7 ms·

yeah, a single M1 Abrams tank costs over $4 million, and we have 9000 of them. DARPA R&D money always feels like money better spent than a lot of other militar

yeah, a single M1 Abrams tank costs over $4 million, and we have 9000 of them. DARPA R&D money always feels like money better spent than a lot of other military spending. We get future dividends, often civilian.

Firehawke 6y ago
Absolutely this. With the culling of most corporate R&D groups over the last 20-30 years, DARPA pie-in-the-sky research projects seem to be one of the last real sources for investigating anything that can't be immediately and quickly monetized.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ghaff 6y ago
  How much real research, as opposed to early-stage product development, has ever happened at corporations? We can easily name a few specific examples (Bell Labs, Xerox PARC) presumably because they weren't the norm. (And there were doubtless some others at companies that weren't as aligned with what's thought of as today's tech industry such as DuPont.)
  - tasogare 6y ago
    Have a look at MSR.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      What about them? They make nice gear. They've done some nice innovation around some of the gear they make. That seems different from pumping multi-millions of dollars into research that may never have direct commercial value--unless you're talking about a different MSR.
      - pedrosorio 6y ago
        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - hencq 6y ago
    You might enjoy the book "The Entrepreneurial State" by Mariana Mazzucato makes a similar argument that a lot of innovation is actually driven by the state, because they can afford to invest a lot in research without an immediate payoff. The author mentions DARPA in particular as a great example of the US stimulating innovation that then later benefits companies. For example, while the iPhone is a great piece of innovation, it built on innovations made possible by state funded research.
    - Joe8Bit 6y ago
      There's also a very good book by Bill Janeway (of Wargburg Pincus notoriety) on the same subject called 'Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy: Reconfiguring the Three-Player Game between Markets, Speculators and the State'. He argues the same point about the states roll in RnD (also explicitly calls out DARPA) and also their role in booms and busts.
  - projektfu 6y ago
    There’s some, obviously, especially in companies in chemicals and materials. I think the push in the 80s-90s to remove slack from corporations to reward managers and shareholders killed a lot of basic research they were doing for posterity.
- tolbish 6y ago
  Fusion researchers will read that and feel like chopped liver.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  Even before then, Wikipedia claims government was, at least in part, responsible for the soda can[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act_of_1950#Cold_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act_of_1950... [1] as far as I've seen, soviet vending machines used a shared glass. They must've been very confident both (a) that the glasses wouldn't grow legs, and (b) in their public health initiatives. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F68bbzOOOdY&t=2644 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F68bbzOOOdY&t=2644
jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
What are you talking about? Everyone is poor and miserable, families arent making rent. My uncle was just dumpster diving to feed his family two months ago. They're wasting the people's money over at DARPA.
- CamperBob2 6y ago
  Good sarcasm needs an element of absurdity or irony. Pathos and non-sequitur alone aren't usually sufficient.
- SahAssar 6y ago
  Reread the comment you are replying to (especially the context of "than") and consider the scale of the resources invested in the military. DARPA accounts for a pretty small part of the military budget and is probably not the reason for poverty.
- pjc50 6y ago
  That's the choice of your fellow citizens who'd rather spend money on weapons than feed people, and will come up with elaborate stories about why your uncle deserves to be in that position. :(
  - CamperBob2 6y ago
    ," he said, on an ARPA-funded network.
    - renewiltord 6y ago
      "My uncle is starving while defence projects get lots of money" and "Some defence projects have led to good outcomes for society". Without aiming to insult here¹, is it interesting to anyone that the same things we say when we're 14-15 years old are the same things we say decades later? I remember having had this argument when I was a kid (and very space-obsessed) and it was almost exactly like this. I remember my classroom, even, and it was between Physics and English and the teacher hadn't come in yet. It's like some number of people have to be thrown into the war of the ideas periodically to preserve the battle lines exactly as they are. Stop and you lose ground. ¹ like not saying I'm better than you guys, I could just as well do what you're doing.
na85 6y ago
I dunno, when you consider the design intent of the Abrams (operating environment, crew protection, etc.) 4 million seems like a reasonable price tag to me. Whether the US Army needs 9000 tanks is a separate discussion though.
- hguant 6y ago
  US DoD had as a strategic goal the ability to fight and win a two theater global conflict against peer or near peer nations up until a few years ago, when it was changed to fight and win one theater, while not losing the other (holding ground until the other theater is won). If you're looking at needing to fight China and Russia, at the same time, over an extended period of time (2+ years), having 9,000 tanks in your back pocket seems like a good idea. Also, it's a jobs/pork barrel program. Congress keeps ordering tanks that the Army puts into storage because the M1 is a beast of a machine that keeps a lot of people employed. The US manufacturing base is pretty depleted, and ordering tanks you don't necessarily need is a good way to keep the skills and tool chains you could need in the future around.
  - na85 6y ago
    >Also, it's a jobs/pork barrel program. Congress keeps ordering tanks that the Army puts into storage because the M1 is a beast of a machine that keeps a lot of people employed. The US manufacturing base is pretty depleted, and ordering tanks you don't necessarily need is a good way to keep the skills and tool chains you could need in the future around. Sure, that's nothing new to anyone who's familiar with Cold War economics. The Soviet Union was able to keep its economy crawling along without sanctioning free enterprise by making enormous investments into collectively-owned (i.e. state-owned) products like nuclear submarines and combat aircraft. Turns out you can achieve much the same goal but also benefit the people if you put that effort into state-funded infrastructure. Whether the US body politic will support reducing M1 Abrams production in favour of fixing the USA's crumbling infrastructure is again a separate discussion.
credit_guy 6y ago
A little numbers correction: it's more like $11 MM per tank. And not to build, to refurbish. More precisely: for the 2020 fiscal year, the US Army did not procure any new M1 Abrams tank, and is not budgeting any for the 2021 year either. Instead it is modernizing existing tanks at a cost of $1.7 BN for 165 units in '20, and $1 BN for 89 units in '21. This comes at about $10.6 MM per tank. [1] https://www.asafm.army.mil/Portals/72/Documents/BudgetMaterial/2020/Roll%20Out/Overview%20and%20Highlights/Army%20FY%202020%20Budget%20Highlights.pdf https://www.asafm.army.mil/Portals/72/Documents/BudgetMateri... [2] https://www.asafm.army.mil/Portals/72/Documents/BudgetMaterial/2021/pbr/Overview%20and%20Highlights/Army_FY_2021_Budget_Highlights.pdf https://www.asafm.army.mil/Portals/72/Documents/BudgetMateri...

Firehawke 6y ago

Absolutely this. With the culling of most corporate R&D groups over the last 20-30 years, DARPA pie-in-the-sky research projects seem to be one of the last real sources for investigating anything that can't be immediately and quickly monetized.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ghaff 6y ago
How much real research, as opposed to early-stage product development, has ever happened at corporations? We can easily name a few specific examples (Bell Labs, Xerox PARC) presumably because they weren't the norm. (And there were doubtless some others at companies that weren't as aligned with what's thought of as today's tech industry such as DuPont.)
- tasogare 6y ago
  Have a look at MSR.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    What about them? They make nice gear. They've done some nice innovation around some of the gear they make. That seems different from pumping multi-millions of dollars into research that may never have direct commercial value--unless you're talking about a different MSR.
    - pedrosorio 6y ago
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- hencq 6y ago
  You might enjoy the book "The Entrepreneurial State" by Mariana Mazzucato makes a similar argument that a lot of innovation is actually driven by the state, because they can afford to invest a lot in research without an immediate payoff. The author mentions DARPA in particular as a great example of the US stimulating innovation that then later benefits companies. For example, while the iPhone is a great piece of innovation, it built on innovations made possible by state funded research.
  - Joe8Bit 6y ago
    There's also a very good book by Bill Janeway (of Wargburg Pincus notoriety) on the same subject called 'Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy: Reconfiguring the Three-Player Game between Markets, Speculators and the State'. He argues the same point about the states roll in RnD (also explicitly calls out DARPA) and also their role in booms and busts.
- projektfu 6y ago
  There’s some, obviously, especially in companies in chemicals and materials. I think the push in the 80s-90s to remove slack from corporations to reward managers and shareholders killed a lot of basic research they were doing for posterity.
tolbish 6y ago
Fusion researchers will read that and feel like chopped liver.
082349872349872 6y ago
Even before then, Wikipedia claims government was, at least in part, responsible for the soda can[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act_of_1950#Cold_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act_of_1950... [1] as far as I've seen, soviet vending machines used a shared glass. They must've been very confident both (a) that the glasses wouldn't grow legs, and (b) in their public health initiatives. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F68bbzOOOdY&t=2644 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F68bbzOOOdY&t=2644

jacobwilliamroy 6y ago

What are you talking about? Everyone is poor and miserable, families arent making rent. My uncle was just dumpster diving to feed his family two months ago. They're wasting the people's money over at DARPA.

CamperBob2 6y ago
Good sarcasm needs an element of absurdity or irony. Pathos and non-sequitur alone aren't usually sufficient.
SahAssar 6y ago
Reread the comment you are replying to (especially the context of "than") and consider the scale of the resources invested in the military. DARPA accounts for a pretty small part of the military budget and is probably not the reason for poverty.
pjc50 6y ago
That's the choice of your fellow citizens who'd rather spend money on weapons than feed people, and will come up with elaborate stories about why your uncle deserves to be in that position. :(
- CamperBob2 6y ago
  ," he said, on an ARPA-funded network.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    "My uncle is starving while defence projects get lots of money" and "Some defence projects have led to good outcomes for society". Without aiming to insult here¹, is it interesting to anyone that the same things we say when we're 14-15 years old are the same things we say decades later? I remember having had this argument when I was a kid (and very space-obsessed) and it was almost exactly like this. I remember my classroom, even, and it was between Physics and English and the teacher hadn't come in yet. It's like some number of people have to be thrown into the war of the ideas periodically to preserve the battle lines exactly as they are. Stop and you lose ground. ¹ like not saying I'm better than you guys, I could just as well do what you're doing.

na85 6y ago

I dunno, when you consider the design intent of the Abrams (operating environment, crew protection, etc.) 4 million seems like a reasonable price tag to me. Whether the US Army needs 9000 tanks is a separate discussion though.

hguant 6y ago
US DoD had as a strategic goal the ability to fight and win a two theater global conflict against peer or near peer nations up until a few years ago, when it was changed to fight and win one theater, while not losing the other (holding ground until the other theater is won). If you're looking at needing to fight China and Russia, at the same time, over an extended period of time (2+ years), having 9,000 tanks in your back pocket seems like a good idea. Also, it's a jobs/pork barrel program. Congress keeps ordering tanks that the Army puts into storage because the M1 is a beast of a machine that keeps a lot of people employed. The US manufacturing base is pretty depleted, and ordering tanks you don't necessarily need is a good way to keep the skills and tool chains you could need in the future around.
- na85 6y ago
  >Also, it's a jobs/pork barrel program. Congress keeps ordering tanks that the Army puts into storage because the M1 is a beast of a machine that keeps a lot of people employed. The US manufacturing base is pretty depleted, and ordering tanks you don't necessarily need is a good way to keep the skills and tool chains you could need in the future around. Sure, that's nothing new to anyone who's familiar with Cold War economics. The Soviet Union was able to keep its economy crawling along without sanctioning free enterprise by making enormous investments into collectively-owned (i.e. state-owned) products like nuclear submarines and combat aircraft. Turns out you can achieve much the same goal but also benefit the people if you put that effort into state-funded infrastructure. Whether the US body politic will support reducing M1 Abrams production in favour of fixing the USA's crumbling infrastructure is again a separate discussion.

credit_guy 6y ago

A little numbers correction: it's more like $11 MM per tank. And not to build, to refurbish. More precisely: for the 2020 fiscal year, the US Army did not procure any new M1 Abrams tank, and is not budgeting any for the 2021 year either. Instead it is modernizing existing tanks at a cost of $1.7 BN for 165 units in '20, and $1 BN for 89 units in '21. This comes at about $10.6 MM per tank. [1] https://www.asafm.army.mil/Portals/72/Documents/BudgetMaterial/2020/Roll%20Out/Overview%20and%20Highlights/Army%20FY%202020%20Budget%20Highlights.pdf https://www.asafm.army.mil/Portals/72/Documents/BudgetMateri... [2] https://www.asafm.army.mil/Portals/72/Documents/BudgetMaterial/2021/pbr/Overview%20and%20Highlights/Army_FY_2021_Budget_Highlights.pdf https://www.asafm.army.mil/Portals/72/Documents/BudgetMateri...