Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

I know it sounds kind of strange, but maybe the solution to this is similar to how you competitively attack a new market with a new company.

The DOD needs to look at a startup/agile mentality and centralize important technical decision making within one room full of competent engineers/architects/developers, rather than farming it out to 50 disparate contractors.

Russia and China will be able to continue to threaten us using only a fraction of our defense budget because of this organizational problem. I feel like our enemies have a much more centralized scope of R&D when it comes to military technology. The only reason the US is competitive is because we can 10x the budget and move mountains every day.

Imagine if we had a monorepo for the entire United States military. All warfighting software systems centralized into 1 location with a unified set of models and logic which can enforce policy across the entire force. A developer should be able to unit test the F35 avionics software at the same time they are working on the air-to-air weapons system. After all, these would likely share many important aspects being that they live in the same damn aircraft.

I know it's cherrypicking but:

>The DOD needs to look at a startup/agile mentality

Please god NO! That's a really a bad idea not just for the DOD but for most government services. 90+% of startups fail. This is fine because most startups are not very essential. Government is often inefficient, but it rarely outright fails. Can you imagine how a government run as a startup would be? Garbage collection went bankrupt the other day, won't be another five months until another one is spun up. Oh yeah we haven't implemented the fire department yet, your house might be on fire now but we have it on the roadmap for Q4 2021 so please hold on until then. Oh your wife is in the hospital? We were running an A/B test on that so she's in the part without blood transfusions. Hope everything goes well! When you are taking a VC bet on to get a startup off the ground, many things are acceptable that are not really feasible if people depend on your continued existence for at least the coming decades.

Don't be overly impressed by the Russians and/or Chinese either btw. They suffer from the exact same problems, but "the grass is greener on the other side" is true in defence matters as much as in the rest of life.

That's what DARPA is supposed to be for.

Solution to ... what? I work in this area - I don’t think a “monorepo” is going to solve the numerous difficult problems the US has with modern multi-domain ISR. How do you represent and compare different capabilities from different domains? How do you pick which assets to buy? How do you pick which theatre to deliver them to? How do you plan tactical deployment of your assets? How do you dynamically retask assets in the event of disruption by the enemy? How do you fuse the numerous different data formats to interpret the multi-modal data you receive from your ISR assets? How do you retrain users to use the new capabilities? How do you maintain the assets for a long period of time without cost overruns? How do you get the systems to interface with legacy systems? How do you deal with all the intra-military political issues? These are just a few issues faced by the DoD in the ISR space.

I think there’s a bit of Chesterton’s fence in general around the DoD - the military (and the government in general) has many inefficient, slow, and expensive practices, but while it sounds like a good idea on the surface to tear it up and start from scratch, people underestimate the difficulty and danger of hastily changing or defunding things without understanding why they were put in place.

Sarcasm warning:

The answer to all your questions is obviously:

Fork it

or

Submit a pull request

or

Rewrite it in Rust

——

More seriously, when all we had was magic / religion everything was magic / religious; when all we had was stream machines, all our analogies were based on that...

And thusly, when all your dreams are centred around the Big-exit Software Start-up VC Backed lottery, that’ll be the he framework within which you extrude all your knowledge.

But, to be fair, that doesn’t mean there is anything to learn from that model of reality. Government certainly may benefit from being more swift to react and faster to iterate.

Though I fear Conway’s Law will be the biggest hurdle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

> The DOD needs to look at a startup/agile mentality

If all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

It should be obvious by now that EaaSu (Everything as a Start-up) is a deeply flawed idea.

That seems like a terrible idea... primarily because having a few different heterogenous systems is advantageous. Bugs or vulnerabilities won't propagate as easily and it's much better to compartmentalize from a security perspective.

You have to find a balance... monorepo for defense is dangerous.

This sounds like how DARPA contracts work. Yea, we're in 10 different companies, but we're all collaborating and sharing deliverables.

I agree that the bidding system on normal defense contracts could benefit greatly, but usually you just end up as a sub.

Threaten, sure, but they're unable to destroy us without also assuring their own destruction.

And nations will always be able to harass us cheaply. That's just the reality of the situation and likely always will be, and will be responsible for the US being more selective about the conflicts in which it asserts itself: the Truman Doctrine, for all of its nobility, exposes the weakness of a global posture when everyone isn't panicked about global thermonuclear war: we just have to care less about things that don't impact us as much, or we'd be at war everywhere. Taking all bait would collapse the republic.

The main issue impairing US military development is entrenched corruption. Any reorganization which fails to explicitly address that is as doomed as a cancer treatment based on diet and exercise.

Like this you mean? https://steveblank.com/2016/01/26/hacking-for-defense-stanfo...

"Russia and China will be able to continue to threaten us"

Really? Russia and China threaten you? How?

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