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Comment by lp4vn | Hacker News Reader

>Where the drawings do exist, "they're like six generations behind the industry standard," he said, adding that there are also no technicians who fully understand them. "They're not alive anymore."

That's like a complex legacy application in which the original developers passed away. In this day and age one can only wonder how the american armed forces will deal with this problem in a scenario where the military struggles to attract and retain their talent.

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> In this day and age one can only wonder how the american armed forces will deal with this problem in a scenario where the military struggles to attract and retain their talent

There is no “in this day” to it. Skill degradation has been a problem since antiquity. It’s why the best armies were those that were fighting; there is no replacement for the real deal.

What does the army 'fighting' look like in this scenario? It seems like there's no other solution for deterrent weapons than refurbishing and replacing stock (preferably without dispatching)

> What does the army 'fighting' look like in this scenario?

Live fire with a dummy warhead. Or, more productively, turning them into launch vehicles for research purposes.

I would class that as 'training' and 'repurposing', and the former could be loosely classed as 'practice' fighting

Its not just skill but also knowledge. Recipe of Greek fire got lost to the ages.

It's a bit different since the industrial revolution, and specifically in the 20th century.

There were periods of time where technology remained relatively static for hundreds of years and all that was required as practice and the generational transfer of knowledge.

Now we can go through several revolutions in a single individuals generation with the relics of several generations past still in implementation and no one really sure of how they work/how to make them work.

Standard government procedure. Neglect investment for a few years, let things degrade, and then you have an emergency where nobody is going to question you why you are building the whole fucking thing again from scratch, no expenses spared! after all, it is an emergency!

You can do this with the educational system, with health care, and with infrastructure. Of course they would also do it with Defense. Lockheed/Northrop/Boeing/etc executives need to have their bonuses too!

The armed forces might just build new missiles. It's not like cost has often been a constraint for them.

I think you're downplaying the level of difficulty of building an ICBM from scratch(I'm assuming it would be from scratch).

I would not be from scratch. We know how to build them, just look at the Trident missiles

I’ve consistently heard that there isn’t too much of a difference between an ICBM and a space rocket.

So I presume the military could “just” buy some modern heavy launch stages from SpaceX or the like, and then strap regular SLBMs to them as their payloads.

Modern space launch vehicles are liquid fuelled because it’s the most energy-dense fuel and you can shut the rocket down if necessary. In SpaceX’s case, you can also refuel the rocket for reuse. But you have to fuel it for a couple of hours on the launch pad.

ICBMs are solid fuel because you can leave the rocket fuelled up indefinitely in its silo.

Stick a nuke on a spaceX rocket, done.

The hard part on an ICBM is down, not up. Also, liquid fuel is a bad idea for rockets that need to be ready to go at a moment’s notice for decades.

The replacement system mentioned in the article is already under development and is called Sentinel. Northrop Grumman got the contract 3 years ago. It's not a "from scratch" effort as it's largely based on existing technology. They aren't having to redo all the work from the last 80+ years of rocket and ICBM R&D.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-35_Sentinel

I have absolutely no idea how complex an ICBM system is, but I would imagine it's a lot easier to make with modern technology than with technology from 60 years ago.

They are. It's called the Sentinel and it's going to cost hundreds of billions of dollars when it's all said and done.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-35_Sentinel

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