4 ms·

The USA as well as the Western allies have a beurocracy 6 deep in old fossils who have optimised how to win the last war. The buying rules require enormous rule

The USA as well as the Western allies have a beurocracy 6 deep in old fossils who have optimised how to win the last war. The buying rules require enormous rules of procurement and parts verification that a chip resistor that costs 1/10th of a penny acquires a bought cost of many dollars - it has been tested and x-rayed and heat cycled etc. The net result is a procurement sysyem gone mad with rings of empires, each with go/nogo approval decisions that interfere with test/approval/production at every level. Then the old fossils of the general staff - also 5 deep in decisions. Why are we still building long range missile targets (which the general stall call a carrier attack group) We know China will toss 1000 missiles at them and when their magazines go empty after downing a few hundred - the 600+ left will sink them all. Then the USA will toss nukes at China. China shrugs - we have no voters to kill, so who cares and the communist party is in a safe hole. What the USA needs to do is revamp the whole thing top to bottom, get some gamer minds in there, buth students and experiences. Sweep out the guys that won the last war - we will not be fighting that again as this time it will lose - we do not want that. Get new missiles, get new radars - all designed my military colleg grad students. I could go on... What the war games reveal is what Churchill saw when WW2 started - dead wood, so he trimmed it. He had his flaws though.

elevation 5y ago
While an organization full of "the guys that won the last war" may not be optimal for the next conflict, having a few old salts to mentor the new "college grad" engineers makes a much more effective team overall. The kind of clean sweep that you advocate leaves green engineers to reinvent the wheel; they don't know how to google for what they don't know, and most colleges will not supply the industry-specific and even proprietary knowledge that a young engineer or engineering manager may need to avoid wasting many months of efforts. You may wish to eliminate the "last war" echo chamber but you'll pay for it if you lose their expertise entirely.
- aurizon 5y ago
  There is validity in what you say, trim the dead wood, keep the good wood and build well.
Closi 5y ago
Get gamers in to define the strategy and use graduate engineers to build new radars? I can’t tell if this is satire or not.
- aurizon 5y ago
  Partly satirical - They need to invigorate the talent pool from the top down, new ideas and new management - and keep the good old techies and managers and weed out the bad ones and move them away from the fast creation track. The British system that started WW1 carried on to WW2. The Germans foresaw the Lightning War - Blitzkreig https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/blitzkrieg https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/blitzkrieg Hitler was no warrior, or strategist, or general - he was a populist, a rabble rouser - didn't the USA just get rid of one of those? Had Hitler given his generals the keys and said win this war. They would have done so. They would have destroyed the RAF and airplane industry on the ground and invaded and taken the UK before the USA entered. Then they could have carved up Europe with Russia as well as the middle east and wire netted the Mediterranean against subs and ships and allow who they like. The UK fleet large as it was would have to flee to other ports or surrender. Then what would the USA do? They would see a fortress europe. Would stalin invade, or digest the meat hitler had given him while Hitler grabbed the middle east oil. At this time Russian oil was unknown. The generals would not let the Jews be killed - they are our best instrument makers and physicists, so no Holocaust. Even Hitlers own officers waned him killed. I am sure glad he ran their war into the ground with his bed strategies and diplomacy. I for one am glad he lost
  - loopz 5y ago
    Hitler sat in prison before they overthrew government.
  - Closi 5y ago
    It’s easy to find a way to win something in hindsight with perfect information, the trick is to make the correct decisions at the time with imperfect information. Saying “Hitler would have won if he did this” is a total bias of hindsight. It also ignores the fact that if Hitler was behaving differently, the allies would have responded differently.
ArkanExplorer 5y ago
Its an interesting take, but the Military's sole purpose isn't to fight China. Its to scare smaller nations into the USA sphere of influence, or to destabilise those firmly outside it. For example, the coup in Bolivia: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/americas/was-coup-against-evo-morales-over-bolivia-s-lithium/2213267 https://www.aa.com.tr/en/americas/was-coup-against-evo-moral... China might win the first battles with that rocket barrage, but it will also firmly cut itself off from world trade - ores, food, gas, oil. There's no winning move. There are large-scale dysgenic Demographic changes occurring in the West: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/iq-rates-are-dropping-many-developed-countries-doesn-t-bode-ncna1008576 https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/iq-rates-are-dropping-... China needs merely wait a few generations (if it has the patience) and it will have a much easier time asserting itself. Alternatively, to just buy off Western politicians (as it is already doing) - which beats rockets for cost efficiency.
- firebaze 5y ago
  China has made alliances with a lot of african nations. If the shit hits the fan I - at least - wouldn't exclude the possibility that china is better positioned in a semi-post-nuclear scenario than the US (russia, africa, china are the most relevant rare-resource exporters, to my knowledge) And I personally wouldn't count a bit on saudi arabian allegiance in a scenario like this. I wouldn't be surprised if they just follow the "strong wo:man" in the world, which right not still is the US.
  - ArkanExplorer 5y ago
    China faces a huge logistical challenge if it wants to rely on Africa for food and ore. Sending cargo ships from South West Africa to East Asia is a long and perilous journey. Africa itself is an unstable part of the world, the people are not friendly to China, and the population is growing rapidly. Its easy to see the local population turning on Chinese citizens or businesses in the event of some economic or food shortfall. By contrast the USA basically has all of the resources it needs inside its own country or nearby allies. Many of the 'rare' resources of the world are not particularly rare, they are just too expensive or too environmentally damaging to mine in the West at current prices. I'm surprised that China doesn't just offer to buy whole sections of Africa, and formally annex the land into its country, and move (voluntarily) the existing African populations as part of the payment terms. For example, the GDP of Mozambique is $16b - China has 200x this value just in USD reserves.
firebaze 5y ago
Don't know why this was heavily downvoted at the time of this posting. No sources, sure, but most of it is common knowledge with a few unsourced opinioned edges - fair enough to me, and I think an interesting viewpoint. Especially the part regarding china (or russia, or north korea, or iran, for that matter, in order of decreasing confidence) seems to be just true to me.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  I work in defense and mostly agree with that they are saying. The GAO and DIB both agree that defense procurement is broken af.
- aurizon 5y ago
  Someone at HN is abusing his moderator's trusted role and acting in a childish and irritating manner.
jcranmer 5y ago
It is very easy to point out, with hindsight, what the seminal moments that change the nature of warfare are. It is not so easy to point them out when they are occurring right now. Furthermore, it's always going to be the case that people will promise that their shiny new technology will be the one that makes all existing battleplans obsolete and is unstoppable, etc., etc. Only rarely are they right, and in historiographical terms, we tend to only remember the people who were right and not those who were wrong. A good example of people betting wrongly on new technology is air power, or specifically, strategic bombing. Early air power theorists (we're talking the 1920s here) made the case that once you start lobbing some bombs at civilian targets, you'd so shatter the morale of the target country that it would collapse in a few weeks--a few months, tops. When WW2 came about, both sides indeed attempted to end the war via bombing the other side's civilians into oblivion. And both times, it failed miserably. Even the US Strategic Bombing Survey struggled to find examples where it came close to achieving its goals, hardly a ringing endorsement of the concept.
- aurizon 5y ago
  Yes, I was living in London when the blitz started(I was 2). The bombs were a random event, and you lived/died on that basis. It failed to defeat the British public - it made them angry. In addition to being useless strategically it also diverted Nazi efforts away from the RAF and allowed a higher degree of production dispersion to be implemented - the result was the UK won the air war and it was impossible to invade the UK with air superiority. Our house was bombed, but we had an estate in Wales and we went there when the blitz began. Insurance failed to pay under an 'acts of war' clause.

elevation 5y ago

While an organization full of "the guys that won the last war" may not be optimal for the next conflict, having a few old salts to mentor the new "college grad" engineers makes a much more effective team overall. The kind of clean sweep that you advocate leaves green engineers to reinvent the wheel; they don't know how to google for what they don't know, and most colleges will not supply the industry-specific and even proprietary knowledge that a young engineer or engineering manager may need to avoid wasting many months of efforts. You may wish to eliminate the "last war" echo chamber but you'll pay for it if you lose their expertise entirely.

aurizon 5y ago
There is validity in what you say, trim the dead wood, keep the good wood and build well.

Closi 5y ago

Get gamers in to define the strategy and use graduate engineers to build new radars? I can’t tell if this is satire or not.

aurizon 5y ago
Partly satirical - They need to invigorate the talent pool from the top down, new ideas and new management - and keep the good old techies and managers and weed out the bad ones and move them away from the fast creation track. The British system that started WW1 carried on to WW2. The Germans foresaw the Lightning War - Blitzkreig https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/blitzkrieg https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/blitzkrieg Hitler was no warrior, or strategist, or general - he was a populist, a rabble rouser - didn't the USA just get rid of one of those? Had Hitler given his generals the keys and said win this war. They would have done so. They would have destroyed the RAF and airplane industry on the ground and invaded and taken the UK before the USA entered. Then they could have carved up Europe with Russia as well as the middle east and wire netted the Mediterranean against subs and ships and allow who they like. The UK fleet large as it was would have to flee to other ports or surrender. Then what would the USA do? They would see a fortress europe. Would stalin invade, or digest the meat hitler had given him while Hitler grabbed the middle east oil. At this time Russian oil was unknown. The generals would not let the Jews be killed - they are our best instrument makers and physicists, so no Holocaust. Even Hitlers own officers waned him killed. I am sure glad he ran their war into the ground with his bed strategies and diplomacy. I for one am glad he lost
- loopz 5y ago
  Hitler sat in prison before they overthrew government.
- Closi 5y ago
  It’s easy to find a way to win something in hindsight with perfect information, the trick is to make the correct decisions at the time with imperfect information. Saying “Hitler would have won if he did this” is a total bias of hindsight. It also ignores the fact that if Hitler was behaving differently, the allies would have responded differently.

ArkanExplorer 5y ago

Its an interesting take, but the Military's sole purpose isn't to fight China. Its to scare smaller nations into the USA sphere of influence, or to destabilise those firmly outside it. For example, the coup in Bolivia: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/americas/was-coup-against-evo-morales-over-bolivia-s-lithium/2213267 https://www.aa.com.tr/en/americas/was-coup-against-evo-moral... China might win the first battles with that rocket barrage, but it will also firmly cut itself off from world trade - ores, food, gas, oil. There's no winning move. There are large-scale dysgenic Demographic changes occurring in the West: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/iq-rates-are-dropping-many-developed-countries-doesn-t-bode-ncna1008576 https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/iq-rates-are-dropping-... China needs merely wait a few generations (if it has the patience) and it will have a much easier time asserting itself. Alternatively, to just buy off Western politicians (as it is already doing) - which beats rockets for cost efficiency.

firebaze 5y ago
China has made alliances with a lot of african nations. If the shit hits the fan I - at least - wouldn't exclude the possibility that china is better positioned in a semi-post-nuclear scenario than the US (russia, africa, china are the most relevant rare-resource exporters, to my knowledge) And I personally wouldn't count a bit on saudi arabian allegiance in a scenario like this. I wouldn't be surprised if they just follow the "strong wo:man" in the world, which right not still is the US.
- ArkanExplorer 5y ago
  China faces a huge logistical challenge if it wants to rely on Africa for food and ore. Sending cargo ships from South West Africa to East Asia is a long and perilous journey. Africa itself is an unstable part of the world, the people are not friendly to China, and the population is growing rapidly. Its easy to see the local population turning on Chinese citizens or businesses in the event of some economic or food shortfall. By contrast the USA basically has all of the resources it needs inside its own country or nearby allies. Many of the 'rare' resources of the world are not particularly rare, they are just too expensive or too environmentally damaging to mine in the West at current prices. I'm surprised that China doesn't just offer to buy whole sections of Africa, and formally annex the land into its country, and move (voluntarily) the existing African populations as part of the payment terms. For example, the GDP of Mozambique is $16b - China has 200x this value just in USD reserves.

firebaze 5y ago

Don't know why this was heavily downvoted at the time of this posting. No sources, sure, but most of it is common knowledge with a few unsourced opinioned edges - fair enough to me, and I think an interesting viewpoint. Especially the part regarding china (or russia, or north korea, or iran, for that matter, in order of decreasing confidence) seems to be just true to me.

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
I work in defense and mostly agree with that they are saying. The GAO and DIB both agree that defense procurement is broken af.
aurizon 5y ago
Someone at HN is abusing his moderator's trusted role and acting in a childish and irritating manner.

jcranmer 5y ago

It is very easy to point out, with hindsight, what the seminal moments that change the nature of warfare are. It is not so easy to point them out when they are occurring right now. Furthermore, it's always going to be the case that people will promise that their shiny new technology will be the one that makes all existing battleplans obsolete and is unstoppable, etc., etc. Only rarely are they right, and in historiographical terms, we tend to only remember the people who were right and not those who were wrong. A good example of people betting wrongly on new technology is air power, or specifically, strategic bombing. Early air power theorists (we're talking the 1920s here) made the case that once you start lobbing some bombs at civilian targets, you'd so shatter the morale of the target country that it would collapse in a few weeks--a few months, tops. When WW2 came about, both sides indeed attempted to end the war via bombing the other side's civilians into oblivion. And both times, it failed miserably. Even the US Strategic Bombing Survey struggled to find examples where it came close to achieving its goals, hardly a ringing endorsement of the concept.

aurizon 5y ago
Yes, I was living in London when the blitz started(I was 2). The bombs were a random event, and you lived/died on that basis. It failed to defeat the British public - it made them angry. In addition to being useless strategically it also diverted Nazi efforts away from the RAF and allowed a higher degree of production dispersion to be implemented - the result was the UK won the air war and it was impossible to invade the UK with air superiority. Our house was bombed, but we had an estate in Wales and we went there when the blitz began. Insurance failed to pay under an 'acts of war' clause.