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The military? Yes. They get more money than they know what to do with - I heard a story about how there's a base where all they do is build M1 Abrams tanks on a

The military? Yes. They get more money than they know what to do with - I heard a story about how there's a base where all they do is build M1 Abrams tanks on an assembly line, then disassemble the tanks, and re-assemble, and then disassemble, Ad Infinium, in order to spend all the money they're allocated. It's always a political winner for Congress to give more money to the military, so their budget has become astronomical and only continues to grow. Every other agency and branch of the US government? Absolutely not.

jlund-molfese 2y ago
Do you have any source for the claim that there is a factory with the sole purpose of assembling and disassembling M1 Abrams tanks without actually delivering or upgrading any of them? That sounds very implausible, bordering on conspiracy theory.
- dgfitz 2y ago
  It’s bullshit. I write software for autonomous tanks. Part of our contract is to have procedures for literally everything, which includes how to take apart and put back together the robot in order to be able to maintain them. We of course run these procedures while writing and formally verifying them, before handing them to the customer, not running them would be folly. Whatever this story is sounds like the worst kind: a small nugget of truth surrounded in a giant ball of shit. Even more than that, a customer doesn’t just hand us a pile of money and say “talk to you again in 2 years” far from it. They literally “status the status” once or more weekly. If the answer to the question of “what is the plan this week” has the answer of “we’re out of work so we’re just charging you pad our profits” won’t play. Also, building tanks is fucking hard, I sincerely doubt any company in the industry isn’t using every penny they have to solve problems and deliver a good product. For those that scoff at the last bit: companies are in the business of making money, and if you deliver an inferior product, you won’t get another contract.
kube-system 2y ago
I'm not sure about that particular story, but many similar stories are rooted in a very real issue of maintaining domestic supply chain expertise. While centrally managed economies can just mandate that state-owned factories continue to exist, private markets won't do this. If you don't order tanks and missiles, the factories that make tanks and missiles will cease to exist, and the market will reallocate resources elsewhere.
- tiberious726 2y ago
  If you don't have the new guys practice taking them apart and putting them back to together, how are they going to lean how to fix them?
groby_b 2y ago
Look, I heard a lot of things from the guy at the street corner too, but that doesn't make it true. We'll start with the fact that M1s aren't built on a "base", they're built at the Joint Systems Manufacturing Center in Lima. Government owned, contractor (GDLS) run, not a base. What they do do is refurbish older tanks, which one I suppose could distort into "disassembling", if one wanted to make a rather distorted claim. The waste contention for that base comes from an Army proposal to temporarily shut down the factory in 2013, which was supposed to save ~$1B. GDLS explained that, sure, can do, but spinning up production again is going to cost ~$1.5B, and restarting production in 2017/18 was always planned. It's not as simple as "the politicians always allocate money to the military".
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

jlund-molfese 2y ago

Do you have any source for the claim that there is a factory with the sole purpose of assembling and disassembling M1 Abrams tanks without actually delivering or upgrading any of them? That sounds very implausible, bordering on conspiracy theory.

dgfitz 2y ago
It’s bullshit. I write software for autonomous tanks. Part of our contract is to have procedures for literally everything, which includes how to take apart and put back together the robot in order to be able to maintain them. We of course run these procedures while writing and formally verifying them, before handing them to the customer, not running them would be folly. Whatever this story is sounds like the worst kind: a small nugget of truth surrounded in a giant ball of shit. Even more than that, a customer doesn’t just hand us a pile of money and say “talk to you again in 2 years” far from it. They literally “status the status” once or more weekly. If the answer to the question of “what is the plan this week” has the answer of “we’re out of work so we’re just charging you pad our profits” won’t play. Also, building tanks is fucking hard, I sincerely doubt any company in the industry isn’t using every penny they have to solve problems and deliver a good product. For those that scoff at the last bit: companies are in the business of making money, and if you deliver an inferior product, you won’t get another contract.

kube-system 2y ago

I'm not sure about that particular story, but many similar stories are rooted in a very real issue of maintaining domestic supply chain expertise. While centrally managed economies can just mandate that state-owned factories continue to exist, private markets won't do this. If you don't order tanks and missiles, the factories that make tanks and missiles will cease to exist, and the market will reallocate resources elsewhere.

tiberious726 2y ago
If you don't have the new guys practice taking them apart and putting them back to together, how are they going to lean how to fix them?

groby_b 2y ago

Look, I heard a lot of things from the guy at the street corner too, but that doesn't make it true. We'll start with the fact that M1s aren't built on a "base", they're built at the Joint Systems Manufacturing Center in Lima. Government owned, contractor (GDLS) run, not a base. What they do do is refurbish older tanks, which one I suppose could distort into "disassembling", if one wanted to make a rather distorted claim. The waste contention for that base comes from an Army proposal to temporarily shut down the factory in 2013, which was supposed to save ~$1B. GDLS explained that, sure, can do, but spinning up production again is going to cost ~$1.5B, and restarting production in 2017/18 was always planned. It's not as simple as "the politicians always allocate money to the military".

deleted 2y ago
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