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.
You're looking at this all wrong. Taking 20 years to develop an airframe is fully intentional. The whole point of that project is to keep military contractors in business in peacetime because if war breaks out it will be much harder to start a company from scratch. If the company were efficient and pumped out aircraft like a normal company the government would be stuck with thousands of otherwise useless machines to maintain. By dragging out the development for decades they can keep the engineers employed without burdening themselves with enormous O&M costs.
Obviously this will have to change if war breaks out for real, but in theory they won't be scrambling to hire people and will have at least some production capability. They will be scrambling to expand the production lines, but they won't be starting from 0.
A lot of people see defense contractors as an enormous waste of money, but to the government it is a strategic investment.
> 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_.
> Something is very wrong if it takes 20+ years to field new military technologies.
Is it? By what criteria? IMHO the point is to get new tech out quickly enough that you aren't falling behind other major powers in the international arms race. The F35 seems to be ahead of the competition because countries around the world are lining up to buy it over much cheaper alternatives from Russia (Su57) and China (J35).
Not to mention that the Su57 also had about a 20 year development cycle. Maybe that's just how long takes to develop a new stealth fighter?
It didn’t take 20 years to make an airframe it took 20 years to do lots of research which eventually resulted in a wide range of systems and multiple very distinct airframes.
Hell F-35B does vertical takeoff and still mostly uses the same systems as the other designs, that should tell you something.
> 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-22 itself was delayed because of the end of the cold war. The original plans were to have it enter service in 1995, and then this slipped by a year or two. They could have had it being pass produced from 1997, but they delayed it because of the peace dividend. (This is from Aronstein et al, "ATF to F-22 Raptor"). So one should not consider the 2005 date as "how long it took".
I had a friend in college in the mid-1970s. He was in engineering, and his dream was to get hired by one of the major shipyards near the beginning of development of a new aircraft carrier, because he knew design to delivery would take up the majority of his career.
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.
> 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'm also convinced this is a primary driver of "emergency/urgency culture".
Everything is hyped as an emergency to justify bureaucratic meetings/rule writing
I have seen considerable fraud in corporation. Contractors love to take money and not deliver, report more hours then they workee, and then they get more money from allied managers.
Back in the day, Lockheed could move very quickly. The P-38 went from proposal to working prototype between February 1937 and January 1939. But there was a cost. Test pilots died
The top American fighter pilot of WW2, Richard Bong was killed test piloting the Lockheed P80 jet fighter.
There's an unwritten 15th rule (from the above-mentioned webpage):
"Starve before doing business with the damned Navy. They don't know what the hell they want and will drive you up a wall before they break either your heart or a more exposed part of your anatomy."
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.
Today's societal war is a philosophical one - do you think everything sucks and it's a matter of lesser evil, or do you think everything sucks and we "just" need to find the perfect solution.
Were you under the impression that federal procurement was all above board before? I’ve got some bad news.
Your options are corrupt procurement or corrupt procurement with a 15% administrative surcharge of make-work patronage jobs for someone’s mistress or friends. I think that we’re in the “let’s pay our centurions in salt because the treasury is empty” stage of administrative innovations to allow the dead empire to linger. Personally, my hope is the next thousand year dark age we are stepping into comes with a knightly aesthetic.
There is an observation that any organization or a process becomes totally bureaucratized over span of several decades. The only solution to this is to make things explicitly time-bound like 20-30 years and dismantle the whole thing at the end replacing it with something new and new people at management positions.
I somewhat agree with this.
It can be true that all the overwatch was a good idea. And it can be true that the process becomes the point, which is bad. It's hard to tell the difference, but I've personally been bogged down by review processes for months, just to get 2FTE from the government itself while working on the government's approved and funded projects while sitting at the government's desk. It's really silly how bad these things are sometimes. It'll take years to do the thing that even the "fast" programs want you to do.
And the solution to date has been to "start another program". That program promises to move fast, and often does, but it will eventually metastasize with process and review.
I just don't think we can add any more "same but faster" programs. It is time to cut back a lot of process, and thereby bring these programs back to parity so we can then cut down the number of programs.
> 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".
Given there is apparently a large emphasis on the performance of these individual "portfolio" managers, and speed of delivery is made to be such a big deal, this is definitely going to get out own people killed.
> this is definitely going to get out own people killed.
But the key feature making this a horrible decision is that the people responsible for getting our people killed will not be discoverable, and they will never face the consequences. Heck: they might not even know, because they're doing good by their standards.
That's exactly how you make a broken but persistent and entrenched system: incentives without consequences for exported costs.
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.
In the timescales of some of our military planes, cars have gone from metal dashboards to collision avoidance in cars with cocoons of safety with 10 airbags.
I think moving faster might also move faster with safety equipment.
The goal of these rules is to reduce corruption and theft. A lot of these rules go out the window when there is a need for speed. The goals have obviously changed: the US Gov believes the world is on a path to war again, and is reforming on that assumption.
What is perhaps more important is how this transition will be managed. Are the old methods just being halted and all projects halted and the new methods will take over whenever they start producing products? Switching horses midstream could end up destroying both old and new acquisitions without a good plan. This seems like something the Trump administration has continually failed at, they break things first, then try to figure out what to replace it with while chaos ensues. Possibly they will have to fund much of the existing plans while simultaneously funding the ramp up of the new plan, perhaps doubling the cost of acquisition for a while. Even if the new plan is faster overall, there may still be a five year delay before products start to appear from factories.
> …and they're about to ban windowless bedrooms which will make office-to-housing conversions impossible.
Where is this not banned?
And it’s not like offices don’t have windows or you can’t cut them. The ban on windowless bedrooms is supposed to prevent renting out a utility closet as a “rustic studio”.
> Among other things, elevators are much stricter and so less frequent than any other country
Speaking from experience with elevators in various countries: Let's keep the part where, for instance, elevators need a door. (And I'm sure I haven't experienced anywhere close to the long tail of bad elevators.) Some regulations make sense.
But if there are ways to make elevators substantially faster without being unsafe, that'd be lovely. What do US elevators fail to do that they could be doing?
I mean the US has a long history of killing people due to bad designs and cut corners. Everyone says cut safety for cost until 50 people die in a death trap.
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)
>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.
Here's a 2022 from Quartz article that might have some context on this. Anduril isn't on the list according to the footnote, but Thiel and Lucky have since had a history collaborating on projects with the same naming scheme.
It's especially interesting because their philosophy is the opposite of Tolkien's. They seek power at all costs, trying to create 'rings' and dallying with bad people.
One common rhetorical tactic, commonly used by their political allies, is to use their (perceived) enemies' most powerful words and ideas against them, to disarm and counter-attack. 'Woke' was a term on the left; racism became descrimination against white people, diversity becomes affirmative action for conservatives, banning and mocking and even embracing discussions of Nazis, etc.
Is this just their marketing language or have they independently verified this? IIRC their interceptors got absolutely rinsed at trials in Alaska so I’d be very wary of their claims at this point.
In particular Anduril is designing its weapons such that they could be manufactured in many other existing civilian factories using common tools and equipment. This should allow for rapidly scaling production in a crisis.
>The invasion of Ukraine has shown that future conflicts will use up weapons at a very high pace. And that the US capability to build them at the rate needed to sustain conflict isn't there anymore.
China has no issue with manufacturing so they will be happy to sell weapons to US at better prices than US manufactured weapons. :)
Wasn’t the son of the current president invested in one of the drone companies selling to the Pentagon? Speedy purchases with no consideration for cost are great are very handy for that kind of investment.
I’m unsure if his sons, but it was discussed on the Joe Rogan (Brian Redban) episode released yesterday that the Vice President has substantial holdings. His prior job had him investing in these companies, while I’m not sure the total sum, he himself holds a few hundred thousand in personal holdings.
Sorry I’m unable to link to the source time on the episode.
Given the pervasiveness of bribery across this admin, this smells like just eliminating the obstacles to a more direct and corrupt patronage and kickback system. Steve Blank might be wishing it will be LEAN when in reality it will be GREEN.
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.
My understanding is that one of the huge barriers to a lot of DoD projects is seemingly unending feature creep:
1. let's make the "next-gen airplane"
2. (work 5 years)
3. ok now we want it to have better radar cloaking
4. (work 5 years)
5. ok now we want it to be faster
6. (work 5 years)
7. ok now we want it to lift off vertically
Eventually every vehicle has all capabilities as opposed to focusing on some limited number.
Yep. No matter what industry, you cannot make a miracle product that accounts for every use case and is amazing at everything. You can burn trillions trying and still come up short.
The better way is focused products/specialization. Make something that fills a specific niche very well at a good price.
You'll might need more products to get complete (or close to complete) coverage, but you'll end up paying FAR less in the long run on R&D, maintenance, delays, etc.
Well. Feature creep happens because the project is not modular enough that any addition has to be a feature instead of an external addon. But modularity would not be compatible with locking in the government.
Negative, the Department of War was the predecessor to the Dept of the Army. There used to be a Secretary of the Navy and a Secretary of War, both of whom rolled up direct to the president.
Following post-WWII reorgs, the DoD was created and the Secretary of War became the Secretary of the Army, reporting to the Secretary of Defense.
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.
"Department of Defense" has always been a weird doublespeak term. I welcome the new old name.
"Gulf of America" is a stupid way to antagonize the world and accomplish nothing. Even if we controlled some area on a map, we ought to disguise our control through proxies rather than attract attention and to it and all that comes with the evil eye. If I was a trump supporter I would be skeptical of even accepting this as a "win", considering it is just words on paper and doesn't reflect a change in material conditions for the demographic.
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.
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.
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."
There might be no 80 year long period in global history more peaceful than the current (measured by war fatalities per global population). And this happened due to a single reason: nuclear warheads. The super-powers USA, China, India whatever better go back to a cold war: stable balance, no casualties, only media fights. Every body, war guys and normal people, is happy. And in case the things escalate we are all to a sudden death than to a painful recovery.
This puts far too much emphasis on weapons and far too little on the diplomatic soft power that made the threat of these weapons effective.
I don’t think we would have had decades of stability without the Marshall plan investing in western Europe. Similarly the US investment in post-WWII Japan and South Korea gave the US strong allies that had common purpose.
It’s not separate; soft diplomacy made the extensive network of US military bases palatable to foreign governments.
I think pointing to nukes as the only factor neglects a lot of other important work. Stability requires the status quo to be another intolerable for governments and their people. The mutually-assured destruction of nuclear deterrence alone doesn’t give you that.
Another factor is economic inter-dependence. Heck, Europe has been buying energy from Russia to fund the war in Ukraine. China has contained the US not through war or diplomacy but through US economic dependency (yet having enough of their own internal markets to ignore economic pressure).
Not sure, but to me this sounds a lot like the song from Paint your Wagon. (I was thinking that it came from The Way the West was Won, which would be more ironic.)
Where am I goin'? I don't know!
Where am I headin'? I ain't certain!
All I know is I am on my way.
When will I be there? I don't know.
When will I get there? I ain't certain.
All that I know is I am on my way.
‘Two organizations ought to be very concerned – China and the defense prime contractors.’
the department was not built with a single country as their focus, and their target will come and go with the times. would have read the whole article the blatant bias is off putting.
China is the only country that is not aligned with the US and has the military might and production capacity to go toe to toe with the US in an all-out war. Russia would drain their coffers within a year. China is likely to start out producing the US on a similar timeframe. It is pretty reasonable to assume that China is top of mind for any war planning.
Do you mean a red flag for the quality of the article, or for the actions of the department? "Department of War" is currently a real name for the department:
> On September 5, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order authorizing "Department of War" and "secretary of war" as secondary titles to the main titles of "Department of Defense" and "secretary of defense." The terms must be accommodated by federal agencies and are permitted in executive branch communications, ceremonial settings, and non-statutory documents. However, only an act of Congress can legally and formally change the department's name and secretary's title, so "Department of Defense" and "secretary of defense" remain legally official.[10][11] Trump described his rebranding as an effort to project a stronger and more bellicose name and said the "defense" names were "woke".[12]
No, it's not. As your quote says, the Department of Defense was created by Congress; the President has no authority whatsoever to rename it or designate a secondary name for it. Writing the words "executive order" on a document doesn't make it legally effective.
Any citizen, of course, can use whatever fake names they'd like for people or places or government organizations. It's a free country. But I don't see any reason to choose this particular fake name except for the purpose of delivering propaganda to your readers.
I'm 99 percent sure that executive orders are not at all legally binding. They're just ways of setting out policy. But the president does not have the authority to override congress with an executive order. An executive order can say whatever the president wishes.
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?
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]
Drones all the way, they go through roughly 1 million a year and this number keeps increasing as time goes.
Artillery was more decisive till cca 2023 when switch to new warfare model happened. Its still important, but not #1. You have (ukraine-made since US switchblades proved inefficient overpriced piece of shit) drones now that have 2-3x the reach, can carry same/bigger payload, steer them till last second, some can come back home for reload. Drone teams are much smaller and more agile compared to artillery, they can drive around in normal SUVs.
Sure, why not? The USA is already a leading international arms dealer. Demand is growing rapidly as countries like Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea make aggressive moves against their neighbors so we might as well get a piece of the sales.
Perhaps if the Department of Whatever engineered and built things they needed themselves*, or at least controlled the program management and knew all of the sub-sub-sub-sub-contractors, they wouldn't be incorporating improperly acquired metals or ballooning programs into mega pork projects for all 50 states. The DoD is a jobs program and wastes money that could be used for housing, healthcare, and food instead of lining the pockets of "defense" contractors as the larger budget in the world compared to the next 9 countries combined and maintaining 750 bases in 80 nations.
* They and the private sector ran out of TNT because of UA-RU and Israel's flattening of Gaza and so they won't have enough for 2 years from now because corporate consolidation leads to unpreparedness because it's more profitable than keeping essential supply chain infrastructure alive. (It used to cost $0.50/kg but now it's $20/kg.) OTOH, they forge the barrels for tanks and artillery mostly themselves. This inconsistency and creeping of megacorp profiteering never lends itself to security or capital efficiency.. privatization isn't "flexibility" or "efficient", it's price-gouging and risky.
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.
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...
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?
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
Kind of strange that weapons procurement has gotten so much attention while the ability of the country to react to epidemics by creating medicines has essentially been disabled.
>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)
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
The Department of Defense has never actually completed an audit anyways, despite it being a Congressional requirement. The last time they tried it everyone just agreed to stop after spending millions of dollars on an audit that revealed what everyone already knew.
There's not much reason to follow FAR when you don't have to account for cash flows in the first place
An audit is about the journey, not the destination. Auditing an organization spending almost $1T/year is going to be difficult no matter what, let alone dealing with all of the compartmentalization that exists there
What has this got to do with accountants. In a normal control model the one thing accountants are not allowed to do is buy stuff, because they can also pay for stuff. This woyld make fraud all too easy.
Yes everything is easier without controls, until something goes wrong. Fast cars have the best brakes for a reason.
Removing budgetary controls makes development much easier. That is until you spent so much money on a space laser that you can no longer afford to feed your Navy.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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".
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.
You're only allowed to be mad because he called it the "department of war". The premise that the US always needs more weapons and should be fighting constant wars must go unchallenged.
Article has LLM-stank on it. Hard to tell how much is actually Steve Blank's original thoughts, and how much is just AI slop. TBH, it fits the philosophy - why write a good article yourself, when you can get a 70% article for 5% of the effort?
I don't care either way, but if there is something that cannot be said about the US it is that they are bad at creating and producing weapons. I bet it's some scheme to get more money from the taxpayer for the friends of Donald Trump.
Also I cannot take serioulsy someone saying that the US cannot match ukraine production of drones
> 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?
Fun fact: The Department of Defense was named through legislation.
Trump's EO that "renames" it only applies to Federal employees as guidance. No one else needs to call it that, and it's still legally the Department of Defense.
Exactly. "Department of War" is guidance that applies only to Federal employees, and the Department of Defense was named through Congressional legislation. That is still the department's name, whatever Trump decrees.
Well compared to countries that don't have these checks and balances, not overly corrupt. But it's not possible to have a government without corruption at least at some level.
But if you take these checks and balances away, say goodbye to "good" governance.
There's just no comparison. The current administration routinely, publicly, accepts literal bars of gold as bribes for favorable treatment. Trump just got a new one from Switzerland this week.
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!
I'm sure there are good reasons for this, and the approach doesn't seem totally unreasonable, to be fair. I'm just personally woefully unequipped to understand how to deploy weapons humanely and morally, and naively think less weapons is better. Thankfully there are adults in the room making these decisions for me...
This I agree with. We should really only have a few dozen nuclear weapons, and nothing more. The whole point is to have a clear line of "DO NOT FUCKING CROSS AT ALL", and that's it. You cross us? We nuke you. We don't bother you, you don't bother us unless you want to face nuclear annihilation. Seems to work for North Korea.
> You cross us? We nuke you. We don't bother you, you don't bother us unless you want to face nuclear annihilation. Seems to work for North Korea.
I think this is interesting on a few levels.
One issue with North Korea is that they have an enormous number of uneducated, malnourished citizens that no country can reasonably absorb. I feel that the potential chaos from the fall of NK was part of the brinkmanship that led to them getting nuclear capabilities.
Second, if you only have nuclear weapons then you lose a lot of tactical possibilities (bunker busting bombs for example) and you lose the ability to dial up/down aggression as we've seen with Russia.
In all, I think have a continuum of force options is rational. What is scary is that this continuum may no longer involve soldiers - and if there's no risk of soldiers' dying, force projection becomes a lot 'cheaper' in a political sense.
It's a nice theory, but it works only if every act of war is clearly an act of total war and there's a responsible party to nuke. Who were we supposed to nuke after 9/11? Who do we nuke if the next big North Korean hack takes out Microsoft instead of Sony? Or if it disrupts the US power grid for a week? Who do we nuke if Russia props up the regime in Iran and Iran props up a terror group that attacks our close ally?
That's the thing: nuclear wars appear to have a good track record of preventing conventional war in the mold of "we show up at your border with tanks". But it doesn't prevent the kinds of conflicts in which nuking another country might not be a defensible reaction.
The threat only works in an existential crisis. As in, if you legitimately attempt to destroy our government then we will nuke you. Using nuclear weapons successfully in a war that doesn't result in a full exchange between all super powers demonstrates the feasibility of limited nuclear war which is just nuclear armageddon in slow motion. Nations (and the earth) want to avoid that just as much as a full nuclear exchange.
A competent person does not summon every senior leader in his worldwide organization to be physically present for an hour in an auditorium while he blusters and attempts to deliver TV-ready one-liners. A competent person also does not take over a massive organization that relies on these senior executives’ decades of experience and immediately fire a non-trivial number of them because of their gender or skin color.
I’m no admirer and I’m speaking relatively here. That’s why I said surprising. I think we could agree he’s a level above Matt Gaetz or “special envoy” Witkoff.
Don't shoot down good ideas just because Hegseth is an idiot.
US procurement is utterly broken and if they are taking lessons from Ukraine wrt drone operations it is an extremely good thing and will save our ass and many lives in the next war.
Still tho, DoW is a bit more truthful innit ? After Iraq (and other fights) it should be obvious that the department's job is quite a bit broader than defense.
The idea that the department is strictly about defense is a comforting story we tell ourselves.
You have to be completely insane to think China is not an adversary.
Personally, I think we are in WW3 right now and we have already lost.
Americans are just too lazy and insular to read anything involving Chinese military strategy. I can't think of more basic Chinese military strategy than to avoid a head-on battle with a strong enemy.
You beat the strong enemy by every means other than a head-on battle.
We are waiting for another battle of Normandy that will never come as we slowly bleed out.
You have to be completely insane, or so deep in propaganda you are about to drink the cool-aid and ascend to the next life, to think you are currently at war with China.
Out of curiosity, I'd love if you'd expand a bit on this comment.
Not meant sarcastically, and not because I want to refute anything, I'm genuinely curious what these tactics have been and why the US has already lost.
> 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 reason that Russian military is unable to beat a smaller force is beause some entities need this meatgrinder to churn on as long as possible and grind as many Slavic men on both sides as possible. It's a perfectly controlled process.
Russia and China definitely love this: choosing time over features or quality is a recipe for failed products and corrupted contractors who specialize in defrauding the government.
This turned the universal hatred of bureaucracy against our greatest capability.
The US has both more features and more quality in all its armaments, which has given us enduring advantages (notwithstanding being spread too thin).
Unlike making products, time actually matters less than feature or quality in war-making because you avoid war as long as possible, and you choose to engage/deploy based on your actual capabilities.
Yes, in rare occasion when you've stumbled into an assymmetrical quagmire, you need to catch up, with armor against roadside bombs in Iraq or drone swarms now. But it's critical to be better by default, and be faster as needed.
The US military has expressly countered the sclerosis of bureaucracy by pushing decisions down to local commanders and funding a broad swath of experimental technologies. But a program like the F35 necessarily involves a ridiculous amount of integration, and it's just hard to get that right. Saying "just do it faster" is an armchair quarterback fantasy.
Never let your enemy use your weaknesses against you.
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.
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You're looking at this all wrong. Taking 20 years to develop an airframe is fully intentional. The whole point of that project is to keep military contractors in business in peacetime because if war breaks out it will be much harder to start a company from scratch. If the company were efficient and pumped out aircraft like a normal company the government would be stuck with thousands of otherwise useless machines to maintain. By dragging out the development for decades they can keep the engineers employed without burdening themselves with enormous O&M costs.
Obviously this will have to change if war breaks out for real, but in theory they won't be scrambling to hire people and will have at least some production capability. They will be scrambling to expand the production lines, but they won't be starting from 0.
A lot of people see defense contractors as an enormous waste of money, but to the government it is a strategic investment.
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> 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_.
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> Something is very wrong if it takes 20+ years to field new military technologies.
Is it? By what criteria? IMHO the point is to get new tech out quickly enough that you aren't falling behind other major powers in the international arms race. The F35 seems to be ahead of the competition because countries around the world are lining up to buy it over much cheaper alternatives from Russia (Su57) and China (J35).
Not to mention that the Su57 also had about a 20 year development cycle. Maybe that's just how long takes to develop a new stealth fighter?
It didn’t take 20 years to make an airframe it took 20 years to do lots of research which eventually resulted in a wide range of systems and multiple very distinct airframes.
Hell F-35B does vertical takeoff and still mostly uses the same systems as the other designs, that should tell you something.
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Programs like the F35 might possibly be used funnel money into other LM black projects over the years
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> 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-22 itself was delayed because of the end of the cold war. The original plans were to have it enter service in 1995, and then this slipped by a year or two. They could have had it being pass produced from 1997, but they delayed it because of the peace dividend. (This is from Aronstein et al, "ATF to F-22 Raptor"). So one should not consider the 2005 date as "how long it took".
I had a friend in college in the mid-1970s. He was in engineering, and his dream was to get hired by one of the major shipyards near the beginning of development of a new aircraft carrier, because he knew design to delivery would take up the majority of his career.
The F-35 has the equivalent of an 80486 in it because it is so old, and can’t be updated.
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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.
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As everyone with functioning eyeballs and more memory than a goldfish who has hung around a large organization more than a year knows, you quickly run out of blood to write in and start writing in "well that could've been worse if the starts had aligned, let's write a rule about it".
I used to work for a defense contractor. My former coworkers are probably cheering right now.
The contractors cheer because there are fewer limitations on poor quality products, project management, and fraud.
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> 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'm also convinced this is a primary driver of "emergency/urgency culture".
Everything is hyped as an emergency to justify bureaucratic meetings/rule writing
I have seen considerable fraud in corporation. Contractors love to take money and not deliver, report more hours then they workee, and then they get more money from allied managers.
Back in the day, Lockheed could move very quickly. The P-38 went from proposal to working prototype between February 1937 and January 1939. But there was a cost. Test pilots died
The top American fighter pilot of WW2, Richard Bong was killed test piloting the Lockheed P80 jet fighter.
Kelly Johnson, head of Lockheed's Skunk Works, worked on the P-38 (as well as U-2, Blackbird, and the F-117A).
He had a list of rules for managing the design of aircraft. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Johnson_(engineer)#Kelly....
There's an unwritten 15th rule (from the above-mentioned webpage):
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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.
And a truck full of low cost drones can swarm your airfield and take all your F35s out while they're still on the ground.
The future isn't in pilot-in-seat aircraft at all.
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Today's societal war is a philosophical one - do you think everything sucks and it's a matter of lesser evil, or do you think everything sucks and we "just" need to find the perfect solution.
Yes, we have swung too much towards the bureaucrats
Is this truly the case or are the criminals and other people who misuse money dragging people towards this position?
Were you under the impression that federal procurement was all above board before? I’ve got some bad news.
Your options are corrupt procurement or corrupt procurement with a 15% administrative surcharge of make-work patronage jobs for someone’s mistress or friends. I think that we’re in the “let’s pay our centurions in salt because the treasury is empty” stage of administrative innovations to allow the dead empire to linger. Personally, my hope is the next thousand year dark age we are stepping into comes with a knightly aesthetic.
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There is an observation that any organization or a process becomes totally bureaucratized over span of several decades. The only solution to this is to make things explicitly time-bound like 20-30 years and dismantle the whole thing at the end replacing it with something new and new people at management positions.
I somewhat agree with this. It can be true that all the overwatch was a good idea. And it can be true that the process becomes the point, which is bad. It's hard to tell the difference, but I've personally been bogged down by review processes for months, just to get 2FTE from the government itself while working on the government's approved and funded projects while sitting at the government's desk. It's really silly how bad these things are sometimes. It'll take years to do the thing that even the "fast" programs want you to do.
And the solution to date has been to "start another program". That program promises to move fast, and often does, but it will eventually metastasize with process and review.
I just don't think we can add any more "same but faster" programs. It is time to cut back a lot of process, and thereby bring these programs back to parity so we can then cut down the number of programs.
> 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...
Given there is apparently a large emphasis on the performance of these individual "portfolio" managers, and speed of delivery is made to be such a big deal, this is definitely going to get out own people killed.
> this is definitely going to get out own people killed.
But the key feature making this a horrible decision is that the people responsible for getting our people killed will not be discoverable, and they will never face the consequences. Heck: they might not even know, because they're doing good by their standards.
That's exactly how you make a broken but persistent and entrenched system: incentives without consequences for exported costs.
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> 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.
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.
The goal of these rules is to reduce corruption and theft. A lot of these rules go out the window when there is a need for speed. The goals have obviously changed: the US Gov believes the world is on a path to war again, and is reforming on that assumption.
... or alternatively the "US Gov" believes that more corruption and theft is desirable.
You are missing the criminals for tge policy discussion.
Idiocracy vs kleptocracy.
Stir in a little kakistocracy there to get it just right ...
the F35 isn’t a “move fast” counterpoint. That’s one of the slowest airframes I can think of
What is perhaps more important is how this transition will be managed. Are the old methods just being halted and all projects halted and the new methods will take over whenever they start producing products? Switching horses midstream could end up destroying both old and new acquisitions without a good plan. This seems like something the Trump administration has continually failed at, they break things first, then try to figure out what to replace it with while chaos ensues. Possibly they will have to fund much of the existing plans while simultaneously funding the ramp up of the new plan, perhaps doubling the cost of acquisition for a while. Even if the new plan is faster overall, there may still be a five year delay before products start to appear from factories.
> brand new jet acts up and results in crashes
The thing is, we waste so much money it's better to crash 15 jets but build 2000 of them than waste the same amount of money and build 5 jets.
Even us SWEs out in the wild, we sometimes... disable tests (gasp heard everywhere) so that a refactor can work.
I mean it's why we have the expression "sometimes you have to crack a few eggs".
That’s putting a pretty low price on human life.
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> …and they're about to ban windowless bedrooms which will make office-to-housing conversions impossible.
Where is this not banned?
And it’s not like offices don’t have windows or you can’t cut them. The ban on windowless bedrooms is supposed to prevent renting out a utility closet as a “rustic studio”.
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> Among other things, elevators are much stricter and so less frequent than any other country
Speaking from experience with elevators in various countries: Let's keep the part where, for instance, elevators need a door. (And I'm sure I haven't experienced anywhere close to the long tail of bad elevators.) Some regulations make sense.
But if there are ways to make elevators substantially faster without being unsafe, that'd be lovely. What do US elevators fail to do that they could be doing?
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I mean the US has a long history of killing people due to bad designs and cut corners. Everyone says cut safety for cost until 50 people die in a death trap.
> 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)
>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.
What’s up with Maga people using LotR names for their military/panopticon companies?
Anduril, Palantir, Lembas have I seen so far.
It's the only book they've read, most likely.
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?
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It's especially interesting because their philosophy is the opposite of Tolkien's. They seek power at all costs, trying to create 'rings' and dallying with bad people.
One common rhetorical tactic, commonly used by their political allies, is to use their (perceived) enemies' most powerful words and ideas against them, to disarm and counter-attack. 'Woke' was a term on the left; racism became descrimination against white people, diversity becomes affirmative action for conservatives, banning and mocking and even embracing discussions of Nazis, etc.
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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.
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Nerd culture. Def not maga, more silicon valley and tech startup types.
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Is this just their marketing language or have they independently verified this? IIRC their interceptors got absolutely rinsed at trials in Alaska so I’d be very wary of their claims at this point.
Could you share more information about the trials in Alaska? I can't track down the results you're talking about.
In particular Anduril is designing its weapons such that they could be manufactured in many other existing civilian factories using common tools and equipment. This should allow for rapidly scaling production in a crisis.
>The invasion of Ukraine has shown that future conflicts will use up weapons at a very high pace. And that the US capability to build them at the rate needed to sustain conflict isn't there anymore.
China has no issue with manufacturing so they will be happy to sell weapons to US at better prices than US manufactured weapons. :)
> the decline of US manufacturing is a related but separate topic
I was under the impression that US manufacturing output is at an all-time high—is that not the case?
> that one thing that could help is making them easier to build
That means anyone can build them.
Be wary of advances that benefit your enemy as much as you, and make more of your enemies capable of war.
> sustain conflict
...this turn of phrase in relation to goal-setting really makes you think twice.
Welcome to war. If you can't sustain a conflict, you will lose to anyone who can.
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Wasn’t the son of the current president invested in one of the drone companies selling to the Pentagon? Speedy purchases with no consideration for cost are great are very handy for that kind of investment.
I’m unsure if his sons, but it was discussed on the Joe Rogan (Brian Redban) episode released yesterday that the Vice President has substantial holdings. His prior job had him investing in these companies, while I’m not sure the total sum, he himself holds a few hundred thousand in personal holdings.
Sorry I’m unable to link to the source time on the episode.
Given the pervasiveness of bribery across this admin, this smells like just eliminating the obstacles to a more direct and corrupt patronage and kickback system. Steve Blank might be wishing it will be LEAN when in reality it will be GREEN.
This is going to make the Bush administration disappearing billions in cash in Iraq look like chump change.
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...
My understanding is that one of the huge barriers to a lot of DoD projects is seemingly unending feature creep:
Eventually every vehicle has all capabilities as opposed to focusing on some limited number.
We saw the same thing with the new USPS vehicle.
Yep. No matter what industry, you cannot make a miracle product that accounts for every use case and is amazing at everything. You can burn trillions trying and still come up short.
The better way is focused products/specialization. Make something that fills a specific niche very well at a good price.
You'll might need more products to get complete (or close to complete) coverage, but you'll end up paying FAR less in the long run on R&D, maintenance, delays, etc.
Well. Feature creep happens because the project is not modular enough that any addition has to be a feature instead of an external addon. But modularity would not be compatible with locking in the government.
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The United States does not have a "Department of War".
That was actually the original name.
Edit: from 1798 until 1949
Negative, the Department of War was the predecessor to the Dept of the Army. There used to be a Secretary of the Navy and a Secretary of War, both of whom rolled up direct to the president.
Following post-WWII reorgs, the DoD was created and the Secretary of War became the Secretary of the Army, reporting to the Secretary of Defense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_th...
It does. https://www.war.gov/
Departments are created by acts of Congress. Not because a wannabe dictator registered a domain name.
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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...
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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.
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oh do you also call it the Gulf of America?
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nope: https://www.military.com/feature/2025/10/17/department-of-wa...
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it’s “official” as a permissible executive-branch label, but legally it's still the DoD until congress passes the law.
Re: dept of war - Just gonna leave this here because I find it humorous:
https://x.com/DOWResponse/status/1989076342051320061
It does and always has. What we name that department makes no difference.
Funny how we can tell now whether the other person is a Kool-Aid drinker by how they refer to things.
Gulf of Mexico, or Gulf of America?
Gulf of Mexico, Department of War.
"Department of Defense" has always been a weird doublespeak term. I welcome the new old name.
"Gulf of America" is a stupid way to antagonize the world and accomplish nothing. Even if we controlled some area on a map, we ought to disguise our control through proxies rather than attract attention and to it and all that comes with the evil eye. If I was a trump supporter I would be skeptical of even accepting this as a "win", considering it is just words on paper and doesn't reflect a change in material conditions for the demographic.
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Department of War is far more honest. The Gulf name doesn't mean anything, it's a joke and we all know it.
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That and Gulf of America instantly gets people on my block list. Do not care what they have to say about anything.
At least it’s a more honest name.
I think we use the same PPBE process at NASA. Many of the systems and procedures that NASA uses are are defense-derived. If it's anything like what we do, then it's a total mess and we mostly just go through the motions with it, knowing it doesn't actually reflect reality and it's kind of a waste of time for everybody.
However, it's risky to assume that scrapping a crappy system will result in things being better. The current shitty system was almost certainly the result of scrapping and replacing something else that had some problems.
Anyway, hopefully this works well, because we'll probably end up copying it at NASA.
NASA turns out amazing results, and to the point of DoD's goals, the most amazing technology in human history. So the system 'works'.
Is there a non-crappy system for managing projects and organizations that large?
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.
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> Based on this article alone
Isn't it unwise to rely 'alone', in any way, on a clearly partisan article like this one?
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.
There might be no 80 year long period in global history more peaceful than the current (measured by war fatalities per global population). And this happened due to a single reason: nuclear warheads. The super-powers USA, China, India whatever better go back to a cold war: stable balance, no casualties, only media fights. Every body, war guys and normal people, is happy. And in case the things escalate we are all to a sudden death than to a painful recovery.
This puts far too much emphasis on weapons and far too little on the diplomatic soft power that made the threat of these weapons effective.
I don’t think we would have had decades of stability without the Marshall plan investing in western Europe. Similarly the US investment in post-WWII Japan and South Korea gave the US strong allies that had common purpose.
It’s not separate; soft diplomacy made the extensive network of US military bases palatable to foreign governments.
I think pointing to nukes as the only factor neglects a lot of other important work. Stability requires the status quo to be another intolerable for governments and their people. The mutually-assured destruction of nuclear deterrence alone doesn’t give you that.
Another factor is economic inter-dependence. Heck, Europe has been buying energy from Russia to fund the war in Ukraine. China has contained the US not through war or diplomacy but through US economic dependency (yet having enough of their own internal markets to ignore economic pressure).
> And this happened due to a single reason: nuclear warheads.
I think this happened in spite of nuclear warheads. US naval dominance has had far greater material impact, even vs other world powers.
> And in case the things escalate we are all to a sudden death than to a painful recovery.
I don't think nuclear war ever implied the complete extinction of the human race.
I thought this was interesting speculation and googled quickly.
It seems... debatable? Close? Obviously a challenging dataset to gather accurately.
https://www3.nd.edu/~dhoward1/Rates%20of%20Death%20in%20War....
Then maybe American politics can go back to fighting a common enemy instead of each other.
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Not sure, but to me this sounds a lot like the song from Paint your Wagon. (I was thinking that it came from The Way the West was Won, which would be more ironic.)
Where am I goin'? I don't know! Where am I headin'? I ain't certain! All I know is I am on my way.
When will I be there? I don't know. When will I get there? I ain't certain. All that I know is I am on my way.
‘Two organizations ought to be very concerned – China and the defense prime contractors.’
the department was not built with a single country as their focus, and their target will come and go with the times. would have read the whole article the blatant bias is off putting.
China is the only country that is not aligned with the US and has the military might and production capacity to go toe to toe with the US in an all-out war. Russia would drain their coffers within a year. China is likely to start out producing the US on a similar timeframe. It is pretty reasonable to assume that China is top of mind for any war planning.
China is the only game in town
> It’s big, bold and brave and long overdue.
I quit reading at this point. Figured I could find something not so full of braindead nonsense.
I'm so glad the whole world is in an arms race while tensions between superpowers keep rising. Really makes me feel reassured about the future.
The mere fact that the title says "Department of War" is a raging red flag...
Do you mean a red flag for the quality of the article, or for the actions of the department? "Department of War" is currently a real name for the department:
> On September 5, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order authorizing "Department of War" and "secretary of war" as secondary titles to the main titles of "Department of Defense" and "secretary of defense." The terms must be accommodated by federal agencies and are permitted in executive branch communications, ceremonial settings, and non-statutory documents. However, only an act of Congress can legally and formally change the department's name and secretary's title, so "Department of Defense" and "secretary of defense" remain legally official.[10][11] Trump described his rebranding as an effort to project a stronger and more bellicose name and said the "defense" names were "woke".[12]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_De...
No, it's not. As your quote says, the Department of Defense was created by Congress; the President has no authority whatsoever to rename it or designate a secondary name for it. Writing the words "executive order" on a document doesn't make it legally effective.
Any citizen, of course, can use whatever fake names they'd like for people or places or government organizations. It's a free country. But I don't see any reason to choose this particular fake name except for the purpose of delivering propaganda to your readers.
> Do you mean a red flag for the quality of the article
Yes, it's a sign that they are writing for partisan political reasons and aren't an impartial observer.
I'm 99 percent sure that executive orders are not at all legally binding. They're just ways of setting out policy. But the president does not have the authority to override congress with an executive order. An executive order can say whatever the president wishes.
It's an alias that only applies to Federal employees.
The Congressionally-legislated actual name of the department is still Department of Defense.
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Elements of the Department of Defense have reorganized and changed names of things multitudes of times, yet nothing ever changes.
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?
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...
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from the reading I have done, something along the lines of 'bump up 155mm production' is more what is needed
not as sexy as drones, but ask the ukranians if they'd rather have drones or artillery
Drones all the way, they go through roughly 1 million a year and this number keeps increasing as time goes.
Artillery was more decisive till cca 2023 when switch to new warfare model happened. Its still important, but not #1. You have (ukraine-made since US switchblades proved inefficient overpriced piece of shit) drones now that have 2-3x the reach, can carry same/bigger payload, steer them till last second, some can come back home for reload. Drone teams are much smaller and more agile compared to artillery, they can drive around in normal SUVs.
Uh it's definitely drones right now. Artillery is < 10% of casualties at this point, the kill zone is close to 20km.
They're using what they have but the remaining pieces will clearly be mostly irrelevant by next year.
Sure, why not? The USA is already a leading international arms dealer. Demand is growing rapidly as countries like Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea make aggressive moves against their neighbors so we might as well get a piece of the sales.
Why are they not calling it Department of Defense?
Department of War hasn't been in used since 1947:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Wa...
https://www.war.gov/
I'm quite concernedd by the decision to use again terms such as department of War. It feels we are going back to war-driven nationalism.
Perhaps if the Department of Whatever engineered and built things they needed themselves*, or at least controlled the program management and knew all of the sub-sub-sub-sub-contractors, they wouldn't be incorporating improperly acquired metals or ballooning programs into mega pork projects for all 50 states. The DoD is a jobs program and wastes money that could be used for housing, healthcare, and food instead of lining the pockets of "defense" contractors as the larger budget in the world compared to the next 9 countries combined and maintaining 750 bases in 80 nations.
* They and the private sector ran out of TNT because of UA-RU and Israel's flattening of Gaza and so they won't have enough for 2 years from now because corporate consolidation leads to unpreparedness because it's more profitable than keeping essential supply chain infrastructure alive. (It used to cost $0.50/kg but now it's $20/kg.) OTOH, they forge the barrels for tanks and artillery mostly themselves. This inconsistency and creeping of megacorp profiteering never lends itself to security or capital efficiency.. privatization isn't "flexibility" or "efficient", it's price-gouging and risky.
See: The UK and the VIP lane during Covid, billions spent on unsuitable equipment, much of it burned in the end.
When will the $500 hammer come back to $10?
https://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+case+for+the+%24435+hamme...
We had... the cheap version of procurement? I mean... that's just fucking not true.
My ship threw tools and parts overboard before pulling into a long shipyard overhaul because they knew they would get more.
I knew shipyard workers who got told to come to work and do nothing so they could mark billable hours (worker gets paid, contract is making money on the workers hourly, so who loses? Not counting the dipshit American taxpayer, of course)
New equipment installed with copy and pasted filters, except new equipment has 100x flowrate so filters last weeks instead of years.
Whole system overhauls descoped from the shipyard maintenance plan so the ship could be delivered "early" and bonuses paid.
Cheney and Halliburton?
Stories too numerous to mention. Only someone who's never seen this up close could think we're doing the cost efficient, safe thing.
I 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...
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But Ukraine was/is forced to "benchmark" their approaches with the reality of the war.
How will success be measured for this reform?
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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?
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Army PIT? Ah, this is not a good name...
Remember Fat Leonard? This time there's going to be more than one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Leonard_scandal
Damn. Didn't know about this until now but it looks like, at least, he sure put in the effort.
"exploited the intelligence for illicit profit, brazenly ordering his moles to redirect aircraft carriers, ships and subs to ports he controlled in Southeast Asia so he could more easily bilk the Navy for fuel, tugboats, barges, food, water and sewage removal."
The devil works hard but apparently Fat Leonard works harder.
"Directing the government to spend money at places you control" isn't a scandal anymore. It's how Donald Trump directing like a hundred million dollars of taxpayer money to his businesses
Sounds like a name that would be given to a GTA character!
He was a GTA character but IRL
Even looks the part.
That page is out of date. Fat Leonard was sentenced last November to fifteen years. With time served he’ll be there for the next seven years or so.
He will probably be pardoned.
Like piggies to the trough.
There are plenty of things to criticize in procurement. I don't see this as a useful reaction or attempt to fix issues in a long term way.
Kind of strange that weapons procurement has gotten so much attention while the ability of the country to react to epidemics by creating medicines has essentially been disabled.
>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)
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
The Department of Defense has never actually completed an audit anyways, despite it being a Congressional requirement. The last time they tried it everyone just agreed to stop after spending millions of dollars on an audit that revealed what everyone already knew.
There's not much reason to follow FAR when you don't have to account for cash flows in the first place
An audit is about the journey, not the destination. Auditing an organization spending almost $1T/year is going to be difficult no matter what, let alone dealing with all of the compartmentalization that exists there
What has this got to do with accountants. In a normal control model the one thing accountants are not allowed to do is buy stuff, because they can also pay for stuff. This woyld make fraud all too easy.
Yes everything is easier without controls, until something goes wrong. Fast cars have the best brakes for a reason.
Removing budgetary controls makes development much easier. That is until you spent so much money on a space laser that you can no longer afford to feed your Navy.
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.
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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.
>> 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?
And he has a huge house which can be seen at the top of each page.
"Got Mine!"
He’s using partisan terminology like Department of War. Fairly certain he’s a partisan
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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.
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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.
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> 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.
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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".
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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.
Make more weapons faster !! Kill more people faster !!
You're only allowed to be mad because he called it the "department of war". The premise that the US always needs more weapons and should be fighting constant wars must go unchallenged.
Article has LLM-stank on it. Hard to tell how much is actually Steve Blank's original thoughts, and how much is just AI slop. TBH, it fits the philosophy - why write a good article yourself, when you can get a 70% article for 5% of the effort?
Sad that Steve Blank of customer development fame now redirects his prodigious intellectual energies toward the security state.
I don't care either way, but if there is something that cannot be said about the US it is that they are bad at creating and producing weapons. I bet it's some scheme to get more money from the taxpayer for the friends of Donald Trump. Also I cannot take serioulsy someone saying that the US cannot match ukraine production of drones
Given Hegseth's record of financial mismanagement I have deep misgivings about what's being done.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/02/pete-hegseth...
When you have an effectively infinite supply of money, what is the need for accountants?
> 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?
Fun fact: The Department of Defense was named through legislation.
Trump's EO that "renames" it only applies to Federal employees as guidance. No one else needs to call it that, and it's still legally the Department of Defense.
Can we please keep calling the DoD with its actual name and not humor the stupids? Thanks.
Exactly. "Department of War" is guidance that applies only to Federal employees, and the Department of Defense was named through Congressional legislation. That is still the department's name, whatever Trump decrees.
Get ready for the Department Of Corruption
You think it wasn't corrupt previously?
Not nearly as much as it is now that OIGs have been replaced.
Well compared to countries that don't have these checks and balances, not overly corrupt. But it's not possible to have a government without corruption at least at some level.
But if you take these checks and balances away, say goodbye to "good" governance.
There's just no comparison. The current administration routinely, publicly, accepts literal bars of gold as bribes for favorable treatment. Trump just got a new one from Switzerland this week.
Tomato / tomato
Feature / bug
> The DoW is being redesigned to now operate at the speed of Silicon Valley
We're so screwed.
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
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War.gov seems pretty official, so according to the USG official site, it is Department of War.
De facto vs de jure. The Trump admin can create any .gov domain they want (doge.gov, trumpcard.gov) and use whatever terminology they want but it doesn't adhere to the law necessarily.
I was very confused until I realized the author was Steve Blank not Steve Klabnik.
I'll be honest with you: every time I see a link to his blog here I go "oh no why is a post of mine on HN I didn't even write anything" and then realize it isn't me. Ha!
More weapons more quickly. This is what I want.
I'm sure they will be used for good.
/s
I'm sure there are good reasons for this, and the approach doesn't seem totally unreasonable, to be fair. I'm just personally woefully unequipped to understand how to deploy weapons humanely and morally, and naively think less weapons is better. Thankfully there are adults in the room making these decisions for me...
>deploy weapons humanely and morally
A bit of an oxymoron there wouldn't you say?
>naively think less weapons is better
This I agree with. We should really only have a few dozen nuclear weapons, and nothing more. The whole point is to have a clear line of "DO NOT FUCKING CROSS AT ALL", and that's it. You cross us? We nuke you. We don't bother you, you don't bother us unless you want to face nuclear annihilation. Seems to work for North Korea.
> You cross us? We nuke you. We don't bother you, you don't bother us unless you want to face nuclear annihilation. Seems to work for North Korea.
I think this is interesting on a few levels.
One issue with North Korea is that they have an enormous number of uneducated, malnourished citizens that no country can reasonably absorb. I feel that the potential chaos from the fall of NK was part of the brinkmanship that led to them getting nuclear capabilities.
Second, if you only have nuclear weapons then you lose a lot of tactical possibilities (bunker busting bombs for example) and you lose the ability to dial up/down aggression as we've seen with Russia.
In all, I think have a continuum of force options is rational. What is scary is that this continuum may no longer involve soldiers - and if there's no risk of soldiers' dying, force projection becomes a lot 'cheaper' in a political sense.
> You cross us? We nuke you.
It's a nice theory, but it works only if every act of war is clearly an act of total war and there's a responsible party to nuke. Who were we supposed to nuke after 9/11? Who do we nuke if the next big North Korean hack takes out Microsoft instead of Sony? Or if it disrupts the US power grid for a week? Who do we nuke if Russia props up the regime in Iran and Iran props up a terror group that attacks our close ally?
That's the thing: nuclear wars appear to have a good track record of preventing conventional war in the mold of "we show up at your border with tanks". But it doesn't prevent the kinds of conflicts in which nuking another country might not be a defensible reaction.
The threat only works in an existential crisis. As in, if you legitimately attempt to destroy our government then we will nuke you. Using nuclear weapons successfully in a war that doesn't result in a full exchange between all super powers demonstrates the feasibility of limited nuclear war which is just nuclear armageddon in slow motion. Nations (and the earth) want to avoid that just as much as a full nuclear exchange.
Out of all of the hires of this new administration, Hegseth is the most surprisingly competent.
A competent person does not summon every senior leader in his worldwide organization to be physically present for an hour in an auditorium while he blusters and attempts to deliver TV-ready one-liners. A competent person also does not take over a massive organization that relies on these senior executives’ decades of experience and immediately fire a non-trivial number of them because of their gender or skin color.
I’m no admirer and I’m speaking relatively here. That’s why I said surprising. I think we could agree he’s a level above Matt Gaetz or “special envoy” Witkoff.
This article kind of mirrors my thoughts about his speech https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/07/opinion/pete-hegseth-spee....
What about this is showing competence? So far it’s just a wild promise of success
At leaking war plans on Signal?
He is competent at firing more competent people than himself.
Indeed that is a low bar to cross.
Sadly so.
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The metric of competence here is that he spends less time on his makeup on a daily basis than his boss.
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I think this article mirrors my thoughts well: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/07/opinion/pete-hegseth-spee....
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> 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!
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Building off the self weapons and parts from whomever bribes them the most
Don't shoot down good ideas just because Hegseth is an idiot.
US procurement is utterly broken and if they are taking lessons from Ukraine wrt drone operations it is an extremely good thing and will save our ass and many lives in the next war.
They are going to buy off the shelf from whoever bribes them the most.
It's not just that he's a drunk. It's the open corruption, because they are even too stupid to hide it.
Not a single administration in the West is as corrupt as the current day US.
And that's why they are changing the 100s of billion dollar procurement for the US military.
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Still tho, DoW is a bit more truthful innit ? After Iraq (and other fights) it should be obvious that the department's job is quite a bit broader than defense.
The idea that the department is strictly about defense is a comforting story we tell ourselves.
We don’t need more weapons. We also don’t have real adversaries, that’s war propaganda.
You have to be completely insane to think China is not an adversary.
Personally, I think we are in WW3 right now and we have already lost.
Americans are just too lazy and insular to read anything involving Chinese military strategy. I can't think of more basic Chinese military strategy than to avoid a head-on battle with a strong enemy.
You beat the strong enemy by every means other than a head-on battle.
We are waiting for another battle of Normandy that will never come as we slowly bleed out.
You have to be completely insane, or so deep in propaganda you are about to drink the cool-aid and ascend to the next life, to think you are currently at war with China.
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Out of curiosity, I'd love if you'd expand a bit on this comment.
Not meant sarcastically, and not because I want to refute anything, I'm genuinely curious what these tactics have been and why the US has already lost.
> 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.
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What does venesuela have that we want? Consider the reasons known.
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You’re about to find out how Russia’s military couldn’t beat a smaller force despite looking very fierce for decades.
The reason that Russian military is unable to beat a smaller force is beause some entities need this meatgrinder to churn on as long as possible and grind as many Slavic men on both sides as possible. It's a perfectly controlled process.
Don't let hatred of bureaucracy blind you.
Russia and China definitely love this: choosing time over features or quality is a recipe for failed products and corrupted contractors who specialize in defrauding the government.
This turned the universal hatred of bureaucracy against our greatest capability.
The US has both more features and more quality in all its armaments, which has given us enduring advantages (notwithstanding being spread too thin).
Unlike making products, time actually matters less than feature or quality in war-making because you avoid war as long as possible, and you choose to engage/deploy based on your actual capabilities.
Yes, in rare occasion when you've stumbled into an assymmetrical quagmire, you need to catch up, with armor against roadside bombs in Iraq or drone swarms now. But it's critical to be better by default, and be faster as needed.
The US military has expressly countered the sclerosis of bureaucracy by pushing decisions down to local commanders and funding a broad swath of experimental technologies. But a program like the F35 necessarily involves a ridiculous amount of integration, and it's just hard to get that right. Saying "just do it faster" is an armchair quarterback fantasy.
Never let your enemy use your weaknesses against you.