Comment by giraffe_lady
7 hours ago
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.
He’s using partisan terminology like Department of War. Fairly certain he’s a 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?
Steve is great, but everyone is partisan.
> Steven Blank (the author) is a respected member of the startup community and is not partisan.
Then that makes it more disgraceful for him to regurgitate propaganda.
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.
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...
> 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.