How a $2.7B air-defense system became a 'zombie' program | Hacker News Reader

How a $2.7B air-defense system became a 'zombie' program

graphics.latimes.com

> Raytheon mobilized its congressional lobbyists. Within the Pentagon, Marine Corps Gen. James E. “Hoss” Cartwright, then vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, came to JLENS’ defense, arguing that it held promise for enhancing the nation’s air defenses.

> At Cartwright’s urging, money was found in 2011 for a trial run of the technology — officially, an “operational exercise” — in the skies above Washington, D.C.

> Cartwright retired the same year — and joined Raytheon’s board of directors five months later. As of the end of 2014, Raytheon had paid him more than $828,000 in cash and stock for serving as a director, Securities and Exchange Commission records show.

How is this level of blatant corruption/conflict of interest tolerated in the USA?

You obviously don't live here. That's a drop in the ocean of corruption and scandals. That's peanuts!!

I think it's fair to say that America has become a corporation.

More a department.

yea, we call it the American Dream. maybe we'll wake up one day.

Sure, but the thing is... when cleaning house you've got to start somewhere.

Look at the SEC people that move straight to Wall Street or the Eric Holder.

Lanny Breuer: as AAG he gave a few slaps on the wrist for LIBOR fraud and laundering terrorist money, now he's got a $4 million/year salary advising those same types of people.

Check out FCC <-> Comcast

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/f-c-c-commi...

> Four months after the Federal Communications Commission approved a hotly contested merger of Comcast and NBC Universal, one of the commissioners who voted for the deal said on Wednesday that she would soon join Comcast’s Washington lobbying office.

> provides “persistent wide area surveillance” for “30 days at a time.”

> massive, milk-white blimps can be grounded by bad weather

I mean... it seems like there is literally no way this could ever perform its stated mission. But then...

> vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff... arguing that it held promise for enhancing the nation’s air defenses.

This seems like basically criminal negligence at best and outright stealing money from the state at worst. It hurts my head to think about how that is allowed to happen. Also... whose idea was this?

> JLENS is short for Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System

Now I feel like they're actually messing with me.

As someone who works with government contractors, those kinds of absolutely insane nested acronyms are par for the course.

And I thought open source software was bad... ;)

When I worked for a defense contractor, we had an annual competition to see who came up with the best/worst acronym.

I know of components in systems I support that have acronyms several layers deep.

Nobody cares?

A big part of specifically why it is tolerated in many ways for the military is that politically nobody wants to even think about military spending cuts for fear of being labeled "anti-veteran" and "anti-America." So many voting US citizens are veterans (70+ years old) and almost as many come from an era when they were treated pretty ok following WW2 that they'd think quite poorly of military defunding given how much it's given to them. And somehow, today's military is drowning in debt servicing pensions and benefits for service members while all these scandals of poor treatment by the VA for cost cutting reasons show up.

The acceptance of a pro-military policy by so much of the country is a very important one to consider as a major differentiator for the US compared to most developed countries and why others tolerate the US politically and economically. Some view the US as what other countries allow to have a weight politically so they don't have to spend money on a military and instead on social programs for their citizens.

I'm not sure this is unique to the US - things are, if anything, even worse with defence procurement in the UK.

> How is this level of blatant corruption/conflict of interest tolerated in the USA?

With few exceptions, the people in top administrative and elected positions are not in it for the public service. Government jobs for them are a springboard into lucrative lobbying and contracting gigs.

Yes, it's a huge loophole: instead of paying the officials directly for their help, which would clearly be illegal, the companies let it be known that if the officials help them out, they will be compensated in the future. I presume this is done in face-to-face conversations with no witnesses so there's no evidentiary trail.

Seems like a law that would really shut down the revolving door would be difficult to craft so there would really be no ways around it... and even more difficult to get passed.

I quit my job at Raytheon right after I was assigned to the JLENS program . Every day there were meetings with f-bombs being exchanged between managers and employees. The environment and culture became extremely toxic. Safe to say I didn't want to have anything to do with the defense industry after that.

Nathaniel Boronstein has interesting take on this. You might describe him as an old-school left-winger, as anti-war as they get (ok, that's my description, not sure if he'd agree!), but somehow he ended up consulting for NATO, right smack in the middle of defense-contracting madness.

He found the experience rather surprising in many ways, and you might say his viewpoint was a bit more nuanced afterwards....

http://guppylake.com/~nsb/WarSpy/SpyInHouseOfWar.pdf

That was a great read, thank you. His observation about the corrupting influence of military money on researchers was interesting - it's obvious in hindsight that the AI researchers were only interested in taking positions that aligned with the "someday" goal of getting AI into combat, if only to secure funding. That his harshest criticism is reserved for fellow academics and the cadre of contractors wasn't what I expected to take away.

His description of the contractors was really scary.

Anecdotally, you are now the fifth former Raytheon engineer I either know personally or have seen online say they left the company due to out of control meetings and managers.

Of course, not all of the defense industry is like that, but I certainly understand why that experience would be enough to turn you off. I have similar reasons for staying away from rockets.

$2.7B sounds like a rounding error somewhere in the Joint Strike Fighter budget

$2.7B here, $2.7B there, pretty soon you are talking real money /s

I'd be curious if the number of these projects in total exceeded the cost of the big ticket items like the JSF.

I wonder if a better technical system would be to mount some sensors on top of a mast. Use a gimballing camera to detect objects moving in a straight line through the air. Use microphones to detect engine noise and trilaterate the position. If the system detects something anomalous send a photo to a human to verify.

If you placed a tower every half a mile along the eastern seaboard you would need ~2500 towers. A $2.7 billion budget would allow $1 million per tower.

Using a fat stationary blimp target to defend against air attack is pretty stupid. Even in WWI blimps were not exactly successful (though of course they were filled with hydrogen). I'd rather have a fleet of smaller drones with smaller radars flying around making a more redundant and flexible system. But then again I am not a defense company raking in billions.

>Even if all those problems could be overcome, it would be prohibitively expensive to deploy enough of the airships to protect the United States along its borders and coasts.

Is this even a proposal? I thought they were mostly worried about protecting their own butts in Washington.

So, when engineering crazy things, many valuable lessons are learned that could help us all. Do we get any of that knowledge for this product WE paid for?

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