4 ms·

Part of the reason why defense companies are risk-averse and bureaucratic is because things just CANNOT fail. It's not like, oh yea, my program crashed, I'm jus

Part of the reason why defense companies are risk-averse and bureaucratic is because things just CANNOT fail. It's not like, oh yea, my program crashed, I'm just gonna fix this bug and re-compile. No, if your jet crashes on its first test flight, the pilot is going to die. If one thing is wrong with a space satellite, yea no, you cannot pull it back down to Earth to fix it up.

msandford 12y ago
If the thing costs $100mm apiece agreed that it's best if it does not fail. If it costs $1mm apiece I am less convinced. How much money is spent engineering to ensure that There Can Be No Failures (tm) of the first flight versus me accidentally destroying the first dozen $1mm drones? Which represents a false economy? Remember that a drone doesn't have a pilot on-board so if it goes down in flames we're only out the money, not human life. I appreciate your passion for the subject man, but I feel like you're purposefully taking stuff out of context and generally ignoring a lot of what I write. I've said nothing about space. And I've mentioned several times that I'm not talking about making things that would pass US military muster! The way the US military conducts business is not the ONLY way to conduct business. It's been fairly successful so far but it does not immediately follow that it's the only way. We lost in Vietnam because it was a war of attrition that our military was completely unprepared to adapt to. We said that we won but in the end it was us that left, not the enemy.
- hga 12y ago
  No, after a critical change in political leadership (LBJ -> Nixon, and for that matter the general in charge, Westmoreland -> Abrams), we won, and the first attempt by the NVA to invade the South was utterly crushed, with only 40,000 of the 150,000 invaders managing to get back north, losing their equipment, which included more tanks than used in any single WWII battle. That was an achievement of the ARVN with air support from the US (the South had and used their own, BTW). Of course the second invasion succeeded, because the US Congress by then was on the other side and had defunded the South, as I recall ammo was so low an infantryman had 1 grenade and less than 100 rounds. Side note: the cost of outfitting the North with 3 complete armored/mechanized armies (first used up piecemeal, second in that first invasion failure) is now credited with helping to bankrupt the USSR.

msandford 12y ago

If the thing costs $100mm apiece agreed that it's best if it does not fail. If it costs $1mm apiece I am less convinced. How much money is spent engineering to ensure that There Can Be No Failures (tm) of the first flight versus me accidentally destroying the first dozen $1mm drones? Which represents a false economy? Remember that a drone doesn't have a pilot on-board so if it goes down in flames we're only out the money, not human life. I appreciate your passion for the subject man, but I feel like you're purposefully taking stuff out of context and generally ignoring a lot of what I write. I've said nothing about space. And I've mentioned several times that I'm not talking about making things that would pass US military muster! The way the US military conducts business is not the ONLY way to conduct business. It's been fairly successful so far but it does not immediately follow that it's the only way. We lost in Vietnam because it was a war of attrition that our military was completely unprepared to adapt to. We said that we won but in the end it was us that left, not the enemy.

hga 12y ago
No, after a critical change in political leadership (LBJ -> Nixon, and for that matter the general in charge, Westmoreland -> Abrams), we won, and the first attempt by the NVA to invade the South was utterly crushed, with only 40,000 of the 150,000 invaders managing to get back north, losing their equipment, which included more tanks than used in any single WWII battle. That was an achievement of the ARVN with air support from the US (the South had and used their own, BTW). Of course the second invasion succeeded, because the US Congress by then was on the other side and had defunded the South, as I recall ammo was so low an infantryman had 1 grenade and less than 100 rounds. Side note: the cost of outfitting the North with 3 complete armored/mechanized armies (first used up piecemeal, second in that first invasion failure) is now credited with helping to bankrupt the USSR.