Comment by stackskipton
3 months ago
Most of time, this delay is in peacetime, it makes sense to do a ton of testing, wait until testing results then go to full production. Your primary concern is not spending a ton of money and not getting a bunch of people killed. It's basically waterfall in fighter development.
Wartime is more agile, you quickly close the loop but downside is sometimes does not work and when it does not work, there might be a people cost. US has done it with fighters before, F-4U Corsair was disaster initially in carrier landings and killed some pilots in training. However, this was considered acceptable cost to get what was clearly very capable fighter out there.
I think this is the crux of it. The article discusses Ukraine but they weren't making millions of drones, the private capital wasn't there and the bureaucracy that coordinates it wasn't primed until the war.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Are we not in peacetime? What war has the US declared?
We're in peacetime, but the current leadership perceives us to be in a pitched great-power struggle, and perhaps near-term shooting war, with China. Similarly, while we are not literally at war with Russia, we are in a very acute global conflict with them of another type that might be thought to warrant a different pace of military innovation. Perhaps these factors are what GP had in mind.
So then what value does the bureaucratic process add if it's the first thing that gets shitcanned when good results in good time matter?
At the end of the day it's all people cost. Just because it's fractional lives wasted in the form of man hours worked to pay the taxes to pay for unnecessary paper pushing labor instead of whole lives doesn't actually make the waste less (I suspect it's actually more in a lot of cases).
> what value does the bureaucratic process add if it's the first thing that gets shitcanned when good results in good time matter?
This is like asking what good do reserves do if you spend them down in a crisis.
The bureaucracy aims to keep waste and corruption to a minimum during peacetime. In war, the aims change--you're now not only ramping up production, but the penalties for fucking with a war are typically more drastic than lining one's pockets during peacetime.
Think about the local implications of what you just said. If we toss the process when effective expenditure of resources toward results matter and consequences are the most serious then the process must be less efficient at producing good results for the expenditure than the corruption (or whatever else the process is replacing). So then why are we running it at all?
You can absolutely make an argument about accepting reduced efficiency to dilute concentrated harms (e.g. keep a test pilot from dying), but none of the peddlers of process dare even make that argument so I suspect the math is questionable without hand waving or subjective valuation (e.g. face saved avoiding errors).
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> The bureaucracy aims to keep waste and corruption to a minimum during peacetime.
This thread is discussing bureaucracy as the cause of waste and corruption during peacetime.
> The bureaucracy aims to keep waste and corruption to a minimum during peacetime.
Sorry, but is this sarcasm ? Pity that HN doesn't alow limited emojis to convey intent.
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> The bureaucracy aims to keep waste and corruption to a minimum during peacetime
This is the problem though - the bureaucracy is guaranteed to add a lot of cost, both in its own personnel, the personnel in the companies employed to deal with the bureaucracy, and the additional time taken for all bids to be evaluated. This is guaranteed to slow down everything, with the promise that it will try to prevent issues. Which, if the bureaucracy is badly run, weaponised, or captured, is a terrible trade.
If most of the losses in your military are training disasters based on the current strategic outlook of maintaining highly effective deterrence, then you go for safety. If most of the losses in your military are (hypothetically) getting slaughtered by a superior enemy who has failed to be deterred, then you go for experimentation, iteration, try quickly and fail quickly. Life is just cheaper in wartime.
You just, without a hint of irony, compared killing service personnel with civil service office work. Giving someone a job isn't what wasted tax money looks like.
The point about government waste is that some of the things government does save lives. So money wasted equates to lives that could have been saved. See value of a statistical life etc.
I don’t know what your first sentence means. Do you say “killing” to mean “eliminating the job of”? I don’t see anywhere that mentioned “killing”.
If your second sentence is correct, then let’s allocate taxes to digging holes and filling them in? Ad absurdum but I think it applies? Like it seems reasonable to have an opinion on whether a function should continue to be funded by tax dollars. In a properly operating economy this would open up skilled labor to work somewhere more useful. Unless they weren’t actually skilled, in which case yes you have a problem hmm…
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