4 ms·
Military procurement is indeed not the most perfect process ever invented, but it's not quite the insane caricature this and other comments make it out to be.
by matt4077 9y ago
Military procurement is indeed not the most perfect process ever invented, but it's not quite the insane caricature this and other comments make it out to be.
The costs-plus accounting scheme is meant to save money. It can just as well be described as "the manufacturer charges the costs plus a fixed (single-digit) percentage of costs. This limits the contractor's margins to the agreed-upon percentage."
And of course the contractors' accounting is routinely scrutinised and all costs need justification.
Remember the famous quote from the Apollo Program: "300,000 moving parts, all supplied by the cheapest bidder". NASA procurement, especially back then, was closely modelled on the military–and the contractors were largely the same as well.
- 0xbear 9y agoExplain then why our f35 program costs $1.5 trillion and counting.
- dsfyu404ed 9y agoBecause it's a massive program that required several technologies that were never used in production aircraft be made production ready with expensive state of the art technology and deliver a result that has acceptable performance for a wide range of users with a wide range of use cases. It was pretty obvious from day 1 that this would be expensive af. Being cutting edge is always expensive af.
- 0xbear 9y agoThere’s nobody more cutting edge than NASA, and its budget _since inception_ is still less than this. There’s expensive and then there’s wiping my ass with hundred dollar bills expensive.