing parts.
Of course then people would complain about all the money wasted not utilizing the equipment/space enough.
> Of course then people would complain about all the money wasted not utilizing the equipment/space enough.
I think this is why the USA, UK and France are all big exporters in the defence sector.
Re: NASA chasing around for Saturn V blueprints and the blueprints for the equipment needed to make the actual rocket parts.
Also the DoE having to figure out how to make Fogbank again (a classified material used in weapons which they lost the manufacturing documentation for)
Invest in technology that makes the facilities that manufacture primers useful for more than just that one product. One might do that by changing the nature of the manufacturing facility towards a multipurpose "forge", changing the nature of primers so they're more like commercially attractive products, or some combination. DARPA has been working pretty hard on these topics over the years.
I was working on one when we got shut down due to a political squabble resulting in sequestrations. Reminds me of our recent shutdown in many ways.
I would even go one step back in the process. Make it possible to rapidly build factories in the US. And don’t idle that capacity — consider how quickly China brings factories online and how rapidly they could scale weapons production by shifting production of car factories to weapons factories.
This is, of course, a hard problem to solve, but solving it would be quite valuable for the US even without any wars.
Yes, this is absolutely part of it. Even if you had unlimited funding, unlimited trained workers, and a defect free, perfect weapon/product design, the urban planning regime would force you to spend 12 years in consultations before you could put one shovel in the ground to build the factory. Through p it all they would be trying to negotiate the size down and down and down until it finally was a factory the size of a single-family house.
If we needed it for war, I suspect everyone involved would be eager to eliminate the restrictions.
We have scaled artillery shell production, it's about 3 times what production was prior to the conflict in Ukraine. And the Pentagon claims they'll double that again by next Spring.
Given that the actual peer conflict that matters to the US will almost certainly be decided by air and sea power, this all seems very much like pointless distraction.
But evidently it can be done, because it is being done. I suppose we are now more ready for some weird anti-matter goldilocks outcome where the PRC can somehow land and supply forces in Taiwan, while still somehow also being incapable of preventing the US from sending forces and supplies to the island. Seems like a weird fixation, but hey, it doesn't cost that many billions of dollars to accommodate Elbridge Colby.
Of course, our ally who actually needs artillery shells for counter battery fire, South Korea, can produce them in vast quantities. They are also conveniently located in the Pacific. It is one thing for them to be wary about doing too much help Ukraine. Russian can complicate their life quite a bit.It would be quite another thing if the US actually asked for shells in the middle of a war with China.
The problem is, the US sea power is being dwarfed by China rapidly, who have now surpassed the size of the US Navy and are quickly going to be even larger.
And the US does not have enough missiles for a war with China or even Russia realistically.
It's why there's a panic for artillery shells. They realize any real symmetrical with an enemy that isn't some guys in caves would become a war of attrition through numbers fast.
Lobbing billion dollar missiles as a strategy fails when you run out of money for them.
> The problem is, the US sea power is being dwarfed by China rapidly, who have now surpassed the size of the US Navy and are quickly going to be even larger.
The thing is that size matters in wars of attrition, but experience almost always wins.
China's problem is that they lack the experience the US Navy gained over decades of pretty much non-stop war even if they did not go up any significant adversary since the Vietnam war.
Sure because we decided to gut manufacturing in this country. It was deliberate decision made not by DoD following Federal Acquisition rules but by beancounters who didn't want to spend money on keeping manufacturing alive. Since we don't have civilian manufacturing base in this country and military does not want to buy a ton of artillery shells just for them to go idle, here we are.
Manufacturing in western countries was gutted by treasonous politicians bribed by corporations to do an end-run around the environmental laws, workplace regulations, and human rights that had been hard-won by the people over the previous 50-100 years, by allowing these abuses to continue elsewhere without even being required to pay commensurate tariffs or penalties.
Manufacturing in western countries was gutted by the price of labor (read: rising standard of living relative to global averages).
1. It's difficult to manufacture competitively when a local living wage is in the upper echelons of global wages.
2. It's often cheaper to manufacture something semi-manually (e.g. 80% automated) than invest in buying and maintaining full automation.
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.
Western countries wouldn't have moved manufacturing to China in the past if wages weren't cheaper.
I think the cost of labour now is kind of irrelevant. It was the cost of labour (and China being a stable country with favourable rule of law) that drove offshoring in the 90s and 2000s. The Chinese manufacturers chose to invest in process improvement and automation rather than just chasing the cheapest labour - and so now they've got a massive technical advantage.
> 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 this seems fair. I think a lot of Africa has an infrastructure problem - it doesn't matter how cheaply you can manufacture if you can't move large volumes of raw materials/parts to the factory and finished goods from the factory. Plus many areas in Africa have security issues which make them less attractive places to do business. Geographically, a lot of the continent is cursed with hard to navigate rivers as well (the upper Nile being an exception), so only coastal shipping is really viable.
No, it was gutted by what I said it was gutted by. The price of labor I include in workplace regulations but I could have called it out on its own too.
If corporations could not have moved operations offshore to exploit workers and the environment in other countries for lower cost, then they would not have. They were permitted to.
Where the old "labor costs did killed it" canard really falls over is when you look at primary industry and things that physically can't be packed up and moved off shore in western countries. Mining, farming, forestry, fishing, things like that. Traditionally a lot of those industries have had high labor input costs too. They miraculously didn't all fall over like manufacturing though.
Labor costs are a cost, same as compliance with other workplace regulations and environmental laws of course. They are not the reason manufacturing was offshored though, they are the reason that corporations bribed treasonous politicians to allow this offshoring to occur with no penalty. As I said.
> Mining, farming, forestry, fishing, things like that. Traditionally a lot of those industries have had high labor input costs too. They miraculously didn't all fall over like manufacturing though.
Mining has been dropping since the 80s [0].
Farming, forestry, fishing are estimated to decline by 3% in the next 10 years [1]. After having fallen from ~50% of the US population in 1870 already.
It's cheaper to do things where labor is cheaper, then ship them around the world by sea.
[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPUBN212W200000000#:~:tex...
[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/Farming-Fishing-and-Forestry/Agricul...
> Mining has been dropping since the 80s [0].
> Farming, forestry, fishing are estimated to decline by 3% in the next 10 years [1]. After having fallen from ~50% of the US population in 1870 already.
You're linking to employment. Like manufacturing, these industries have been significantly automated and mechanized. So yes they have been employing fewer people. Corporations can't move the land and minerals and oil and gas offshore though, so those industries have not been killed. The cost of labor didn't kill them. That's despite all these minerals and petrochemicals and farmland available all around the global south too.
US ammo for civilian use isn't magically much more expensive than in cheaper places around the globe. Could be many factors ie economies of scale but at the end it doesn't matter - price of labor isn't a deciding factor, definitely not when you have US military budget.
$300 drones are not doing much of anything in Ukraine. Maybe some light weight ISR, but they don't even go-to the front line before having several grand of hardened radio equipment put on them - at which point they're not $300 anymore...
The flippant commentaries about drones help no one: they're a significant change in the intel environment, but nobody carefully inspects assumptions about cost efficiency or on the ground conditions.
Expensive drones are being used to fulfill roles which artillery fires could fulfill far more effectively, except both sides of the conflict don't have enough artillery but for vastly different reasons (whereas significant amounts of supplies are coming from a party which is more or less arming both of them: China's factories).
It should be noted that Ukraine has invested significant effort attempting to acquire US spec long range weapons like ATACMS and Tomahawk, and F-16 and HIMARS were both a big deal which took significant effort to get. Drones have created a new warfare dimension, but I find the way they're often discussed lacks of a lot of rigor or bearing on how they're actually being used.
> The American appetite for new "war fighters" is exceptionally low when there's no exigent conflict facing us.
That’s a problem easily solved.
We have the menace of the Red Maple Leaf people to the north, and perhaps a buffer zone south of the Rio Grand would stave off the caravans, give Texans some breathing room, and make more room for real Americans. Remember, the anti-Christ may show up at any time.
The American people have no appetite for war with Canada. Half the country think it's a deranged threat and the other half think it's a hilarious joke. There's no genuine support for it from the public.
Mexico is another story, but even then I don't think there's much in the way of public support for a ground invasion.
More than half the country was against the wars in Vietnam or in Iraq (2003), but they still happened. And if the current administration decides they want to invade Canada, Canada will be invaded no matter what the country thinks. Same goes for Mexico. How it ends, it is a completely different story and another administration's problem.
A great deal changed after Vietnam. Iraq was only possible because the country had a general blood lust against Muslims after 9/11, who were easy for a mostly white christian country to "other".
Nothing like that exists for Canada. Proposals to invade Canada aren't taken seriously by the public. Those who pretend to support it are just trying to piss people off with how stupid they can be.
Don't forget Belarus just today mentioning they have nukes in warm standby mode.
> The American appetite for new "war fighters" is exceptionally low when there's no exigent conflict facing us.
Isn’t this a self-fulfilling prophecy? Who would want to get into a conflict with someone who has guaranteed air supremacy?
Lack of funding? My impression is that the F-35 program is the most expensive in history.
That's not surprising. If you allocate 1500 billion USD to building the Death Star, it will simultaneously be
1. the most expensive space station program in history, and
2. severely underfunded compared to the desired deliverable.
The original estimate was $250b. They undershot that by 10x. The expense is all "overages."
> Something is very wrong if it takes 20+ years to field new military technologies.
Is it? By what criteria? IMHO the point is to get new tech out quickly enough that you aren't falling behind other major powers in the international arms race. The F35 seems to be ahead of the competition because countries around the world are lining up to buy it over much cheaper alternatives from Russia (Su57) and China (J35).
Not to mention that the Su57 also had about a 20 year development cycle. Maybe that's just how long takes to develop a new stealth fighter?
It didn’t take 20 years to make an airframe it took 20 years to do lots of research which eventually resulted in a wide range of systems and multiple very distinct airframes.
Hell F-35B does vertical takeoff and still mostly uses the same systems as the other designs, that should tell you something.
F-35B was added to JSF to ensure Lockheed (who had been working on exactly that since 1980s even to the point of licensing designs from USSR) was the only company that could win the contract.
What evidence is there of that?
And without the F-35B, what would be flown by the US Marines, and by most other countries' aircraft carriers, all of which require vertical take-off and landing?
Late addition of VTOL variant on mandates common airframe when it was well known that only Lockheed had anything in pipeline that could match the requirements and even then -B meant delays and issues due to inherent complexity of VTOL (to the point Britain nearly canceled the order for -B, only finding out it was too late to refit Queen Elizabeth carriers with CATOBAR kept the purchase afloat)
Reality is that VTOL model is ultimately a niche variant whose mandated commonality with air force and CATOBAR carrier variants impacted negatively both non- and VTOL options.
However, slapping supersonic VTOL requirement on what was supposed to be F-16 replacement in the given timeframe meant Lockheed would automatically get ahead as every other vendor had to scramble nearly from scratch while L-M had fresh supersonic VTOL data from both their own lab work and experimental work on Yak-141
That is a theory, but the evidence is that VTOL F-35s are needed and used widely.
> -B meant delays and issues
The -B was the first of the three variants to become operational.
For very special meaning of operational that could be summarized as "USMC could not allow it to fail".
And the delays were on the whole project due to forced commonality (in addition to L-M being L-M)
Can you provide any evidence? What I'm stating are public facts. We can always come up with reasons, but we need evidence of what actually happened.
You'll never find evidince hard enough to fashion the sort of club people who ask such questions ought to be bludgeoned with.
Do you really think anyone would be so stupid as to leave hard evidince? That's the magic of the whole process, they can do those things fully within the bounds of the process. They decide (or don't), often at the urging of lobbyists, or non-lobbyists parties who themselves typically aren't completely impartial, what they want. And often they have a specific product in mind that they want, but they can't say that so they write the requirement to all but say it.
Often times this is very reasonable and comes as the result of the end user having used multiple products or having used multiple contractors and knowing from experience with near certainty what or who they want.
In the alternate case where it's pork, this is often how upstarts get their start. Whoever the prime is doesn't wanna pay out the ass for someone else's pork that's been inserted into the requirements so connections get leveraged and several dominoes later a subcontractor to someone is under contract + NDA to buy a controlling stake in an idling paper mill and refit as necessary the small town's wastewater plant it dumps into because that is how they are going to provide the filter media meeting the performance specified in the requirements without being forced to pay out the ass for the product the lobbyists ghost wrote into it. The prime has basically entered into contract to create a company making a competing product out of thin air. There are many funny stories like this kicking around the beltway.
The "special casing" of "operational capability" is public fact - USMC decided to claim initial operational capability on aircraft that didn't even have complete SMS (stores management system), something that was missing even after first "front line" USAF units got theirs. Block 2 software had only minimal air-to-air and air-to-ground capabilities implemented. Block 3 was the infamous one with constant reboots, with Block 3F the first planned to provide full not just weapons capability, but even flight envelope. Heck, in 2015, they barely lifted limitations on attitude and acceleration/wing loading after finally testing them in flight.
Conflicts between requirements of -A/-C and -B, among other reasons due to weight, were discussed as far and wide as GAO reports, because like with F-111, there was strong political push for maximum commonality, which resulted in cascading issues - for example, -B added 18 months around 2004 to -A and -C when the fuselage ended up too heavy for -B to operate with any equipment, and extensive rework had to be done on all models to shave ~1200kg. By 2010 there was discussion to cancel -B altogether.
On a topic closer to typical fare on HN, ALIS (IIRC now renamed to ODIN, but awarded back to the same team...), the ground support system critical to even running the airplane, was close to useless in 2015. Something that anyone with experience with that part of Lockheed probably expected and were not listened to.
Ultimately the aircraft is probably pretty good (I am saying probably because some crankiness isn't much talked unless you're actually embedded with users of such hardware, and is secret - there I have only my suspicions), but the road there was more painful than it should be - and ofc I would not trust it if I was foreign buyer for reasons of not just software black boxes but also dependency on US-located labs to provide mission data updates - at least I have not heard of that aspect changing. We used to joke it was first aircraft with "phone home" license system...
Harrier 2.0
It doesn't take 20 years to do that, it takes 20 years to do that and wade through the bureaucratic morass. The SR-71 went from initiation to deployment in under a decade, more than half a century ago. With the myriad of advancements in everything from engineering, computation, to business development/management practices, building new cutting edge planes is the sort of thing we should be getting better and quicker at.
Design iteration cycle-times should be decreasing due to CAD, experimental cycles-times reduced due to the proliferation of rapid-turn 5-axis CNC mills, experimental cycles reduced due to simulation, business processes streamlined due to advancements in JIT manufacturing and six-sigma/kaizen/etc, and so on and so forth. That this isn't occurring is a giant blinking red light that something is wrong, and that we are going to get our lunch eaten by someone who researches, designs, and manufactures with a modicum of competence. Ostensibly China.
The SR-71 had a strait forward mission well suited to a specialized airframe, and again you’re focusing on the airframe.
Just the software for the helmet alone provides a huge technical advantage that has little to do with how the aircraft is manufactured other than having the appropriate sensors, communication systems, and computing power. Yet through all that bureaucracy what would normally be 3 different airframes all get to leverage the same systems without the need for retrofits etc. It’s inherently a two step process to figure out what you need before you can finalize the design.
By comparison vs the F-35, the B-2 spirit was vastly more expensive and far more limited. The F-35 also costs less than the more specialized F-22, but that versatility takes time.
To be fair the F22 would have been closer to the F35 in price if the number produced were larger so that the R&D was spread over a larger number of airframes. Such a pretty plane.
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.
Agree, agree, agree.
New technologies should make iteration time on this stuff faster not shorter... even for complex things like fighter aircraft.
The fact that there are over a dozen Chinese humanoid robotics companies that have shipped working products in the past 12 months should be a big red flag.
I will say though that during WW2 and the Cold War, the amount of tolerance for killing test pilots was much greater given the number of people dying during active military conflicts at the time.
> The fact that there are over a dozen Chinese humanoid robotics companies that have shipped working products in the past 12 months should be a big red flag.
I think that mostly means money is cheap in China. In America, if you try to start a humanoid robot company you'll immediately run into the "Why though?" question when you try to get money for it. The case for the economic relevance of humanoid robots is dubious at best, so to proceed with such a development program you need your own money or at least good friends with connections who don't care about money.
But it's not the technologies that are a problem most of the time. It's that:
- DoD / DoW is a chaotic project owner, trying to squeeze in colossal and sometimes self-contradictory lists of requirements, which it wants to change often.
- The US government is a poor customer, which runs out of money from time to time.
- The US Congress is a cantankerous financier, which haggles for the money every year, and demands the production to be distributed all over the place, to bring jobs to the constituencies which voted for the congresspersons.
- The companies that produce this stuff are few and mostly cannot be easily replaced, and they know it. This is because in the late 1980s the US government decided that it has won the Cold War and will not need the many competing manufacturers of military gear any more. That proved to be a bit shortsighted, but now it's a bit late.
> Something is very wrong if it takes 20+ years to field new military technologies. By the time these technologies are fielded, a whole generation of employees have retired and leadership has turned over multiple times.
Conversely, the Navy's first SSBN went start to finish in something like 4 years.
And unlike the F-35, which could easily have been an evolution of the existing F-22 design, the Navy had to develop 4 major new pieces of technology, simultaneously, and get them all integrated and working.
1. A reduced-size nuclear warhead (the missile would need to fit inside the submarine for any of this to matter) 2. A way to launch the nuclear missile while submerged 3. A way to reliably provide the nuclear missile with its initial navigation fix at launch 4. A way to fuel the nuclear missile with a safe-enough propellant to be usable on a submerged submarine without significant risk to the crew
The USAF's Century series of fighters were turned around quick. So was the B-52.
Having been involved in defense innovation efforts during my time in uniform, I cannot overemphasize how much the existing acquisition system is counter-productive to the nation's defense, despite 10+ years of earnest efforts dating back to before Trump's first term.
Most of the aspects to it are well-intentioned and all, but as they say the purpose of the system is what it does, and what America's defense acquisition system does is burn up tax dollars just to get us a warmed-over version of something grandma and granddad's generation cooked up during the Cold War.
Its turned into a death spiral because as these programs get more onerous the cost goes up, and who in their right mind thinks it's a good idea to just let people go off on a $1B effort with less oversight?
Until it's even possible to deliver things cheaply through the DAS (or WAS or whatever it will be now) we'll never be able to tackle the rest of the improvements. I look forward to reviewing the upcoming changes but Hegseth isn't the first one to push on this, it's a huge rat's nest of problems.
The F-35 has the equivalent of an 80486 in it because it is so old, and can’t be updated.
> can’t be updated
You mean the ICP that's already been updated as part of TR3 to support Block 4 features? https://militaryembedded.com/avionics/computers/f-35-program...
The contract modification that the American taxpayer paid over $7 billion for that wasn't released until 2023?
For that you got an update to...
>2900 DMIPS, 1MB L2 Cache 512MB DRAM, 256MB Flash 128KB NOVRAM
So you got to upgrade from an 80486 level to something the equivalent of an early-2000s Pentium II.
It's peacetime engineering. These things would be developed 10x faster during a hot war. Look at COVID vaccine in 10 months vs. 7 years normally.
That is not a guarantee. We look at WW2 and think that what happened then will happen at any other time. But in WW1 the US had to borrow rifles from France. WW1 was a total disgrace as far as the US military industrial complex was concerned. I know I'm committing a bit of a sin, today marks the 107th anniversary of the end of WW1 and that end was possible because of the US involvement. But, uncharacteristically for the US, it was the manpower, not the arsenal of the US that decided the end of that war. And, yes, even at that time the US was the largest economy of the world.
> But in WW1 the US had to borrow rifles from France. WW1 was a total disgrace as far as the US military industrial complex was concerned
Up until WW1, the US were not a global military power, and because of their location, they had little reason do become one. Additionally they were not involved directly in ww1, so they had little reason to develop quickly a military industry that was at the level of western europe
You’re right of course, but there’s another important way the US contributed. Who do you think paid for those French rifles in the first place? The Entente was financed by Wall Street for years, until Wall Street ran out of money and the federal government took over the loans. The British Empire was close to insolvent at the end of the war—the main reason they were so insistent on receiving reparations from Germany was because of their own debt to the United States, a debt they ultimately defaulted on.
They borrowed (or rented for $1 for the duration of the war) binoculars from US citizens for WWI. Then returned them after the war was over. Patriotic people sent them in.
That wasn’t a heroic effort, it was a straightforward application of mRNA technology paired with an FDA Emergency Use Authorization to bypass the onerous approval process. And even that 10 month process could have been significantly faster if they performed human challenge trials.
Peacetime funding.
Experts generally expected that there would be effective COVID vaccines by the end of 2020, because vaccine development is not magic. There are several known approaches to creating vaccines, and it was reasonable to expect that some of them would work.
What set COVID vaccines apart was government commitment. Governments around the world bought large quantities of vaccines before it was known whether that particular vaccine would be effective. (Regulatory approval was also expedited, but that it business as usual during serious disease outbreaks.)
The equivalent with fighter jets would be the government committing to buy 200 fighter jets, with an option for many more, from everyone who made a good enough proposal. And paying for the first 200 in advance, even if it later turns out that the proposal was fundamentally flawed and the jets will not be delivered.
As everyone with functioning eyeballs and more memory than a goldfish who has hung around a large organization more than a year knows, you quickly run out of blood to write in and start writing in "well that could've been worse if the starts had aligned, let's write a rule about it".
I used to work for a defense contractor. My former coworkers are probably cheering right now.
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 nickels and dimes really do add up.
The paper pushers on both sides that will do many rounds in order to make that happen are the only people benefitting from the make-work here as does anyone who skims their existence off of the paper pushers.
I have seen considerable fraud in corporation. Contractors love to take money and not deliver, report more hours then they workee, and then they get more money from allied managers.
Back in the day, Lockheed could move very quickly. The P-38 went from proposal to working prototype between February 1937 and January 1939. But there was a cost. Test pilots died
The top American fighter pilot of WW2, Richard Bong was killed test piloting the Lockheed P80 jet fighter.
Kelly Johnson, head of Lockheed's Skunk Works, worked on the P-38 (as well as U-2, Blackbird, and the F-117A).
He had a list of rules for managing the design of aircraft. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Johnson_(engineer)#Kelly....
There's an unwritten 15th rule (from the above-mentioned webpage):
Rule 14 is pretty interesting. Keep the teams small and reward performance with compensation. Don't just reward increasing headcount. Could improve things at so many tech companies today.
Rule 14 is why every government and large cooperation has an insane amount of bloat and middle managers, IMHO. People's power and pay are determined by two things - the number of people working under them, and their budget (which is often determined by the number of people working under them). It is rarely determined by positive outcomes, it seems, in the government world.
Today's societal war is a philosophical one - do you think everything sucks and it's a matter of lesser evil, or do you think everything sucks and we "just" need to find the perfect solution.
The F35 is the most in demand military plane in the world for the price. They spent 20 years iterating on it and its now the best plane for the cost with its capabilities.
> but it looks like whole "We will fix busted models later" might have been more expensive. Time will tell.
Time has already told us. Historically it means it was more expensive. If it wasn't, it would be such a rare an interesting case, that it would deserve a documentary on the surprising result.
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.
> 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.
This already started. "Trump Jr.-Linked Unusual Machines Lands Major Pentagon Drone Contract Amid Ethics Concerns"[1] It's for drone motors for FPV drones, which are usually cheap. The terms of the contract are undisclosed "due to the shutdown".
[1] https://dronexl.co/2025/10/25/trump-jr-unusual-machines-pent...
Can't we just buy safe planes?
In the timescales of some of our military planes, cars have gone from metal dashboards to collision avoidance in cars with cocoons of safety with 10 airbags.
I think moving faster might also move faster with safety equipment.
> Move fast [is] not so great when brand new jet acts up and results in crashes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...
https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/air-force-blames-oxygen-depri...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Andersen_Air_Force_Base_B...
https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/2017/07/21/f-35b-helmets-ni...
(etc)
The reality is that developing bespoke solutions with bleeding edge technology is going to result in brand new jets crashing, no matter how much bureaucrats and processes slow down the process. Nothing can substitute for using it.
> Federal Acquisition rules are written in misuse of money, sometimes criminally.
Where "misuse of money" means money not being spent a manner convenient to those who wrote the rules. Which means starting illegal wars, cost-plus contracts, lies about WMDs, no-bid contracts, arms trafficking to dictatorships, pork barreling, and *nudge* *wink* 7 figure do-nothing "consulting" gigs for bureaucrats and generals after they leave the government. Nothing is going to solve that, but if you threw out the whole rule book and started again, it would require a monumental effort to do worse than things have been.
The goal of these rules is to reduce corruption and theft. A lot of these rules go out the window when there is a need for speed. The goals have obviously changed: the US Gov believes the world is on a path to war again, and is reforming on that assumption.
You are missing the criminals for tge policy discussion.
Idiocracy vs kleptocracy.
the F35 isn’t a “move fast” counterpoint. That’s one of the slowest airframes I can think of
What is perhaps more important is how this transition will be managed. Are the old methods just being halted and all projects halted and the new methods will take over whenever they start producing products? Switching horses midstream could end up destroying both old and new acquisitions without a good plan. This seems like something the Trump administration has continually failed at, they break things first, then try to figure out what to replace it with while chaos ensues. Possibly they will have to fund much of the existing plans while simultaneously funding the ramp up of the new plan, perhaps doubling the cost of acquisition for a while. Even if the new plan is faster overall, there may still be a five year delay before products start to appear from factories.
> brand new jet acts up and results in crashes
The thing is, we waste so much money it's better to crash 15 jets but build 2000 of them than waste the same amount of money and build 5 jets.
Even us SWEs out in the wild, we sometimes... disable tests (gasp heard everywhere) so that a refactor can work.
I mean it's why we have the expression "sometimes you have to crack a few eggs".
That’s putting a pretty low price on human life.
We're talking modern fighter jets. You can fly those around with a mass simulator in the pilot seat.
No, it's putting a high price on human life, but it depends on how you look at it. We can be a nation that gets bombed into nothingness, or the only country that can defend our own or another one. But we can't do that unless we're willing to actually build weapons of war.
It's why WWII vets did what they did knowing not every bomb, aircraft or handheld weapon was perfect but still ran in to stop Hitler. I would say that put a high price on human life. These last few generations won't get it until it gets its WW.
> We can be a nation that gets bombed into nothingness
There is literally no one that can bomb the US into nothingness. Even if the US decided to stop develop new weapons, they cannot be invaded. They are too big, too rich and too protected by the ocean and weak neighbors for that
Right now USA is cpintry that threatens others and is primary threat to stabilily. Its rhetoric is not building up to defense.
I don't know to me it sounds like Isreal and Russia if you ask, well anyone. NK wants a lot of people dead too.
Although Israel is committing genocide, it is not a threat to worldwide stability. NK is not threat to world wide stability either, as evil they are, they are no where near to that. USA half switched alliance to Russia, so yeah. Current American leadership admires how Russia does things and wants to be more like them.
There is a reason why USA is currently seen as the biggest threat to stability - because USA is intentionally trying to make the world unstable.
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 sudden death than to a painful recovery.
My understanding is that one of the huge barriers to a lot of DoD projects is seemingly unending feature creep:
Eventually every vehicle has all capabilities as opposed to focusing on some limited number.We saw the same thing with the new USPS vehicle.
Given the pervasiveness of bribery across this admin, this smells like just eliminating the obstacles to a more direct and corrupt patronage and kickback system. Steve Blank might be wishing it will be LEAN when in reality it will be GREEN.
Elements of the Department of Defense have reorganized and changed names of things multitudes of times, yet nothing ever changes.
> Design For Rapid Scale In a Crisis
One of the things that I think Anduril (Palmer Luckey and other founders) is doing right is designing for manufacturability. The invasion of Ukraine has shown that future conflicts will use up weapons at a very high pace. And that the US capability to build them at the rate needed to sustain conflict isn't there anymore. But that one thing that could help is making them easier to build. (the decline of US manufacturing is a related but separate topic)
Is this just their marketing language or have they independently verified this? IIRC their interceptors got absolutely rinsed at trials in Alaska so I’d be very wary of their claims at this point.
What’s up with Maga people using LotR names for their military/panopticon companies?
Anduril, Palantir, Lembas have I seen so far.
It's the only book they've read, most likely.
Is it a MAGA thing, or is it just a Palmer Luckey thing?
JD Vance has a company named after the ring Narya.
Peter Thiel too
Here's a 2022 from Quartz article that might have some context on this. Anduril isn't on the list according to the footnote, but Thiel and Lucky have since had a history collaborating on projects with the same naming scheme.
[1] https://qz.com/1346926/the-hidden-logic-of-peter-thiels-lord...
[2] https://fortune.com/2025/07/07/peter-thiel-palmer-luckey-ere...
Lembas seems unrelated to the MIC, or is there some investor or board member in common?
(EDIT: thanks to a reply for researching; it is the same people.)
As for the rest, I think because it's many of the same people and the same VCs.
Lembas LLC is owned by Peter Thiel.
It's especially interesting because their philosophy is the opposite of Tolkien's. They seek power at all costs, trying to create 'rings' and dallying with bad people.
One common rhetorical tactic, commonly used by their political allies, is to use their (perceived) enemies' most powerful words and ideas against them, to disarm and counter-attack. 'Woke' was a term on the left; racism became descrimination against white people, diversity becomes affirmative action for conservatives, banning and mocking and even embracing discussions of Nazis, etc.
I don't know what Tolkien's personal philosophy was but I think a reasonable reading of LOTR would put it at centre right. The culture it valorizes has military capability and heroism at its core.
His personal philosophy was very Catholic. My reading of LotR is that it is consistent with that, valorising faithfulness, the personal in place of the modern, and avoiding the temptation to sin for power. I agree it's centre-right (though idiosyncratically) but not about military capability: the orcs are the most modern military capability and they are decidedly not valorised. The central heros are a member of the rural gentry and his gardener, who barely fight. The Shire is defiantly non-military and pre-industrial.
> The Shire is defiantly non-military and pre-industrial.
The Shire stands as a symbol for a rural and peaceful life but their protected way of life is only possible because of the the military might of others and this is explicitly alluded to several times...for example in a conversation between Merry and Pippin (which I just happened to read to my kid yesterday!):
"Still there are things deeper and higher; and not a gaffer could tend his garden in what he calls peace but for them, whether he knows about them or not."
This is not entirely correct. The hobbits were very good with slings and spears and bows according to Tolkien.
Before the events of The Lord of the Rings, hobbits maintained a tradition of archery and other martial skills, partly due to past conflicts such as the Battle of Greenfields (1). By the time of the Scouring off the Shire, Merry, Pippin, and other veterans of the War of the Ring organized quickly taking up arms. According to the appendices, they managed to eliminate nearly two-thirds of Saruman’s invading force , displaying both tactical coordination and surprising courage. (Treebeard also notes this in The two towers) It’s a powerful reminder that, in Tolkien’s world, even the humblest people are capable of heroism when defending their home.
1. https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Battle_of_the_Green_Fields
The LoTR had a great distrust of power as dangerous and corrupting - the Ring corrupted everyone who tried to use it - and a rejection of those who abided with evil. The mission was to destroy the power, not build a super-army.
Well in fact the raising of a huge army is indeed one of the goals of the protagonists. Of course for them the goal is to defeat evil. I'm sure that the people behind Palantir, Anduril and other such companies also believe they are building a military capability that will allow the United States to defeat what they see as evil. Every centre right libertarian I've encountered also has a "great distrust of power".
All I'm saying is that it only takes a small shift of perspective to see how the LoTR will appeal broadly to anyone who believes in good vs evil narratives - whichever side they appear to be on from one's own point of view.
This is an excellent interpretation but I would put forth that it is also possible that these people simply want to use "cool names" and get on with their business without any kind of deep understanding of the literature.
Tolkien was right-wing even in his own time, for instance he was a supporter of Franco.
> One common rhetorical tactic, commonly used by their political allies, is to use their (perceived) enemies' most powerful words and ideas against them, to disarm and counter-attack. 'Woke' was a term on the left; racism became descrimination against white people, diversity becomes affirmative action for conservatives, banning and mocking and even embracing discussions of Nazis, etc.
Heresy is at truth taken too far, or a virtue emphasised to the detriment of others - paraphrasing Chesterton whom Tolkien almost certainly read given their similar locations/religions. It's a theme you see with Sauron's love of order in particular.
I think a lot of the Maga people pretty much take this view of DEI or Nazi hate. That diversity was originally good when it was about helping minorities but not when hurting whites, however tricky those are to separate in zero sum environments.
Nerd culture. Def not maga, more silicon valley and tech startup types.
I'm not so sure, JD Vance created a company called Narya after Gandalf's ring and Viggo Mortensen has more than once had to call out far-right groups trying to co-opt the fandom or litterature:
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-48187786
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/comments/1litq7h/viggo_mort...
https://www.brego.net/article/viggo-mortensen-interview-3/
Narya was a Thiel investment vehicle; Vance is a Thiel employee.
> James J.D. Vance and Colin Greenspon have co-founded a new venture firm called Narya Capital and have already raised $93 million toward a target of $125 million.
That's not employee status.
Officially he's an employee of the US government now, of course.
Thiel gave Vance his first real job. Thiel introduced Vance to Colin Greenspon (who was the managing director at Thiel's VC firm and now runs Narya with Vance). Thiel supported Vance's book. Thiel supported Vance's governor run. Thiel introduced Vance to Donald Trump. Thiel supported Vance's VP run.
It's not an employer/employee relationship, so maybe patronage is a better word.
In particular Anduril is designing its weapons such that they could be manufactured in many other existing civilian factories using common tools and equipment. This should allow for rapidly scaling production in a crisis.
>The invasion of Ukraine has shown that future conflicts will use up weapons at a very high pace. And that the US capability to build them at the rate needed to sustain conflict isn't there anymore.
China has no issue with manufacturing so they will be happy to sell weapons to US at better prices than US manufactured weapons. :)
>The invasion of Ukraine has shown that future conflicts will use up weapons at a very high pace.
That has been shown even in WWII. And the war was won by US/UK/USSR specifically because their mass production of weapons were several times higher than Germany/Japan/Italy.
The war in Ukraine actually haven't yet reached the levels of weapons use of WWII. (for example 500K-1M/day artillery shells in WWII vs. 20-60K/day in Ukraine war)
These days i so far see only China capable and ready to produce weapons, say drones, at that scale. And i so far don't see anybody, including Anduril with their anti-drone systems, able, or even preparing, to deal with 1M/day (my modest estimate of what China would unleash even in a small conflict like say for Taiwan) of enemy drones. No existing anti-drone systems/approaches are scalable to that level, and we can only hope that something new is being developed somewhere in top secret conditions, and that is why we don't know about it.
> sustain conflict
...this turn of phrase in relation to goal-setting really makes you think twice.
Welcome to war. If you can't sustain a conflict, you will lose to anyone who can.
There's no need to welcome me to war. I'm not in one, despite the fact that the powers that be are hellbent on getting me (and everyone else) into one.
Oh, yes. That's exactly how it works. No one would ask you "do you want to get into a war"? Ukraine didn't want to get into a war. Turns out it wasn't their call to make!
Least you can do is be prepared. If a hostile country believes "oh, they can't handle a war, it's going to be so easy", the risk of that country trying shit goes up. And if you really can't, the war would be more devastating than if you can.
Wasn’t the son of the current president invested in one of the drone companies selling to the Pentagon? Speedy purchases with no consideration for cost are great are very handy for that kind of investment.
I’m unsure if his sons, but it was discussed on the Joe Rogan (Brian Redban) episode released yesterday that the Vice President has substantial holdings. His prior job had him investing in these companies, while I’m not sure the total sum, he himself holds a few hundred thousand in personal holdings.
Sorry I’m unable to link to the source time on the episode.
I'm so glad the whole world is in an arms race while tensions between superpowers keep rising. Really makes me feel reassured about the future.
A big assumption with this change is that the "Modular Open Systems Approach" (MOSA) [0] [1] will be adequate for integrating new systems developed and acquired under this "fast track". MOSA appears to be about 6 years old as a mandate [2] and is something that big contractors - SAIC, BAI, Palantir [3] - talk about. But, 6 years seems brand new in this sector. I'd be curious to see if LLM's have leverage for MOSA software system integrations.
[0] https://breakingdefense.com/tag/modular-open-systems-archite...
[1] https://www.dsp.dla.mil/Programs/MOSA/
[2] https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/USCODE-2016-title10/USCO...
[3] https://blog.palantir.com/implementing-mosa-with-software-de...
See: The UK and the VIP lane during Covid, billions spent on unsuitable equipment, much of it burned in the end.
The United States does not have a "Department of War".
it’s “official” as a permissible executive-branch label, but legally it's still the DoD until congress passes the law.
It does. https://www.war.gov/
Departments are created by acts of Congress. Not because a wannabe dictator registered a domain name.
What's the difference between a wannabe dictator and an actual dictator?
I don't think it's what's on a piece of paper somewhere. I think it's what they're able to do, and get away with.
I don't see any impeachment proceedings from Congress. Looks like the wannabe dictator has their blessings.
Bad news. Trump and Hegseth do not have the authority to rename the Department of Defense, no matter what they put on a Web site. That requires an act of Congress, which hasn't happened. And probably won't, because even if they could convince Congress to do it, that would require them to ask... and their whole modus operandi is based around pretending to have authority they don't have.
Calling it the Department of War is accepting that Trump's the King.
They can add a secondary title. And they're drafting legislation to change the primary title.
Seems pretty simple.
The ada.gov website has a banner that reads, "Democrats have shut down the government. Department of Justice websites are not currently regularly updated."
Trump is the king.
Edit: To be clear, I think it's complete and utter garbage. I'm assuming people think I think it's a good thing? It's not a good thing. At all.
It's garbage and also illegal. He probably won't get what he deserves since nature will likely get to him first at this rate. Hut there will be a reckoning one day when this alls shifts.
I think that's the most likely scenario, but I'm open to two others:
- this escalates and we enter Civil War. How things play out from there is unimaginable since there's so many other attack vectors in a civil war with a super power.
- things shift and everyone accointable simply flees. Not the ideal outcome, but I'll take mass resignations at this point. The focus will need to be on rebuilding either way.
Something being illegal only has a meaning if somebody prosecutes it and has the power to stop it. With the DOJ head’s main qualification being loyal to the president there is nothing that will be done.
My other concern is that Congress will spend the next few decades prosecuting, investigating and impeaching each other without doing anything useful for the country. I thought impeaching Trump while knowing that it would never succeed was a big distraction and basically show business. I would like to see much more focus on actual problems of citizens. Trump being in prison won’t improve my life.
The high level corruption is core reason why nothing can be done for actual problems of citizens. And the more corruption, the less will be done. Impeaching Trump would be first step toward word where lives of citizens can be improved.
What happened was the opposite and lives of citizens will be worst off.
Trump being hanged would improve your life immensely. It sends a message to future criminals snd traitors.
... and the most probable scenario - this is new normal, US slides mildly into fascist dictatorship ruled by elite who doesn't even try to hide its status and control, but maintains enough momentum of the past to keep it afloat at/around the top with China as a cca peer. Less actual military power but better overall economy shape. Its not like US is a champion of real democracy for decades, not if you compare it to places like Switzerland.
Lets not forget half of US population knew pretty well what they voted for and went on ahead full speed, in 'fuck it' or 'fuck'em' mentality.
Farmers.gov goes even further:
> Due to the Radical Left Democrat shutdown...
And, this page exists: https://www.whitehouse.gov/mysafespace
It is a fact the democrats shut down government because they wanted to hide irrelevant provisions in the funding bill. Enough shady business from democrats!
> Enough shady business from democrats!
Okay what is with this style of writing? I see it in Trump tweets, on Fox news, and in other conservative circles.
Are you guys made in a fucking lab or something?
If by "irrelevant provisions" you mean... funding. For things that were already being funded. Yes, hiding continuing funding in the continuing funding bill. Very devious.
No, Trump has a minor fiefdom district and some authority for services the states and their representatives agreed to let the federal government execute.
He is not king.
If Congress tells the Executive: "Here's some money, spend it on USAID to stabilize regions in which the US Army operates and are of strategic importance". And the Executive says, "thanks for the money! I will spend it on whatever the hell I choose." And congress just belly flops over the next time they pass a budget, without checking that overreach of power, the Executive looks more and more like a king.
You voted for congress, but apparently congress doesn't matter anymore.
My point was that he is acting like a king. And if he's allowed to act like a king, checks and balances don't mean anything.
Which makes him the king.
Turns out, letting government operate on a system of agreements that require appropriate behavior instead of clear consequences for this type of behavior is a bad idea.
He is routinely violating laws, so quickly that there isn't enough room in the courts for all of them.
"King" is inaccurate, but correctly implies the degree to which the law does not apply to him.
I thought the executive had the power to rename existing departments and map landmarks. That's why we got "DOGE" disgused under the USDS and the "Gulf of America".
If that's not legal, I'll do my best to act shocked.
Stop thinking and RTFM[1]:
> (a) The Secretary of Defense is authorized the use of this additional secondary title — the Secretary of War — and may be recognized by that title in official correspondence, public communications, ceremonial contexts, and non-statutory documents within the executive branch.
> (b) The Department of Defense and the Office of the Secretary of Defense may be referred to as the Department of War and the Office of the Secretary of War, respectively, in the contexts described in subsection (a) of this section.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/rest...
I think you should also quote this part:
> Within 60 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of War shall submit to the President (...) a recommendation on the actions required to permanently change the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War. This recommendation shall include the proposed legislative and executive actions necessary to accomplish this renaming.
It may currently be a second name, but the explicit intention is for it to become the only one. In HN terms I'd argue that saying "there is no Department of War" is akin to arguing that a piece of software doesn't have feature X because it's only available in the beta release.
AKA - it’s the department of defense in the same way Robert Kennedy was named Robert but went by Bobby sometimes. Trump doesn’t get to change the name, just assign an unofficial nickname that he thinks sounds more tough. Sort of like his pretend tough guy Secretary of defense that dresses up as a Secretary of war for TV moments. The fact they drag along the entire military and its leadership in their charade is embarrassing, and the asinine nickname is expensive and likely causes operational confusion.
In this case, the executive had the power to add a secondary title, Department of War. It does not override the primary name of Dept of Defense but it appears to be the proper amount of appeasement.
Considering the sheer amount of wars the CIA and DoD are responsible for that are ongoing; the rebranding is more honest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...
oh do you also call it the Gulf of America?
In my eyes, Gulf of America is really stupid and useless.
But calling it "Department of War" clearly states their intent, contrary to his campaign as the "no new wars" president. We renamed it 70 years ago for a reason, and such reason completely flew over the admins' heads.
The Department of Defense DID NOT used to be called the Department of War. Before there was no central department for the entire military. Instead, there was the Department of the Navy and the Department of War (which was for the Army).
Yes.
Did anyone ask the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci?
Gulf of Vespucci sounds great.
nope: https://www.military.com/feature/2025/10/17/department-of-wa...
Nobody uses statutory titles for anything to be honest; when’s the last time you referred to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act instead of “Obamacare”? When’s the last time you referred to the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance program instead of “Social Security”? I’ve never heard anyone say Title XIX of the Social Security Act instead of “Medicaid,” or Title XVIII of the Social Security Act instead of “Medicare,” or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act instead of “Welfare.”
> when’s the last time you referred to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act instead of “Obamacare”
I refer to it as "the ACA", which is short and avoids an unofficial moniker first introduced as an insult.
It's not just a personal preference, it's civically important: There are still morons out there who have spent the last 15 years simultaneously gushing about how the ACA is awesome while demonizing "Obamacare."
ACA is still technically incorrect; as it’s actually statutorily the PPACA. Accuracy, am I right?
By that position we should have been using TUSoA this whole time. US is wrong. USA is wrong.America is wrong.
You're kind of proving their point: People seem to use common names (ACA, Obamacare, DoD) regardless of whether they abide by statute (PPACA) or executive meme-forcing (DoW).
There's a difference between an informal name that catches on organically and isn't politically charged, and an highly visible, ostentatiously political renaming specifically intended to make a point.
You’re telling me “Obamacare” isn’t politically charged? It was originally a political slur.
1. It's not politically charged now.
2. It's not all over government Web sites. In fact I doubt it's on them at all.
3. Cabinet-level officials aren't giving stupid speeches about how important the name is in reflecting a Whole New Approach.
4. I don't remember Obama objecting to it at the time... nor did Obama go on TV and say "It will now be called OBAMACARE in honor of me, the greatest and only competent President ever".
5. Actually I don't remember it even being a "slur". The first draft was based on Romneycare. There was also "Hillarycare", which might have actually been pejorative. In any case it wasn't anything like on the level of the President or the Secretary of anything making a bunch of noise about it.
> I don't remember Obama objecting to it at the time...
I remember that Democrats were accusing Republicans of violating the Hatch Act by using their official congressional mailers to say "Obamacare".
> It's not all over government Web sites. In fact I doubt it's on them at all.
I can’t find reference to “Obamacare” but there is one for TrumpRx: https://trumprx.gov/
I say ACA, Obamacare is politically charged. And the cases you've mentioned all shorten a long name into a colloquial name. This is not the case for Department of War/Defense.
That said, let's call it what it is... it's a war machine. Just as we should refer to Israeli Occupation Forces and not "Defense" forces, since genocidal occupation is just about the furthest thing from defense.
I’ll always remember the turn around phrase that was a Yankee Doodle dandy moment “Obamacare because Obama cares”
It’s not a war machine, it’s a pork processing system for Congress.
That was actually the original name.
Edit: from 1798 until 1949
Negative, the Department of War was the predecessor to the Dept of the Army. There used to be a Secretary of the Navy and a Secretary of War, both of whom rolled up direct to the president.
Following post-WWII reorgs, the DoD was created and the Secretary of War became the Secretary of the Army, reporting to the Secretary of Defense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_th...
It does and always has. What we name that department makes no difference.
Funny how we can tell now whether the other person is a Kool-Aid drinker by how they refer to things.
Gulf of Mexico, or Gulf of America?
Gulf of Mexico, Department of War.
"Department of Defense" has always been a weird doublespeak term. I welcome the new old name.
"Gulf of America" is a stupid way to antagonize the world and accomplish nothing. Even if we controlled some area on a map, we ought to disguise our control through proxies rather than attract attention and to it and all that comes with the evil eye. If I was a trump supporter I would be skeptical of even accepting this as a "win", considering it is just words on paper and doesn't reflect a change in material conditions for the demographic.
The purpose of the "weird doublespeak" is to remind yourself what you're aspiring to.
Department of War is far more honest. The Gulf name doesn't mean anything, it's a joke and we all know it.
> it's a joke and we all know it.
"grab them by the pussy" -> just a joke
selling cans of beans from the oval office -> just a joke
shilling a pillow company from the white house -> just a joke
"let's march to the capitol" -> just a joke
doge -> just a joke
"give me the peace nobel price" -> just a joke
"Ukraine started it" -> just a joke
"6 gazillion percent tariff on china" -> just a joke
I rug pulled my supporters with a meme coin -> just a joke
I do obvious market manipulation to help inside traders -> just a joke
It's all so convenient...
It is a “joke” insofar as it’s an asinine undertaking.
It’s not a “joke” in the sense of being lighthearted or unserious: there was a press conference at the White House. Official US maps have been updated. Google Maps has been updated.
It's not a joke and I don't know it. Trump is gradually demanding the authority to control every aspect of American life, and you're enabling it by not taking his entry-level steps seriously. I hope you'll realize your mistake while he's still stuck on relatively harmless things.
A gag, a giggle.
> Trump is gradually demanding the authority to control every aspect of American life
Trump, or the federal government? This trend is bipartisan, and renaming the Gulf doesn't really hold a candle to PRISM.
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?
It is not joke. He punished companies for not obeying. "It was just a joke bro" is stupid manipulative excuse in normal situations, but in the case of Trump, it is a complete unambigous lie.
It was not a joke, no one laught. It is what republican leader said in all seriouaness and insisted on. And his voters seen it as a show of strength.
I think we use the same PPBE process at NASA. Many of the systems and procedures that NASA uses are are defense-derived. If it's anything like what we do, then it's a total mess and we mostly just go through the motions with it, knowing it doesn't actually reflect reality and it's kind of a waste of time for everybody.
However, it's risky to assume that scrapping a crappy system will result in things being better. The current shitty system was almost certainly the result of scrapping and replacing something else that had some problems.
Anyway, hopefully this works well, because we'll probably end up copying it at NASA.
NASA turns out amazing results, and to the point of DoD's goals, the most amazing technology in human history. So the system 'works'.
Is there a non-crappy system for managing projects and organizations that large?
Prima Facie: probably good. The existing system is pure and simple money laundering, the legendary $900 toilet seat is absurd and this seems to be a step away from the supply-chain-for-everything system in place currently. I believe the defense budget could be cut in half with increased capability, at least in theory. There's that much cruft.
Nobody ever paid $900 for a toilet seat. That was a statistical artifact caused by an accounting method called "equal allocation".
"The equal allocation method calculates prices for large numbers of items in a contract by assigning "support' costs such as indirect labor and overhead equally to each item. Take a contract to provide spare parts for a set of radar tracking monitors. Suppose a monitor has 100 parts and support costs amount to a total of $100,000. Using the equal allocation method each part is assigned $1,000 in such costs, even though one item may be a sophisticated circuit card assembly, which requires the attention of high-salaried engineers and managers, and another item may be a plastic knob. Add $1,000 to the direct cost of the part and you get a billing price. This is what the government is billed, though not what the part is really worth--the circuit card being undervalued, the knob being overvalued. The need for billing prices arises because contractors want to be paid up front for items that are shipped earlier than others."
I always assumed it was $50 for the toilet seat and $850 toward some hypersonic stealth cruise bomber being flown in the Nevada desert.
But maybe it’s just graft.
Based on this article alone, I can believe this is a good thing. The US military suffers incredibly from its monopsony position and without a doubt will get a heavy wakeup call (read: dead young people) next time it has to fight a real war. In addition the army should be the most accountable and results oriented branch of government, since it’s the only one that’s actively oppositional. If we can’t fix procurement there then what hope do we have for the rest of government?
> In addition the army should be the most accountable and results oriented branch of government
The army isn't a branch of government - and if you then wish for Defense to be accountable, there's the question of how to allocate money for secret things.
I don't know how other countries do this and if there are better ways to structure this.
Plus the branch it is a part of is... Well, easily the worst for accountability-failures this year.
> there's the question of how to allocate money for secret things.
In the history of war I find very few examples where an obscure secret technology was the key to military victory.
Cryptography, radar, proximity fuses, and nuclear bombs are all examples of obscure secret technologies that were keys to military victory in WWII.
We weren't the only nation using any of those technologies. The Germans, for their part, were trying all of that. It was neither obscure or secret. Technical acumen in using commonly shared technologies was the difference.
It's why people like to forget there were three distinct phases to that war. Russia was not always on our side. The outset was bleak, the middle was indeterminate, and the end, the part we like to remember, was when the tide really started going our way.
In any case, we weren't invested in any of those things _before_ the war, so even if you do believe your premise, there's no reason to suspect that we wouldn't be able to do the same in the next conflict. Trying to prognosticate what the next war will look like has led to some embarrassing military defeats throughout history. The military fails to be egalitarian.
Speaking of proximity fuses you should look into what it took to _actually_ get them used on the battlefield as I think it highlights this point. In concert with that I like to think about the "Millennium Challenge 2002." War is won by skilled soldiers not by lavish spending or deep secret technologies.
The secrecy definitely played a major role when it comes to cryptography. It was not known to the Axis how far Allied codebreaking technology had come, and how much of their communications was being regularly monitored.
The Manhattan project is a pretty obvious example. The past world wars were full of technological advances that world powers were trying to keep away from enemies.
> Based on this article alone
Isn't it unwise to rely 'alone', in any way, on a clearly partisan article like this one?
Not sure, but to me this sounds a lot like the song from Paint your Wagon. (I was thinking that it came from The Way the West was Won, which would be more ironic.)
Where am I goin'? I don't know! Where am I headin'? I ain't certain! All I know is I am on my way.
When will I be there? I don't know. When will I get there? I ain't certain. All that I know is I am on my way.
‘Two organizations ought to be very concerned – China and the defense prime contractors.’
the department was not built with a single country as their focus, and their target will come and go with the times. would have read the whole article the blatant bias is off putting.
China is the only country that is not aligned with the US and has the military might and production capacity to go toe to toe with the US in an all-out war. Russia would drain their coffers within a year. China is likely to start out producing the US on a similar timeframe. It is pretty reasonable to assume that China is top of mind for any war planning.
China is the only game in town
> It’s big, bold and brave and long overdue.
I quit reading at this point. Figured I could find something not so full of braindead nonsense.
The mere fact that the title says "Department of War" is a raging red flag...
Do you mean a red flag for the quality of the article, or for the actions of the department? "Department of War" is currently a real name for the department:
> On September 5, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order authorizing "Department of War" and "secretary of war" as secondary titles to the main titles of "Department of Defense" and "secretary of defense." The terms must be accommodated by federal agencies and are permitted in executive branch communications, ceremonial settings, and non-statutory documents. However, only an act of Congress can legally and formally change the department's name and secretary's title, so "Department of Defense" and "secretary of defense" remain legally official.[10][11] Trump described his rebranding as an effort to project a stronger and more bellicose name and said the "defense" names were "woke".[12]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_De...
I'm 99 percent sure that executive orders are not at all legally binding. They're just ways of setting out policy. But the president does not have the authority to override congress with an executive order. An executive order can say whatever the president wishes.
No, it's not. As your quote says, the Department of Defense was created by Congress; the President has no authority whatsoever to rename it or designate a secondary name for it. Writing the words "executive order" on a document doesn't make it legally effective.
Any citizen, of course, can use whatever fake names they'd like for people or places or government organizations. It's a free country. But I don't see any reason to choose this particular fake name except for the purpose of delivering propaganda to your readers.
Remember Fat Leonard? This time there's going to be more than one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Leonard_scandal
Damn. Didn't know about this until now but it looks like, at least, he sure put in the effort.
"exploited the intelligence for illicit profit, brazenly ordering his moles to redirect aircraft carriers, ships and subs to ports he controlled in Southeast Asia so he could more easily bilk the Navy for fuel, tugboats, barges, food, water and sewage removal."
The devil works hard but apparently Fat Leonard works harder.
"Directing the government to spend money at places you control" isn't a scandal anymore. It's how Donald Trump directing like a hundred million dollars of taxpayer money to his businesses
Sounds like a name that would be given to a GTA character!
Even looks the part.
He was a GTA character but IRL
That page is out of date. Fat Leonard was sentenced last November to fifteen years. With time served he’ll be there for the next seven years or so.
He will probably be pardoned.
Like piggies to the trough.
There are plenty of things to criticize in procurement. I don't see this as a useful reaction or attempt to fix issues in a long term way.
So fast forward five years and 50% of our war materials are produced in foreign countries?
I can't help but believe this is going to weaken our war footing because the dumbest people in the room are behind it. Thirsty Pete does not inspire confidence in the Department of War Thunder.
I mean on the surface it sounds good, but LEAN is why we had no PPE on hand during covid.
In order to have off the shelf supplies we are going have an active international arms market by definition. Is this what we want?
from the reading I have done, something along the lines of 'bump up 155mm production' is more what is needed
not as sexy as drones, but ask the ukranians if they'd rather have drones or artillery
Drones all the way, they go through roughly 1 million a year and this number keeps increasing as time goes.
Artillery was more decisive till cca 2023 when switch to new warfare model happened. Its still important, but not #1. You have (ukraine-made since US switchblades proved inefficient overpriced piece of shit) drones now that have 2-3x the reach, can carry same/bigger payload, steer them till last second, some can come back home for reload. Drone teams are much smaller and more agile compared to artillery, they can drive around in normal SUVs.
Uh it's definitely drones right now. Artillery is < 10% of casualties at this point, the kill zone is close to 20km.
They're using what they have but the remaining pieces will clearly be mostly irrelevant by next year.
Sure, why not? The USA is already a leading international arms dealer. Demand is growing rapidly as countries like Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea make aggressive moves against their neighbors so we might as well get a piece of the sales.
The lack of PPE manufacturing in the US after 2021 is a travesty that does not simplify to LEAN is why we didn't. Dismantling the pandemic response unit didn't help. Not replenishing a stockpile of masks that existed for that specific reason didn't help. A lack of tooling supply base didn't help, Straight up corruption; no bid government contracts going to friends of the administration with no. proven capability to deliver (and they didn't). By the time this was discovered, months that could have been used to build and certify actual factories had been wasted.
Worse though, is 3M and Honeywell built factories to make masks, only to get fucked on it. Factories (must grow but also) take time to build. In the 6-9 months it took for them to build those factories after the initial delay, China started allowing exports again, and those factories folded basically before we got any use out of them. I wouldn't expect 3M to build needed factories a second time we need them to save our asses.
Which 3M PPE factory folded?
Cursory searching says in 2020 they created a new production line in Wisconsin and moved it to 3M Aberdeen.[1][2]
If you look on Google street view dates for the Aberdeen factory and compare 2019 to 2023 it had a big expansion that's still there.
The other major 3M PPE factory, 3M Valley, was expanded in 2024. [3]
Edit: For the curious, Honeywell did fire their pandemic mask factory workers, closed a pandemic mask factory, and then exited the PPE business entirely. [4][5][6]
[1] https://www.startribune.com/3m-says-it-s-on-track-with-n95-p...
[2] https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/company-us/coronavirus/us-policy...
[3] https://news.3m.com/2024-05-03-3M-expands-facility-in-Valley...
[4] https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/honeywell-manufactured-...
[5] https://www.wpri.com/business-news/honeywell-smithfield-faci...
[6] https://www.honeywell.com/us/en/press/2025/05/honeywell-comp...
Thanks for calling me out. You're right, it wasn't 3M. (Why do I feel like an LLM writing that. Anyway...)
Yeah so 3M got kinda fucked, Honeywell got a little bit fucked, but it was the med/small timers that got turbo fucked, but they're smaller names that noone recognizes unless we're on similar rabbit hole adventures. Places like Patriot Medical Devices or Cleveland Veteran Business Solutions are descriptive names vs, say, HomTex or Halcyon Shades, but names aside, some people, in true American fashion, saw a problem, built a company, and then a factory. Hired employees, and then had to fire them all and fold, because globalization. Meanwhile Jared Kushner walks free.
Given Hegseth's record of financial mismanagement I have deep misgivings about what's being done.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/02/pete-hegseth...
What has this got to do with accountants. In a normal control model the one thing accountants are not allowed to do is buy stuff, because they can also pay for stuff. This woyld make fraud all too easy.
Yes everything is easier without controls, until something goes wrong. Fast cars have the best brakes for a reason.
Removing budgetary controls makes development much easier. That is until you spent so much money on a space laser that you can no longer afford to feed your Navy.
We had... the cheap version of procurement? I mean... that's just fucking not true.
My ship threw tools and parts overboard before pulling into a long shipyard overhaul because they knew they would get more.
I knew shipyard workers who got told to come to work and do nothing so they could mark billable hours (worker gets paid, contract is making money on the workers hourly, so who loses? Not counting the dipshit American taxpayer, of course)
New equipment installed with copy and pasted filters, except new equipment has 100x flowrate so filters last weeks instead of years.
Whole system overhauls descoped from the shipyard maintenance plan so the ship could be delivered "early" and bonuses paid.
Cheney and Halliburton?
Stories too numerous to mention. Only someone who's never seen this up close could think we're doing the cost efficient, safe thing.
Army PIT? Ah, this is not a good name...
I don't care either way, but if there is something that cannot be said about the US it is that they are bad at creating and producing weapons. I bet it's some scheme to get more money from the taxpayer for the friends of Donald Trump. Also I cannot take serioulsy someone saying that the US cannot match ukraine production of drones
Kind of strange that weapons procurement has gotten so much attention while the ability of the country to react to epidemics by creating medicines has essentially been disabled.
You’re about to find out how Russia’s military couldn’t beat a smaller force despite looking very fierce for decades.
Make more weapons faster !! Kill more people faster !!
You're only allowed to be mad because he called it the "department of war". The premise that the US always needs more weapons and should be fighting constant wars must go unchallenged.
>DoW will prioritize buying off-the-shelf things that already exist
Hey Hegseth. You could use SAP - that's off the shelf & I'm reliably informed by an army of consultants that they can customize it to fit the exacting needs of the department of war!
(psst China - if I pull this off you better slide me a couple billion as thanks)
Perhaps if the Department of Whatever engineered and built things they needed themselves*, or at least controlled the program management and knew all of the sub-sub-sub-sub-contractors, they wouldn't be incorporating improperly acquired metals or ballooning programs into mega pork projects for all 50 states. The DoD is a jobs program and wastes money that could be used for housing, healthcare, and food instead of lining the pockets of "defense" contractors as the larger budget in the world compared to the next 9 countries combined and maintaining 750 bases in 80 nations.
* They and the private sector ran out of TNT because of UA-RU and Israel's flattening of Gaza and so they won't have enough for 2 years from now because corporate consolidation leads to unpreparedness because it's more profitable than keeping essential supply chain infrastructure alive. (It used to cost $0.50/kg but now it's $20/kg.) OTOH, they forge the barrels for tanks and artillery mostly themselves. This inconsistency and creeping of megacorp profiteering never lends itself to security or capital efficiency.. privatization isn't "flexibility" or "efficient", it's price-gouging and risky.
This reads like a propaganda piece. (Cautiously) Great that we're attempting modernization, but maybe don't huff the press release like a stick of finely aged glue
I feel uneasy about the govt taking the "move fast and break things" approach.
It's what Ukraine was forced to do, because the more traditional approaches failed them.
It's wiser to enact change before the next big war happens and the same exact failures pop up in the US MIC too.
But what's the limit, especially when there is no sign "the next big war" is imminent or big?
If we assume that we'll have a Ukraine-like scenario, then we might as well start with nationalizing industries like US steel, snatching "untrustworthy" residents to put them into internment camps, start rationing how much food people can eat, and... Heyyyyy waitaminute...
If you listen to generals and admirals for the past few years, much of the US military force alignments and procurements have been around fighting on islands in the Pacific...
This is why the US Marines don't have tanks anymore.
But Ukraine was/is forced to "benchmark" their approaches with the reality of the war.
How will success be measured for this reform?
More money to Trump Jr.
Does anyone believe these changes are being made for some sort of pragmatic reason? I feel like I'm insane. This administration is doing so many grifts how does anyone take what they say at face value anymore?
Do you think that The Entirety Of US Government is one monolithic and self-consistent person that only ever does things for one purpose only?
I skimmed this and want everyone to be aware of the danger in articles like this- it sounds like the author is knowledgeable but there are some real conceptual problems. I’ll list a few so that maybe you won’t read this and think that it’s time to jump into defense contracting. Before I start I’ll state that I’m a statistics professor but also worked in acquisitions for the USAF for 10 years, which is apparently 10 years more experience than the author has. Not to denigrate the author’s service in Vietnam, but it looks like he got out and jumped into Silicon Valley and never actually worked in government acquisitions, all his experience seems to be from the side of the contractor. If you’re looking for a tl;dr (or a BLUF), it’s that nothing has actually changed.
Issue 1: “using fast-track acquisition processes, rather than the cumbersome existing Federal Acquisition Regulations.” This is just plain wrong. The FAR always applies. It has special considerations for buying COTS products, but you’re still required to follow the FAR.
Issue 2: “Instead of buying custom-designed weapons, the DoW will prioritize buying off-the-shelf things that already exist” this isn’t something that Hegseth thought up, it has been a priority since at least the late 2000s, it’s in my FAM training material. The issue is that there are no COTS fighter jets or tanks. So we might prioritize COTS but the big ticket items are going to be custom.
Issue 3: (paraphrasing) “We’ve created PAEs, and there so much different than the clunky PEOs!” They actually sound like almost the exact same thing to me. The General Officer, whatever you call him, might notice a few different people showing up to his meetings. He’s still calling the shots. There is a slight difference that we seem to be trimming the number of portfolios, which means that each GO will have a few more programs to be responsible for.
Issue 4: (paraphrasing) “The PAEs will be able to trade cost, schedule, and performance!” This has literally always been the only job of acquisition. This isn’t new.
Issue 5: “Companies selling to the DoW previously had to comply with the impenetrable DFAR and FAR – the Defense and Federal Acquisition Regulations – with over 5,000 pages of complex rules. … Now the DoW is telling PAEs to toss those and use Non-FAR regulations like OTAs (Other Transaction Authorities).” I researched options for OTAs for my program director during the Biden administration. They are a great way to do research and possibly even get a prototype made with significant participation by a non-traditional contractor. Unfortunately you can’t get anything mass produced under an OTA, so it allows you to speed by without a contract until you actually need to order a production run, and then the FAR applies. So any contractor that hopes to get a big order has to be planning for FAR compliance during development anyway. The profit isn’t in the prototype.
“Weapons Will Be Able to Talk to Each Other” Yup, we’ve had that one since at least the late 2000s. This is just rewording the “Net-ready KPP” that all major systems have to meet. Modular open systems aren’t new. (Okay, a few years ago this was downgraded from a KPP, but literally all modern weapons systems are still networked on common standards).
“To retrain/reeducate contracting and acquisition officers, the “Defense Acquisition University” will become the “Warfighting Acquisition University.” Fine. I’ll start using the word sex instead of gender and I’ll start sprinkling the word “merit” in my reports. It doesn’t change the end product.
“In JCIDS’ place the Secretary of War created three new organizations…” Holy shit, I thought we were streamlining this process! You cut off one dysfunctional organization and three grew in its place! Is this Hegseth or the Hydra?
Anyway, nothing has actually changed until Congress changes the laws that we have to follow. Until then it’s all window dressing.
> The DoW is being redesigned to now operate at the speed of Silicon Valley, delivering more, better, and faster. Our warfighters will benefit from the innovation and lower cost of commercial technology, and the nation will once again get a military second to none.
So move fast and break things, and now the thing we’re breaking is our national defense?
Embarrassing regurgitation of propaganda. This is basically the military DOGE. Are these systems dysfunctional in some ways, could well-intended sweeping reforms improve them? Sure, maybe, I don't know much about it.
Is that what's happening here? No, this a way to get the existing functions out from under the oversight and constraints of acquisition laws to reduce friction for corruption and war profiteering.
If you fell for DOGE don't fall for this too.
Steven Blank (the author) is a respected member of the startup community and is not partisan. He's been working with the defense department for 10 years (across both administrations) to modernize the way the military buys technology.
His work to create the "hacking for defense" project to modernize things is not at all like DOGE and preceeds it by many years
https://www.h4d.us/
He's also never worked on any project involving delivering physical goods to DoD.
It's one thing to chuck software at DoD, it's another to try and put together a new IFV when a bunch of competing interests have their opinions and you are trying to balance it all.
I dislike Hegseth and MAGA as much as anything, but quite honestly what you are describing is just bureacracy, and it doesn't serve a country well in an actual armed conflict.
In the current Ukraine conflict, the US provided something like 50 M1 abrams tanks all of which have currently been destroyed or out of commission. Russia threw something on the order of 3500 tanks (around the same number Hitler threw at Operation Barbarossa, but with each tank far far more capable) and virtually all of those machines have been destroyed or put out of commission.
In a real war, you need to come up with new solutions rapidly as the situation changes, and that's a capability the United States seems to have lost. The quality of US tech is fantastic, but the quantity is probably not going to be there when it matters.
1. If you've been in business for 10 years, you're not a "startup". 2. The "startup community", such as it is, is loaded with hucksters and not particularly respectable. 3. What he wrote is partisan. 4. Putting "Department of War" in the title is heavily partisan.
And he has a huge house which can be seen at the top of each page.
"Got Mine!"
>> Steven Blank (the author) is a respected member of the startup community and is not partisan.
Then why is he calling it Department of War when the official name is Department of Defense?
He’s using partisan terminology like Department of War. Fairly certain he’s a partisan
Sadly if he called it the Department of Defense he would also be expressing a partisan preference. Even the name of that arm of the government is "partisan" right now.
At least that’s the legal name. And yea, kinda hard not to be partisan currently with everything being made partisan
I think the setup is that our society needs a lot of reforms, and everyone has their pet reforms they've focused on the need for. But rather than have any sort of coherent constructive plan, the fascists will shamelessly say multiple contradictory things that each sound good in isolation. So then people get drawn into playing "4d chess" trying to pick out signal from the noise, assuming that there must be some kind of higher goals in there beyond embezzlement and deprecation of the Constitutional government in favor of some corporate oligarchy.
Steve is great, but everyone is partisan.
It's also allowing for "good enough" solutions to enter the field of battle.
Which is fucking frightening. We don't want "good enough", we want weapons that are fully capable and best-in-class. After all, that's why the Department's budget is nearly a trillion dollars a year. We aren't paying for good enough, we're paying for the best of the best of the best.
We should first solve for why we've allowed massive scope creep in the development of our flagship fighters, and why that scope creep has come at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars to our nation. Yet we can't ask why the likes of Boeing or Lockheed Martin are allowed to function as entities that need to please Wall Street and lobbyists instead of scaring the living shit out of anyone who wishes to do us harm via pure technological prowess. We've allowed the management class to take over our defense manufacturing at great cost to our country.
Is an off the shelf FPV drone with a grenade strapped to it a "best in class" weapon?
No.
By now, its battlefield lethality exceeds that of small arms and artillery shells.
Take that as a lesson on "best in class" systems. The "best" system is often one that's barely "good enough", but can be manufactured at scale.
And, what can US manufacture at scale today? Oh.
>By now, its battlefield lethality exceeds that of small arms and artillery shells.
The war in Ukraine seems to be showing this to not be true. Drones are used as much as they are because they do not have enough artillery. Are they useful, yes. But they do not replace artillery. Maybe in another type of war, but that is another issue, what is the next war we expect to find ourselves in? For all the talk of China deterrence, we're seeing a pivot away from China now.
Ukrainian here, and you couldn't be more wrong.
The key advantage of the drone ecosystem is that it spans from tactical to strategic applications, from short to long distance, at very low-cost compared to traditional multiple platforms. It's not an artillery alternative, or at least not in the way you think. There are ambush-drones that go behind enemy lines, land on the ground, and wait. There are 10 flavours of FPV stuff, and by now none of it is "off-the-shelf." There are of course the fixed-wing stuff that would completely overwhelm enemy air defense and hit key strategic manufacturing and oil processing plants. There was operation Spider Web where a handful of FPV drones took out 20 or so russian strategic bombers (sic!) many thousand kilometers behind enemy lines. Most importantly, drones present a major advantage in that the operator does not have to be physically present in the target area. Moreover, the operator himself is no longer necessary in many modes of operation, like "last mile targeting"
Your opinion reads like it has been formed by exposure to some contrariant analysis by BigBrain western analyst that would go for soundbites like "drones are artillery."
Actually "good enough" is often actually superior to "best-in-class" and "fully capable" because they are simpler to make and as a result you can make more of them.
It is often better to have 1000 things that are "good enough" then 100 things that are "best-in-class".
Right, do you want a King Tiger or 20 Shermans?
Yep. You see this play out not only in war, but in business and software as well.
e.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
Quantity has a quality all of its own.
- Stalin
> We don't want "good enough", we want weapons that are fully capable and best-in-class.
OK...
> We should first solve for why we've allowed massive scope creep in the development of our flagship fighters, and why that scope creep has come at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars to our nation.
Because we want best-in-class, and best-in-class means "better than everything else that currently exists", and that's really hard.
It's hard and hardly guaranteed, but the US has the largest budget by far, the best technology, and that has created organizations geared toward R&D on that level.
Much of what the US deploys is best-in-class: ships, planes, subs, etc.
In case of a conventional land-war against either Russia or China (or both at the same time) good-enough will be best, because you'll need quantity, and you can't have quantity while also maintaining the "best-in-class" attribute. I think this war in Ukraine has been a great wake-up call for the Western military establishment, one which had become way too enamoured with the tech-side of things.
If the SNAP and Healthcare debate didn't convince you that they don't care about people or soldiers then perhaps this will...
>Which is fucking frightening. We don't want "good enough", we want weapons that are fully capable and best-in-class. After all, that's why the Department's budget is nearly a trillion dollars a year. We aren't paying for good enough, we're paying for the best of the best of the best.
We pay a lot of money because we want a giant fuck off Navy (literally by doctrine required to be able to "Take on the next two largest world navies and win) and because we spend a lot of money on training the human resources in our military. Pilots cost millions of dollars a year to keep proficient, and we do not shirk from doing ten times the training of other air forces. Russian pilots at the start of the Ukraine war for example had very few yearly training flights, and that applies to maintenance crews as well, and several planes were lost on takeoff from system failures and similar.
America actually has a great history of winning wars with average equipment. The Sherman tank wasn't the most fancy or had the biggest gun or the most armor. It was ergonomic, survivable, and we made like 80k of them and gave them to anyone willing to shoot germans. The B-17 bomber was not exactly good, but hey they bombed a lot of Europe.
>We should first solve for why we've allowed massive scope creep in the development of our flagship fighters
This is primarily because the theory of "Actually planes are a great item to gold plate" has proven true. The fighter mafia that insisted missiles were a fad and we want cheap planes was just wrong. BVR fighting is the norm. Large radars are required. "Tech" pays huge dividends. If you still think the F35 is anything other than a very very good plane after China has demonstrated they intend to follow in its design footsteps and our 26 year old stealth bomber was able to fly over Iran and drop munitions with no real threat to speak of, I don't know what to tell you.
>why that scope creep has come at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars to our nation.
The massive numbers you have seen are for the entire F35 program, which is thousands of planes over 50 years or so. Currently, the per plane cost of an F35A in July 2024 was $100 million. A fully upgraded F16 is about $70 million. An F35 costs about $40k to fly per hour, which is a lot, but is also about what the F14 cost to fly per hour
The "military industrial complex" is overstated. Raytheon does about $70 billion revenue a year. Walmart, by comparison, does over $650 billion. FedEx does over $80 billion. Pepsico does $98 billion. Raytheon's revenue isn't even all government related. They used to own Otis Elevators.
The actual military dollars spent on "Procurement" of guns and tanks and missiles is about 1/6th the total military budget.
> We've allowed the management class to take over our defense manufacturing at great cost to our country.
The management class is the exact group of morons that are currently elected. Insisting they are magically brilliant even though they have no real track record, insisting that everyone else is at fault, and absolutely cracking down on any and all mention of their imperfections, and sure that if they just vaguely push hard, magic will happen, because that's just how good they are.
The department that DOGE brainslugged and killed was a government department for building that skill and hiring talent so they could use fewer shitty software contractors. They built software to replace TurboTax and save americans money. That wasn't getting the right people rich so Musk and Trump killed it.
Department of Defense... unless Congress changes the name.
Department of Defense always sounded too close to Ministry of Truth.
Yeah… just in the use of those glorified nicknames tells me a lot about the author’s standpoints, and dictates the size of the grain of salt I take their opinions with.
He launched the "lean" movement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Blank
So of course he's excited about this.
sigh
War.gov seems pretty official, so according to the USG official site, it is Department of War.
De facto vs de jure. The Trump admin can create any .gov domain they want (doge.gov, trumpcard.gov) and use whatever terminology they want but it doesn't adhere to the law necessarily.
I was very confused until I realized the author was Steve Blank not Steve Klabnik.
I'll be honest with you: every time I see a link to his blog here I go "oh no why is a post of mine on HN I didn't even write anything" and then realize it isn't me. Ha!
More weapons more quickly. This is what I want.
I'm sure they will be used for good.
/s
I'm sure there are good reasons for this, and the approach doesn't seem totally unreasonable, to be fair. I'm just personally woefully unequipped to understand how to deploy weapons humanely and morally, and naively think less weapons is better. Thankfully there are adults in the room making these decisions for me...
>deploy weapons humanely and morally
A bit of an oxymoron there wouldn't you say?
>naively think less weapons is better
This I agree with. We should really only have a few dozen nuclear weapons, and nothing more. The whole point is to have a clear line of "DO NOT FUCKING CROSS AT ALL", and that's it. You cross us? We nuke you. We don't bother you, you don't bother us unless you want to face nuclear annihilation. Seems to work for North Korea.
> You cross us? We nuke you. We don't bother you, you don't bother us unless you want to face nuclear annihilation. Seems to work for North Korea.
I think this is interesting on a few levels.
One issue with North Korea is that they have an enormous number of uneducated, malnourished citizens that no country can reasonably absorb. I feel that the potential chaos from the fall of NK was part of the brinkmanship that led to them getting nuclear capabilities.
Second, if you only have nuclear weapons then you lose a lot of tactical possibilities (bunker busting bombs for example) and you lose the ability to dial up/down aggression as we've seen with Russia.
In all, I think have a continuum of force options is rational. What is scary is that this continuum may no longer involve soldiers - and if there's no risk of soldiers' dying, force projection becomes a lot 'cheaper' in a political sense.
> You cross us? We nuke you.
It's a nice theory, but it works only if every act of war is clearly an act of total war and there's a responsible party to nuke. Who were we supposed to nuke after 9/11? Who do we nuke if the next big North Korean hack takes out Microsoft instead of Sony? Or if it disrupts the US power grid for a week? Who do we nuke if Russia props up the regime in Iran and Iran props up a terror group that attacks our close ally?
That's the thing: nuclear wars appear to have a good track record of preventing conventional war in the mold of "we show up at your border with tanks". But it doesn't prevent the kinds of conflicts in which nuking another country might not be a defensible reaction.
The threat only works in an existential crisis. As in, if you legitimately attempt to destroy our government then we will nuke you. Using nuclear weapons successfully in a war that doesn't result in a full exchange between all super powers demonstrates the feasibility of limited nuclear war which is just nuclear armageddon in slow motion. Nations (and the earth) want to avoid that just as much as a full nuclear exchange.
Out of all of the hires of this new administration, Hegseth is the most surprisingly competent.
A competent person does not summon every senior leader in his worldwide organization to be physically present for an hour in an auditorium while he blusters and attempts to deliver TV-ready one-liners. A competent person also does not take over a massive organization that relies on these senior executives’ decades of experience and immediately fire a non-trivial number of them because of their gender or skin color.
I’m no admirer and I’m speaking relatively here. That’s why I said surprising. I think we could agree he’s a level above Matt Gaetz or “special envoy” Witkoff.
This article kind of mirrors my thoughts about his speech https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/07/opinion/pete-hegseth-spee....
At leaking war plans on Signal?
What about this is showing competence? So far it’s just a wild promise of success
Indeed that is a low bar to cross.
Sadly so.
He is competent at firing more competent people than himself.
> Out of all of the hires of this new administration, Hegseth is the most surprisingly competent.
He is indeed the worlds tallest midget.
I gotta remember that one!
Get ready for the Department Of Corruption
You think it wasn't corrupt previously?
Not nearly as much as it is now that OIGs have been replaced.
Well compared to countries that don't have these checks and balances, not overly corrupt. But it's not possible to have a government without corruption at least at some level.
But if you take these checks and balances away, say goodbye to "good" governance.
There's just no comparison. The current administration routinely, publicly, accepts literal bars of gold as bribes for favorable treatment. Trump just got a new one from Switzerland this week.
Tomato / tomato
Feature / bug
Can we please keep calling the DoD with its actual name and not humor the stupids? Thanks.
We 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 waiting for another battle of Normandy that will never come as we slowly bleed out.
You have to be completely insane, or so deep in propaganda you are about to drink the cool-aid and ascend to the next life, to think you are currently at war with China.
Yet so many Americans really do believe that China is the boogey man de jour, out to steal their freedom.
How many armed conflicts or foreign coups has China started or supported in the past 50 years? What about America? How many people has China executed with drone strikes in the past 15 years? And America?
It's absolute madness that people are buying into this war-mongering FUD.
> We also don’t have real adversaries, that’s war propaganda.
Granting for the sake of argument the (gravely-unrealistic) premise, we have to "skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it is" — the father of hockey legend Wayne Gretzky, a.k.a. The Great One.
Looks like they want to add parts of South America to the hegemony, for reasons unknown.
What does venesuela have that we want? Consider the reasons known.
The Monroe Doctrine goes back 200 years; the reasons are quite well known.
The Monroe Doctrine was about preventing monarchies from operating in the Americas in a time when the United States was heady with its eighteenth-century democratic framework. The USA was preindustrial, trade was much simpler, and there was an honest belief among political elites that American democracy was uniquely good and a flame worthy of spreading.
While the Monroe Doctrine persists, I think the actual reasons for it changed drastically by the twentieth century, when preventing foreign expansion in the Americas was so blatantly about protecting American economic interests, democracy in those countries be damned. And today geopolitical doctrine makes the other superpowers adversaries regardless of what political system they espouse.
Sad that Steve Blank of customer development fame now redirects his prodigious intellectual energies toward the security state.
Why are they not calling it Department of Defense?
Department of War hasn't been in used since 1947:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Wa...
https://www.war.gov/
I'm quite concernedd by the decision to use again terms such as department of War. It feels we are going back to war-driven nationalism.