10 ms·

Reverse engineering seems like a good skillset for the DoD to nurture, anyway. Yes, the US is going to be at the cutting edge of weapons design at least through

Reverse engineering seems like a good skillset for the DoD to nurture, anyway. Yes, the US is going to be at the cutting edge of weapons design at least through the medium term, but the leadership isn't arrogant enough to think that all engineering innovations will come domestically. If the US acquired a next-generation Chinese fighter, wouldn't it be handy if someone had the expertise to tell you exactly how its parts were made and machine replicas if needed? So, the tinfoil hat interpretation of this story would be, of course the Pentagon has the original blueprints in quintuplicate, but it's identified reverse engineering as a key strategic advantage China has over the US (pretty reasonable so far, right?) and has announced this as a way to shuffle some money into building up domestic RE expertise in the defence industry.

tablespoon 6y ago
I don't think this kind of thing is all that uncommon for military airplanes that have been long out of production. I recall reading a decade or two ago that our local air guard wing had to fabricate some of its own replacement parts for its F-16s (IIRC, then some of oldest that were still in service). I also recall that Lockheed had to take special effort to preserve production know-how and tooling for the F-22 when they shutdown production early, so it would be possible to restart if needed. You can't capture everything you need to know in blueprints and documentation.
- benzene 6y ago
  >Long out of production. The difference in technology likely plays a large role - these parts were designed without CAD and modern fabrication protocols have changed. It reminded me of NASA's endeavor to reverse engineer the Saturn rockets https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the-monstrous-f-1-moon-rocket-back-to-life/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - hondo77 6y ago
    > The difference in technology likely plays a large role - these parts were designed without CAD and modern fabrication protocols have changed. Actually, the B-2 was one of the first military aircraft designed with CAD. https://www.northropgrumman.com/wp-content/uploads/B-2-Spirit-of-Innovation.pdf https://www.northropgrumman.com/wp-content/uploads/B-2-Spiri... (search for "NCAD")
- jyounker 6y ago
  Preventing the loss of manufacturing capability is one of the reasons for offering military aid to friendly countries. We give them money to buy weapons, but they are obligated to buy certain weapons systems with that money. For example, the Saudi's really don't need all those M-1s they buy from us (with money we give them), but we offer the it keeps our production lines open and active. It's a devious way of laundering military readiness expenses.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  A friend of mine looked into building a P-51 from scratch, as buying a real one was too expensive. He ordered the blueprints, which are readily available. But then he talked to some P-51 owners, who told him the blueprints wouldn't be much use. The airplane was defined by the jigs used to build it, and the blueprints were just drawn up later as documentation and never checked. The jigs were scrapped when the airplane went out of production.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  During the escalation of the Vietnam War, the Air Force ran short of jet transports and decided to pull a bunch of WW2 era propeller transports out of mothballs and put them back in service. The mechanics, however, complained that they followed the instructions to the letter on tuning the engines but could not get them to develop the power they were supposed to. The AF finally hired a bunch of old WW2 airplane mechanics. Those mechanics never looked at the manual, they just listened to the engine, made few adjustments, and the engines were soon singing at full power.
Jtsummers 6y ago
US DOD and their industry partners definitely has this capability already. If they're putting this call out there then there's a real need, not a covert effort to promote the discipline of reverse engineering.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  Also, to quote Independence Day: > You don't actually think they spend $20,000 on a hammer, $30,000 on a toilet seat, do you? The budgets they use for secret reverse engineering aren't booked as any kind of reverse engineering.
  - jessaustin 6y ago
    One fears we'd be shocked by how much is actually going to General Smith's brother-in-law's toilet-seat dropship company. We'd like to think that Pentagon auditors could find that sort of thing, except that Pentagon people tell us continuously that they are unauditable. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/pentagon-audit-budget-fraud/ https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/pentagon-audit-bud...
jandrese 6y ago
As someone who works with the government a fair bit, this kind of forward thinking is extremely unlikely to be the case. This is the kind of government competence that only exists in the most wild conspiracy theories. The idea that it was made by some long defunct subcontractor and nobody knows what happened to their blueprints and production notes is far more likely. Also, even if you had the blueprints you still need to be able to make the tooling, which is at least half of this project. That said, if some contractor does come through with this and does a good job (on time, on budget, parts work, etc...) they could likely find plenty of other programs with similar needs. In some cases the original contractor does still exist, but they're asking way too much money to reconstitute an old production line so a scrappy startup like this could prove themselves valuable.
- nullserver 6y ago
  My dad was talking to an engineer at one of the major airlines manufactures apparently some critical part was foam injection or some such. Anyway the process as such did not work as documented. You had to add strings to the inside of the mold to get it to set correctly. This was not written down anywhere. Part of it may have been job protection. The union was bad about that. New hires would not be able to complete the work. Always stuck with me that at some point the ability to make that part would be los-tech.
  - banana_giraffe 6y ago
    It's also possible it was "Hey! The foam injection machine isn't working, I've tried everything", "There's this string trick I used once, try that", "Great, that fixed it, we should document that", "Sure, once we get all parts made that have backed up" Or, maybe I'm reading bad practices in my industry to everywhere else.
    - mywittyname 6y ago
      It makes sense that new employees are trained on the job from actual line workers, rather than by reading documentation. It is totally possible that the line workers have no idea what the documentation on the tooling says.
time0ut 6y ago
I don't think we need the tinfoil hat. This sort of thing happens sometimes. Like the time we forgot how to may part of our thermonuclear weapons and had to reverse engineer that [0]. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOGBANK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOGBANK
- tablespoon 6y ago
  > I don't think we need the tinfoil hat. This sort of thing happens sometimes. Like the time we forgot how to may part of our thermonuclear weapons and had to reverse engineer that [0]. The really interesting thing about that is one of the main things they had to reverse-engineer was an impurity in one of the ingredients that the original designers didn't even know they were depending on.
  - est31 6y ago
    Reminds me of how NASA had to design completely new rocket engines for SLS because while they still had the plans for the Saturn-V rocket engines, back then plans weren't followed to such high accuracy as nowadays a 3D model would be followed. Each engine was custom tailored with small modifications here and there. The knowledge to custom tailor them was lost, so they went with designing new engines from scratch instead. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovD0aLdRUs0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovD0aLdRUs0
    - KineticLensman 6y ago
      > Each engine was custom tailored with small modifications here and there This was true of lots of things outside NASA. This was one of the problems that killed the UK attempt to modernise the Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft [0]. They wanted to fit new wings to the old planes, but only discovered after the contract had been signed that the different airframes had not been built identically, but were different interpretations of a common plan. Each of the nine planes was in effect a completely new refit challenge. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAE_Systems_Nimrod_MRA4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAE_Systems_Nimrod_MRA4
godelski 6y ago
Even if you're not innovating everything you want to reverse engineer enemy systems because you want to discover vulnerabilities. This is common practice.
TheCondor 6y ago
I've heard from various acquaintances that it's not unusual for the contractor to be required to destroy documentation and tooling for certain classified projects upon completion.
- structural 6y ago
  It is absolutely standard practice for this to happen. At contract completion, the contractor must destroy or return all classified materials: these sorts of designs would certainly be included. It's pretty interesting, but a lot of this stuff is structured specifically so that the contractor organization doesn't retain knowledge that it's "not supposed to have", as wasteful as that ends up being. Even stuff like a list of personnel who worked on a project or production line might be included... so that a few years after the project is completed, the management of the contractor might not even be able to figure out who to ask, because they've destroyed even their knowledge of the list of people who worked on the component's design and manufacturing.
mattnewton 6y ago
I wish my tax dollars were going to some galaxy-brain forward thinking group of men and women capable of making such reverse engineering challenges for itself; but it almost certainly is the case that what looks like sheer incompetence is just that.
- prox 6y ago
  Most of the companies are Initech ;)
  - mjevans 6y ago
    Office Space (the movie) If you don't get the reference. Similar: See Dilbert, the cartoon version had a funny episode about company names through acquisitions.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
enkid 6y ago
Read about the history of NASIC and the other service intelligence centers [0]. Understanding foreign technology is one of their core missions. I'm pretty sure they have already been reverse engineering stuff for a long time. [0]https://www.nasic.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Article/611728/national-air-and-space-intelligence-center-heritage/ https://www.nasic.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Article/611728...
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
> Reverse engineering seems like a good skillset for the DoD to nurture, anyway. I though they already had enough practice reverse engineering the alien tech at Area 51?
GuB-42 6y ago
Nah, I think the one guy who knows the thing is gone, the data was on a hard drive that crashed and the backup system didn't work, and the papers copies are probably somewhere except no one knows where and it is faster to reverse engineer the damn thing. I have no reason to believe that defense projects are not plagued by bureaucracy, office politics and incompetence like in a lot of government entities and large companies. If anything, it is worse because secrecy is a convenient way to hide incompetence. And when information is shared on a "need to know" basis and we realize that no one "needs to know", then it gets lost. I have touched a bit on defense projects (not in the US) and generally, compared to civilian, open projects, if feels slow and primitive. I didn't get to the super-secret stuff but I have a feeling that the only parts where civilians don't do much better are the ones that only the army is interested in.
alliao 6y ago
Yeah no. Back in the 2000s when Iraq war was happening and marines were using MSN Messenger and I asked whether the unencrypted nature of the chat program would adversely impacted on their missions etc, and he basically said "hell they can spy all they want WE don't even know what we're doing next" Which I thought he was joking at the time.
908B64B197 6y ago
> If the US acquired a next-generation Chinese fighter, wouldn't it be handy if someone had the expertise to tell you exactly how its parts were made and machine replicas if needed? I suppose they could always call the engineers at Boeing or Lockheed who designed it in the first place. Like getting tech support for your Huawei networking equipment, just use the Cisco guide! [0] [0] https://blogs.cisco.com/news/huawei-and-ciscos-source-code-correcting-the-record https://blogs.cisco.com/news/huawei-and-ciscos-source-code-c...
- Bedon292 6y ago
  For anyone unaware Lockheed was hacked in 2007 and the hackers got away with technical documentation related to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The hack was attributed to hackers in China. So it is thought that the development of the Chinese J-20 was at least helped along by information from the hack.
dokem 6y ago
I think the US (and power nations in general) have a history of reverse engineering the foreign war tech they can get their hands on.
dublin 6y ago
We generally only reverse-engineer technologies from elsewhere (no, not other countries...)

tablespoon 6y ago

I don't think this kind of thing is all that uncommon for military airplanes that have been long out of production. I recall reading a decade or two ago that our local air guard wing had to fabricate some of its own replacement parts for its F-16s (IIRC, then some of oldest that were still in service). I also recall that Lockheed had to take special effort to preserve production know-how and tooling for the F-22 when they shutdown production early, so it would be possible to restart if needed. You can't capture everything you need to know in blueprints and documentation.

benzene 6y ago
>Long out of production. The difference in technology likely plays a large role - these parts were designed without CAD and modern fabrication protocols have changed. It reminded me of NASA's endeavor to reverse engineer the Saturn rockets https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the-monstrous-f-1-moon-rocket-back-to-life/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- hondo77 6y ago
  > The difference in technology likely plays a large role - these parts were designed without CAD and modern fabrication protocols have changed. Actually, the B-2 was one of the first military aircraft designed with CAD. https://www.northropgrumman.com/wp-content/uploads/B-2-Spirit-of-Innovation.pdf https://www.northropgrumman.com/wp-content/uploads/B-2-Spiri... (search for "NCAD")
jyounker 6y ago
Preventing the loss of manufacturing capability is one of the reasons for offering military aid to friendly countries. We give them money to buy weapons, but they are obligated to buy certain weapons systems with that money. For example, the Saudi's really don't need all those M-1s they buy from us (with money we give them), but we offer the it keeps our production lines open and active. It's a devious way of laundering military readiness expenses.
WalterBright 6y ago
A friend of mine looked into building a P-51 from scratch, as buying a real one was too expensive. He ordered the blueprints, which are readily available. But then he talked to some P-51 owners, who told him the blueprints wouldn't be much use. The airplane was defined by the jigs used to build it, and the blueprints were just drawn up later as documentation and never checked. The jigs were scrapped when the airplane went out of production.
WalterBright 6y ago
During the escalation of the Vietnam War, the Air Force ran short of jet transports and decided to pull a bunch of WW2 era propeller transports out of mothballs and put them back in service. The mechanics, however, complained that they followed the instructions to the letter on tuning the engines but could not get them to develop the power they were supposed to. The AF finally hired a bunch of old WW2 airplane mechanics. Those mechanics never looked at the manual, they just listened to the engine, made few adjustments, and the engines were soon singing at full power.

Jtsummers 6y ago

US DOD and their industry partners definitely has this capability already. If they're putting this call out there then there's a real need, not a covert effort to promote the discipline of reverse engineering.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago
Also, to quote Independence Day: > You don't actually think they spend $20,000 on a hammer, $30,000 on a toilet seat, do you? The budgets they use for secret reverse engineering aren't booked as any kind of reverse engineering.
- jessaustin 6y ago
  One fears we'd be shocked by how much is actually going to General Smith's brother-in-law's toilet-seat dropship company. We'd like to think that Pentagon auditors could find that sort of thing, except that Pentagon people tell us continuously that they are unauditable. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/pentagon-audit-budget-fraud/ https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/pentagon-audit-bud...

jandrese 6y ago

As someone who works with the government a fair bit, this kind of forward thinking is extremely unlikely to be the case. This is the kind of government competence that only exists in the most wild conspiracy theories. The idea that it was made by some long defunct subcontractor and nobody knows what happened to their blueprints and production notes is far more likely. Also, even if you had the blueprints you still need to be able to make the tooling, which is at least half of this project. That said, if some contractor does come through with this and does a good job (on time, on budget, parts work, etc...) they could likely find plenty of other programs with similar needs. In some cases the original contractor does still exist, but they're asking way too much money to reconstitute an old production line so a scrappy startup like this could prove themselves valuable.

nullserver 6y ago
My dad was talking to an engineer at one of the major airlines manufactures apparently some critical part was foam injection or some such. Anyway the process as such did not work as documented. You had to add strings to the inside of the mold to get it to set correctly. This was not written down anywhere. Part of it may have been job protection. The union was bad about that. New hires would not be able to complete the work. Always stuck with me that at some point the ability to make that part would be los-tech.
- banana_giraffe 6y ago
  It's also possible it was "Hey! The foam injection machine isn't working, I've tried everything", "There's this string trick I used once, try that", "Great, that fixed it, we should document that", "Sure, once we get all parts made that have backed up" Or, maybe I'm reading bad practices in my industry to everywhere else.
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    It makes sense that new employees are trained on the job from actual line workers, rather than by reading documentation. It is totally possible that the line workers have no idea what the documentation on the tooling says.

time0ut 6y ago

I don't think we need the tinfoil hat. This sort of thing happens sometimes. Like the time we forgot how to may part of our thermonuclear weapons and had to reverse engineer that [0]. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOGBANK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOGBANK

tablespoon 6y ago
> I don't think we need the tinfoil hat. This sort of thing happens sometimes. Like the time we forgot how to may part of our thermonuclear weapons and had to reverse engineer that [0]. The really interesting thing about that is one of the main things they had to reverse-engineer was an impurity in one of the ingredients that the original designers didn't even know they were depending on.
- est31 6y ago
  Reminds me of how NASA had to design completely new rocket engines for SLS because while they still had the plans for the Saturn-V rocket engines, back then plans weren't followed to such high accuracy as nowadays a 3D model would be followed. Each engine was custom tailored with small modifications here and there. The knowledge to custom tailor them was lost, so they went with designing new engines from scratch instead. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovD0aLdRUs0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovD0aLdRUs0
  - KineticLensman 6y ago
    > Each engine was custom tailored with small modifications here and there This was true of lots of things outside NASA. This was one of the problems that killed the UK attempt to modernise the Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft [0]. They wanted to fit new wings to the old planes, but only discovered after the contract had been signed that the different airframes had not been built identically, but were different interpretations of a common plan. Each of the nine planes was in effect a completely new refit challenge. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAE_Systems_Nimrod_MRA4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAE_Systems_Nimrod_MRA4

godelski 6y ago

Even if you're not innovating everything you want to reverse engineer enemy systems because you want to discover vulnerabilities. This is common practice.

TheCondor 6y ago

I've heard from various acquaintances that it's not unusual for the contractor to be required to destroy documentation and tooling for certain classified projects upon completion.

structural 6y ago
It is absolutely standard practice for this to happen. At contract completion, the contractor must destroy or return all classified materials: these sorts of designs would certainly be included. It's pretty interesting, but a lot of this stuff is structured specifically so that the contractor organization doesn't retain knowledge that it's "not supposed to have", as wasteful as that ends up being. Even stuff like a list of personnel who worked on a project or production line might be included... so that a few years after the project is completed, the management of the contractor might not even be able to figure out who to ask, because they've destroyed even their knowledge of the list of people who worked on the component's design and manufacturing.

mattnewton 6y ago

I wish my tax dollars were going to some galaxy-brain forward thinking group of men and women capable of making such reverse engineering challenges for itself; but it almost certainly is the case that what looks like sheer incompetence is just that.

prox 6y ago
Most of the companies are Initech ;)
- mjevans 6y ago
  Office Space (the movie) If you don't get the reference. Similar: See Dilbert, the cartoon version had a funny episode about company names through acquisitions.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

enkid 6y ago

Read about the history of NASIC and the other service intelligence centers [0]. Understanding foreign technology is one of their core missions. I'm pretty sure they have already been reverse engineering stuff for a long time. [0]https://www.nasic.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Article/611728/national-air-and-space-intelligence-center-heritage/ https://www.nasic.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Article/611728...

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

> Reverse engineering seems like a good skillset for the DoD to nurture, anyway. I though they already had enough practice reverse engineering the alien tech at Area 51?

GuB-42 6y ago

Nah, I think the one guy who knows the thing is gone, the data was on a hard drive that crashed and the backup system didn't work, and the papers copies are probably somewhere except no one knows where and it is faster to reverse engineer the damn thing. I have no reason to believe that defense projects are not plagued by bureaucracy, office politics and incompetence like in a lot of government entities and large companies. If anything, it is worse because secrecy is a convenient way to hide incompetence. And when information is shared on a "need to know" basis and we realize that no one "needs to know", then it gets lost. I have touched a bit on defense projects (not in the US) and generally, compared to civilian, open projects, if feels slow and primitive. I didn't get to the super-secret stuff but I have a feeling that the only parts where civilians don't do much better are the ones that only the army is interested in.

alliao 6y ago

Yeah no. Back in the 2000s when Iraq war was happening and marines were using MSN Messenger and I asked whether the unencrypted nature of the chat program would adversely impacted on their missions etc, and he basically said "hell they can spy all they want WE don't even know what we're doing next" Which I thought he was joking at the time.

908B64B197 6y ago

> If the US acquired a next-generation Chinese fighter, wouldn't it be handy if someone had the expertise to tell you exactly how its parts were made and machine replicas if needed? I suppose they could always call the engineers at Boeing or Lockheed who designed it in the first place. Like getting tech support for your Huawei networking equipment, just use the Cisco guide! [0] [0] https://blogs.cisco.com/news/huawei-and-ciscos-source-code-correcting-the-record https://blogs.cisco.com/news/huawei-and-ciscos-source-code-c...

Bedon292 6y ago
For anyone unaware Lockheed was hacked in 2007 and the hackers got away with technical documentation related to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The hack was attributed to hackers in China. So it is thought that the development of the Chinese J-20 was at least helped along by information from the hack.

dokem 6y ago

I think the US (and power nations in general) have a history of reverse engineering the foreign war tech they can get their hands on.

dublin 6y ago

We generally only reverse-engineer technologies from elsewhere (no, not other countries...)