Comment by V_Terranova_Jr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by V_Terranova_Jr | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Within a given class of system, sometimes rugged, robust, and plentiful does win the day over sophisticated but more fragile and expensive. On the other hand, an advanced military will want advanced capabilities and there is plenty of history of putting such things to good use. See for example the F-117, precision guided bombs/JDAMs, etc.

A lot of good arguments can be made about how the U.S. has failed to control the costs of developing and fielding advanced capabilities. Sometimes they just plain make bad design decisions, like with the M1A1 or F-35. But I don't think there's a valid case that advanced capabilities confer insignificant benefits vs. large quantities of less-sophisticated systems. You ideally want a good balance of both and you need the understanding and empowerment on the acquisition side to control costs.

Re the M-16, Jim Fallows wrote a great article decades ago: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1981/06/m-16-a-...

How was the F-35 a bad decision? It's already cheaper than every competitor it has and is leaps and bounds the better overall fighter due to its stealth.

That story on the M-16 is mental. So my AR-15 is actually more effective than its military offspring?

Militaries tend to be fairly conservative, so this is generally true of any given gun - civilian variants tend to acquire features faster. There's also the economic aspect of it - even small savings add up to a lot when you're ordering the product by the million, so there's a tendency to skimp on such small stuff.

And then, of course, there's the military bureaucracy. Here are some entertaining stories from David A. Lutz, who was the project manager for M16A2 at USMC:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200708173852/https://www.ar15....

"Ever wonder why Safe, Semi, and Burst are marked on the starboard side of the receiver? Well as the list of improvements increased to a point some 2 1/2 years into the program spilled over onto a second viewgraph, the last thing on the first page was the starboard side marking, the first thing on the second slide was a "mirror image" selector that pulged-in from the right side for us left-handed Marines. One Colonel who shall remain un-named insisted that I "lose everything on the second slide.""

Or here's the story of the M16A2 barrel profile change:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200708174036/https://www.ar15....

Reply on news.ycombinator.com