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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleshort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleshort > According to Allied Ordnance Publication AOP-38-3,[1] a NATO publication,
by btown 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleshort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleshort
> According to Allied Ordnance Publication AOP-38-3,[1] a NATO publication, a battleshort is "The capability to bypass certain safety features in a system to ensure completion of the mission without interruption due to the safety feature." It also says, "Examples of bypassed safety features are circuit overload protection, and protection against overheating".
> For example, the electrical drives to elevate and traverse the guns of a combat warship may have "battleshort" fuses, which are simply copper bars of the correct size to fit the fuse holders, as failure to return fire in a combat situation is a greater threat to the ship and crew than damaging or overheating the electrical motors.
> Battleshorts have been used in some non-combat situations as well, including the Firing Room/Mission Control spaces at NASA during the manned Apollo missions — specifically the Moon landings.
As a side note, with great apology to those who may have lost their lives due to the consequences of real-world battleshorts - this is actually a really interesting analogy for the "war room" scenarios we find ourselves in at startups. Risking damage to morale and productivity can be acceptable if the alternative is irrecoverable loss of the startup's reputation. But this also can't be a sustained state of affairs - these types of procedures are meant for a battle, and risk compounds if you don't return to a steady state. Perhaps adding "battleshort" to our lexicon would make it clear that "doing things that don't scale" is often necessary but not without its costs.
- helldritch 6y agoThis is one of those comments I so rarely see where what I already know is put in to words I've never been able to find. Thank you for this, I'll be updating our documentation to include these concepts first thing tomorrow.
- vosper 6y ago> Perhaps adding "battleshort" to our lexicon would make it clear that "doing things that don't scale" is often necessary but not without its costs. ... And 6 months later marketing people will have commandeered it, without regard to the original meaning, and they’ll be asking people to battleshort so they can really be agile and lean in on providing air cover via the updated sales deck.
- xmprt 6y agoThis made me sad. I was so excited to find this new term that I was looking forward to using.
- btown 6y ago“It’s okay team we’ll just push hard and discuss how to avoid this in the retrospective”
- blaser-waffle 6y agoThat sentence triggered me like 3 times. Doubly so because I used to be in the US military but now live in a different country, and it's crazy to see how those terms and acronyms infect a lot of US business culture. A decade ago I would have been fine, even glad, that I could wrap myself in verbiage that would jive with poor career choices I made at 18. Now it just feels incongruous or jingoistic.
- btown 6y agoIt's the good old "military-industrial complex" - except with the psychoanalytical sense of the word "complex."