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All the people here claiming new types of drones and secret programs dating back decades have clearly never worked in defense. Most of the US military, the best

All the people here claiming new types of drones and secret programs dating back decades have clearly never worked in defense. Most of the US military, the best funded in the world, is decades behind the private sector on computing technology -- it's honestly unthinkable to me that their propulsion technology would be decades (or centuries) ahead. The best engineers and scientists have taken Silicon Valley jobs paying 5-10x more since the late 90's. And why are we acting like this is a new phenomenon? It's been going on since at least the 1940's, when there should be little doubt that we didn't have technology to explain it. While I've never seen anything personally, and my anecdote is meaningless to others, I have a family story dating back to ~1969-1970 that either means a bunch of sane family members are completely nuts, or that (in their case, a classic silver "flying saucer") are real, prevalent, and not things that can be prosaically explained.

treyfitty 3y ago
That “government employee doesn’t get paid enough to attract talent” trope has to die. I work with many government employees that are not beholden to the government pay scales and get special exemptions to be compensated “at market rates.” You’d be surprised how many tech employees inside government clear $750k
- rdtsc 3y ago
  They typical pattern is they work for one of the government contractors L3 (now L3Harris), Northrop Grumman, etc. Of course it's a revolving door as well. > You’d be surprised how many tech employees inside government clear $750k That does sound a little high. But it seems you have more recent info than I do.
  - lend000 3y ago
    Yes I'm a bit skeptical of the parent's numbers, but if true, I imagine it's very much the exception, not the norm. Technical employees at the contractors did not do much better than the price ranges posted for government job boards (even distinguished/principal engineers capped out at what is probably around $300-350k today after inflation) except in management positions, in my experience. All the most talented engineers I knew were gone within a few years. Not to mention the red-taped filled work environment does not exactly encourage innovation.
    - jandrewrogers 3y ago
      It is an exception but specialized technical expertise can definitely bill out that high to the US government. (source: I've billed out higher)
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > That does sound a little high. But it seems you have more recent info than I do This is the solo special contractor rate. You aren't paying a person a million bucks. You're paying a "company" that because that's what expertise in how carbon fibers set in a particular resin matrix subjected to a high-frequency supersonic detonation ring or something, an expertise that globally numbers maybe five, and within the U.S., three, is worth.
    - rdtsc 3y ago
      Agree, for the solo special contractor rate that is quite plausible.
- esaym 3y ago
  Then how do I join?
- rndmwlk 3y ago
  Also ignores the entire defense and aerospace industry. It's laughably ignorant to just write off the STEM talent at places like Lockheed, Boeing, Honeywell, etc because FAANG is a popular destination for CS grads. Also, people here (and in SV in general) doubt the capabilities and talent in the public sector until suddenly a Stuxnet is brought to light.
- wing-_-nuts 3y ago
  As a former government employee, I doubt they work directly for the government. The government loves to outsource everything remotely technical to contractors in my (dated) experience. The GS and even the SES pay scales they offer are laughable in comparison to what one can get in the private sector.
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    Correct, but if you do 5 years in the military, and 15 in FedGov, you can then retire at your GS-15 / SES grade and get a pension + guaranteed healthcare. Then you start your 2nd career at GD or Lockheed or Microsoft, et al, and get 300k per annum.
    - wing-_-nuts 3y ago
      I think you're really overstating it. I know guys that have done the military / fed / contractor shuffle. Getting above gs 12 damned near impossible, and when they figure that out, they go into contracting for ~100k+ positions, but it's not 300k. If you play it right, yeah you can fully retire at 55 with a small pension and (hugely important!) health insurance, but someone who went tech sector from the jump can easily retire at 40 if they really set their minds to it. For other fields though, it can make sense.
Workaccount2 3y ago
Yes and no. The military has lots of old tech because it's heavily field tested, well understood, and still does what it needs to do good enough. They do use cutting edge stuff to, and silicon valley pays well, but really only if your a software guy. Contrary to contemporary beliefs, their still are smart engineers out their building cutting edge non-compute hardware.
- dingusdew 3y ago
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localplume 3y ago
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meroes 3y ago
Decades behind in ad networks and social graphs but miles ahead in their core competencies maybe?
- lend000 3y ago
  Not if cybersecurity is supposed to be one of their core competencies.
  - AlexandrB 3y ago
    The easiest way to improve cybersecurity is keeping your critical hardware off of the public internet or even keeping it air-gapped. Something that doesn't require leading edge tech but operational care. I suspect the military is pretty good at the latter, certainly much better than the typical SV company.
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    compared to the private sector? lol the Verizon Disclosure Reports are still a thing, you can find the 2022 DBIR with breaches across the private sector. they get hit hard all the time. hell, the biggest breach in FedGov history is cuz of SolarWinds, which pwnd a lot of private sector folks too, including M$
NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
Ehh, what's the SV state of the art in low-observability, or railguns, or high-precision fuzing? I'm thinking "not very much".
- georgeburdell 3y ago
  Exactly. The government is quite competitive in fields that are not printing SAAS levels of money
- throwaway4aday 3y ago
  Not SV but there's a lot of aerospace companies in Cali and the rest of the SW. The guy[0] who invented the first modern UAV that became the basis of the military's entire drone program was running his company out of his garage in LA, literally a garage startup. This is why DARPA exists and funds companies outside of the direct purview of military R&D. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Karem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Karem
  - godelski 3y ago
    So you get it then. Military tech is developed by companies. They are coupled. All those secret jets and rockets aren't built by military engineers with no affiliation to any private entity, they are built through contractors who get paid way more than government salaries but are still given clearances and cannot sell their top of the line technologies to the public. I mean Lockheed built the SR71. That's how this works. I'm confused why so many people are confused. The problem is about the ridiculous price tags and maybe (or maybe not) that the military non-contractor salaries are rather low. But there is no shortage of contractors.
- sixstringtheory 3y ago
  We make one helluva juice pouch squeezer!
jklinger410 3y ago
> Most of the US military, the best funded in the world, is decades behind the private sector on computing technology -- it's honestly unthinkable to me that their propulsion technology would be decades (or centuries) ahead What makes you qualified to say this? Do you have top secret military clearance?
- NickC25 3y ago
  Seriously. Oftentimes, though, it's not the government who is ahead in tech, it's the quasi-private sector that is decades ahead but due to secrecy laws cannot come forward and talk about it under any and every circumstance. I have a relative who recently retired after 40+ years at Lockheed Martin, a great majority of those years were spent within the Skunkworks umbrella. I had the chance to ask him a similar question a few years back. The response was "in the non-top-secret areas, stuff that we're getting ready to roll out into pre-production, we're about 5-10 years ahead of current tech". Which makes sense, because their focus is very narrow. They've been working on a project for a while and have had unlimited money to work on it with, so it would make sense that their tech is a few years ahead of ours. When asked about more classified research areas the response was "a much, much larger number". And that was it. There's no doubt he knows or knew a lot more but due to having clearance and taking it very seriously, he wouldn't talk about it other than to acknowledge that yes, contractors who are effectively the R&D arm of the military and have huge budgets are probably decades ahead of modern tech. This lines up pretty well with the theory that when a UFO is recovered by the government, it goes straight to contractors who can do better research with a substantially wider breadth, and also add a layer of plausible deniability to the folks at the top of the government.
  - hindsightbias 3y ago
    In most classified arenas, there is no private sector competition. No one in SV is building subs, SOSUS arrays or stealth a/c. So it's completely reasonable they're way ahead of some niche innovator building a sub out of carbon fiber. But it's not sci-fi tech. People talk about the SR-71 as an example, but the A-12 predecessor was only a secret for about 18 months. The P&W jewels were out by ~1978 or so. LM, afaik, doesn't do propulsion so there's no place to hide an anti-grav unit.
CamperBob2 3y ago
The best engineers and scientists have taken Silicon Valley jobs paying 5-10x more since the late 90's. Not necessarily. I once sold a Ferrari to a nuclear weapons tech from Los Alamos. His boss had a Countach.
godelski 3y ago
I've worked with the government in the past. Their compute systems definitely are not decades behind. Though some are. They have the the top supercomputers and machines that haven't been updated since the 80's. That's a more realistic picture of the government. That it is this gigantic thing that is in no way remotely monolithic. It's more like The Blob, that it is an amorphis mixture of a lot of things. Neither this nor that. This is why people get into arguments when discussing the government, because it is a hodgepodge of conflicting things that with extreme differences in capacity and effectiveness. The same also goes for the military (and this should be more obvious to people if you know the joke about "military grade" and recognize that our military is the most powerful and modern one. It is the reason all those "more advanced" private sector things exist. Just because not bought in "bulk" and handed to every private doesn't mean it isn't in the system). So stop painting it with a broad brush because it is leading to conspiracy theories that are just silly (goes in both directions). With the military (in addition to what I said) you have to be very aware that it, like most gov entities, outsources work. The private sector is coupled with the military. The US military doesn't build the secret jets on secret military bases, Lockheed and Boeing do. Lockheed built the SR71, which definitely led to many UFO stories.
- jvanderbot 3y ago
  To add, the reason most computers are behind is usually a mentality of "if it aint broke dont fix it" Same thing in spaceflight. The most recent mars rover uses, essentially, a half-speed imac processor from 1990s.
  - ch4s3 3y ago
    > The most recent mars rover uses, essentially, a half-speed imac processor from 1990s. Isn't this because they need to be specified, texted, and certified to work under high levels of radiation, extreme temperature swings, and a tiny power envelope determined years in advance?
    - jvanderbot 3y ago
      Well, the mars helicopter essentially uses a cell phone, so not really. And it's not that low power. But yeah, the mentality was: We know this works, it's too costly to guarantee a new one will work, and too risky to just try it. Same in the military. Imagine the military didn't have radiation, temperature, etc requirements
kube-system 3y ago
You say this as if Silicon Valley was built on ad tech. Silicon Valley was born of the military industrial complex. > Corporate needs you to find the differences between these pictures.jpg: [military tech] [private sector tech] (they're the same picture)
uhtred 3y ago
It does seem odd that people would put their reputation on the line by making up a story about seeing a UFO. For example, why would this guy lie about it publicly: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/06/03/opinion/night-i-saw-ufo/ https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/06/03/opinion/night-i-saw-u...
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  > It does seem odd that people would put their reputation on the line by making up a story about seeing a UFO. Why does this seem odd? People embellish or make shit up all the time. Trump loved to tell transparently goofy "sir" stories (https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/16/politics/sir-trump-telltale-word-false/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/16/politics/sir-trump-telltale-w...). "But no genre of Trump story is more reliably sir-heavy than his collection of suspiciously similar tales about macho men breaking into tears of gratitude in his presence." > For example, why would this guy lie about it publicly... Might not be a lie. False memories exist, and misidentifying things in the sky at night is hardly uncommon. I was once in the Adirondacks and observed what could only be described as a UFO - a bright, silent, slow moving light in the sky - until a minute or two later that C-5 flew loudly over the lake we were staying in, presumably to land at Fort Drum. Size, shape, speed, etc. were all impossible to accurately identify.
  - uhtred 3y ago
    Trump is Trump, I wouldn't use him as an example personally. The guy who wrote this article in the Boston Globe is "a professor of philosophy and director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College" - seems like it wouldn't be worth him making this up. And he doesn't describe seeing distant lights in the sky, but a flying saucer hovering over him and aiming a light on him- what could he be misidentifying?
    - ceejayoz 3y ago
      > Trump is Trump, I wouldn't use him as an example personally. He's a perfect example of how not everyone cares about getting caught lying. > And he doesn't describe seeing distant lights in the sky, but a flying saucer hovering over him and aiming a light on him- what could he be misidentifying? Shit, it could've been a realistic dream; I've had dreams I was certain were real. Or, more mundanely, maybe it was a helicopter with a searchlight. https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/07/30/206946740/mysterious-dancing-lights-in-afghanistan https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/07/30/206946740/m... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopp%E2%80%93Etchells_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopp%E2%80%93Etchells_effect
slg 3y ago
>I have a family story dating back to ~1969-1970 that either means a bunch of sane family members are completely nuts, or that (in their case, a classic silver "flying saucer") are real, prevalent, and not things that can be prosaically explained. There is a huge amount of ground between aliens are visiting Earth and your family is nuts. We don't understand a lot of things about our world, doubly so for your average layperson. When we encounter something we can't recognize, we look for patterns and aspects we do recognize. That impacts the way we view things and our memory. There are all sorts of stories about how people's native languages impact the way the view the world for example. Maybe your family saw a "a classic silver flying saucer" or maybe they just saw something they couldn't explain and a "classic silver flying saucer" was the closest thing their brains could come up with. That is why the potential recovery part of this story is so important. It takes the fallibility of the human brain out of the equitation and would provide direct physical evidence beyond "I saw something that looked weird" level of evidence that we have previously lived in when it comes to UFOs.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  Plus, silver flying saucers actually exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar
  - tedivm 3y ago
    >Service ceiling: 10,000 ft (3,000 m) (estimated), 3 ft (0.91 m) (actual) I don't know if I'd call that a flying saucer- it was more of a hovering saucer.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      Low-altitude ground-effect flight is still flight, I guess.
akiselev 3y ago
Counter-example: the obsolete space telescopes NRO donated to NASA in 2012 were better than what NASA had despite being nearly two decades old by that point. > An unnamed space analyst stated that the instruments may be a part of the KH-11 Kennen line of satellites which have been launched since 1976, but which have now been largely superseded by newer telescopes with wider fields of view than the KH-11. The analyst stated, however, that the telescopes have "state-of-the art optics" despite their obsolescence for reconnaissance purposes. [1] Bureaucratic (in)efficiency and (in)competence is not evenly distributed throughout the government and its contractors. We just don't get to see the best in action because they're classified until they're almost pedestrian. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_Office_space_telescope_donation_to_NASA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...
- nathancahill 3y ago
  Absolutely the case. For example, the military requires all commercial satellite imagery to be scaled to 25 cm resolution (up until 2014 it was limited to 50 cm). The true resolution is classified.
  - Seattle3503 3y ago
    Surely it isn't the military that requires this? I couldn't find anything on a 25 cm limit, but I don't the military is a regulatory agency.
    - avar 3y ago
      An overview of it: https://www.wired.com/story/how-the-government-controls-sensitive-satellite-data/ https://www.wired.com/story/how-the-government-controls-sens...
  - yetanotherloser 3y ago
    Classified, but inferrable from the size of launch vehicles and basic optical properties. Still incredibly impressive.
- 3y ago
carabiner 3y ago
I've worked in defense aerospace. Silicon Valley has no relevance to aerospace. Likewise dod computing systems / IT infrastructure has nothing to do with propulsion engineering at govt labs or in industry. You're mixing up a whole bunch of things to make a broad conclusion that old computers means that DoD still isn't funding advanced weaponry beyond which we have seen. See the stealth hawk used in the bin Laden raid.
nbaugh1 3y ago
Completely anecdotal counter-point - the smartest person I know is a physicist who subcontracts for the Army
mcpackieh 3y ago
> And why are we acting like this is a new phenomenon? It's been going on since at least the 1940's Exactly what has been going on since the 40s though? The Roswell Incident in 1947 was a balloon. There was no evidenced advanced propulsion technology, neither from aliens or the government. It was just a balloon that got blown up into an massive bizarre cultural phenomena of people whispering rumors about alien spacecraft. The recent infamous Navy videos also show mundane technology, contrary to popular claims. Mick West has shown that mundane explanations exist for everything shown to the public so far. There's no good evidence for any 'exotic' technology, either from the government or from space. The government doesn't have stuff like antigrav craft, but there's no good evidence for such craft existing in the first place.
- FollowingTheDao 3y ago
  I think thou protest too much.
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    On the internet, nobody knows that you're secretly a Venusian.
- esbranson 3y ago
  Mick West should stick to Tony Hawk videogames and leave this to the pilots who say his explanations are idiotic.
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    When discussing something rationally what matters is the merits of the arguments, not the background of the speaker. Mick West's background as a video game developer don't detract from his arguments. Furthermore, Navy pilot are not assured against dishonesty or error; even US Navy pilots are humans. Spare me this "support the troops" style of rhetoric; you can't use patriotism to shame me into uncritically taking military personnel at their word.
oxygen_crisis 3y ago
> All the people here claiming new types of drones and secret programs dating back decades have clearly never worked in defense. Most of the US military, the best funded in the world, is decades behind the private sector on computing technology How quickly we forget the entire NSA ANT catalogue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANT_catalog#Content https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANT_catalog#Content
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  Nothing in that catalogue provides evidence of the government having exotic technology, the fundamental principles of which were completely unknown to the public. Governments can commission custom software and microchips and keep the details of those secret, but those things still operate on principles already known to the public; electronics, exploiting software, etc. When has this ever not been the case? Maybe gunpowder in the middle ages, when it was best understood by secretive alchemists and utter magic to everybody else. But in the modern scientific era, what are some examples? Even wacky shit like cavity magnetrons don't fit the bill; the basic premise of EM radiation and even radar was already public knowledge by the time these technologies became militarily relevant. The devil was in the details but the broad strokes of the thing weren't utterly exotic. Even in the case of nuclear weapons, the broad foundation of theory was already public years before they were brought into existence. A great many details were kept secret, but the broad strokes of the thing wasn't secret. When Werner Heisenberg and his colleagues, now in Allied captivity, first heard of the atomic bombings of Japan their first reaction was disbelief.. because they thought such bombs weren't practical to build. But they knew most of the theoretical basis for such bombs already and once they became convinced the bombs were real they had a pretty good idea of how they must have worked. But then you have alleged antigrav. There's no theoretical basis for such a technology known to the public right now. Nobody can say "well it could be done with XYZ but it would be very tricky to design and expensive to build.."
  - oxygen_crisis 3y ago
    > Nothing in that catalogue provides evidence of the government having exotic technology It doesn't have to, it was a counter-example to that "decades behind the private sector on computing technology" thesis.
mustacheemperor 3y ago
Do you think the jet engines being built at Pratt & Whitney to power the F-35 and developed for the NGAD fighter are behind the private sector? Not like P&W is a government owned company, either - the private sector and the military are closely integrated, that's the military industrial complex.
jandrewrogers 3y ago
> Most of the US military, the best funded in the world, is decades behind the private sector on computing technology This assertion embeds many assumptions not in evidence. Closed source computer science R&D, not only to which the US defense establishment have access but in many cases funded, is decades ahead of open source and academia in many key areas, not just in obvious areas like cryptography but data structures and algorithms, as well as exotic hardware. It doesn't explain UFOs, but the idea that the most advanced public computer tech is decades ahead of what elements of the US DoD have doesn't pass the smell test. At worst there is parity and in some areas there is quite a bit of anecdotal evidence of capability that should not be possible if you solely went on public computing literature. (As a well-known example, there is empirical evidence that graph analysis capabilities exist that are vastly more scalable than is explainable by literature.) Not everyone aspires to be a code monkey at Facebook for the money. There are extremely talented computer scientists working in US government, especially the secretive parts, that could instantly get a job at any FAANG company if they wanted to -- I've met many of them -- but they don't. The notion that the US DoD does not have access to "the best engineers and scientists" is dubious.
- TMWNN 3y ago
  > (As a well-known example, there is empirical evidence that graph analysis capabilities exist that are vastly more scalable than is explainable by literature.) What's the government application here? AI? NSA analysis of metadata to figure out hidden connections between individuals?

treyfitty 3y ago

That “government employee doesn’t get paid enough to attract talent” trope has to die. I work with many government employees that are not beholden to the government pay scales and get special exemptions to be compensated “at market rates.” You’d be surprised how many tech employees inside government clear $750k

rdtsc 3y ago
They typical pattern is they work for one of the government contractors L3 (now L3Harris), Northrop Grumman, etc. Of course it's a revolving door as well. > You’d be surprised how many tech employees inside government clear $750k That does sound a little high. But it seems you have more recent info than I do.
- lend000 3y ago
  Yes I'm a bit skeptical of the parent's numbers, but if true, I imagine it's very much the exception, not the norm. Technical employees at the contractors did not do much better than the price ranges posted for government job boards (even distinguished/principal engineers capped out at what is probably around $300-350k today after inflation) except in management positions, in my experience. All the most talented engineers I knew were gone within a few years. Not to mention the red-taped filled work environment does not exactly encourage innovation.
  - jandrewrogers 3y ago
    It is an exception but specialized technical expertise can definitely bill out that high to the US government. (source: I've billed out higher)
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > That does sound a little high. But it seems you have more recent info than I do This is the solo special contractor rate. You aren't paying a person a million bucks. You're paying a "company" that because that's what expertise in how carbon fibers set in a particular resin matrix subjected to a high-frequency supersonic detonation ring or something, an expertise that globally numbers maybe five, and within the U.S., three, is worth.
  - rdtsc 3y ago
    Agree, for the solo special contractor rate that is quite plausible.
esaym 3y ago
Then how do I join?
rndmwlk 3y ago
Also ignores the entire defense and aerospace industry. It's laughably ignorant to just write off the STEM talent at places like Lockheed, Boeing, Honeywell, etc because FAANG is a popular destination for CS grads. Also, people here (and in SV in general) doubt the capabilities and talent in the public sector until suddenly a Stuxnet is brought to light.
wing-_-nuts 3y ago
As a former government employee, I doubt they work directly for the government. The government loves to outsource everything remotely technical to contractors in my (dated) experience. The GS and even the SES pay scales they offer are laughable in comparison to what one can get in the private sector.
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  Correct, but if you do 5 years in the military, and 15 in FedGov, you can then retire at your GS-15 / SES grade and get a pension + guaranteed healthcare. Then you start your 2nd career at GD or Lockheed or Microsoft, et al, and get 300k per annum.
  - wing-_-nuts 3y ago
    I think you're really overstating it. I know guys that have done the military / fed / contractor shuffle. Getting above gs 12 damned near impossible, and when they figure that out, they go into contracting for ~100k+ positions, but it's not 300k. If you play it right, yeah you can fully retire at 55 with a small pension and (hugely important!) health insurance, but someone who went tech sector from the jump can easily retire at 40 if they really set their minds to it. For other fields though, it can make sense.

Workaccount2 3y ago

Yes and no. The military has lots of old tech because it's heavily field tested, well understood, and still does what it needs to do good enough. They do use cutting edge stuff to, and silicon valley pays well, but really only if your a software guy. Contrary to contemporary beliefs, their still are smart engineers out their building cutting edge non-compute hardware.

dingusdew 3y ago
[dead]

localplume 3y ago

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meroes 3y ago

Decades behind in ad networks and social graphs but miles ahead in their core competencies maybe?

lend000 3y ago
Not if cybersecurity is supposed to be one of their core competencies.
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  The easiest way to improve cybersecurity is keeping your critical hardware off of the public internet or even keeping it air-gapped. Something that doesn't require leading edge tech but operational care. I suspect the military is pretty good at the latter, certainly much better than the typical SV company.
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  compared to the private sector? lol the Verizon Disclosure Reports are still a thing, you can find the 2022 DBIR with breaches across the private sector. they get hit hard all the time. hell, the biggest breach in FedGov history is cuz of SolarWinds, which pwnd a lot of private sector folks too, including M$

NovemberWhiskey 3y ago

Ehh, what's the SV state of the art in low-observability, or railguns, or high-precision fuzing? I'm thinking "not very much".

georgeburdell 3y ago
Exactly. The government is quite competitive in fields that are not printing SAAS levels of money
throwaway4aday 3y ago
Not SV but there's a lot of aerospace companies in Cali and the rest of the SW. The guy[0] who invented the first modern UAV that became the basis of the military's entire drone program was running his company out of his garage in LA, literally a garage startup. This is why DARPA exists and funds companies outside of the direct purview of military R&D. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Karem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Karem
- godelski 3y ago
  So you get it then. Military tech is developed by companies. They are coupled. All those secret jets and rockets aren't built by military engineers with no affiliation to any private entity, they are built through contractors who get paid way more than government salaries but are still given clearances and cannot sell their top of the line technologies to the public. I mean Lockheed built the SR71. That's how this works. I'm confused why so many people are confused. The problem is about the ridiculous price tags and maybe (or maybe not) that the military non-contractor salaries are rather low. But there is no shortage of contractors.
sixstringtheory 3y ago
We make one helluva juice pouch squeezer!

jklinger410 3y ago

> Most of the US military, the best funded in the world, is decades behind the private sector on computing technology -- it's honestly unthinkable to me that their propulsion technology would be decades (or centuries) ahead What makes you qualified to say this? Do you have top secret military clearance?

NickC25 3y ago
Seriously. Oftentimes, though, it's not the government who is ahead in tech, it's the quasi-private sector that is decades ahead but due to secrecy laws cannot come forward and talk about it under any and every circumstance. I have a relative who recently retired after 40+ years at Lockheed Martin, a great majority of those years were spent within the Skunkworks umbrella. I had the chance to ask him a similar question a few years back. The response was "in the non-top-secret areas, stuff that we're getting ready to roll out into pre-production, we're about 5-10 years ahead of current tech". Which makes sense, because their focus is very narrow. They've been working on a project for a while and have had unlimited money to work on it with, so it would make sense that their tech is a few years ahead of ours. When asked about more classified research areas the response was "a much, much larger number". And that was it. There's no doubt he knows or knew a lot more but due to having clearance and taking it very seriously, he wouldn't talk about it other than to acknowledge that yes, contractors who are effectively the R&D arm of the military and have huge budgets are probably decades ahead of modern tech. This lines up pretty well with the theory that when a UFO is recovered by the government, it goes straight to contractors who can do better research with a substantially wider breadth, and also add a layer of plausible deniability to the folks at the top of the government.
- hindsightbias 3y ago
  In most classified arenas, there is no private sector competition. No one in SV is building subs, SOSUS arrays or stealth a/c. So it's completely reasonable they're way ahead of some niche innovator building a sub out of carbon fiber. But it's not sci-fi tech. People talk about the SR-71 as an example, but the A-12 predecessor was only a secret for about 18 months. The P&W jewels were out by ~1978 or so. LM, afaik, doesn't do propulsion so there's no place to hide an anti-grav unit.

CamperBob2 3y ago

The best engineers and scientists have taken Silicon Valley jobs paying 5-10x more since the late 90's. Not necessarily. I once sold a Ferrari to a nuclear weapons tech from Los Alamos. His boss had a Countach.

godelski 3y ago

I've worked with the government in the past. Their compute systems definitely are not decades behind. Though some are. They have the the top supercomputers and machines that haven't been updated since the 80's. That's a more realistic picture of the government. That it is this gigantic thing that is in no way remotely monolithic. It's more like The Blob, that it is an amorphis mixture of a lot of things. Neither this nor that. This is why people get into arguments when discussing the government, because it is a hodgepodge of conflicting things that with extreme differences in capacity and effectiveness. The same also goes for the military (and this should be more obvious to people if you know the joke about "military grade" and recognize that our military is the most powerful and modern one. It is the reason all those "more advanced" private sector things exist. Just because not bought in "bulk" and handed to every private doesn't mean it isn't in the system). So stop painting it with a broad brush because it is leading to conspiracy theories that are just silly (goes in both directions). With the military (in addition to what I said) you have to be very aware that it, like most gov entities, outsources work. The private sector is coupled with the military. The US military doesn't build the secret jets on secret military bases, Lockheed and Boeing do. Lockheed built the SR71, which definitely led to many UFO stories.

jvanderbot 3y ago
To add, the reason most computers are behind is usually a mentality of "if it aint broke dont fix it" Same thing in spaceflight. The most recent mars rover uses, essentially, a half-speed imac processor from 1990s.
- ch4s3 3y ago
  > The most recent mars rover uses, essentially, a half-speed imac processor from 1990s. Isn't this because they need to be specified, texted, and certified to work under high levels of radiation, extreme temperature swings, and a tiny power envelope determined years in advance?
  - jvanderbot 3y ago
    Well, the mars helicopter essentially uses a cell phone, so not really. And it's not that low power. But yeah, the mentality was: We know this works, it's too costly to guarantee a new one will work, and too risky to just try it. Same in the military. Imagine the military didn't have radiation, temperature, etc requirements

kube-system 3y ago

You say this as if Silicon Valley was built on ad tech. Silicon Valley was born of the military industrial complex. > Corporate needs you to find the differences between these pictures.jpg: [military tech] [private sector tech] (they're the same picture)

uhtred 3y ago

It does seem odd that people would put their reputation on the line by making up a story about seeing a UFO. For example, why would this guy lie about it publicly: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/06/03/opinion/night-i-saw-ufo/ https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/06/03/opinion/night-i-saw-u...

ceejayoz 3y ago
> It does seem odd that people would put their reputation on the line by making up a story about seeing a UFO. Why does this seem odd? People embellish or make shit up all the time. Trump loved to tell transparently goofy "sir" stories (https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/16/politics/sir-trump-telltale-word-false/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/16/politics/sir-trump-telltale-w...). "But no genre of Trump story is more reliably sir-heavy than his collection of suspiciously similar tales about macho men breaking into tears of gratitude in his presence." > For example, why would this guy lie about it publicly... Might not be a lie. False memories exist, and misidentifying things in the sky at night is hardly uncommon. I was once in the Adirondacks and observed what could only be described as a UFO - a bright, silent, slow moving light in the sky - until a minute or two later that C-5 flew loudly over the lake we were staying in, presumably to land at Fort Drum. Size, shape, speed, etc. were all impossible to accurately identify.
- uhtred 3y ago
  Trump is Trump, I wouldn't use him as an example personally. The guy who wrote this article in the Boston Globe is "a professor of philosophy and director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College" - seems like it wouldn't be worth him making this up. And he doesn't describe seeing distant lights in the sky, but a flying saucer hovering over him and aiming a light on him- what could he be misidentifying?
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    > Trump is Trump, I wouldn't use him as an example personally. He's a perfect example of how not everyone cares about getting caught lying. > And he doesn't describe seeing distant lights in the sky, but a flying saucer hovering over him and aiming a light on him- what could he be misidentifying? Shit, it could've been a realistic dream; I've had dreams I was certain were real. Or, more mundanely, maybe it was a helicopter with a searchlight. https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/07/30/206946740/mysterious-dancing-lights-in-afghanistan https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/07/30/206946740/m... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopp%E2%80%93Etchells_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopp%E2%80%93Etchells_effect

slg 3y ago

>I have a family story dating back to ~1969-1970 that either means a bunch of sane family members are completely nuts, or that (in their case, a classic silver "flying saucer") are real, prevalent, and not things that can be prosaically explained. There is a huge amount of ground between aliens are visiting Earth and your family is nuts. We don't understand a lot of things about our world, doubly so for your average layperson. When we encounter something we can't recognize, we look for patterns and aspects we do recognize. That impacts the way we view things and our memory. There are all sorts of stories about how people's native languages impact the way the view the world for example. Maybe your family saw a "a classic silver flying saucer" or maybe they just saw something they couldn't explain and a "classic silver flying saucer" was the closest thing their brains could come up with. That is why the potential recovery part of this story is so important. It takes the fallibility of the human brain out of the equitation and would provide direct physical evidence beyond "I saw something that looked weird" level of evidence that we have previously lived in when it comes to UFOs.

ceejayoz 3y ago
Plus, silver flying saucers actually exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar
- tedivm 3y ago
  >Service ceiling: 10,000 ft (3,000 m) (estimated), 3 ft (0.91 m) (actual) I don't know if I'd call that a flying saucer- it was more of a hovering saucer.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    Low-altitude ground-effect flight is still flight, I guess.

akiselev 3y ago

Counter-example: the obsolete space telescopes NRO donated to NASA in 2012 were better than what NASA had despite being nearly two decades old by that point. > An unnamed space analyst stated that the instruments may be a part of the KH-11 Kennen line of satellites which have been launched since 1976, but which have now been largely superseded by newer telescopes with wider fields of view than the KH-11. The analyst stated, however, that the telescopes have "state-of-the art optics" despite their obsolescence for reconnaissance purposes. [1] Bureaucratic (in)efficiency and (in)competence is not evenly distributed throughout the government and its contractors. We just don't get to see the best in action because they're classified until they're almost pedestrian. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_Office_space_telescope_donation_to_NASA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...

nathancahill 3y ago
Absolutely the case. For example, the military requires all commercial satellite imagery to be scaled to 25 cm resolution (up until 2014 it was limited to 50 cm). The true resolution is classified.
- Seattle3503 3y ago
  Surely it isn't the military that requires this? I couldn't find anything on a 25 cm limit, but I don't the military is a regulatory agency.
  - avar 3y ago
    An overview of it: https://www.wired.com/story/how-the-government-controls-sensitive-satellite-data/ https://www.wired.com/story/how-the-government-controls-sens...
- yetanotherloser 3y ago
  Classified, but inferrable from the size of launch vehicles and basic optical properties. Still incredibly impressive.
3y ago

carabiner 3y ago

I've worked in defense aerospace. Silicon Valley has no relevance to aerospace. Likewise dod computing systems / IT infrastructure has nothing to do with propulsion engineering at govt labs or in industry. You're mixing up a whole bunch of things to make a broad conclusion that old computers means that DoD still isn't funding advanced weaponry beyond which we have seen. See the stealth hawk used in the bin Laden raid.

nbaugh1 3y ago

Completely anecdotal counter-point - the smartest person I know is a physicist who subcontracts for the Army

mcpackieh 3y ago

> And why are we acting like this is a new phenomenon? It's been going on since at least the 1940's Exactly what has been going on since the 40s though? The Roswell Incident in 1947 was a balloon. There was no evidenced advanced propulsion technology, neither from aliens or the government. It was just a balloon that got blown up into an massive bizarre cultural phenomena of people whispering rumors about alien spacecraft. The recent infamous Navy videos also show mundane technology, contrary to popular claims. Mick West has shown that mundane explanations exist for everything shown to the public so far. There's no good evidence for any 'exotic' technology, either from the government or from space. The government doesn't have stuff like antigrav craft, but there's no good evidence for such craft existing in the first place.

FollowingTheDao 3y ago
I think thou protest too much.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  On the internet, nobody knows that you're secretly a Venusian.
esbranson 3y ago
Mick West should stick to Tony Hawk videogames and leave this to the pilots who say his explanations are idiotic.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  When discussing something rationally what matters is the merits of the arguments, not the background of the speaker. Mick West's background as a video game developer don't detract from his arguments. Furthermore, Navy pilot are not assured against dishonesty or error; even US Navy pilots are humans. Spare me this "support the troops" style of rhetoric; you can't use patriotism to shame me into uncritically taking military personnel at their word.

oxygen_crisis 3y ago

> All the people here claiming new types of drones and secret programs dating back decades have clearly never worked in defense. Most of the US military, the best funded in the world, is decades behind the private sector on computing technology How quickly we forget the entire NSA ANT catalogue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANT_catalog#Content https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANT_catalog#Content

mcpackieh 3y ago
Nothing in that catalogue provides evidence of the government having exotic technology, the fundamental principles of which were completely unknown to the public. Governments can commission custom software and microchips and keep the details of those secret, but those things still operate on principles already known to the public; electronics, exploiting software, etc. When has this ever not been the case? Maybe gunpowder in the middle ages, when it was best understood by secretive alchemists and utter magic to everybody else. But in the modern scientific era, what are some examples? Even wacky shit like cavity magnetrons don't fit the bill; the basic premise of EM radiation and even radar was already public knowledge by the time these technologies became militarily relevant. The devil was in the details but the broad strokes of the thing weren't utterly exotic. Even in the case of nuclear weapons, the broad foundation of theory was already public years before they were brought into existence. A great many details were kept secret, but the broad strokes of the thing wasn't secret. When Werner Heisenberg and his colleagues, now in Allied captivity, first heard of the atomic bombings of Japan their first reaction was disbelief.. because they thought such bombs weren't practical to build. But they knew most of the theoretical basis for such bombs already and once they became convinced the bombs were real they had a pretty good idea of how they must have worked. But then you have alleged antigrav. There's no theoretical basis for such a technology known to the public right now. Nobody can say "well it could be done with XYZ but it would be very tricky to design and expensive to build.."
- oxygen_crisis 3y ago
  > Nothing in that catalogue provides evidence of the government having exotic technology It doesn't have to, it was a counter-example to that "decades behind the private sector on computing technology" thesis.

mustacheemperor 3y ago

Do you think the jet engines being built at Pratt & Whitney to power the F-35 and developed for the NGAD fighter are behind the private sector? Not like P&W is a government owned company, either - the private sector and the military are closely integrated, that's the military industrial complex.

jandrewrogers 3y ago

> Most of the US military, the best funded in the world, is decades behind the private sector on computing technology This assertion embeds many assumptions not in evidence. Closed source computer science R&D, not only to which the US defense establishment have access but in many cases funded, is decades ahead of open source and academia in many key areas, not just in obvious areas like cryptography but data structures and algorithms, as well as exotic hardware. It doesn't explain UFOs, but the idea that the most advanced public computer tech is decades ahead of what elements of the US DoD have doesn't pass the smell test. At worst there is parity and in some areas there is quite a bit of anecdotal evidence of capability that should not be possible if you solely went on public computing literature. (As a well-known example, there is empirical evidence that graph analysis capabilities exist that are vastly more scalable than is explainable by literature.) Not everyone aspires to be a code monkey at Facebook for the money. There are extremely talented computer scientists working in US government, especially the secretive parts, that could instantly get a job at any FAANG company if they wanted to -- I've met many of them -- but they don't. The notion that the US DoD does not have access to "the best engineers and scientists" is dubious.

TMWNN 3y ago
> (As a well-known example, there is empirical evidence that graph analysis capabilities exist that are vastly more scalable than is explainable by literature.) What's the government application here? AI? NSA analysis of metadata to figure out hidden connections between individuals?