Comment by aurizon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aurizon | Hacker News Reader

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China and Russia have a number of advantages. The biggest one is the top down ossification in the US military where aged milpols (military politicians) with old ideas and low mental capacity are in charge of all R&D as well as purchasing. The USA has a lot of Aircraft Carriers, none of which could withstand 50 time-on-target (hit at the same time) ship killers at 5000 MPH. China could easily deal with them all. Russia less so, due to lack of missiles due to budgetary limits. The same thing rules in the air, where unmanned drone fighters that cost less than .1% of a new fighter each, with enough AI internal to wiggle through. The USA planes will be swamped. Drones will also take out tanks and risk no pilots. Drones are dirt cheap compared to F35s.

Military production and procurement is also 10 times as costly per unitof weaponry compared to China or Russia.

This is due to the want-of-a-nail POV. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Want_of_a_Nail

So much attention is placed at the nail level that costs can climb to 100 times as much as what a civilian pays for the same thing. Modern electronic parts are made robotically and have very very good reliability - yet the MIL-SPEC procurement process often demands xrays for each part = $$$. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Military_Standar...

Have you ever wondered why Russia was able to maintain it's place in line as to space matters, to get the first satellite etc? People in the USA wanted to make and launch satellites well before Russia, and even conceived the geostationary communications nets. The same old farts sat on it. Those same old farts pushed Amazon off-the-puck for the AWS contract. We have all seen the mess Microsoft has made of the cloud services they launched, now the US military will suffer through that same waste of time, money and performance due to that same old boy network. So get used to it. China is going on top and will stay on top, Russia will carry on being robbed by it's own milpols, but will still hit waaay above it's weight due to the US Milpols..

>The USA has a lot of Aircraft Carriers, none of which could withstand 50 time-on-target (hit at the same time) ship killers at 5000 MPH. China could easily deal with them all.

Do you have any source on China's missile defense?

Just youtube? But they have lower cost and numbers and even if their missiles are inferior they will be in a position to swamp US defences of non nuclear missles by numbers alone. Keep firing until the carriers are out of planes and out of ammo the planes only have 4 to 8 missiles each. Once it goes nuclear then the US forces will deploy the boomers etc and we will all hide and hope we emerge one day?

You might be interested in watching the 70th National Day anniversary to conclude what others in the military might have concluded; China has some military superiority. These are just the highlights [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lmp51YN-7wc

I saw a lot of people marching in uniform together and flying fighter planes and wearing suits and making speeches. What did I miss? Not quite sure where the superiority in that video is.

It was the highlights, most of the full video shows China flexing its military powers. Whatever man, we could all live in our bubbles and not admit that other countries have a more disciplined military and one that might produce and showcase offensive weapons that are a modern threat.

No idea whether you're right about eg aircraft carriers and drones but on what I think is your core point...

> The biggest one is the top down ossification in the US military where aged milpols (military politicians) with old ideas and low mental capacity are in charge of all R&D as well as purchasing.

...I've been enjoying a little window into this sort of debate by reading https://acquisitiontalk.com/

If we're ever at the point of a carrier group getting missile spammed isn't there a risk that the next step in escalation is nuclear?

Not sure why are you correlating unrelated reasoning with MS deal with US Military.

You seem to suggest that MS is poor at Cloud game, which is not exactly true. They are cost effective compared to AWS and catching up.

Maybe military wanted to save money. May be this is all about a better deal after all.

Trump wanted to personally screw over Amazon in this. He even tweeted about it. I’m not sure what’s left there to speculate but okay.

The cost effective argument doesn’t mean much - there’s something here that makes AWS competitive, including cost, or everyone would just use their competitors.

Disclaimer: I have about equal investments (greater than 1MM) in both companies, so I’m personally not biased for one vs the other.

I’ve been reading Jeff’s letters to the shareholders since the early 2000s. He basically says - we don’t care about optimizing for today. We’re in it for the marathon. Agree with him or not, but I doubt Amazon tried to give expensive pricing to the US government. I would wager they might even offer services at a loss - the profit would come from the long term lock in, not to mention all the government contractors who’d have to follow and use AWS.

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