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).
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.
> 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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
> 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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, Trump has a minor fiefdom district and some authority for services the states and their representatives agreed to let the federal government execute.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Last week the Department of War finally killed the last vestiges of Robert McNamara’s 1962 Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS)... The DoW is being redesigned to now operate at the speed of Silicon Valley
200% wrong. Absolutely nothing but words have happened so far. The government hasn't even reopened yet. If anything, we're about to see an exorbitant display of the strength of Robert McNamara's policy.
Here's some perspective Steve:
> I didn’t have great expectations about what Trump would do in a positive way, but I thought at least, for the first time in 100 years, we had a Republican who was not giving us this syrupy Bush nonsense. It was not the same as progress, but we could at least have a conversation. In retrospect, this was a preposterous fantasy.
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."
‘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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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]
>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)
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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 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.
The Pentagon is a giant grifting and fraud machine, that's why they can't ever pass a financial audit. New changes to how the grifting works from the pedophile rapist grifter-in-chief who is hoping we forget the files showing how he is a child rapist will change nothing.
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
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
What was frustrating about it? From time to time your exact plan sounded appealing to me.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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):
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.
> 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.
> 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...
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.
> 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.
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.
The mere fact that the title says "Department of War" is a raging red flag...
> 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)
What’s up with Maga people using LotR names for their military/panopticon companies?
Anduril, Palantir, Lembas have I seen so far.
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...
Is it a MAGA thing, or is it just a Palmer Luckey thing?
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.
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.
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.
The United States does not have a "Department of War".
It does and always has. What we name that department makes no difference.
It does. https://www.war.gov/
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
That was actually the original name.
Edit: from 1798 until 1949
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?
Department of War is far more honest. The Gulf name doesn't mean anything, it's a joke and we all know it.
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.
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.
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...
You’re about to find out how Russia’s military couldn’t beat a smaller force despite looking very fierce for decades.
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.
Sad that Steve Blank of customer development fame now redirects his prodigious intellectual energies toward the security state.
And then, to miss the mark so widely.
> Last week the Department of War finally killed the last vestiges of Robert McNamara’s 1962 Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS)... The DoW is being redesigned to now operate at the speed of Silicon Valley
200% wrong. Absolutely nothing but words have happened so far. The government hasn't even reopened yet. If anything, we're about to see an exorbitant display of the strength of Robert McNamara's policy.
Here's some perspective Steve:
> I didn’t have great expectations about what Trump would do in a positive way, but I thought at least, for the first time in 100 years, we had a Republican who was not giving us this syrupy Bush nonsense. It was not the same as progress, but we could at least have a conversation. In retrospect, this was a preposterous fantasy.
Guess who said this.
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.
‘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.
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.
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.
Can we please keep calling the DoD with its actual name and not humor the stupids? Thanks.
Remember Fat Leonard? This time there's going to be more than one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Leonard_scandal
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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...
Army PIT? Ah, this is not a good name...
>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)
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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.
The Pentagon is a giant grifting and fraud machine, that's why they can't ever pass a financial audit. New changes to how the grifting works from the pedophile rapist grifter-in-chief who is hoping we forget the files showing how he is a child rapist will change nothing.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Tomato / tomato
Feature / bug