6 ms·

The problem in the US defense industry is, that since the end of the cold war, defense companies have consolidated into just 5 huge conglomerates and the lack o

The problem in the US defense industry is, that since the end of the cold war, defense companies have consolidated into just 5 huge conglomerates and the lack of competition wasn't great for the pace of innovation, affordability or timely development. And the Cold War ended more than three decades ago, about the time we went from piston aircraft to the teen series jets making up the bulk of US inventory even today. Imagine that there isn't a single engineer today at Boeing who has gone through a clean sheet fighter aircraft development cycle throughout his career. Boeing and LM, 2 of the biggest manufacturers of aircraft, have spotty reputations. I'm pretty sure the US gov. is absolutely eager to create more competition of the space.

dralley 3y ago
There's definitely more than one problem with defense procurement, one of the biggest problems is simply having straightforward, acheivable goals in the first place and not fucking with them halfway through the process. And honestly at this point the Air Force is handling this much better than the other branches. Despite all the delays and cost overruns on the F-22 and F-35 projects, at least we ended up with really fantastic and capable platforms. The B-21 is also basically on time and budget, which is nice. Compare that to the Navy's LCS program, a massively expensive clusterfuck with very few redeeming qualities. The Army is somewhere in the middle.
- 7thaccount 3y ago
  The LCS situation is embarrassing. What is the navy working on now? Replacements to the Arleigh Burke destroyers?
  - relaxing 3y ago
    Depends on what you mean by “working.” DDG-1000 is still kicking around trying to figure out what to do with itself. DDG(X) is in a requirements development phase. FFG-62 is actually getting built. There are various autonomous surface and sub efforts that may turn into something.
    - ethbr1 3y ago
      They're also upgrading some Arleigh Burkes (and everything bigger that will stay in service) with SEWIP Block III (EW).
  - iraqmtpizza 3y ago
    The new hotness is the Constellation-class frigate which chose a mature design to keep costs down. That was until feature creep completely consumed it in record time: "At one point the Constellation design shared about 85 percent commonality with the original FREMM design, but the alterations have brought that commonality down to under 15 percent, a person familiar with the changes told USNI News." https://news.usni.org/2024/04/02/constellation-frigate-delivery-delayed-3-years-says-navy https://news.usni.org/2024/04/02/constellation-frigate-deliv...
    - 7thaccount 3y ago
      Every single time.
- mesofile 3y ago
  "Starve before doing business with the damned Navy. They don't know what the hell they want and will drive you up a wall before they break either your heart or a more exposed part of your anatomy." — Kelly Johnson Shocking that this quote still rings true a half-century later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Johnson_(engineer)#Kelly_Johnson's_14_Rules_of_Management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Johnson_(engineer)#Kelly...
  - justin66 3y ago
    Ben Rich expanded on Johnson's advice regarding the Navy in his book, although I think he also conceded that the Navy has some pretty good engineers.
    - ToDougie 3y ago
      Skunk Works is such a fantastic book. Would recommend to all engineers.
- eropple 3y ago
  > Compare that to the Navy's LCS program, a massively expensive clusterfuck with very few redeeming qualities. Which, to be fair to the Navy, is as much Congressional meddling and military procurement seeding--if you stop paying your contractors, they stop being military contractors and the knowledge you'd like walks out the door, which doesn't excuse the LCS program but does explain some of it--as anything else. When we say that we're bad at procurement in the United States, there's a lot of targets for blame. (I think you're right that the Air Force tends to have the best project execution of the service branches though.)
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    Imho, the service branches are defined by and structured around the type of equipment required to complete their missions. The Navy builds years-long expensive ships, then sends them halfway around the world under command of someone. It has a structure to facilitate that. The Army (at best) efficiency organizes a huge amount of people and material, and it deploys and sustains it wherever needed. It has a structure to facilitate that. The Air Force procures, operates, and sustains the most technical platforms. So it's gotten halfway decent at doing that, or at least learned some lessons from repeated mistakes. It has a structure to facilitate that. (And the Marines scrounge through everyone's trash bin, cobble something together, and come out armed to the teeth) Point being, if you look at the people who have risen to the ranks of power, they've been moulded to fit their service culture. Which means some services might not be as good as procurement...
    - sandworm101 3y ago
      >> The Air Force procures, operates, and sustains the most technical platforms. Space force. It is like flying a billion-dollar fighter jet that you will never be allowed to repair after it takes off for the first time.
      - ethbr1 3y ago
        Space Force is still mostly Air Force though, and I'd expect it to take awhile to form it's own culture.
- Shawnj2 3y ago
  Cost plus contracts are a mistake. If you get paid to do something, it should be for a fixed price not a variable number that encourages you to waste as much taxpayer money as you want. If you can’t do it for that price you need to increase your estimate until you can.
anyfactor 3y ago
Thank you very much. I feel like engineering innovation has been concentrated on technology and not in defense engineering at all. Immigrants have helped a lot in building the tech sector's innovation in the last half of the century. But the defense industry often requires naturalized citizens to work on these projects. I think there is a difference between immigrants coming to North America to work and eventually settling down, and offshoring work outside of North America. Immigrants cannot work in the defense sector while private companies are more than glad to have them work on their projects. The challenge is that the current framework for innovation may not qualify for the defense industry. In the pre-Cold War era, the concept of American innovation was largely fueled by industrialization and academic participation in government sectors. Post-2000s, I feel like American innovation is rooted in the idea of diversity and America's ability to bring talent from across the world and concentrate it in major cities. My thesis is that the US wants one or two American companies with monopolistic nature to build their future defense sector.
- aprilthird2021 3y ago
  Innovation has not been in defense engineering lately because the US has lost A LOT of public trust when it comes to the defense industry in the wake of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The US is not the country, nor do they have the reputation in front of the public that led to the Manhattan project, where the greatest minds would willingly work on defense projects, not just willingly but eagerly. The breakthroughs are also less than they used to be. We have the nuke. We have reached space. We've hit the peaks. Everything else is just automatic turrets and AI to choose who to kill. I remember being in college. I went to a top CS school (perhaps the top CS school), and it was often considered a black mark if you went to work for a defense company (even Palantir). It was also a different time, when we had our pick of companies to work at, not like today. But that sentiment is hard to shake off. I'm not convinced it is not still large in academia and the CS world today
  - bigbacaloa 3y ago
    [dead]
  - 3y ago
rapsey 3y ago
> I'm pretty sure the US gov. is absolutely eager to create more competition of the space. The DOD actually is the reason the defense companies consolidated. They literally told them to do it. I think they explained it in the Acquired episode on Lockheed Martin from a year ago.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  After you retire from politics or government it's much easier to be a highly paid board member of one company than a badly paid member of five companies.
- relaxing 3y ago
  That seems misleading. The DOD was the reason inasmuch as the budget to pay contractors was slashed, and the alternative was letting the smaller companies go out of business and losing the knowledge and manufacturing capabilities altogether.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    Post-USSR, the DoD literally met with defense companies and told them that (a) there was going to be less money so (b) they needed to consolidate to survive. It was pretty explicit. That said, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. Everyone forgets that system complexity increases generation by generation: an F-35 is not an F-111 is not an F-86 is not a P-51. The unconsolidated, smaller defense companies of yore likely couldn't have managed a project of F-35 A+B+C complexity.
    - relaxing 3y ago
      That’s what I’m saying. But without the added nuance it sounds like the DoD wanted a duopoly of companies capable of building a 5G fighter.
  - gantron 3y ago
    It's actually exactly correct. That comment is referring to 1993's "last supper" in which the SECDEF gathered the defense CEOs at the time and literally did tell them to consolidate/merge. https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2023/03/01/the-last-supper-how-a-1993-pentagon-dinner-reshaped-the-defense-industry https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2023/03/01/the-last-supper-how-...
willcipriano 3y ago
You know how you hear a lot of complaints about private prisons? How it creates perverse incentives that result in more people being imprisoned? We have a private war apparatus. We have been at war for 30 years without even a clear objective.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  The objective is the same for every superpower in the world: to try and establish military hegemony and retain it for as long as possible.
  - willcipriano 3y ago
    I'd believe that if we won the wars instead of losing them all. This is just looting.
    - ethbr1 3y ago
      South Korea's doing pretty well. Germany's in one piece. The Balkans aren't on fire. Granted, the Middle East is still its perpetual religious/sectarian/ethnic clusterfuck...
      - willcipriano 3y ago
        How's America though?
        ethbr1 3y ago
        Still democratic and #1/#2 in the world, by most measures. Was there something specific you were looking for?
        willcipriano 3y ago
        We pay a european level of taxes (and rising) in order to receive a "safety net" thinner than Cuba, mostly so we can drop bombs on brown people and shadowy "communists"/"terrorists"/"freedom haters"/"yellow cake enjoyers"/"nazis that arent Ukrainian". What's the metric for that?
greedo 3y ago
Your timeframe is a bit off. Piston powered aircraft were not in use in the US military 30 years ago. 30 years ago was 1994. We had B2 bombers, and the F22 was in full development. Also Boeing was developing the F-32 (which lost out to the F-35) in the mid 90's, so it's conceivable that an engineer on that program might still be around in some role.
- thejohnconway 3y ago
  I think you misunderstood, 30 years from piston powered to jets that are still being flown today. The F15 was introduced 27 years after the end of WW2, where all the fighters of consequence were piston powered.
- defrost 3y ago
  As a minor point of no real consequence the Cessna T-41 Mescalero has been in service in the US airforce and army from 1964 until today, and I've been told the Diamond DA20 Katana is in indirect service via a through a civilian contract that screens prospective pilots. Weird nitpick, I know. There's also a slew of drones that may or may not use efficient small piston engines or rotary varients which may or may not count as piston. On the data aquisition side I'm willing to bet there's still a place in the US military for low, slow, ground hugging piston engine craft that run radiometrics or EM mapping.
  - NegativeLatency 3y ago
    There’s also stuff like the super tucano where it’s got a sorta warbird vibe but with a turbo prop (not technically a piston engine plane but performs a similar role to older types that did have piston engines) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_EMB_314_Super_Tucano https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_EMB_314_Super_Tucano
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    SOCOM allegedly uses : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L3Harris_OA-1K_Sky_Warden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L3Harris_OA-1K_Sky_Warden It looks like someone is abusing a small prop plane that's normally used for crop dustin and just duct taping some cheap weapons to it. Because that's exactly what it is

dralley 3y ago

There's definitely more than one problem with defense procurement, one of the biggest problems is simply having straightforward, acheivable goals in the first place and not fucking with them halfway through the process. And honestly at this point the Air Force is handling this much better than the other branches. Despite all the delays and cost overruns on the F-22 and F-35 projects, at least we ended up with really fantastic and capable platforms. The B-21 is also basically on time and budget, which is nice. Compare that to the Navy's LCS program, a massively expensive clusterfuck with very few redeeming qualities. The Army is somewhere in the middle.

7thaccount 3y ago
The LCS situation is embarrassing. What is the navy working on now? Replacements to the Arleigh Burke destroyers?
- relaxing 3y ago
  Depends on what you mean by “working.” DDG-1000 is still kicking around trying to figure out what to do with itself. DDG(X) is in a requirements development phase. FFG-62 is actually getting built. There are various autonomous surface and sub efforts that may turn into something.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    They're also upgrading some Arleigh Burkes (and everything bigger that will stay in service) with SEWIP Block III (EW).
- iraqmtpizza 3y ago
  The new hotness is the Constellation-class frigate which chose a mature design to keep costs down. That was until feature creep completely consumed it in record time: "At one point the Constellation design shared about 85 percent commonality with the original FREMM design, but the alterations have brought that commonality down to under 15 percent, a person familiar with the changes told USNI News." https://news.usni.org/2024/04/02/constellation-frigate-delivery-delayed-3-years-says-navy https://news.usni.org/2024/04/02/constellation-frigate-deliv...
  - 7thaccount 3y ago
    Every single time.
mesofile 3y ago
"Starve before doing business with the damned Navy. They don't know what the hell they want and will drive you up a wall before they break either your heart or a more exposed part of your anatomy." — Kelly Johnson Shocking that this quote still rings true a half-century later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Johnson_(engineer)#Kelly_Johnson's_14_Rules_of_Management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Johnson_(engineer)#Kelly...
- justin66 3y ago
  Ben Rich expanded on Johnson's advice regarding the Navy in his book, although I think he also conceded that the Navy has some pretty good engineers.
  - ToDougie 3y ago
    Skunk Works is such a fantastic book. Would recommend to all engineers.
eropple 3y ago
> Compare that to the Navy's LCS program, a massively expensive clusterfuck with very few redeeming qualities. Which, to be fair to the Navy, is as much Congressional meddling and military procurement seeding--if you stop paying your contractors, they stop being military contractors and the knowledge you'd like walks out the door, which doesn't excuse the LCS program but does explain some of it--as anything else. When we say that we're bad at procurement in the United States, there's a lot of targets for blame. (I think you're right that the Air Force tends to have the best project execution of the service branches though.)
- ethbr1 3y ago
  Imho, the service branches are defined by and structured around the type of equipment required to complete their missions. The Navy builds years-long expensive ships, then sends them halfway around the world under command of someone. It has a structure to facilitate that. The Army (at best) efficiency organizes a huge amount of people and material, and it deploys and sustains it wherever needed. It has a structure to facilitate that. The Air Force procures, operates, and sustains the most technical platforms. So it's gotten halfway decent at doing that, or at least learned some lessons from repeated mistakes. It has a structure to facilitate that. (And the Marines scrounge through everyone's trash bin, cobble something together, and come out armed to the teeth) Point being, if you look at the people who have risen to the ranks of power, they've been moulded to fit their service culture. Which means some services might not be as good as procurement...
  - sandworm101 3y ago
    >> The Air Force procures, operates, and sustains the most technical platforms. Space force. It is like flying a billion-dollar fighter jet that you will never be allowed to repair after it takes off for the first time.
    - ethbr1 3y ago
      Space Force is still mostly Air Force though, and I'd expect it to take awhile to form it's own culture.
Shawnj2 3y ago
Cost plus contracts are a mistake. If you get paid to do something, it should be for a fixed price not a variable number that encourages you to waste as much taxpayer money as you want. If you can’t do it for that price you need to increase your estimate until you can.

anyfactor 3y ago

Thank you very much. I feel like engineering innovation has been concentrated on technology and not in defense engineering at all. Immigrants have helped a lot in building the tech sector's innovation in the last half of the century. But the defense industry often requires naturalized citizens to work on these projects. I think there is a difference between immigrants coming to North America to work and eventually settling down, and offshoring work outside of North America. Immigrants cannot work in the defense sector while private companies are more than glad to have them work on their projects. The challenge is that the current framework for innovation may not qualify for the defense industry. In the pre-Cold War era, the concept of American innovation was largely fueled by industrialization and academic participation in government sectors. Post-2000s, I feel like American innovation is rooted in the idea of diversity and America's ability to bring talent from across the world and concentrate it in major cities. My thesis is that the US wants one or two American companies with monopolistic nature to build their future defense sector.

aprilthird2021 3y ago
Innovation has not been in defense engineering lately because the US has lost A LOT of public trust when it comes to the defense industry in the wake of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The US is not the country, nor do they have the reputation in front of the public that led to the Manhattan project, where the greatest minds would willingly work on defense projects, not just willingly but eagerly. The breakthroughs are also less than they used to be. We have the nuke. We have reached space. We've hit the peaks. Everything else is just automatic turrets and AI to choose who to kill. I remember being in college. I went to a top CS school (perhaps the top CS school), and it was often considered a black mark if you went to work for a defense company (even Palantir). It was also a different time, when we had our pick of companies to work at, not like today. But that sentiment is hard to shake off. I'm not convinced it is not still large in academia and the CS world today
- bigbacaloa 3y ago
  [dead]
- 3y ago

rapsey 3y ago

> I'm pretty sure the US gov. is absolutely eager to create more competition of the space. The DOD actually is the reason the defense companies consolidated. They literally told them to do it. I think they explained it in the Acquired episode on Lockheed Martin from a year ago.

robertlagrant 3y ago
After you retire from politics or government it's much easier to be a highly paid board member of one company than a badly paid member of five companies.
relaxing 3y ago
That seems misleading. The DOD was the reason inasmuch as the budget to pay contractors was slashed, and the alternative was letting the smaller companies go out of business and losing the knowledge and manufacturing capabilities altogether.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  Post-USSR, the DoD literally met with defense companies and told them that (a) there was going to be less money so (b) they needed to consolidate to survive. It was pretty explicit. That said, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. Everyone forgets that system complexity increases generation by generation: an F-35 is not an F-111 is not an F-86 is not a P-51. The unconsolidated, smaller defense companies of yore likely couldn't have managed a project of F-35 A+B+C complexity.
  - relaxing 3y ago
    That’s what I’m saying. But without the added nuance it sounds like the DoD wanted a duopoly of companies capable of building a 5G fighter.
- gantron 3y ago
  It's actually exactly correct. That comment is referring to 1993's "last supper" in which the SECDEF gathered the defense CEOs at the time and literally did tell them to consolidate/merge. https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2023/03/01/the-last-supper-how-a-1993-pentagon-dinner-reshaped-the-defense-industry https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2023/03/01/the-last-supper-how-...

willcipriano 3y ago

You know how you hear a lot of complaints about private prisons? How it creates perverse incentives that result in more people being imprisoned? We have a private war apparatus. We have been at war for 30 years without even a clear objective.

ethbr1 3y ago
The objective is the same for every superpower in the world: to try and establish military hegemony and retain it for as long as possible.
- willcipriano 3y ago
  I'd believe that if we won the wars instead of losing them all. This is just looting.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    South Korea's doing pretty well. Germany's in one piece. The Balkans aren't on fire. Granted, the Middle East is still its perpetual religious/sectarian/ethnic clusterfuck...
    - willcipriano 3y ago
      How's America though?
      - ethbr1 3y ago
        Still democratic and #1/#2 in the world, by most measures. Was there something specific you were looking for?
        willcipriano 3y ago
        We pay a european level of taxes (and rising) in order to receive a "safety net" thinner than Cuba, mostly so we can drop bombs on brown people and shadowy "communists"/"terrorists"/"freedom haters"/"yellow cake enjoyers"/"nazis that arent Ukrainian". What's the metric for that?

greedo 3y ago

Your timeframe is a bit off. Piston powered aircraft were not in use in the US military 30 years ago. 30 years ago was 1994. We had B2 bombers, and the F22 was in full development. Also Boeing was developing the F-32 (which lost out to the F-35) in the mid 90's, so it's conceivable that an engineer on that program might still be around in some role.

thejohnconway 3y ago
I think you misunderstood, 30 years from piston powered to jets that are still being flown today. The F15 was introduced 27 years after the end of WW2, where all the fighters of consequence were piston powered.
defrost 3y ago
As a minor point of no real consequence the Cessna T-41 Mescalero has been in service in the US airforce and army from 1964 until today, and I've been told the Diamond DA20 Katana is in indirect service via a through a civilian contract that screens prospective pilots. Weird nitpick, I know. There's also a slew of drones that may or may not use efficient small piston engines or rotary varients which may or may not count as piston. On the data aquisition side I'm willing to bet there's still a place in the US military for low, slow, ground hugging piston engine craft that run radiometrics or EM mapping.
- NegativeLatency 3y ago
  There’s also stuff like the super tucano where it’s got a sorta warbird vibe but with a turbo prop (not technically a piston engine plane but performs a similar role to older types that did have piston engines) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_EMB_314_Super_Tucano https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_EMB_314_Super_Tucano
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  SOCOM allegedly uses : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L3Harris_OA-1K_Sky_Warden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L3Harris_OA-1K_Sky_Warden It looks like someone is abusing a small prop plane that's normally used for crop dustin and just duct taping some cheap weapons to it. Because that's exactly what it is