Comment by dsfyu404ed | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dsfyu404ed | Hacker News Reader

I get that this sort of headline makes for a great circle jerk but let's be real here, the military isn't as stupid as HN likes to imply. Rife with perverse incentives that keep things from being done ideally? Yes, but not stupid. The military is also rife with ass-covering careerists so if some nobody on HN can think of a way they can do it better then someone in the system has almost certainly thought about it and looked into it and sent out an email letting everybody know about it. The fact that they're only buying something from one of their suppliers doesn't mean they can't get it from another with less lead time than their stockpile. This goes for a whole class of products. Typically if you are a contractor or a sub contractor and you are the only source for a unique product that can't easily be substituted you're required to provide a sufficient technical data package such that someone else could make the same stuff. If this factory was really a serious priority it would a) be redundant b) be fixed already. Because some careerist would have sniffed out the brownie points and then made sure it got done and that they got credit. It's also possible that there's internal politics involved and letting it turn into a dumpster fire is being done on purpose in order to make the situation get remediated in a specific way.

Guess: Most folks on HN realize that "the military", in the sense of "the current general and admirals", have damn little influence over these outsourcing, single-sourcing, etc. decisions. That is mostly controlled by Congress, via the budget purse-strings. And Congress in term is mostly controlled by...

>Most folks on HN realize that "the military", in the sense of "the current general and admirals", have damn little influence over these outsourcing, single-sourcing, etc. decisions. That is mostly controlled by Congress,

I think your claim is way to optimistic in light of the fact there are other people claiming that the LCS boondoggle is the fault of faulty procurement and not Congress.

And yet, you don’t have the stomach to reply to me about it — or to discuss the procurement failure regarding munitions outlined by CSIS.

The LCS is the fault of the Navy in at least three ways:

- they didn’t bother to make sure the gearbox worked

- they didn’t bother to make sure the structural framing was sufficient, leading to shoulder cracks

- they didn’t design it to have sufficient arms or ability to perform ASW roles

None of which has to do with Congress, and every bit of which has to do with military design, procurement, and contract management.

Congress doesn’t design ships for the fleet: the Navy proposes what they want and Congress funds (or doesn’t) the project. The only role Congress played was forcing the Navy to keep them after it became clear they were such a total failure, the Navy scrapped the class while still in production.

But keep making excuses for abject failure — that’s sure to fix the problem.

I'm rate limited for not towing the line so I wasn't gonna burn a reply on it. The LCS is basically the Navy's Orion but worse. Like Orion it's congressionally mandated garbage. Unlike Orion the Navy DGAF about it, put no effort into making it workable. So of course it's spec'd out poorly (no ASW) and has a ton of teething problems (gearbox, hull structure). It was a B rate project nobody really cared about from the get go. No wonder it flopped. Nobody cared to make sure it didn't.

> Nobody cared to make sure it didn't.

That’s my point:

The Navy didn’t perform at the level of making the gearbox work, because despite getting their admirals’ request for a modular super ship, they’re not ninja problem fixers but in on the MIC grift.

What's really irritating about the LCS is that the Danish StanFlex system is exactly the capability the LCS was supposed to offer, and StanFlex works. Pure NIH syndrome. In addition, someone has already done the legwork to make sure that a half-dozen different hulls compatible with StanFlex modules are proven technology…

How does this theory explain the LCS failure?

To me, that seems a fractal of stupid choices — which make sense when viewed through the lens of financial corruption and backroom dealing, but not through the lens of capable careerists succeeding by preventing problems.

Also, it fails to predict the reality that we can’t build munitions to fight a serious war — because we can’t even build them to fight a year-long proxy war. Or does CSIS not understand the MIC either?

https://www.csis.org/analysis/rebuilding-us-inventories-six-...

The purpose of the military is not to be an effective fighting force. That is, at most, a happy side effect. The purpose is to shovel as much public money as possible into the private companies comprising the military industrial complex. So your efficient-market-hypothesis-but-for-the-military idea is essentially just not even wrong.

There's a group of people for whom that may be true, but it's certainly not a driver for the majority of people in the military.

The will of the majority of people in the military is irrelevant, because they don't call the shots. The military is not a democracy.

> The military is also rife with ass-covering careerists

This is true, and I believe it's nigh impossible for a normal person to understand the level of politics and fuckery that goes on at all levels of the military; hence the down votes!

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