Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

This is the "it doesn't matter if it actually works" factor rather than the "CDI" factor.

America is not fighting a war of national survival on a limited budget. It's fighting some wars of choice and maintaining a defence procurement industry on a seemingly unlimited budget. There is no way even the total failure of the war will personally affect the people doing the producement, and there is no need for them to economise because they can't run out of other people's money.

So, everyone involved is free to have endless meetings. Senior management can commission studies at great expense then ignore the result on a whim. They can engage in turf wars and internal empire building; after all, the real enemy is the people you're competing with for promotions.

The procurements that have been successful are mostly those resulting from urgent operational requirements, when losing to insurgents with a tiny budget became embarrassing.

(The UK is not immune to this; we've built an aircraft carrier that's supposed to use the F-35, which may not be available and we can't really afford)

I'm not sure what this comment is supposed to say. The article submitted here is pretty weak, but the operational issues about the subject were quite real and genuine problems in the "field".

That has largeley been solved with the adoption of a new series based on improved color-temperature of background tones--something overlooked when all the focus was on the patterns.

The deployment of coyete in lieu of green/olive and the current multi-cam is pretty good stuff. The problem with marpat and some of the other ACU stuff was that the color temps (ie, too much blue-ish undertones in a desert) can make you stick out more than having the wrong pattern.

This was a problem that resulted from trying to have a rural/urban combination that would work for troops fighting terrorist cells in cities and not just in classical land-warfare scenarios in open-country.

You can read some more background here:

http://www.military.com/daily-news/2012/06/28/army-to-recomm...

And if you dig it up you can find the comparison field tests that illustrated the weaknesses in the field of the earlier designs.

My comment was about the political and economic process that produced the choice of uniform, not the uniform itself. Of course the problems were genuine. What I am saying is that it's very likely that the problems could have been spotted and worked out before billions were spent, because the institutional culture is not good at spotting problems.

Indeed - when you consider that the purpose of the US military machine is not to defend the US, but rather to be a vehicle for vast spending and dissemination of government funds to private contractors who lobby for their bread, it's fair to say that these uniforms work perfectly.

So it's like just about every other type of government of spending?

The US military is unusually detached from reality. The ISS was under constant budgetary supervision and periodic redesigns despite costing, I think, maybe a tenth the F35 program.

I think it's a general problem of large organizations disconnected to their output, of which the US Army is one. So are most large public universities. When there is a large gap between the payer and the user of activities, and an organization has a monopoly or competitive moat, then inefficiency and rot happens.

Indeed. A control system without enough feedback. Bring back organisational cybernetics!

However, saying "gap between the payer and the user of activities" suggests that you might think a market solution would work. For the military this makes no sense and cannot work; protection is necessarily collective.

It would be nice to set the anti-tax-and-spend libertarians against the military budget, but they don't seem interested.

>It would be nice to set the anti-tax-and-spend libertarians against the military budget, but they don't seem interested.

That 'seeming' may stem from your sources of information on those libertarians. Places like lewrockwell.com and the von Mises institute have railed against military spending for as long as I know.

Eh, people probably shouldn't recommend lewrockwell.com if they want to be taken seriously, e.g.: http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/07/no_author/whats-in-vaccin...

(which even manages to repeat the popular conflating of quicksilver vs mercury bound as a part of a compound – maybe we should stop drinking water since it contains highly flammable hydrogen. Oh, and highly flammable oxygen.)

> It would be nice to set the anti-tax-and-spend libertarians against the military budget, but they don't seem interested.

Of all the people you pick to blame here, you pick... the libertarians? Really? Really? The guys that have Ron Paul as their spokesman? You know, the guy that has spoken out every chance he gets about military spending and the cost of wars.

I'm not sure traditional free market costs work for the military, I'm just highlighting that problems happen when (sometimes by necessity) you separate payer from beneficiary. The same challenges occur in insurance markets.

That said, the military could use a lot more cost-benefit analysis in decisions like what's the best way to organize, and which weapons should be bought relative to each other. (And worry less about forcing suppliers to offer jobs in each senator's state)

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