It Will Be Years Before Raytheon Can Build New Stinger Missiles | Hacker News Reader

It Will Be Years Before Raytheon Can Build New Stinger Missiles

defenseone.com

15 pointsAmbolia12 comments

This is part of the reason I think we need to be able to hire people from the industrial side the arms complex, so that they give us the inside on how the sausage is made. Not CEO but software grunts, engineers, program managers or supply chain people.

Supply chains, development and production methods. With enough industrial experience, one can help design an gov-industrial strategy to avoid this kind of problems. In the current case, having a (sw/hw) upgrade roadmap planned would give incentives not to rely too much on internal stock and to always watch the damn supply chain.

'Finished' products are, sadly, very often, products that have already been rotting for some time...

> This is part of the reason I think we need to be able to hire people from the industrial side the arms complex

Who is “we” and why aren't “we” able to do that now?

We as the people's government. Yes we're able, with salaries almost half of what the industry pays, and people constantly complaining about revolving doors and assuming corruption and bias if you ever come from any industry (it is a problem but being extremist about it doesn't help much). Sure, I'd want that spot.

It should be unsurprising that if a company has been drawing down inventory for decades, and not producing new stock, that eventually restarting production might prove to be impossible, for all but the most trivial of manufactured items.

Especially if certain industries were allowed to be offshored. There was a local company that made rare-earth magnets used in things like missile actuators, that got sold off to China a few years back. Unsurprising, but they could possibly have been a part of that supply chain 20 years ago, and it might now be broken forever.

[Speculation] I have been reading comments that the issue is that some of the components are just not produced anymore and replacing those components with more modern ones would require going through the whole certification and testing process for the product. Basically you need to redesign the whole product because some of the components have been lost in time.

Yep, it's like the Rocketdyne F-1 Engine[1], the heart of the Saturn Booster for Apollo. Drawings exist, NASA documented everything... but the processes that were used were manual, and people with the requisite skills don't exist anymore. The materials used have far better modern replacements. The thing barely held together without blowing itself up.

It's far better to use a newer engine that's in production now if you want to get into space. The plans NASA had were to develop reusable rockets in the 1970s, before their funding was slashed.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocketdyne_F-1

If you get rid of Raytheon's patents, a scrappy competitor could be mass producing a better Stinger in under a year.

Patents serve only to enrich incumbents by squeezing out innovation.

You've never developed any hardware have you? Patents aren't the problem.

It’s funny how people with no understanding of X always thinks X is easy. And the more people understand X the more they know it isn’t.

Without comments like that, HN would have 1/3 of the total comment volume. I find it highly entertaining.

I really hope that the U.S. sending these weapons to Ukraine is a clearance on outmoded military technology, not a strategic failure.

The US military recently launched a Stinger replacement effort, has just solicited bids, expects production start in (fiscal year) 2027.

(OTOH, in addition to transfers to Ukraine, it's also ramped up its own Stinger deployment recently specifically in response to the crisis in Ukraine.)

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