Comment by crdb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crdb | Hacker News Reader

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> And the point of the ship is .. what? If you are a US taxpayer you should weep.

Same as any prototype or sufficiently advanced aircraft like the F-117, pave the way for future generations like the Beast of Kandahar, demonstrate or invalidate a series of bold ideas.

In particular, the number of innovations crammed in the Zumwalt makes it relatively cost-effective from a "things we had to try" point of view: new low RCS hull, new composite bridge, new launch system (VLS), new centralised control systems (TSCE). All of this stuff can now be iterated upon and integrated in newer ships. That the new gun system has "failed" in practice is itself a lesson probably worth the dollars spent on it.

Not to mention: look up the name of its first captain [1].

There's few institutions that can do R&D with a multi-decade horizon and the armed forces are one of them. Is there waste in the process, sure, the ghost of Admiral Rickover must be turning in his grave, but it is not totally wasted, unlike a certain aircraft that is somehow manufactured in a full 45 states (have the remaining ones managed to get a piece yet, I haven't followed).

[1] http://www.public.navy.mil/surfor/ddg1000/Pages/bio1.aspx - shame the USS Enterprise was inactivated in 2012.

>Same as any prototype or sufficiently advanced aircraft like the F-117, pave the way for future generations ...

The F-117 had an incredibly useful operational life, though. I can't imagine these three destroyers having anywhere near the relative effectiveness that the F-117 program brought to the table for its time.

Obviously, the comparison is not perfect. For starters, Have Blue was done by Kelly Johnson's Lockheed (although technically under Ben Rich, himself no slouch); Rickover's nuclear navy was similarly led and with similar low budgets, met deadlines and exceeded expectations. So ROI for projects from that era will be much higher (and let's not mention the actual Kelly Johnson projects like the A-12...).

That being said I'm not sure the F-117 was that useful in actual combat, certainly it was used because it was there but did it change anything? It flew a large number of sorties in the first Gulf War but some say these could have been flown cheaper and just as well with conventional aircraft [1], and bombed a few targets in Yugoslavia (so far away from the kind of conflict it was designed for that TV crews were filming it taking off, live) until Zoltan Dani worked out how to shoot one down using equipment worth a fraction as much thus pointing out its edge was gone in less than two decades after launch.

As far as I understand it, Have Blue's main value was to pave the way for stealth research, its operational value being what happened to it in combat rather than the targets it took out.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_F-117_Nighthawk#Opera... "On the first night they failed to hit 40% of the air-defense targets they were assigned, including the Air Defense Operations Center in Baghdad, and 8 such targets remained functional out of 10 that could be assessed. [...] many other aircraft hit targets in the downtown area, with minimal casualties when they attacked at night like the F-117"

The Zumwalt was designed for railguns. The third ship of the class will have at least one railgun. That fires dumb projectiles at some insane velocity. Maybe the earlier ships will get an upgrade.

and I bet they don't cost $800,000 each

Here's the Navy's railgun.[1] Each projectile costs $25,000. Not clear why it costs that much.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXF0n6aojSc

Interesting point. We are quick to judge such apparent failures and waste on the part of the government, but what percentage of Silicon Valley startups succeed? What percentage of scientific experiments advance our knowledge?

I don't think the difference is about the source of the money. It's about whether the returns are, to use terms from machine learning, in exploration versus exploitation.

If the point of these expensive weapons systems is to inefficiently defeat imaginary enemies, then clearly they are a waste of money and the real motive is corporate welfare.

But if the point is 'we don't know what the world will be like in 2050, and the only way to find out and start preparing for it is to build a lot of hardware that doesn't end up getting directly used' then that could be a valid justification. I'm not making any claims about whether that actually is the justification. I'm just saying that if it is, it's the one that would work.

The difference is that VCs give their money to the start-up voluntarily.

Tax payers are forced.

By the people they chose to make those decisions.

A big part of the US political discourse for the last 5 or so years has been that the voters no longer have any say. The machinery of so-called "Big Defence" trundles on forever, immune from the politicians who might want to cut spending due to the attack ads they would surely face about "jeopardizing national security".

The national security argument only flies if the people buy it. That's the root cause; fix the people.

I deliberately and provocatively overly simplify the issue here, but I claim that every problem we face can be solved by better education that simply requires people to ask "Is that really the way you say it is?" in every single step of every single fact they ever face.

>The national security argument only flies if the people buy it. That's the root cause; fix the people.

You can't. People that are receptive to the politics of fear are that way because of brain structure; they simply are unable to respond to reasoned arguments.

They choose between two options.

To make the point: Would you rather suffer from pest or cholera for the next 4 years?

Following your argument you cannot complain because you chose it.

That's not how it works. They are very well capable of choosing something else and we all know it. They may lack the knowledge to do it - but that is fixable, politicians are not.

Well, there is no (credible) third. So maybe they would if they could and maybe not.

It sounds like we both agree on the problem and disagree on the solution.

If I understand correctly, you want to fix the people by educating them / making them think more!?

I think the problem is also solvable by fixing the system via direct feedback. This could be implemented via continuous elections (instead of once every 4ys) , directed tax payments (dedicated to specific areas/projects/representatives), direct elections (no intermediary), ...

Of course, today's politicians would never allow any of this to happen, so the problem is still somehow the politician.

There's no point in making people just to think more. They have to think very carefully and along a very specific line of though: they have to ask, "Is it really the way you say it is?", every single time something, anything, meaningful is at stake, for the rest of their lives.

People talk endlessly about their values. They talk about self-reliance, decency, honor. But we betray our values if we don't know what really is true. We work against our best interest and our dearest of things when we are mislead the moment we stop asking what really is. No matter what the values.

How about some self-reliance of thought for a change.

Make no mistake, it is a 30-year project to fix peoples. You need to educate a single generation before things start to get better. But then they will. Happens every time and in every country and in every culture. Skip that and no matter what you try, everything falls apart eventually if the people don't want to ask what really is true. Everything else is built on top of that. Nothing else is sufficient anymore, not in this age we now find ourselves in.

PS. I agree - I am greatly in favor of shortening any feedback loops in any system, societal, political, business, software development - it is what makes systems robust against changing environments.

> Well, there is no (credible) third.

How about not pissing around where we are clearly not wanted?

Spreading democracy is great and all, but it's pretty clear that the various places we've been trying to spread it aren't interested in the least. How about we let them stew in their own mess for a while and put our efforts into fixing issues at home for a while?

Maybe stop trying to be the world's policeman for a while. Let the UN sort it out and when they inevitably fail, then we can think about it. And if the UN doesn't, well, at least we haven't wasted the money in the meantime.

CAPTAIN James T. Kirk......just kidding James A. Kirk.

CVN-80 is going into service in 2025... just saying.

maybe, the Ford class is having a lot of teething pains.

Or James R. Kirk, depending on the episode: http://i.stack.imgur.com/KLPqJ.jpg

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