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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

yeah, a single M1 Abrams tank costs over $4 million, and we have 9000 of them.

DARPA R&D money always feels like money better spent than a lot of other military spending. We get future dividends, often civilian.

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Absolutely this. With the culling of most corporate R&D groups over the last 20-30 years, DARPA pie-in-the-sky research projects seem to be one of the last real sources for investigating anything that can't be immediately and quickly monetized.

How much real research, as opposed to early-stage product development, has ever happened at corporations? We can easily name a few specific examples (Bell Labs, Xerox PARC) presumably because they weren't the norm. (And there were doubtless some others at companies that weren't as aligned with what's thought of as today's tech industry such as DuPont.)

You might enjoy the book "The Entrepreneurial State" by Mariana Mazzucato makes a similar argument that a lot of innovation is actually driven by the state, because they can afford to invest a lot in research without an immediate payoff. The author mentions DARPA in particular as a great example of the US stimulating innovation that then later benefits companies. For example, while the iPhone is a great piece of innovation, it built on innovations made possible by state funded research.

There's also a very good book by Bill Janeway (of Wargburg Pincus notoriety) on the same subject called 'Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy: Reconfiguring the Three-Player Game between Markets, Speculators and the State'.

He argues the same point about the states roll in RnD (also explicitly calls out DARPA) and also their role in booms and busts.

There’s some, obviously, especially in companies in chemicals and materials. I think the push in the 80s-90s to remove slack from corporations to reward managers and shareholders killed a lot of basic research they were doing for posterity.

Have a look at MSR.

What about them? They make nice gear. They've done some nice innovation around some of the gear they make. That seems different from pumping multi-millions of dollars into research that may never have direct commercial value--unless you're talking about a different MSR.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research

Even before then, Wikipedia claims government was, at least in part, responsible for the soda can[1].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act_of_1950...

[1] as far as I've seen, soviet vending machines used a shared glass. They must've been very confident both (a) that the glasses wouldn't grow legs, and (b) in their public health initiatives.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F68bbzOOOdY&t=2644

Fusion researchers will read that and feel like chopped liver.

I dunno, when you consider the design intent of the Abrams (operating environment, crew protection, etc.) 4 million seems like a reasonable price tag to me.

Whether the US Army needs 9000 tanks is a separate discussion though.

US DoD had as a strategic goal the ability to fight and win a two theater global conflict against peer or near peer nations up until a few years ago, when it was changed to fight and win one theater, while not losing the other (holding ground until the other theater is won).

If you're looking at needing to fight China and Russia, at the same time, over an extended period of time (2+ years), having 9,000 tanks in your back pocket seems like a good idea.

Also, it's a jobs/pork barrel program. Congress keeps ordering tanks that the Army puts into storage because the M1 is a beast of a machine that keeps a lot of people employed. The US manufacturing base is pretty depleted, and ordering tanks you don't necessarily need is a good way to keep the skills and tool chains you could need in the future around.

>Also, it's a jobs/pork barrel program. Congress keeps ordering tanks that the Army puts into storage because the M1 is a beast of a machine that keeps a lot of people employed. The US manufacturing base is pretty depleted, and ordering tanks you don't necessarily need is a good way to keep the skills and tool chains you could need in the future around.

Sure, that's nothing new to anyone who's familiar with Cold War economics. The Soviet Union was able to keep its economy crawling along without sanctioning free enterprise by making enormous investments into collectively-owned (i.e. state-owned) products like nuclear submarines and combat aircraft. Turns out you can achieve much the same goal but also benefit the people if you put that effort into state-funded infrastructure. Whether the US body politic will support reducing M1 Abrams production in favour of fixing the USA's crumbling infrastructure is again a separate discussion.

A little numbers correction: it's more like $11 MM per tank. And not to build, to refurbish.

More precisely: for the 2020 fiscal year, the US Army did not procure any new M1 Abrams tank, and is not budgeting any for the 2021 year either. Instead it is modernizing existing tanks at a cost of $1.7 BN for 165 units in '20, and $1 BN for 89 units in '21. This comes at about $10.6 MM per tank.

[1] https://www.asafm.army.mil/Portals/72/Documents/BudgetMateri...

[2] https://www.asafm.army.mil/Portals/72/Documents/BudgetMateri...

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