3 ms·
The flaw exhibited by the losing side was "retrofitting" effective and functional ships in the middle of a war. A similar attitude happens that I've seen count
by lowbloodsugar 3y ago
The flaw exhibited by the losing side was "retrofitting" effective and functional ships in the middle of a war. A similar attitude happens that I've seen countless times in live applications where decisions were made to allow the existing system to stagnate because a new shiny rewrite was going to come online "by the end of the year". Four years later, the new system isn't ready, and the "old" one (i.e. the one in production) is hitting scaling cliffs because it wasn't kept up to date.
But I suspect this post was in response to the "it's obsolete" comments on the F35 post earlier today, with lots of calls for work on drones.
The warning in Clarke's story is not that we shouldn't build new tech, however. We should absolutely build new tech, and have skunk works and the like. But we shouldn't stop building the existing tech as long as it is effective in battle. The concern comes when we don't have the capacity to build "what's next" because the most important piece is made in a little island off the coast of another continent full of potential adversaries.
- pixl97 3y agoAny way we go about it, the unfortunate fact is hindsight is the only way to tell what the right choice was. In some cases the old system is outclassed so badly attempting to keep using it would be a fatal mistake (cavalry charges at machine gun nests). Other times a new system can be way better, but the rate of production is so far behind the old model you can't make enough fast enough to make a difference. And then other times the new systems have such terrible weaknesses they can be a risk to the entire nation state.
- marcosdumay 3y agoYou don't stop an old system before proving the new one in practice, and you don't disrupt logistic channels, ever. Those don't take any hindsight.