well yes you need to keep the aerospace and engineering pipelines full if you ever need to actually go to war. So boeing and all the other chumps making gravy is part of the deal in downtime
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That is asinine, what do you think happens to those institutions when incompetence is what gets rewarded. The real threat to the US military is not the lack of weapons, or that the F35 is not as good or as cheap as it could have been, it's because it is a lumbering bureaucracy full of people who couldn't get better jobs elsewhere.
Respectfully, the problem is not incompetence or bureaucracy. There's plenty of each in the military but they are only symptoms.
I like the Stanford Beer quote - "The purpose of a system is what it does".
What does the current defense acquisition system reliably produce? Obscene amounts of money for the defense contractors, campaign contributions for politicians, promotions and well-paid private sector careers for the top military leadership. The quality and suitability of its weapon systems, though sometimes excellent, is secondary.
All people who matter in this system, the ones who built and sustain it, are rewarded by the status quo. It's working exactly as intended.
The poor incentive structure is what results in incompetence and bureaucracy. I personally would measure competence with respect to stated aims, not some unstated aim.
If we are to assume the unstated aim is long term wealth extraction then I would again suggest the current extent of short term wealth extraction is putting that long term at serious risk so I would not consider that competence either. I would consider it an emergent behaviour where two or more parasites have to compete against each other for resources from the host, each has the very strong intensive to maximise their personal take even at the risk of the killing host because to leave anything on the table is to allow the competition to have more resources which they will use to attack you with.
Perhaps if the intent is to undermine the US as part of some broader strategic goal, OK, maybe those people are competent, but I would hope that those people are a very very small number of those operating in the system.
Seems to be jobs program. I ended up in defense after a year of being out of work and while all the new grads were desperate and destitute, we were steadily hiring new juniors out of school.
I’ve heard stories from years ago about some of the waste being protected because it we weren’t producing tanks in excess of what we need, some small town in Ohio would lose a ton of jobs and their congressmen his job.
Outside of wartime, yes these are jobs programs. If we stop, we lose the know-how, man-power, and facilities. Starting back up becomes expensive, time consuming, and potentially impossible on the time scales required. That does not bode well for a war you're involved in.
> it's because it is a lumbering bureaucracy full of people who couldn't get better jobs elsewhere
So, raise the amount of money paid to the military so the most qualified candidates apply?
The most qualified candidates for what? 100% of people in the military have passed the ASVAB. And the most capable people in the military are EXTREMELY intelligent.
The problem is unlocking that brilliance in an organization which has LOTS of office politics, cross currents, uncoordinated long term goals, too many interests who get to requirements to every project, etc.
And the biggest problem is that everything the US military decides long term needs sign off by Congress, so there is always a political dimension to every project approval. Congress laughs at the F35 as the “world’s largest jobs program” with components built in just about every member’s district. The A10 is unlikable because Congress wants to keep it around, even though the AirForce thinks it’s cheaper (logistically) and safer to use other aircraft for the role. Not everybody is thinking about the same factors.
> the A10 is *unkillable
Sounds like boiling the ocean, a cultural overhaul is probably in order.
These capabilities don't stick around for free. A corporation isn't going to keep around design staff doing nothing. Even if you move the design staff to the military stuff, you still need to give them work or their skills atrophy.
Incentives matter and incentivizing bugs in software is a very bad idea, it’s how you forget how to write software without so many bugs. And what was the point of it all, it was obvious even back then that the future was cheap missiles / drones.
>lumbering bureaucracy full of people who couldn't get better jobs elsewhere.
That's what trump has always believed all government employees are. Since at least the 70s. DOGE was his weapon to enact his truth.
> it's because it is a lumbering bureaucracy full of people who couldn't get better jobs elsewhere.
I don’t think that they exploit the military industrial complex for personal job security and fortune makes it likely that they’re incompetent. In fact, as a society we seem to praise those who are exceedingly successful at such exploitation, and even elect them to the highest levels of government and hang onto every word they say.
you can just say "capitalism did this" -- no need to pussyfoot around it mate
most of HN will downvote you for it
I was trying to draw more of a connection to rent-seeking behavior, which is I guess one of the failure modes of “free market” capitalism.