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Comment by torginus | Hacker News Reader

The problem in the US defense industry is, that since the end of the cold war, defense companies have consolidated into just 5 huge conglomerates and the lack of competition wasn't great for the pace of innovation, affordability or timely development.

And the Cold War ended more than three decades ago, about the time we went from piston aircraft to the teen series jets making up the bulk of US inventory even today. Imagine that there isn't a single engineer today at Boeing who has gone through a clean sheet fighter aircraft development cycle throughout his career.

Boeing and LM, 2 of the biggest manufacturers of aircraft, have spotty reputations.

I'm pretty sure the US gov. is absolutely eager to create more competition of the space.

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There's definitely more than one problem with defense procurement, one of the biggest problems is simply having straightforward, acheivable goals in the first place and not fucking with them halfway through the process.

And honestly at this point the Air Force is handling this much better than the other branches. Despite all the delays and cost overruns on the F-22 and F-35 projects, at least we ended up with really fantastic and capable platforms. The B-21 is also basically on time and budget, which is nice.

Compare that to the Navy's LCS program, a massively expensive clusterfuck with very few redeeming qualities.

The Army is somewhere in the middle.

The LCS situation is embarrassing. What is the navy working on now? Replacements to the Arleigh Burke destroyers?

Depends on what you mean by “working.” DDG-1000 is still kicking around trying to figure out what to do with itself. DDG(X) is in a requirements development phase. FFG-62 is actually getting built. There are various autonomous surface and sub efforts that may turn into something.

They're also upgrading some Arleigh Burkes (and everything bigger that will stay in service) with SEWIP Block III (EW).

The new hotness is the Constellation-class frigate which chose a mature design to keep costs down. That was until feature creep completely consumed it in record time:

"At one point the Constellation design shared about 85 percent commonality with the original FREMM design, but the alterations have brought that commonality down to under 15 percent, a person familiar with the changes told USNI News."

https://news.usni.org/2024/04/02/constellation-frigate-deliv...

Every single time.

"Starve before doing business with the damned Navy. They don't know what the hell they want and will drive you up a wall before they break either your heart or a more exposed part of your anatomy."

— Kelly Johnson

Shocking that this quote still rings true a half-century later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Johnson_(engineer)#Kelly...

Ben Rich expanded on Johnson's advice regarding the Navy in his book, although I think he also conceded that the Navy has some pretty good engineers.

Skunk Works is such a fantastic book. Would recommend to all engineers.

> Compare that to the Navy's LCS program, a massively expensive clusterfuck with very few redeeming qualities.

Which, to be fair to the Navy, is as much Congressional meddling and military procurement seeding--if you stop paying your contractors, they stop being military contractors and the knowledge you'd like walks out the door, which doesn't excuse the LCS program but does explain some of it--as anything else.

When we say that we're bad at procurement in the United States, there's a lot of targets for blame. (I think you're right that the Air Force tends to have the best project execution of the service branches though.)

Imho, the service branches are defined by and structured around the type of equipment required to complete their missions.

The Navy builds years-long expensive ships, then sends them halfway around the world under command of someone. It has a structure to facilitate that.

The Army (at best) efficiency organizes a huge amount of people and material, and it deploys and sustains it wherever needed. It has a structure to facilitate that.

The Air Force procures, operates, and sustains the most technical platforms. So it's gotten halfway decent at doing that, or at least learned some lessons from repeated mistakes. It has a structure to facilitate that.

(And the Marines scrounge through everyone's trash bin, cobble something together, and come out armed to the teeth)

Point being, if you look at the people who have risen to the ranks of power, they've been moulded to fit their service culture. Which means some services might not be as good as procurement...

>> The Air Force procures, operates, and sustains the most technical platforms.

Space force. It is like flying a billion-dollar fighter jet that you will never be allowed to repair after it takes off for the first time.

Space Force is still mostly Air Force though, and I'd expect it to take awhile to form it's own culture.

Cost plus contracts are a mistake. If you get paid to do something, it should be for a fixed price not a variable number that encourages you to waste as much taxpayer money as you want. If you can’t do it for that price you need to increase your estimate until you can.

Thank you very much. I feel like engineering innovation has been concentrated on technology and not in defense engineering at all.

Immigrants have helped a lot in building the tech sector's innovation in the last half of the century. But the defense industry often requires naturalized citizens to work on these projects. I think there is a difference between immigrants coming to North America to work and eventually settling down, and offshoring work outside of North America. Immigrants cannot work in the defense sector while private companies are more than glad to have them work on their projects. The challenge is that the current framework for innovation may not qualify for the defense industry.

In the pre-Cold War era, the concept of American innovation was largely fueled by industrialization and academic participation in government sectors. Post-2000s, I feel like American innovation is rooted in the idea of diversity and America's ability to bring talent from across the world and concentrate it in major cities.

My thesis is that the US wants one or two American companies with monopolistic nature to build their future defense sector.

Innovation has not been in defense engineering lately because the US has lost A LOT of public trust when it comes to the defense industry in the wake of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

The US is not the country, nor do they have the reputation in front of the public that led to the Manhattan project, where the greatest minds would willingly work on defense projects, not just willingly but eagerly.

The breakthroughs are also less than they used to be. We have the nuke. We have reached space. We've hit the peaks. Everything else is just automatic turrets and AI to choose who to kill.

I remember being in college. I went to a top CS school (perhaps the top CS school), and it was often considered a black mark if you went to work for a defense company (even Palantir). It was also a different time, when we had our pick of companies to work at, not like today. But that sentiment is hard to shake off. I'm not convinced it is not still large in academia and the CS world today

I think you’re probably right, and to those who share that anti-US government sentiment here, I’d like to say: “wake up”! If you think the US is bad, wait till you try Russia or China. I have three refugees in my house. They may never now return home.

Generally the people critical of the US are trying to improve it, not saying “we should be more like Russia”

If nobody stands up for our rights and freedoms at home they could easily be eroded, or lost entirely.

Sure, I'm fine with that. What I object to is people using the US's flaws or past mistakes as a reason for isolationism or surrender to far worse actors.

I also went to a/the top CS school. When I graduated I would have never considered working at a defense company. Now, after bouncing around big tech and startups for a few years, I am a few days away from accepting a position at one. What changed? Appreciation for how entirely insignificant to downright harmful the rest of the industry is, perhaps. I made changes that impacted tens of millions of users in... no significant way whatsoever. Certainly not anything they'd remember on their deathbed. And what else is out there? Finding better algorithms to keep people hooked on their phones watching ads for longer, making more bullshit "AI" products to strip communication of all personality, and hundreds and hundreds of healthcare startups begging me to help them "cut out the middleman" in X healthcare system and replace them with... themselves! Idk. If I can make one anti-drone system take down one more suicide drone than it'd be able to without me, I'm 100% sure whoever would have been on the other end of that kamikaze will appreciate my efforts a hell of a lot more than the 2^25 people I fed a slightly different arrangement of pixels than they'd have gotten without me.

That 'cut out the middleman' angle always makes me chuckle. I remember seeing an ad on the tube for Made.com offering to cut out the middleman in furniture purchasing - what are you if not a middleman I thought!

Cut out the middle and you're just dealing with The Man.

That, and Poorly Targeted Revenge for 9/11 was not the most inspiring mission. Great Power Competition, however? I can get my blood pumping red, white, and blue for Great Power Competition.

I still think the defense industry is the greater evil (since nearly everything that starts out as "defense" ends up being used for "offense"), but I 100% agree with your argument against the modern tech industry.

The defense industry isn't just "defense" against bad people. Is it better to optimize the colors of buttons, or work on projects that could potentially kill innocent civilians?

Wars suck. But sometimes the result of not fighting a war sucks more. Sure, military projects could POTENTIALLY kill innocent civilians. But that's not a guarantee, modern Western militaries go out of their way to minimize that, and again sometimes the result of not fighting a war would cause even more innocent people to suffer or die.

The idea that "this one bad thing could happen, therefore I will do nothing that could remotely cause this one bad thing" is childish reasoning.

There are plenty of things that people can and do in private industry that are significantly more harmful than making some incremental improvement in a weapons platform.

"cars don't just transport you, they also kill people in wrecks sometimes"

There are lots of things in the public sector that also kill people, unfortunately. While often less indirect or over time, companies simply trying to make a buck (be capitalist) have led to products, processes, trends, etc. that have killed a lot of people over time.

I think the conclusion is that there is very little justified technology development that actually betters society, except for things that actually save people from dying. Things like healthcare, utilities, civil engineering, defense, etc. However, almost all of those industries are mired in bureaucracy and are the ultimate examples of such.

The catch with all those things that "actually save people from dying" is that they happen to be the same things that "could potentially kill innocent civilians". Any pharmaceutical researcher, surgeon, civil engineer, utility worker, and yes – defense contractor, has the ability to kill innocent civilians. But they by and large continue to do their work on a belief that by doing X job to the best of their ability, they will have a positive impact on the world that will leave it in a better place than if either nobody did the job, or someone with less experience than themselves executed it poorly.

Regarding defense specifically, there is no shortage of ways for maniacal dictators to raze entire cities to the ground under the justification that "bad guys were in the tunnels". That is, in effect, a solved problem – many times over. Accordingly, that is not where the research money is being spent. Rather, the goal of most new "Defense" is to achieve those same mission goals (kill the bad guys) with as little civilian casualties as possible, or to protect our own assets against such attacks as well as possible.

I'd argue that working on the right projects reduces the likelihood of collateral damage.

Take for example the R9X [0]. Instead of an explosive warhead it has a set of blades on the tip. The US has used it to assassinate single people in the passenger seat of a car while leaving the driver untouched. I'd rather this than dropping bombs on terrorists that come with a blast radius that takes out everyone else nearby.

This seems net-good to me. There are certainly people alive today because of the R9X team's work.

    > I made changes that impacted
    > tens of millions of users in...
    > no significant way whatsoever.
    > Certainly not anything they'd
    > remember on their deathbed [...]

Going into defense to directly contribute to someone's deathbed experience is certainly one way to guarantee that you'll make it memorable.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40160961

> and it was often considered a black mark if you went to work for a defense company (even Palantir)

Yeah, this always tickled me. Obviously smart people should just go work somewhere innocuous like Meta or ByteDance.

Also FWIW this is Palantir and Anduril's bread and butter. They get to vacuum up all the wrongthinkers.

"I'll make products that cause civil unrest, poison the political systems of entire countries, and give young girls mental issues, but I'll be damned if I work for that nasty military-industrial complex; I'm too moral for that!"

And it's frankly a childish sentiment. Go look at what's happening in Ukraine today. Why did that occur? Because a dictator woke up on the wrong side of the bed and said "you have, I want, I take." Military force and military innovation is the only thing stopping him from literally committing genocide against the Ukrainian people. Not "genocide" as in faculty lounge hyperbole . . . actual genocide.

Yes, "speak softly and carry a big stick", is the only feasible peacetime politics.

It’s wrong and, frankly racist, to imply Americans are incapable of innovation. Immigrants are used to suppress wages, that innovation you describe is a key aspect of American culture and can be replicated in defense by Americans. One big problem is that the politics of the most innovative areas has been pretty anti-defense tech until very recently

I did not notice any implication of Americans being incapable of innovation. It is wrong and, frankly racist, to imply immigrants are used to suppress wages.

You are both wrong, frankly. It's probably somewhere in the middle.

> I'm pretty sure the US gov. is absolutely eager to create more competition of the space.

The DOD actually is the reason the defense companies consolidated. They literally told them to do it. I think they explained it in the Acquired episode on Lockheed Martin from a year ago.

After you retire from politics or government it's much easier to be a highly paid board member of one company than a badly paid member of five companies.

That seems misleading. The DOD was the reason inasmuch as the budget to pay contractors was slashed, and the alternative was letting the smaller companies go out of business and losing the knowledge and manufacturing capabilities altogether.

Post-USSR, the DoD literally met with defense companies and told them that (a) there was going to be less money so (b) they needed to consolidate to survive.

It was pretty explicit.

That said, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing.

Everyone forgets that system complexity increases generation by generation: an F-35 is not an F-111 is not an F-86 is not a P-51.

The unconsolidated, smaller defense companies of yore likely couldn't have managed a project of F-35 A+B+C complexity.

That’s what I’m saying. But without the added nuance it sounds like the DoD wanted a duopoly of companies capable of building a 5G fighter.

It's actually exactly correct. That comment is referring to 1993's "last supper" in which the SECDEF gathered the defense CEOs at the time and literally did tell them to consolidate/merge.

https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2023/03/01/the-last-supper-how-...

Your timeframe is a bit off. Piston powered aircraft were not in use in the US military 30 years ago. 30 years ago was 1994. We had B2 bombers, and the F22 was in full development.

Also Boeing was developing the F-32 (which lost out to the F-35) in the mid 90's, so it's conceivable that an engineer on that program might still be around in some role.

I think you misunderstood, 30 years from piston powered to jets that are still being flown today. The F15 was introduced 27 years after the end of WW2, where all the fighters of consequence were piston powered.

As a minor point of no real consequence the Cessna T-41 Mescalero has been in service in the US airforce and army from 1964 until today, and I've been told the Diamond DA20 Katana is in indirect service via a through a civilian contract that screens prospective pilots.

Weird nitpick, I know.

There's also a slew of drones that may or may not use efficient small piston engines or rotary varients which may or may not count as piston.

On the data aquisition side I'm willing to bet there's still a place in the US military for low, slow, ground hugging piston engine craft that run radiometrics or EM mapping.

There’s also stuff like the super tucano where it’s got a sorta warbird vibe but with a turbo prop (not technically a piston engine plane but performs a similar role to older types that did have piston engines)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_EMB_314_Super_Tucano

SOCOM allegedly uses :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L3Harris_OA-1K_Sky_Warden

It looks like someone is abusing a small prop plane that's normally used for crop dustin and just duct taping some cheap weapons to it.

Because that's exactly what it is

Heh - hardened crop duster.

I'm getting strong PAC 750XL family vibes from that, we had a modified version hardened to fly 80 m drapes across all of Mali some years back .. locals were taking random potshots as it passed over: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_MO5Wfomks

Can't SOCOM afford the good stuff?

Our civilian aerospace industry had a scandal a decade or two back because apparently various African countries were buying our trainers, discovering that as shipped the trim was a little off, and rebalancing by mounting MGs in the too-light-because-it-was-empty space.

These are the "good stuff" .. for various data gathering activities you do not want a fast high flying jet, you want a slow close to ground platform travelling at sub 70 m/s speeds to maximise "dwell time" over each ground point (while not travelling so slow as to fall out of the bloody sky).

Crop dusters carry weight, excel at STOL (Short Takeoff and Landing) on "Oh shit, that's not a runway".

US Special Operations Command is into the sneaky stuff - intelligence gathering, quick in | out person on ground infil and exfiltrates.

Stubby little planes that pull like tractors and can depart flying upside down underneath a bridge are ideal, they get overshot by fighter jets and have engines too cold for air to air missiles (fingers crossed).

> too cold for air to air missiles

I'm guessing that these days there are two kinds of airborne objects: multi-modal drones and targets.

Oddly enough, heat seeking air to air came in ca.1950s, so self-flying has been around a while, and now people (especially those with heavy logistics requirements) are talking about land based self-driving, but shouldn't the seas be an intermediate problem? Where did all the self-sailing vessels go?

The Battle of Beersheba ties two worlds together: on the one hand both sides were using aerial reconnaissance (akin to this 2024 thread), on the other the australian 12th channeled their inner Alexander and galloped through a gap directly to their victory condition (akin to Gaugamela 331 BC).

You know how you hear a lot of complaints about private prisons?

How it creates perverse incentives that result in more people being imprisoned?

We have a private war apparatus.

We have been at war for 30 years without even a clear objective.

The objective is the same for every superpower in the world: to try and establish military hegemony and retain it for as long as possible.

I'd believe that if we won the wars instead of losing them all.

This is just looting.

South Korea's doing pretty well.

Germany's in one piece.

The Balkans aren't on fire.

Granted, the Middle East is still its perpetual religious/sectarian/ethnic clusterfuck...

How's America though?

Still democratic and #1/#2 in the world, by most measures. Was there something specific you were looking for?

We pay a european level of taxes (and rising) in order to receive a "safety net" thinner than Cuba, mostly so we can drop bombs on brown people and shadowy "communists"/"terrorists"/"freedom haters"/"yellow cake enjoyers"/"nazis that arent Ukrainian". What's the metric for that?

Number of world wars or countries invaded?

You tell me if you don't know.

You’d have a point if you made this comment 15 years ago, but Russia invaded Ukraine 10 years ago. Around the same time, China started to make outlandish claims on the South China Sea.

You can make a lot of complaints about the defense industry like waste and corruption, but a lack of a clear objective is no longer an issue.

Hopefully I’m beyond the draft age of it comes to it but I don’t want a shooting war in my lifetime.

This is an absurdity. The US did counterinsurgency brush fires and that's it since major combat operations ended in Iraq. Go look at Ukraine. THAT is what "being at war" looks like, and you should be thankful we haven't been forced to do that for 30 years.

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