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As someone who has some familiarity with this process, just like safety regulations are written in blood, Federal Acquisition rules are written in misuse of mon

As someone who has some familiarity with this process, just like safety regulations are written in blood, Federal Acquisition rules are written in misuse of money, sometimes criminally. Yes, we have swung too much towards the bureaucrats but I'm not sure throwing out everything is solution to the issue. Move fast works great when it's B2B software and failures means stock price does not go up. It's not so great when brand new jet acts up and results in crashes. Oh yea, F-35 was built with move fast, they rolled models off the production line quickly, so Lockheed could get more money, but it looks like whole "We will fix busted models later" might have been more expensive. Time will tell.

IT4MD 1y ago
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themafia 1y ago
> but it looks like whole "We will fix busted models later" might have been more expensive. Time will tell. Time has already told us. Historically it means it was more expensive. If it wasn't, it would be such a rare an interesting case, that it would deserve a documentary on the surprising result.
Alupis 1y ago
The F-35 was Lockheed's entry in the Joint Strike Fighter program. The JSF has roots going back to 1996. The X-35 first flew in 2000. The F-35 first flew in 2006, and didn't enter service until 2015(!!). That's nearly 20 years to develop a single airframe. Yes, it's the most sophisticated airframe to date, but 20 years is not trivial. The F-35 had many issues during trials and early deployment - some are excusable for a new airframe and some were not. I suspect the issue wasn't "move fast, break things" but rather massive layers of bureaucracy and committees that paralyzed the development pipeline. The F-22 was part of the Advanced Tactical Fighter (ATF) program which dates back to 1981. It's prototype, the YF-22 first flew in 1990, and the F-22 itself first flew in 1997. It entered production in 2005. Again, 20+ years to field a new airframe. Something is very wrong if it takes 20+ years to field new military technologies. By the time these technologies are fielded, a whole generation of employees have retired and leadership has turned over multiple times.
- themafia 1y ago
  > but rather massive layers of bureaucracy and committees that paralyzed the development pipeline. They decided to make one airframe in three variants for three different branches. They were trying to spend money they didn't have and thought this corner cutting would save it. > Something is very wrong if it takes 20+ years to field next-generation military technologies. It's the funding. The American appetite for new "war fighters" is exceptionally low when there's no exigent conflict facing us. They're simply building the _wrong thing_.
  - HPsquared 1y ago
    Lack of funding? My impression is that the F-35 program is the most expensive in history.
    - saithound 1y ago
      That's not surprising. If you allocate 1500 billion USD to building the Death Star, it will simultaneously be 1. the most expensive space station program in history, and 2. severely underfunded compared to the desired deliverable.
    - themafia 1y ago
      The original estimate was $250b. They undershot that by 10x. The expense is all "overages."
  - Alupis 1y ago
    The problem clearly is, once a need is identified - it can be costly or ruinous to wait 20+ years to realize the solution. The DoW is clearly signaling they want the "Need -> Solution" loop tightened, significantly, sacrificing cost for timeliness. That puts the US on good footing, ready to face peer and near-peer, next-generation warfare. If Ukraine has taught us anything, it's off-the-shelf - ready today - weapons are needed in significant quantity. Drone warfare has changed almost everything - we're seeing $300 off-the-shelf drones kill millions of dollars of equipment and personnel. If the military needs anti-drone capabilities, it can't wait 20+ years to field them. We don't just need to pick on new/next-generation military technologies either. The US currently produces between 30,000-40,000 155mm artillery shells a month, but Ukraine (at peak) expended 10,000 per day[1]. The loop is far too long... [1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/ukraine-crisis-artillery/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/ukraine-...
Animats 1y ago
> As someone who has some familiarity with this process, just like safety regulations are written in blood, Federal Acquisition rules are written in misuse of money, sometimes criminally. This already started. "Trump Jr.-Linked Unusual Machines Lands Major Pentagon Drone Contract Amid Ethics Concerns"[1] It's for drone motors for FPV drones, which are usually cheap. The terms of the contract are undisclosed "due to the shutdown". [1] https://dronexl.co/2025/10/25/trump-jr-unusual-machines-pentagon-drone-contract/ https://dronexl.co/2025/10/25/trump-jr-unusual-machines-pent...
astrange 1y ago
[flagged]
- pixl97 1y ago
  I mean the US has a long history of killing people due to bad designs and cut corners. Everyone says cut safety for cost until 50 people die in a death trap.
- koolba 1y ago
  > …and they're about to ban windowless bedrooms which will make office-to-housing conversions impossible. Where is this not banned? And it’s not like offices don’t have windows or you can’t cut them. The ban on windowless bedrooms is supposed to prevent renting out a utility closet as a “rustic studio”.
  - astrange 1y ago
    No, the ban is because an architect thinks they're icky, sent in a request to ban it, and the building code people take any suggestion to ban anything that anyone sends them. Safety regulations are written in blood, you know! https://bsky.app/profile/stephenjacobsmith.com/post/3m3xpe3nbz22s https://bsky.app/profile/stephenjacobsmith.com/post/3m3xpe3n...
    - nradov 1y ago
      The ban on windowless bedroom is at least partly about fire safety. A window provides an escape route for low floors, or a means for firefighters to rescue the occupants.
      - gottorf 1y ago
        The GP's point is that levelheaded cost-benefit analyses on things like that seem to escape regulators, and everything is greatly skewed towards "it's worth it if it saves even one life". Sure, fire safety in homes is a good thing to have. But is it so good that we can't economically build buildings to meet them, and people end up with no home at all?
stinkbeetle 1y ago
> Move fast [is] not so great when brand new jet acts up and results in crashes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_the_Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident... https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/air-force-blames-oxygen-deprived-pilot-22-crash/story?id=15162509 https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/air-force-blames-oxygen-depri... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Andersen_Air_Force_Base_B-2_crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Andersen_Air_Force_Base_B... https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/2017/07/21/f-35b-helmets-night-vision-camera-failed-during-test-flight/ https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/2017/07/21/f-35b-helmets-ni... (etc) The reality is that developing bespoke solutions with bleeding edge technology is going to result in brand new jets crashing, no matter how much bureaucrats and processes slow down the process. Nothing can substitute for using it. > Federal Acquisition rules are written in misuse of money, sometimes criminally. Where "misuse of money" means money not being spent a manner convenient to those who wrote the rules. Which means starting illegal wars, cost-plus contracts, lies about WMDs, no-bid contracts, arms trafficking to dictatorships, pork barreling, and *nudge* *wink* 7 figure do-nothing "consulting" gigs for bureaucrats and generals after they leave the government. Nothing is going to solve that, but if you threw out the whole rule book and started again, it would require a monumental effort to do worse than things have been.
LarsDu88 1y ago
Back in the day, Lockheed could move very quickly. The P-38 went from proposal to working prototype between February 1937 and January 1939. But there was a cost. Test pilots died The top American fighter pilot of WW2, Richard Bong was killed test piloting the Lockheed P80 jet fighter.
- canucker2016 1y ago
  Kelly Johnson, head of Lockheed's Skunk Works, worked on the P-38 (as well as U-2, Blackbird, and the F-117A). He had a list of rules for managing the design of aircraft. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Johnson_(engineer)#Kelly_Johnson's_14_Rules_of_Management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Johnson_(engineer)#Kelly.... There's an unwritten 15th rule (from the above-mentioned webpage): "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."
  - LarsDu88 1y ago
    Rule 14 is pretty interesting. Keep the teams small and reward performance with compensation. Don't just reward increasing headcount. Could improve things at so many tech companies today.
    - iamtheworstdev 1y ago
      Rule 14 is why every government and large cooperation has an insane amount of bloat and middle managers, IMHO. People's power and pay are determined by two things - the number of people working under them, and their budget (which is often determined by the number of people working under them). It is rarely determined by positive outcomes, it seems, in the government world.
      - thmsths 1y ago
        Because when someone working for a public entity is rewarded with more money, eventually it results in someone else publishing something along the lines of "Our investigative team scoured records and sent a bunch of FOIA request, they found that some public servants make more than <insertLargeAmountOfMoney>", cue outrage, tightly defined salary bands set by the legislator and ultimately the problem you describe.
rapjr9 1y ago
What is perhaps more important is how this transition will be managed. Are the old methods just being halted and all projects halted and the new methods will take over whenever they start producing products? Switching horses midstream could end up destroying both old and new acquisitions without a good plan. This seems like something the Trump administration has continually failed at, they break things first, then try to figure out what to replace it with while chaos ensues. Possibly they will have to fund much of the existing plans while simultaneously funding the ramp up of the new plan, perhaps doubling the cost of acquisition for a while. Even if the new plan is faster overall, there may still be a five year delay before products start to appear from factories.
potato3732842 1y ago
As everyone with functioning eyeballs and more memory than a goldfish who has hung around a large organization more than a year knows, you quickly run out of blood to write in and start writing in "well that could've been worse if the starts had aligned, let's write a rule about it". I used to work for a defense contractor. My former coworkers are probably cheering right now.
- mmooss 1y ago
  The contractors cheer because there are fewer limitations on poor quality products, project management, and fraud.
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    I'm talking engineering teams supporting already fielded equipment. They just "know things" like which basically free tweaks ought to be made as a result of knowledge gained from the assembly being in the field. They don't stand to gain from the product being crap. Most of the fixes are basically free BOM tweaks that don't really matter but provide incremental improvements/refinements if made and the cumulative nickels and dimes really do add up. The paper pushers on both sides that will do many rounds in order to make that happen are the only people benefitting from the make-work here as does anyone who skims their existence off of the paper pushers.
    - shadowpho 1y ago
      >Most of the fixes are basically free BOM tweaks that don't really matter From my experience there are very few BOM tweaks that don’t need a whole lot of validation, there’s no free lunch here
      - potato3732842 1y ago
        I'm talking about changes on the order of hot vs cold weather optimized rubber dust boots. Either works. One lasts longer. The "wrong" one was chosen originally because the default assumption at the time was Fulda and not Fallujah.
ashanoko 1y ago
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m463 1y ago
Can't we just buy safe planes? In the timescales of some of our military planes, cars have gone from metal dashboards to collision avoidance in cars with cocoons of safety with 10 airbags. I think moving faster might also move faster with safety equipment.
cm2012 1y ago
The F35 is the most in demand military plane in the world for the price. They spent 20 years iterating on it and its now the best plane for the cost with its capabilities.
- busterarm 1y ago
  And a truck full of low cost drones can swarm your airfield and take all your F35s out while they're still on the ground. The future isn't in pilot-in-seat aircraft at all.
  - bootsmann 1y ago
    “Drones will make xyz technology obsolete” is probably the most naive armchair conclusion you can draw from the Ukraine war. Food for thought: Russias most impactful innovation of this war so far has been building more precise glide bombs, which notably are dropped by fighter planes (and the reason why Ukraine went after those planes with their drones).
    - busterarm 1y ago
      I'm not saying you won't need fighter planes but why do they have to be manned when they can be autonomous or semi-autonomous with remote pilots? Hence recent projects like X-BAT and YFQ-44A. Sure, YFQ-44A says the mission now is to support crewed fighters, but I don't expect that to last.
scuff3d 1y ago
Given there is apparently a large emphasis on the performance of these individual "portfolio" managers, and speed of delivery is made to be such a big deal, this is definitely going to get out own people killed.
- w10-1 1y ago
  > this is definitely going to get out own people killed. But the key feature making this a horrible decision is that the people responsible for getting our people killed will not be discoverable, and they will never face the consequences. Heck: they might not even know, because they're doing good by their standards. That's exactly how you make a broken but persistent and entrenched system: incentives without consequences for exported costs.
  - scuff3d 1y ago
    There's also going to be a large lag. A lot of the protections are baked in and won't just disappear overnight, but as the system degrades it will get worse and worse. Decisions made today might not cause immediately visible damage for a decade, and by then the people responsible will be gone, even if you could find them. If people think Boeing has been a shit show over the last 10 years, they ain't seen nothing yet.
almosthere 1y ago
> brand new jet acts up and results in crashes The thing is, we waste so much money it's better to crash 15 jets but build 2000 of them than waste the same amount of money and build 5 jets. Even us SWEs out in the wild, we sometimes... disable tests (gasp heard everywhere) so that a refactor can work. I mean it's why we have the expression "sometimes you have to crack a few eggs".
- efnx 1y ago
  That’s putting a pretty low price on human life.
  - almosthere 1y ago
    No, it's putting a high price on human life, but it depends on how you look at it. We can be a nation that gets bombed into nothingness, or the only country that can defend our own or another one. But we can't do that unless we're willing to actually build weapons of war. It's why WWII vets did what they did knowing not every bomb, aircraft or handheld weapon was perfect but still ran in to stop Hitler. I would say that put a high price on human life. These last few generations won't get it until it gets its WW.
    - watwut 1y ago
      Right now USA is cpintry that threatens others and is primary threat to stabilily. Its rhetoric is not building up to defense.
      - almosthere 1y ago
        I don't know to me it sounds like Isreal and Russia if you ask, well anyone. NK wants a lot of people dead too.
        watwut 1y ago
        Although Israel is committing genocide, it is not a threat to worldwide stability. NK is not threat to world wide stability either, as evil they are, they are no where near to that. USA half switched alliance to Russia, so yeah. Current American leadership admires how Russia does things and wants to be more like them. There is a reason why USA is currently seen as the biggest threat to stability - because USA is intentionally trying to make the world unstable.
deleted 1y ago
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yard2010 1y ago
Today's societal war is a philosophical one - do you think everything sucks and it's a matter of lesser evil, or do you think everything sucks and we "just" need to find the perfect solution.
cyanydeez 1y ago
You are missing the criminals for tge policy discussion. Idiocracy vs kleptocracy.
- LightBug1 1y ago
  Stir in a little kakistocracy there to get it just right ...
helloooooooo 1y ago
The goal of these rules is to reduce corruption and theft. A lot of these rules go out the window when there is a need for speed. The goals have obviously changed: the US Gov believes the world is on a path to war again, and is reforming on that assumption.
- mindslight 1y ago
  ... or alternatively the "US Gov" believes that more corruption and theft is desirable.
stogot 1y ago
the F35 isn’t a “move fast” counterpoint. That’s one of the slowest airframes I can think of
dfxm12 1y ago
Yes, we have swung too much towards the bureaucrats Is this truly the case or are the criminals and other people who misuse money dragging people towards this position?
- stocksinsmocks 1y ago
  Were you under the impression that federal procurement was all above board before? I’ve got some bad news. Your options are corrupt procurement or corrupt procurement with a 15% administrative surcharge of make-work patronage jobs for someone’s mistress or friends. I think that we’re in the “let’s pay our centurions in salt because the treasury is empty” stage of administrative innovations to allow the dead empire to linger. Personally, my hope is the next thousand year dark age we are stepping into comes with a knightly aesthetic.
  - dfxm12 1y ago
    Were you under the impression that federal procurement was all above board before? No, the only impression I had was from the earlier post, which is light on details, which is why I was asking for clarification. Your options are corrupt procurement or corrupt procurement with a 15% administrative surcharge of make-work patronage jobs for someone’s mistress or friends. This is an obvious false dichotomy.
fpoling 1y ago
There is an observation that any organization or a process becomes totally bureaucratized over span of several decades. The only solution to this is to make things explicitly time-bound like 20-30 years and dismantle the whole thing at the end replacing it with something new and new people at management positions.
- jvanderbot 1y ago
  I somewhat agree with this. It can be true that all the overwatch was a good idea. And it can be true that the process becomes the point, which is bad. It's hard to tell the difference, but I've personally been bogged down by review processes for months, just to get 2FTE from the government itself while working on the government's approved and funded projects while sitting at the government's desk. It's really silly how bad these things are sometimes. It'll take years to do the thing that even the "fast" programs want you to do. And the solution to date has been to "start another program". That program promises to move fast, and often does, but it will eventually metastasize with process and review. I just don't think we can add any more "same but faster" programs. It is time to cut back a lot of process, and thereby bring these programs back to parity so we can then cut down the number of programs.

IT4MD 1y ago

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themafia 1y ago

> but it looks like whole "We will fix busted models later" might have been more expensive. Time will tell. Time has already told us. Historically it means it was more expensive. If it wasn't, it would be such a rare an interesting case, that it would deserve a documentary on the surprising result.

Alupis 1y ago

The F-35 was Lockheed's entry in the Joint Strike Fighter program. The JSF has roots going back to 1996. The X-35 first flew in 2000. The F-35 first flew in 2006, and didn't enter service until 2015(!!). That's nearly 20 years to develop a single airframe. Yes, it's the most sophisticated airframe to date, but 20 years is not trivial. The F-35 had many issues during trials and early deployment - some are excusable for a new airframe and some were not. I suspect the issue wasn't "move fast, break things" but rather massive layers of bureaucracy and committees that paralyzed the development pipeline. The F-22 was part of the Advanced Tactical Fighter (ATF) program which dates back to 1981. It's prototype, the YF-22 first flew in 1990, and the F-22 itself first flew in 1997. It entered production in 2005. Again, 20+ years to field a new airframe. Something is very wrong if it takes 20+ years to field new military technologies. By the time these technologies are fielded, a whole generation of employees have retired and leadership has turned over multiple times.

themafia 1y ago
> but rather massive layers of bureaucracy and committees that paralyzed the development pipeline. They decided to make one airframe in three variants for three different branches. They were trying to spend money they didn't have and thought this corner cutting would save it. > Something is very wrong if it takes 20+ years to field next-generation military technologies. It's the funding. The American appetite for new "war fighters" is exceptionally low when there's no exigent conflict facing us. They're simply building the _wrong thing_.
- HPsquared 1y ago
  Lack of funding? My impression is that the F-35 program is the most expensive in history.
  - saithound 1y ago
    That's not surprising. If you allocate 1500 billion USD to building the Death Star, it will simultaneously be 1. the most expensive space station program in history, and 2. severely underfunded compared to the desired deliverable.
  - themafia 1y ago
    The original estimate was $250b. They undershot that by 10x. The expense is all "overages."
- Alupis 1y ago
  The problem clearly is, once a need is identified - it can be costly or ruinous to wait 20+ years to realize the solution. The DoW is clearly signaling they want the "Need -> Solution" loop tightened, significantly, sacrificing cost for timeliness. That puts the US on good footing, ready to face peer and near-peer, next-generation warfare. If Ukraine has taught us anything, it's off-the-shelf - ready today - weapons are needed in significant quantity. Drone warfare has changed almost everything - we're seeing $300 off-the-shelf drones kill millions of dollars of equipment and personnel. If the military needs anti-drone capabilities, it can't wait 20+ years to field them. We don't just need to pick on new/next-generation military technologies either. The US currently produces between 30,000-40,000 155mm artillery shells a month, but Ukraine (at peak) expended 10,000 per day[1]. The loop is far too long... [1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/ukraine-crisis-artillery/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/ukraine-...

Animats 1y ago

> As someone who has some familiarity with this process, just like safety regulations are written in blood, Federal Acquisition rules are written in misuse of money, sometimes criminally. This already started. "Trump Jr.-Linked Unusual Machines Lands Major Pentagon Drone Contract Amid Ethics Concerns"[1] It's for drone motors for FPV drones, which are usually cheap. The terms of the contract are undisclosed "due to the shutdown". [1] https://dronexl.co/2025/10/25/trump-jr-unusual-machines-pentagon-drone-contract/ https://dronexl.co/2025/10/25/trump-jr-unusual-machines-pent...

astrange 1y ago

[flagged]

pixl97 1y ago
I mean the US has a long history of killing people due to bad designs and cut corners. Everyone says cut safety for cost until 50 people die in a death trap.
koolba 1y ago
> …and they're about to ban windowless bedrooms which will make office-to-housing conversions impossible. Where is this not banned? And it’s not like offices don’t have windows or you can’t cut them. The ban on windowless bedrooms is supposed to prevent renting out a utility closet as a “rustic studio”.
- astrange 1y ago
  No, the ban is because an architect thinks they're icky, sent in a request to ban it, and the building code people take any suggestion to ban anything that anyone sends them. Safety regulations are written in blood, you know! https://bsky.app/profile/stephenjacobsmith.com/post/3m3xpe3nbz22s https://bsky.app/profile/stephenjacobsmith.com/post/3m3xpe3n...
  - nradov 1y ago
    The ban on windowless bedroom is at least partly about fire safety. A window provides an escape route for low floors, or a means for firefighters to rescue the occupants.
    - gottorf 1y ago
      The GP's point is that levelheaded cost-benefit analyses on things like that seem to escape regulators, and everything is greatly skewed towards "it's worth it if it saves even one life". Sure, fire safety in homes is a good thing to have. But is it so good that we can't economically build buildings to meet them, and people end up with no home at all?

stinkbeetle 1y ago

> Move fast [is] not so great when brand new jet acts up and results in crashes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_the_Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident... https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/air-force-blames-oxygen-deprived-pilot-22-crash/story?id=15162509 https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/air-force-blames-oxygen-depri... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Andersen_Air_Force_Base_B-2_crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Andersen_Air_Force_Base_B... https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/2017/07/21/f-35b-helmets-night-vision-camera-failed-during-test-flight/ https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/2017/07/21/f-35b-helmets-ni... (etc) The reality is that developing bespoke solutions with bleeding edge technology is going to result in brand new jets crashing, no matter how much bureaucrats and processes slow down the process. Nothing can substitute for using it. > Federal Acquisition rules are written in misuse of money, sometimes criminally. Where "misuse of money" means money not being spent a manner convenient to those who wrote the rules. Which means starting illegal wars, cost-plus contracts, lies about WMDs, no-bid contracts, arms trafficking to dictatorships, pork barreling, and *nudge* *wink* 7 figure do-nothing "consulting" gigs for bureaucrats and generals after they leave the government. Nothing is going to solve that, but if you threw out the whole rule book and started again, it would require a monumental effort to do worse than things have been.

LarsDu88 1y ago

Back in the day, Lockheed could move very quickly. The P-38 went from proposal to working prototype between February 1937 and January 1939. But there was a cost. Test pilots died The top American fighter pilot of WW2, Richard Bong was killed test piloting the Lockheed P80 jet fighter.

canucker2016 1y ago
Kelly Johnson, head of Lockheed's Skunk Works, worked on the P-38 (as well as U-2, Blackbird, and the F-117A). He had a list of rules for managing the design of aircraft. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Johnson_(engineer)#Kelly_Johnson's_14_Rules_of_Management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Johnson_(engineer)#Kelly.... There's an unwritten 15th rule (from the above-mentioned webpage): "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."
- LarsDu88 1y ago
  Rule 14 is pretty interesting. Keep the teams small and reward performance with compensation. Don't just reward increasing headcount. Could improve things at so many tech companies today.
  - iamtheworstdev 1y ago
    Rule 14 is why every government and large cooperation has an insane amount of bloat and middle managers, IMHO. People's power and pay are determined by two things - the number of people working under them, and their budget (which is often determined by the number of people working under them). It is rarely determined by positive outcomes, it seems, in the government world.
    - thmsths 1y ago
      Because when someone working for a public entity is rewarded with more money, eventually it results in someone else publishing something along the lines of "Our investigative team scoured records and sent a bunch of FOIA request, they found that some public servants make more than <insertLargeAmountOfMoney>", cue outrage, tightly defined salary bands set by the legislator and ultimately the problem you describe.

rapjr9 1y ago

What is perhaps more important is how this transition will be managed. Are the old methods just being halted and all projects halted and the new methods will take over whenever they start producing products? Switching horses midstream could end up destroying both old and new acquisitions without a good plan. This seems like something the Trump administration has continually failed at, they break things first, then try to figure out what to replace it with while chaos ensues. Possibly they will have to fund much of the existing plans while simultaneously funding the ramp up of the new plan, perhaps doubling the cost of acquisition for a while. Even if the new plan is faster overall, there may still be a five year delay before products start to appear from factories.

potato3732842 1y ago

As everyone with functioning eyeballs and more memory than a goldfish who has hung around a large organization more than a year knows, you quickly run out of blood to write in and start writing in "well that could've been worse if the starts had aligned, let's write a rule about it". I used to work for a defense contractor. My former coworkers are probably cheering right now.

mmooss 1y ago
The contractors cheer because there are fewer limitations on poor quality products, project management, and fraud.
- potato3732842 1y ago
  I'm talking engineering teams supporting already fielded equipment. They just "know things" like which basically free tweaks ought to be made as a result of knowledge gained from the assembly being in the field. They don't stand to gain from the product being crap. Most of the fixes are basically free BOM tweaks that don't really matter but provide incremental improvements/refinements if made and the cumulative nickels and dimes really do add up. The paper pushers on both sides that will do many rounds in order to make that happen are the only people benefitting from the make-work here as does anyone who skims their existence off of the paper pushers.
  - shadowpho 1y ago
    >Most of the fixes are basically free BOM tweaks that don't really matter From my experience there are very few BOM tweaks that don’t need a whole lot of validation, there’s no free lunch here
    - potato3732842 1y ago
      I'm talking about changes on the order of hot vs cold weather optimized rubber dust boots. Either works. One lasts longer. The "wrong" one was chosen originally because the default assumption at the time was Fulda and not Fallujah.

ashanoko 1y ago

[dead]

m463 1y ago

Can't we just buy safe planes? In the timescales of some of our military planes, cars have gone from metal dashboards to collision avoidance in cars with cocoons of safety with 10 airbags. I think moving faster might also move faster with safety equipment.

cm2012 1y ago

The F35 is the most in demand military plane in the world for the price. They spent 20 years iterating on it and its now the best plane for the cost with its capabilities.

busterarm 1y ago
And a truck full of low cost drones can swarm your airfield and take all your F35s out while they're still on the ground. The future isn't in pilot-in-seat aircraft at all.
- bootsmann 1y ago
  “Drones will make xyz technology obsolete” is probably the most naive armchair conclusion you can draw from the Ukraine war. Food for thought: Russias most impactful innovation of this war so far has been building more precise glide bombs, which notably are dropped by fighter planes (and the reason why Ukraine went after those planes with their drones).
  - busterarm 1y ago
    I'm not saying you won't need fighter planes but why do they have to be manned when they can be autonomous or semi-autonomous with remote pilots? Hence recent projects like X-BAT and YFQ-44A. Sure, YFQ-44A says the mission now is to support crewed fighters, but I don't expect that to last.

scuff3d 1y ago

Given there is apparently a large emphasis on the performance of these individual "portfolio" managers, and speed of delivery is made to be such a big deal, this is definitely going to get out own people killed.

w10-1 1y ago
> this is definitely going to get out own people killed. But the key feature making this a horrible decision is that the people responsible for getting our people killed will not be discoverable, and they will never face the consequences. Heck: they might not even know, because they're doing good by their standards. That's exactly how you make a broken but persistent and entrenched system: incentives without consequences for exported costs.
- scuff3d 1y ago
  There's also going to be a large lag. A lot of the protections are baked in and won't just disappear overnight, but as the system degrades it will get worse and worse. Decisions made today might not cause immediately visible damage for a decade, and by then the people responsible will be gone, even if you could find them. If people think Boeing has been a shit show over the last 10 years, they ain't seen nothing yet.

almosthere 1y ago

> brand new jet acts up and results in crashes The thing is, we waste so much money it's better to crash 15 jets but build 2000 of them than waste the same amount of money and build 5 jets. Even us SWEs out in the wild, we sometimes... disable tests (gasp heard everywhere) so that a refactor can work. I mean it's why we have the expression "sometimes you have to crack a few eggs".

efnx 1y ago
That’s putting a pretty low price on human life.
- almosthere 1y ago
  No, it's putting a high price on human life, but it depends on how you look at it. We can be a nation that gets bombed into nothingness, or the only country that can defend our own or another one. But we can't do that unless we're willing to actually build weapons of war. It's why WWII vets did what they did knowing not every bomb, aircraft or handheld weapon was perfect but still ran in to stop Hitler. I would say that put a high price on human life. These last few generations won't get it until it gets its WW.
  - watwut 1y ago
    Right now USA is cpintry that threatens others and is primary threat to stabilily. Its rhetoric is not building up to defense.
    - almosthere 1y ago
      I don't know to me it sounds like Isreal and Russia if you ask, well anyone. NK wants a lot of people dead too.
      - watwut 1y ago
        Although Israel is committing genocide, it is not a threat to worldwide stability. NK is not threat to world wide stability either, as evil they are, they are no where near to that. USA half switched alliance to Russia, so yeah. Current American leadership admires how Russia does things and wants to be more like them. There is a reason why USA is currently seen as the biggest threat to stability - because USA is intentionally trying to make the world unstable.

deleted 1y ago

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yard2010 1y ago

Today's societal war is a philosophical one - do you think everything sucks and it's a matter of lesser evil, or do you think everything sucks and we "just" need to find the perfect solution.

cyanydeez 1y ago

You are missing the criminals for tge policy discussion. Idiocracy vs kleptocracy.

LightBug1 1y ago
Stir in a little kakistocracy there to get it just right ...

helloooooooo 1y ago

The goal of these rules is to reduce corruption and theft. A lot of these rules go out the window when there is a need for speed. The goals have obviously changed: the US Gov believes the world is on a path to war again, and is reforming on that assumption.

mindslight 1y ago
... or alternatively the "US Gov" believes that more corruption and theft is desirable.

stogot 1y ago

the F35 isn’t a “move fast” counterpoint. That’s one of the slowest airframes I can think of

dfxm12 1y ago

Yes, we have swung too much towards the bureaucrats Is this truly the case or are the criminals and other people who misuse money dragging people towards this position?

stocksinsmocks 1y ago
Were you under the impression that federal procurement was all above board before? I’ve got some bad news. Your options are corrupt procurement or corrupt procurement with a 15% administrative surcharge of make-work patronage jobs for someone’s mistress or friends. I think that we’re in the “let’s pay our centurions in salt because the treasury is empty” stage of administrative innovations to allow the dead empire to linger. Personally, my hope is the next thousand year dark age we are stepping into comes with a knightly aesthetic.
- dfxm12 1y ago
  Were you under the impression that federal procurement was all above board before? No, the only impression I had was from the earlier post, which is light on details, which is why I was asking for clarification. Your options are corrupt procurement or corrupt procurement with a 15% administrative surcharge of make-work patronage jobs for someone’s mistress or friends. This is an obvious false dichotomy.

fpoling 1y ago

There is an observation that any organization or a process becomes totally bureaucratized over span of several decades. The only solution to this is to make things explicitly time-bound like 20-30 years and dismantle the whole thing at the end replacing it with something new and new people at management positions.

jvanderbot 1y ago
I somewhat agree with this. It can be true that all the overwatch was a good idea. And it can be true that the process becomes the point, which is bad. It's hard to tell the difference, but I've personally been bogged down by review processes for months, just to get 2FTE from the government itself while working on the government's approved and funded projects while sitting at the government's desk. It's really silly how bad these things are sometimes. It'll take years to do the thing that even the "fast" programs want you to do. And the solution to date has been to "start another program". That program promises to move fast, and often does, but it will eventually metastasize with process and review. I just don't think we can add any more "same but faster" programs. It is time to cut back a lot of process, and thereby bring these programs back to parity so we can then cut down the number of programs.