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> The only real solve is that the they need a new branch of the military that handles production and R&D in house, and also mans and owns the factories, and to stop giving contracts to parasitic companies.

Might be a good idea, but the military doesn't pay enough (and can't because of regulations) or have the prestige to do this. Part of why the contractors exist is so the military can pay more.

The nice/bad thing about the military is they can literally train people from the ground up in whatever particular skill sets they need. No matter how obscure. The military pays for people to get medical degrees and all kinds of advanced degrees already.

In fact military training is the primary pipeline for people to enter industries with esoteric skill sets. Adding to those skill sets stuff like "chip production" isnt that big of a reach.

The brutal reality is that the modern American military is a giant jobs program to begin with. Having a "factory corps" that has "soldiers" who are basically assembly line workers with military retirements and benefits might actually be a plus for alot of people.

I'm sure they could do production just fine. It's the R&D that is hard. You can't just train random people from the ground up to be great engineers. The people who are capable of that choose by-and-large to make lots more money in the private sector. Even if you could, good luck making them stay when they can easily make 3x or more by leaving.

The military is already full of people who could make 3x by leaving and dont......

In what jobs? I don't think that's true. Or it's only true if they make a career change. The jobs it is true for, like pilots, do have a problem with retention and they give large bonuses to keep people in.

If you have a sufficiently high security clearance you will find jobs based on basically that detail alone. Many of which pay much more than what those persons currently make (and yes they would represent a career change)

And yes retention is a constant problem for people in specialized training. But even in "grunt" jobs, if individuals are willing to work for a PMC they can make more money. The military trains electrical engineers, network engineers, security engineers, (even a few software engineers), medical doctors, materials scientists, psychologists, psychiatrists and more.

The officer corps is filled with people with advanced degrees and training. Most of them are in because of the benefits package they are guaranteed to get and pension. I once met a person who got their medical degree from the military and managed to retire debt free in their late 40s while pulling a military pension and was opening their own medical practice basically free of the debt worries that plagued most doctors (and was able to use their veteran status to get some nice loans to set up their business too).

This shocks people but some people actually ARE motivated by a sense of patriotism as well, and in the military it becomes possible to work on things that are basically impossible to do in the "real world". Not everyone is universally motivated by wealth so long as they hit a certain degree where they feel safe and secure in their livelihood and future.

SpaceX showed a way through the bureaucracy and corruption. By building technology that was dramatically better and cheaper, it became almost impossible for NASA to avoid awarding them contracts.

This seems to be Anduril's approach as well. Whether they can execute as well as SpaceX has done remains to be seen.

You could argue this only happened because the technology effectively stagnated for so long that private sector actors were able to not only catch up but get ahead. And even then it only caught up because that particular technology was a passion project for a billionaire, and they werent necessarily optimizing towards wealth extraction in the space.

Personally I dont think its a great idea for a country to let their military technology stagnant if military supremacy is a core part of your international doctrine like the United States.

They also had other customers. That's an important difference. SpaceX can be profitable without NASA contracts.

Also that it's a monopsony - a market with only one buyer. Who's going to develop a new weapon in a competitive field with 2nd place being first loser? That's a lot of money to risk.

Thats a great callout.

Beginning of WW1 era worked kind of liked i am talking about, companies would make prototype guns, and the army would test them all out and choose the one they liked the best. The companies that lost the bids might and did go out of business. But relative cost to make a prototype gun was relatively low. Im sure there was quite a bit of good old boy network going on, but at least we have evidence of the different prototypes being competed and assessed against.

But something like modern fighter jets are just too expensive for a company to have a working prototype first. But I would argue thats a sign that a nation shouldnt be investing so heavily in things like F35s to begin with. I think most estimates have an actual peer level shooting war result in most air plane fleets being wiped out pretty quickly by missiles and destroying the bases. Why does Russian need an F35 equivalent when they can produce more than enough SAM missiles to destroy it? And the time to actually replace an F35 that gets destroyed is what? A year or more? Time to make missiles isnt a year.

The nation that has designs for a "good enough" plane that can go from factory sky to in 1 to 3 months will win that conflict, and the United States doesnt explore that style at all. Even though its the exact method that helped them win their last major conflict!

> Also that it's a monopsony - a market with only one buyer.

It depends on what weapons we're talking about, some (most?) are also sold to allies.

There are other customers than US Military (eg foreign allied militaries), but it is true that they don’t spend nearly as much as Pentagon does.