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Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

Ah, the [cough] wisdom of [gag] outsourcing mission-critical military activities to private enterprise.

If you look at history - the British Crown started making their own gunpowder at the Tower of London, in the middle of the 13th Century. The British Board of Ordnance was formally constituted in 1683, by HRM King Charles the Second.

And if you look at the more-recent era, when the US started shutting down most of its own government armories, arsenals, etc. - that happened fairly shortly after the old tradition of leading American families having their sons (at least the ones who wanted to becomes notable leaders themselves) serve in the military faded away. If you no longer have any skin in the game...

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The problem here would not seem to be the outsourcing, but the single-sourcing. That's entirely on the purchaser; whether they single-source it from a single private contractor or a single-source internal government provider isn't going to change anything, the problem is you need multiple sources.

A large purchaser may well have to go out of their way to ensure that too. No good having three sources for your gunpowder if they're all pulling the raw materials from the same single point of failure.

> American families having their sons (at least the ones who wanted to becomes notable leaders themselves) serve in the military faded away. If you no longer have any skin in the game...

I think we can see this expressed in the decline of architecture and new, grand, important public works projects. Why build everlasting institutions and monuments to mankind's glory when you can buy a second yacht? Really disappointing.

Royal Ordnance was privatized in 1987, most of the factories have closed now.

The UK had problems sourcing enough ammunition for Iraq and Afghanistan.

I’m not convinced that outsourcing it to private enterprise is bad. Outsourcing it overseas, that’s a really big issue.

> I’m not convinced that outsourcing it to private enterprise is bad.

Counterpoint:

In every war that involves a substantial conventional component, there has been a huge ammunition shortage. Even though people know this, the phenomenon still exists.

Private industry isn't going to maintain huge "burst" capacity. It's simply completely uneconomical.

It's possible that a sort of public-private partnership could exist where the government pays companies to maintain huge excess capacity, but I don't really see a substantial difference between that and the government just owning everything.

And it's important that this excess capacity gets used often, otherwise there's a big risk that it won't work when it's eventually called upon.

Which isn't to say that there's no place for private enterprise to supply ammunition to the government. Just that it probably shouldn't be the only source.

> Private industry isn't going to maintain huge "burst" capacity. It's simply completely uneconomical.

not in the US, many ammo providers have substantially expanded production in response to civilian demand, and only recently have prices come down

so if you limit your worldview to 9mm and .556, the US is far more capable of producing in volume than anywhere, perhaps well beyond the rest-of-the-world

Based on what happened with the Strategic National Stockpile [1] right before COVID hit, I don’t have much confidence in government run capacity either:

> From 2017 to 2019, the Trump administration failed to replace masks and other supplies used in earlier disasters. In May 2020, in a House subcommittee meeting, whistle-blower Dr. Rick Bright, previous director of Department of Health and Human Services’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, explained that the Trump administration had ignored his early warnings to stock up on masks and other supplies to combat the coronavirus.

I’d like to think that we’ve learned our lesson with COVID and we can blame it all on the-administration-that-must-not-be-named but that’s naive. The supply problem has been growing in magnitude for decades and is likely caused in part by the same policies that lead to anticonsumer consolidation in the rest of the market.

Bring back trust busting!

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_National_Stockpile

Maybe we shouldn't elect presidents who make it their mission to destroy anything the previous administration built?

Depends entirely on precisely what the previous administration built, don’t you think?

We had a similar situation in the UK where most of the emergency supply of masks, etc. had expired when covid started. The obvious way to handle this seems to be to make a deal with a big wholesaler or wholesalers where the government pays them to maintain a much larger buffer than they normally would. This would ensure the stock was always being rotated. The pre-covid scheme of paying some randoms to keep a warehouse full of mouldering stock seemed doomed to failure.

One problem with masks is that they are statically charged and that charge depletes pretty rapidly. So it's not as if you can create a bunch of stock for 'some unspecified time in the future', you'll have to continuously renew it at that level every couple of months. This is certainly going to raise eyebrows if there isn't a demand for a longer period of time and someone figures they can cut that cost without impacting safety. Which works. Right up until the next pandemic and then you're back where you were before. This sort of vigilance is very costly and it is hard to get everybody to agree on the appropriate level over time.

> Private industry isn't going to maintain huge "burst" capacity.

IMO, private industry produces, the government buys and store it. I'm thinking wrongly here?

Cost cutting combined with mismanagement at work here. As the saying goes - two is one, one is none…

It would make sense to pay for at least 3 or more of these to be open (privately or military operated) at any given time. Hopefully the military have a plan for a rapid buildup in case of an acute need.

Private companies will no longer discriminate against overseas staffing or, perhaps more importantly, ownership.

No way. Military contractors are barred from hiring overseas, or giving up ownership stakes to overseas entities. It's why they're great places to work if job security is your thing.

The US doesn't allow critical military production infrastructure to be foreign owned.

Look at every computer monitor on every military desk. I bet it says "Made in ____".

the military computers I've seen are typically from Dell, an american company. Manuafacturing is probably foreign, though.

4 Dell monitors on my desk were made in China.

A different perspective:

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. - President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Farewell Address, 1961

https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwigh...

That should also be weighed when decisions highly dependent on products such as petroleum, lithium, cobalt...

I see the following problem here. When the war starts citizens are forced to tighten the belts. Military industry meanwhile gets rich so they're inherently supportive of wars.

You are cherry-picking. By the end of WWII, Ford motor company was making 650 B-24 Liberators every month.

https://www.thehenryford.org/artifact/229817/

In the west almost all but a small fraction of military procurement is satisfied by private industry. That was just as true in WW2 as it is today. The question is how you manage that.

That's one of the major unspoken reasons of why "too big to fail" corporations are bailed out.

They're also often used to supply things the government wants such as n95 masks during the pandemic.

At the height of a massive modern war, yes. But look at (say) the histories of most of the weapons used in WWII. How many of the major small arms, artillery pieces, guns, tanks, warships, etc. of WWII were developed directly by the government, in-house, and then produced at scale during the war at government armories?

https://www.jmc.army.mil/About.aspx?id=About

lists the DoD munitions sites

Yes...but at the bottom of that web page - "JMC employs 21 military personnel, more than 5,000 Army civilian personnel and more than 6,000 contractors nationwide throughout the organic industrial base."

So more contractors (head count of corporations) than army folks (head count of humans)? Sounds like the Army's side of it amounts to little more than "Purchasing Dept." and "Warehouse". :(

> If you look at history - the British Crown started making their own gunpowder at the Tower of London, in the middle of the 13th Century. The British Board of Ordnance was formally constituted in 1683, by HRM King Charles the Second.

This is true, but is far more about the scarcity of saltpeter at the time than anything else.

So if gunpowder is 75% saltpeter, and His Royal Majesty wished to have a plentiful & reliable supply of gunpowder, then ...

(I don't know about the sulfur situation back then, but charcoal - the 3rd ingredient in gunpowder - could hardly be in short supply.)

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