5 ms·

Most of time, this delay is in peacetime, it makes sense to do a ton of testing, wait until testing results then go to full production. Your primary concern is

Most of time, this delay is in peacetime, it makes sense to do a ton of testing, wait until testing results then go to full production. Your primary concern is not spending a ton of money and not getting a bunch of people killed. It's basically waterfall in fighter development. Wartime is more agile, you quickly close the loop but downside is sometimes does not work and when it does not work, there might be a people cost. US has done it with fighters before, F-4U Corsair was disaster initially in carrier landings and killed some pilots in training. However, this was considered acceptable cost to get what was clearly very capable fighter out there.

nateglims 1y ago
I think this is the crux of it. The article discusses Ukraine but they weren't making millions of drones, the private capital wasn't there and the bureaucracy that coordinates it wasn't primed until the war.
- herewulf 1y ago
  Necessity is the mother of invention.
potato3732842 1y ago
So then what value does the bureaucratic process add if it's the first thing that gets shitcanned when good results in good time matter? At the end of the day it's all people cost. Just because it's fractional lives wasted in the form of man hours worked to pay the taxes to pay for unnecessary paper pushing labor instead of whole lives doesn't actually make the waste less (I suspect it's actually more in a lot of cases).
- forgetfreeman 1y ago
  You just, without a hint of irony, compared killing service personnel with civil service office work. Giving someone a job isn't what wasted tax money looks like.
  - pfannkuchen 1y ago
    I don’t know what your first sentence means. Do you say “killing” to mean “eliminating the job of”? I don’t see anywhere that mentioned “killing”. If your second sentence is correct, then let’s allocate taxes to digging holes and filling them in? Ad absurdum but I think it applies? Like it seems reasonable to have an opinion on whether a function should continue to be funded by tax dollars. In a properly operating economy this would open up skilled labor to work somewhere more useful. Unless they weren’t actually skilled, in which case yes you have a problem hmm…
    - exe34 1y ago
      The argument was literally about pilots dying because of war-time cutting of costs to ensure fast deployment of new tech. Then somebody misread the room and suggested office work was just as much of a waste of life as dying in a horrible accident due to canning of safety testing.
      - pfannkuchen 1y ago
        You are right, I misread, my apologies. Wasted productivity being equated with pilots dying is too out there even for me.
    - krisoft 1y ago
      > Do you say “killing” to mean “eliminating the job of”? No. They mean killing as in ordering a pilot to fly an airplane with less cautious testing resulting in a crash and the death of the crew. > I don’t see anywhere that mentioned “killing”. It is there. This is what stackskipton said “Your primary concern is not spending a ton of money and not getting a bunch of people killed.” They even use the example of the F-4U Corsairs mentioning how during the program pilots died. This is the comment potato3732842 replied to and this is the context their message should be interpreted in. They compared “fractional lives wasted” which they define as “man hours worked to pay the taxes to pay for unnecessary paper pushing labor” with “whole lives”. They don’t define what they mean by whole lives lost, but since they wrote it as a response to stackskipton‘s comment from context i think they mean pilot deaths. To me it seems they are arguing that if we accept more mangled pilot bodies pulled out of burning wreckages then we can do the program cheaper. And to understand where they stand on the question they call the work needed to prevent those pilot deaths “unnecessary paper pushing”. Is your reading of the comment different?
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > what value does the bureaucratic process add if it's the first thing that gets shitcanned when good results in good time matter? This is like asking what good do reserves do if you spend them down in a crisis. The bureaucracy aims to keep waste and corruption to a minimum during peacetime. In war, the aims change--you're now not only ramping up production, but the penalties for fucking with a war are typically more drastic than lining one's pockets during peacetime.
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    Think about the local implications of what you just said. If we toss the process when effective expenditure of resources toward results matter and consequences are the most serious then the process must be less efficient at producing good results for the expenditure than the corruption (or whatever else the process is replacing). So then why are we running it at all? You can absolutely make an argument about accepting reduced efficiency to dilute concentrated harms (e.g. keep a test pilot from dying), but none of the peddlers of process dare even make that argument so I suspect the math is questionable without hand waving or subjective valuation (e.g. face saved avoiding errors).
    - scott_w 1y ago
      War and peacetime are two different things. During wartime you need lots of materiel quickly, so value for money estimates, anti corruption practices all get reduced in the name of production numbers at all costs. Verification is easier because you go directly from the assembly line to the front line. If it doesn’t work, you find out and make changes quickly. You know what you need because you’re in the process of using it. In peacetime, everything is different. You don’t know who your next opponent is going to be, so you need to keep options open. You don’t know if you’ll have a war before the equipment you just bought rots away. You don’t want wartime production levels and stifling your wider economy. You also don’t want a Russia situation where you ignore value for money estimates and audits only to find the money you spent on missiles went in the back pocket of a random colonel.
      - 1y ago
- mapt 1y ago
  If most of the losses in your military are training disasters based on the current strategic outlook of maintaining highly effective deterrence, then you go for safety. If most of the losses in your military are (hypothetically) getting slaughtered by a superior enemy who has failed to be deterred, then you go for experimentation, iteration, try quickly and fail quickly. Life is just cheaper in wartime.
CGMthrowaway 1y ago
Are we not in peacetime? What war has the US declared?
- pdabbadabba 1y ago
  We're in peacetime, but the current leadership perceives us to be in a pitched great-power struggle, and perhaps near-term shooting war, with China. Similarly, while we are not literally at war with Russia, we are in a very acute global conflict with them of another type that might be thought to warrant a different pace of military innovation. Perhaps these factors are what GP had in mind.

nateglims 1y ago

I think this is the crux of it. The article discusses Ukraine but they weren't making millions of drones, the private capital wasn't there and the bureaucracy that coordinates it wasn't primed until the war.

herewulf 1y ago
Necessity is the mother of invention.

potato3732842 1y ago

So then what value does the bureaucratic process add if it's the first thing that gets shitcanned when good results in good time matter? At the end of the day it's all people cost. Just because it's fractional lives wasted in the form of man hours worked to pay the taxes to pay for unnecessary paper pushing labor instead of whole lives doesn't actually make the waste less (I suspect it's actually more in a lot of cases).

forgetfreeman 1y ago
You just, without a hint of irony, compared killing service personnel with civil service office work. Giving someone a job isn't what wasted tax money looks like.
- pfannkuchen 1y ago
  I don’t know what your first sentence means. Do you say “killing” to mean “eliminating the job of”? I don’t see anywhere that mentioned “killing”. If your second sentence is correct, then let’s allocate taxes to digging holes and filling them in? Ad absurdum but I think it applies? Like it seems reasonable to have an opinion on whether a function should continue to be funded by tax dollars. In a properly operating economy this would open up skilled labor to work somewhere more useful. Unless they weren’t actually skilled, in which case yes you have a problem hmm…
  - exe34 1y ago
    The argument was literally about pilots dying because of war-time cutting of costs to ensure fast deployment of new tech. Then somebody misread the room and suggested office work was just as much of a waste of life as dying in a horrible accident due to canning of safety testing.
    - pfannkuchen 1y ago
      You are right, I misread, my apologies. Wasted productivity being equated with pilots dying is too out there even for me.
  - krisoft 1y ago
    > Do you say “killing” to mean “eliminating the job of”? No. They mean killing as in ordering a pilot to fly an airplane with less cautious testing resulting in a crash and the death of the crew. > I don’t see anywhere that mentioned “killing”. It is there. This is what stackskipton said “Your primary concern is not spending a ton of money and not getting a bunch of people killed.” They even use the example of the F-4U Corsairs mentioning how during the program pilots died. This is the comment potato3732842 replied to and this is the context their message should be interpreted in. They compared “fractional lives wasted” which they define as “man hours worked to pay the taxes to pay for unnecessary paper pushing labor” with “whole lives”. They don’t define what they mean by whole lives lost, but since they wrote it as a response to stackskipton‘s comment from context i think they mean pilot deaths. To me it seems they are arguing that if we accept more mangled pilot bodies pulled out of burning wreckages then we can do the program cheaper. And to understand where they stand on the question they call the work needed to prevent those pilot deaths “unnecessary paper pushing”. Is your reading of the comment different?
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> what value does the bureaucratic process add if it's the first thing that gets shitcanned when good results in good time matter? This is like asking what good do reserves do if you spend them down in a crisis. The bureaucracy aims to keep waste and corruption to a minimum during peacetime. In war, the aims change--you're now not only ramping up production, but the penalties for fucking with a war are typically more drastic than lining one's pockets during peacetime.
- potato3732842 1y ago
  Think about the local implications of what you just said. If we toss the process when effective expenditure of resources toward results matter and consequences are the most serious then the process must be less efficient at producing good results for the expenditure than the corruption (or whatever else the process is replacing). So then why are we running it at all? You can absolutely make an argument about accepting reduced efficiency to dilute concentrated harms (e.g. keep a test pilot from dying), but none of the peddlers of process dare even make that argument so I suspect the math is questionable without hand waving or subjective valuation (e.g. face saved avoiding errors).
  - scott_w 1y ago
    War and peacetime are two different things. During wartime you need lots of materiel quickly, so value for money estimates, anti corruption practices all get reduced in the name of production numbers at all costs. Verification is easier because you go directly from the assembly line to the front line. If it doesn’t work, you find out and make changes quickly. You know what you need because you’re in the process of using it. In peacetime, everything is different. You don’t know who your next opponent is going to be, so you need to keep options open. You don’t know if you’ll have a war before the equipment you just bought rots away. You don’t want wartime production levels and stifling your wider economy. You also don’t want a Russia situation where you ignore value for money estimates and audits only to find the money you spent on missiles went in the back pocket of a random colonel.
    - 1y ago
mapt 1y ago
If most of the losses in your military are training disasters based on the current strategic outlook of maintaining highly effective deterrence, then you go for safety. If most of the losses in your military are (hypothetically) getting slaughtered by a superior enemy who has failed to be deterred, then you go for experimentation, iteration, try quickly and fail quickly. Life is just cheaper in wartime.

CGMthrowaway 1y ago

Are we not in peacetime? What war has the US declared?

pdabbadabba 1y ago
We're in peacetime, but the current leadership perceives us to be in a pitched great-power struggle, and perhaps near-term shooting war, with China. Similarly, while we are not literally at war with Russia, we are in a very acute global conflict with them of another type that might be thought to warrant a different pace of military innovation. Perhaps these factors are what GP had in mind.