As someone who has some familiarity with this process, just like safety regulations are written in blood, Federal Acquisition rules are written in misuse of money, sometimes criminally.
Yes, we have swung too much towards the bureaucrats but I'm not sure throwing out everything is solution to the issue.
Move fast works great when it's B2B software and failures means stock price does not go up. It's not so great when brand new jet acts up and results in crashes.
Oh yea, F-35 was built with move fast, they rolled models off the production line quickly, so Lockheed could get more money, but it looks like whole "We will fix busted models later" might have been more expensive. Time will tell.
The F-35 was Lockheed's entry in the Joint Strike Fighter program. The JSF has roots going back to 1996. The X-35 first flew in 2000. The F-35 first flew in 2006, and didn't enter service until 2015(!!).
That's nearly 20 years to develop a single airframe. Yes, it's the most sophisticated airframe to date, but 20 years is not trivial.
The F-35 had many issues during trials and early deployment - some are excusable for a new airframe and some were not. I suspect the issue wasn't "move fast, break things" but rather massive layers of bureaucracy and committees that paralyzed the development pipeline.
The F-22 was part of the Advanced Tactical Fighter (ATF) program which dates back to 1981. It's prototype, the YF-22 first flew in 1990, and the F-22 itself first flew in 1997. It entered production in 2005. Again, 20+ years to field a new airframe.
Something is very wrong if it takes 20+ years to field new military technologies. By the time these technologies are fielded, a whole generation of employees have retired and leadership has turned over multiple times.
> but rather massive layers of bureaucracy and committees that paralyzed the development pipeline.
They decided to make one airframe in three variants for three different branches. They were trying to spend money they didn't have and thought this corner cutting would save it.
> Something is very wrong if it takes 20+ years to field next-generation military technologies.
It's the funding. The American appetite for new "war fighters" is exceptionally low when there's no exigent conflict facing us. They're simply building the _wrong thing_.
> but it looks like whole "We will fix busted models later" might have been more expensive. Time will tell.
Time has already told us. Historically it means it was more expensive. If it wasn't, it would be such a rare an interesting case, that it would deserve a documentary on the surprising result.
> As someone who has some familiarity with this process, just like safety regulations are written in blood, Federal Acquisition rules are written in misuse of money, sometimes criminally.
This already started. "Trump Jr.-Linked Unusual Machines Lands Major Pentagon Drone Contract Amid Ethics Concerns"[1]
It's for drone motors for FPV drones, which are usually cheap.
The terms of the contract are undisclosed "due to the shutdown".
One of the things that I think Anduril (Palmer Luckey and other founders) is doing right is designing for manufacturability. The invasion of Ukraine has shown that future conflicts will use up weapons at a very high pace. And that the US capability to build them at the rate needed to sustain conflict isn't there anymore. But that one thing that could help is making them easier to build. (the decline of US manufacturing is a related but separate topic)
Bad news. Trump and Hegseth do not have the authority to rename the Department of Defense, no matter what they put on a Web site. That requires an act of Congress, which hasn't happened. And probably won't, because even if they could convince Congress to do it, that would require them to ask... and their whole modus operandi is based around pretending to have authority they don't have.
Calling it the Department of War is accepting that Trump's the King.
Nobody uses statutory titles for anything to be honest; when’s the last time you referred to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act instead of “Obamacare”? When’s the last time you referred to the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance program instead of “Social Security”? I’ve never heard anyone say Title XIX of the Social Security Act instead of “Medicaid,” or Title XVIII of the Social Security Act instead of “Medicare,” or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act instead of “Welfare.”
There's a difference between an informal name that catches on organically and isn't politically charged, and an highly visible, ostentatiously political renaming specifically intended to make a point.
A big assumption with this change is that the "Modular Open Systems Approach" (MOSA) [0] [1] will be adequate for integrating new systems developed and acquired under this "fast track". MOSA appears to be about 6 years old as a mandate [2] and is something that big contractors - SAIC, BAI, Palantir [3] - talk about. But, 6 years seems brand new in this sector. I'd be curious to see if LLM's have leverage for MOSA software system integrations.
This reads like a propaganda piece. (Cautiously) Great that we're attempting modernization, but maybe don't huff the press release like a stick of finely aged glue
Based on this article alone, I can believe this is a good thing. The US military suffers incredibly from its monopsony position and without a doubt will get a heavy wakeup call (read: dead young people) next time it has to fight a real war. In addition the army should be the most accountable and results oriented branch of government, since it’s the only one that’s actively oppositional. If we can’t fix procurement there then what hope do we have for the rest of government?
> In addition the army should be the most accountable and results oriented branch of government
The army isn't a branch of government - and if you then wish for Defense to be accountable, there's the question of how to allocate money for secret things.
I don't know how other countries do this and if there are better ways to structure this.
Damn. Didn't know about this until now but it looks like, at least, he sure put in the effort.
"exploited the intelligence for illicit profit, brazenly ordering his moles to redirect aircraft carriers, ships and subs to ports he controlled in Southeast Asia so he could more easily bilk the Navy for fuel, tugboats, barges, food, water and sewage removal."
The devil works hard but apparently Fat Leonard works harder.
So fast forward five years and 50% of our war materials are produced in foreign countries?
I can't help but believe this is going to weaken our war footing because the dumbest people in the room are behind it. Thirsty Pete does not inspire confidence in the Department of War Thunder.
I mean on the surface it sounds good, but LEAN is why we had no PPE on hand during covid.
In order to have off the shelf supplies we are going have an active international arms market by definition. Is this what we want?
The lack of PPE manufacturing in the US after 2021 is a travesty that does not simplify to LEAN is why we didn't. Dismantling the pandemic response unit didn't help. Not replenishing a stockpile of masks that existed for that specific reason didn't help. A lack of tooling supply base didn't help, Straight up corruption; no bid government contracts going to friends of the administration with no. proven capability to deliver (and they didn't). By the time this was discovered, months that could have been used to build and certify actual factories had been wasted.
Worse though, is 3M and Honeywell built factories to make masks, only to get fucked on it. Factories (must grow but also) take time to build. In the 6-9 months it took for them to build those factories after the initial delay, China started allowing exports again, and those factories folded basically before we got any use out of them. I wouldn't expect 3M to build needed factories a second time we need them to save our asses.
Cursory searching says in 2020 they created a new production line in Wisconsin and moved it to 3M Aberdeen.[1][2]
If you look on Google street view dates for the Aberdeen factory and compare 2019 to 2023 it had a big expansion that's still there.
The other major 3M PPE factory, 3M Valley, was expanded in 2024. [3]
Edit: For the curious, Honeywell did fire their pandemic mask factory workers, closed a pandemic mask factory, and then exited the PPE business entirely. [4][5][6]
The Pentagon is a giant grifting and fraud machine, that's why they can't ever pass a financial audit. New changes to how the grifting works from the pedophile rapist grifter-in-chief who is hoping we forget the files showing how he is a child rapist will change nothing.
Embarrassing regurgitation of propaganda. This is basically the military DOGE. Are these systems dysfunctional in some ways, could well-intended sweeping reforms improve them? Sure, maybe, I don't know much about it.
Is that what's happening here? No, this a way to get the existing functions out from under the oversight and constraints of acquisition laws to reduce friction for corruption and war profiteering.
Steven Blank (the author) is a respected member of the startup community and is not partisan. He's been working with the defense department for 10 years (across both administrations) to modernize the way the military buys technology.
His work to create the "hacking for defense" project to modernize things is not at all like DOGE and preceeds it by many years
He's also never worked on any project involving delivering physical goods to DoD.
It's one thing to chuck software at DoD, it's another to try and put together a new IFV when a bunch of competing interests have their opinions and you are trying to balance it all.
I think the setup is that our society needs a lot of reforms, and everyone has their pet reforms they've focused on the need for. But rather than have any sort of coherent constructive plan, the fascists will shamelessly say multiple contradictory things that each sound good in isolation. So then people get drawn into playing "4d chess" trying to pick out signal from the noise, assuming that there must be some kind of sensible plans in there beyond embezzlement and deprecation of the Constitutional government in favor of some corporate oligarchy.
1. If you've been in business for 10 years, you're not a "startup".
2. The "startup community", such as it is, is loaded with hucksters and not particularly respectable.
3. What he wrote is partisan.
4. Putting "Department of War" in the title is heavily partisan.
It's also allowing for "good enough" solutions to enter the field of battle.
Which is fucking frightening. We don't want "good enough", we want weapons that are fully capable and best-in-class. After all, that's why the Department's budget is nearly a trillion dollars a year. We aren't paying for good enough, we're paying for the best of the best of the best.
We should first solve for why we've allowed massive scope creep in the development of our flagship fighters, and why that scope creep has come at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars to our nation. Yet we can't ask why the likes of Boeing or Lockheed Martin are allowed to function as entities that need to please Wall Street and lobbyists instead of scaring the living shit out of anyone who wishes to do us harm via pure technological prowess. We've allowed the management class to take over our defense manufacturing at great cost to our country.
>By now, its battlefield lethality exceeds that of small arms and artillery shells.
The war in Ukraine seems to be showing this to not be true. Drones are used as much as they are because they do not have enough artillery. Are they useful, yes. But they do not replace artillery. Maybe in another type of war, but that is another issue, what is the next war we expect to find ourselves in? For all the talk of China deterrence, we're seeing a pivot away from China now.
In case of a conventional land-war against either Russia or China (or both at the same time) good-enough will be best, because you'll need quantity, and you can't have quantity while also maintaining the "best-in-class" attribute. I think this war in Ukraine has been a great wake-up call for the Western military establishment, one which had become way too enamoured with the tech-side of things.
> We don't want "good enough", we want weapons that are fully capable and best-in-class.
OK...
> We should first solve for why we've allowed massive scope creep in the development of our flagship fighters, and why that scope creep has come at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars to our nation.
Because we want best-in-class, and best-in-class means "better than everything else that currently exists", and that's really hard.
> The DoW is being redesigned to now operate at the speed of Silicon Valley, delivering more, better, and faster. Our warfighters will benefit from the innovation and lower cost of commercial technology, and the nation will once again get a military second to none.
So move fast and break things, and now the thing we’re breaking is our national defense?
Yeah… just in the use of those glorified nicknames tells me a lot about the author’s standpoints, and dictates the size of the grain of salt I take their opinions with.
De facto vs de jure. The Trump admin can create any .gov domain they want (doge.gov, trumpcard.gov) and use whatever terminology they want but it doesn't adhere to the law necessarily.
I'll be honest with you: every time I see a link to his blog here I go "oh no why is a post of mine on HN I didn't even write anything" and then realize it isn't me. Ha!
A competent person does not summon every senior leader in his worldwide organization to be physically present for an hour in an auditorium while he blusters and attempts to deliver TV-ready one-liners. A competent person also does not take over a massive organization that relies on these senior executives’ decades of experience and immediately fire a non-trivial number of them because of their gender or skin color.
I'm sure there are good reasons for this, and the approach doesn't seem totally unreasonable, to be fair. I'm just personally woefully unequipped to understand how to deploy weapons humanely and morally, and naively think less weapons is better. Thankfully there are adults in the room making these decisions for me...
This I agree with. We should really only have a few dozen nuclear weapons, and nothing more. The whole point is to have a clear line of "DO NOT FUCKING CROSS AT ALL", and that's it. You cross us? We nuke you. We don't bother you, you don't bother us unless you want to face nuclear annihilation. Seems to work for North Korea.
It's a nice theory, but it works only if every act of war is clearly an act of total war and there's a responsible party to nuke. Who were we supposed to nuke after 9/11? Who do we nuke if the next big North Korean hack takes out Microsoft instead of Sony? Or if it disrupts the US power grid for a week? Who do we nuke if Russia props up the regime in Iran and Iran props up a terror group that attacks our close ally?
That's the thing: nuclear wars appear to have a good track record of preventing conventional war in the mold of "we show up at your border with tanks". But it doesn't prevent the kinds of conflicts in which nuking another country might not be a defensible reaction.
The threat only works in an existential crisis. As in, if you legitimately attempt to destroy our government then we will nuke you. Using nuclear weapons successfully in a war that doesn't result in a full exchange between all super powers demonstrates the feasibility of limited nuclear war which is just nuclear armageddon in slow motion. Nations (and the earth) want to avoid that just as much as a full nuclear exchange.
> You cross us? We nuke you. We don't bother you, you don't bother us unless you want to face nuclear annihilation. Seems to work for North Korea.
I think this is interesting on a few levels.
One issue with North Korea is that they have an enormous number of uneducated, malnourished citizens that no country can reasonably absorb. I feel that the potential chaos from the fall of NK was part of the brinkmanship that led to them getting nuclear capabilities.
Second, if you only have nuclear weapons then you lose a lot of tactical possibilities (bunker busting bombs for example) and you lose the ability to dial up/down aggression as we've seen with Russia.
In all, I think have a continuum of force options is rational. What is scary is that this continuum may no longer involve soldiers - and if there's no risk of soldiers' dying, force projection becomes a lot 'cheaper' in a political sense.
As someone who has some familiarity with this process, just like safety regulations are written in blood, Federal Acquisition rules are written in misuse of money, sometimes criminally.
Yes, we have swung too much towards the bureaucrats but I'm not sure throwing out everything is solution to the issue.
Move fast works great when it's B2B software and failures means stock price does not go up. It's not so great when brand new jet acts up and results in crashes.
Oh yea, F-35 was built with move fast, they rolled models off the production line quickly, so Lockheed could get more money, but it looks like whole "We will fix busted models later" might have been more expensive. Time will tell.
The F-35 was Lockheed's entry in the Joint Strike Fighter program. The JSF has roots going back to 1996. The X-35 first flew in 2000. The F-35 first flew in 2006, and didn't enter service until 2015(!!).
That's nearly 20 years to develop a single airframe. Yes, it's the most sophisticated airframe to date, but 20 years is not trivial.
The F-35 had many issues during trials and early deployment - some are excusable for a new airframe and some were not. I suspect the issue wasn't "move fast, break things" but rather massive layers of bureaucracy and committees that paralyzed the development pipeline.
The F-22 was part of the Advanced Tactical Fighter (ATF) program which dates back to 1981. It's prototype, the YF-22 first flew in 1990, and the F-22 itself first flew in 1997. It entered production in 2005. Again, 20+ years to field a new airframe.
Something is very wrong if it takes 20+ years to field new military technologies. By the time these technologies are fielded, a whole generation of employees have retired and leadership has turned over multiple times.
> but rather massive layers of bureaucracy and committees that paralyzed the development pipeline.
They decided to make one airframe in three variants for three different branches. They were trying to spend money they didn't have and thought this corner cutting would save it.
> Something is very wrong if it takes 20+ years to field next-generation military technologies.
It's the funding. The American appetite for new "war fighters" is exceptionally low when there's no exigent conflict facing us. They're simply building the _wrong thing_.
It's peacetime engineering. These things would be developed 10x faster during a hot war. Look at COVID vaccine in 10 months vs. 7 years normally.
> but it looks like whole "We will fix busted models later" might have been more expensive. Time will tell.
Time has already told us. Historically it means it was more expensive. If it wasn't, it would be such a rare an interesting case, that it would deserve a documentary on the surprising result.
> As someone who has some familiarity with this process, just like safety regulations are written in blood, Federal Acquisition rules are written in misuse of money, sometimes criminally.
This already started. "Trump Jr.-Linked Unusual Machines Lands Major Pentagon Drone Contract Amid Ethics Concerns"[1] It's for drone motors for FPV drones, which are usually cheap. The terms of the contract are undisclosed "due to the shutdown".
[1] https://dronexl.co/2025/10/25/trump-jr-unusual-machines-pent...
> Design For Rapid Scale In a Crisis
One of the things that I think Anduril (Palmer Luckey and other founders) is doing right is designing for manufacturability. The invasion of Ukraine has shown that future conflicts will use up weapons at a very high pace. And that the US capability to build them at the rate needed to sustain conflict isn't there anymore. But that one thing that could help is making them easier to build. (the decline of US manufacturing is a related but separate topic)
The United States does not have a "Department of War".
It does. https://www.war.gov/
Bad news. Trump and Hegseth do not have the authority to rename the Department of Defense, no matter what they put on a Web site. That requires an act of Congress, which hasn't happened. And probably won't, because even if they could convince Congress to do it, that would require them to ask... and their whole modus operandi is based around pretending to have authority they don't have.
Calling it the Department of War is accepting that Trump's the King.
oh do you also call it the Gulf of America?
Considering the sheer amount of wars the CIA and DoD are responsible for that are ongoing; the rebranding is more honest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...
nope: https://www.military.com/feature/2025/10/17/department-of-wa...
Nobody uses statutory titles for anything to be honest; when’s the last time you referred to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act instead of “Obamacare”? When’s the last time you referred to the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance program instead of “Social Security”? I’ve never heard anyone say Title XIX of the Social Security Act instead of “Medicaid,” or Title XVIII of the Social Security Act instead of “Medicare,” or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act instead of “Welfare.”
There's a difference between an informal name that catches on organically and isn't politically charged, and an highly visible, ostentatiously political renaming specifically intended to make a point.
You’re telling me “Obamacare” isn’t politically charged? It was originally basically the legal equivalent of a slur.
[delayed]
Funny how we can tell now whether the other person is a Kool-Aid drinker by how they refer to things.
Gulf of Mexico, or Gulf of America?
Get ready for the Department Of Corruption
A big assumption with this change is that the "Modular Open Systems Approach" (MOSA) [0] [1] will be adequate for integrating new systems developed and acquired under this "fast track". MOSA appears to be about 6 years old as a mandate [2] and is something that big contractors - SAIC, BAI, Palantir [3] - talk about. But, 6 years seems brand new in this sector. I'd be curious to see if LLM's have leverage for MOSA software system integrations.
[0] https://breakingdefense.com/tag/modular-open-systems-archite...
[1] https://www.dsp.dla.mil/Programs/MOSA/
[2] https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/USCODE-2016-title10/USCO...
[3] https://blog.palantir.com/implementing-mosa-with-software-de...
This reads like a propaganda piece. (Cautiously) Great that we're attempting modernization, but maybe don't huff the press release like a stick of finely aged glue
Based on this article alone, I can believe this is a good thing. The US military suffers incredibly from its monopsony position and without a doubt will get a heavy wakeup call (read: dead young people) next time it has to fight a real war. In addition the army should be the most accountable and results oriented branch of government, since it’s the only one that’s actively oppositional. If we can’t fix procurement there then what hope do we have for the rest of government?
> In addition the army should be the most accountable and results oriented branch of government
The army isn't a branch of government - and if you then wish for Defense to be accountable, there's the question of how to allocate money for secret things.
I don't know how other countries do this and if there are better ways to structure this.
> there's the question of how to allocate money for secret things.
In the history of war I find very few examples where an obscure secret technology was the key to military victory.
Remember Fat Leonard? This time there's going to be more than one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Leonard_scandal
That page is out of date. Fat Leonard was sentenced last November to fifteen years. With time served he’ll be there for the next seven years or so.
Like piggies to the trough.
There are plenty of things to criticize in procurement. I don't see this as a useful reaction or attempt to fix issues in a long term way.
Damn. Didn't know about this until now but it looks like, at least, he sure put in the effort.
"exploited the intelligence for illicit profit, brazenly ordering his moles to redirect aircraft carriers, ships and subs to ports he controlled in Southeast Asia so he could more easily bilk the Navy for fuel, tugboats, barges, food, water and sewage removal."
The devil works hard but apparently Fat Leonard works harder.
Sounds like a name that would be given to a GTA character!
He was a GTA character but IRL
Army PIT? Ah, this is not a good name...
So fast forward five years and 50% of our war materials are produced in foreign countries?
I can't help but believe this is going to weaken our war footing because the dumbest people in the room are behind it. Thirsty Pete does not inspire confidence in the Department of War Thunder.
I mean on the surface it sounds good, but LEAN is why we had no PPE on hand during covid.
In order to have off the shelf supplies we are going have an active international arms market by definition. Is this what we want?
from the reading I have done, something along the lines of 'bump up 155mm production' is more what is needed
not as sexy as drones, but ask the ukranians if they'd rather have drones or artillery
The lack of PPE manufacturing in the US after 2021 is a travesty that does not simplify to LEAN is why we didn't. Dismantling the pandemic response unit didn't help. Not replenishing a stockpile of masks that existed for that specific reason didn't help. A lack of tooling supply base didn't help, Straight up corruption; no bid government contracts going to friends of the administration with no. proven capability to deliver (and they didn't). By the time this was discovered, months that could have been used to build and certify actual factories had been wasted.
Worse though, is 3M and Honeywell built factories to make masks, only to get fucked on it. Factories (must grow but also) take time to build. In the 6-9 months it took for them to build those factories after the initial delay, China started allowing exports again, and those factories folded basically before we got any use out of them. I wouldn't expect 3M to build needed factories a second time we need them to save our asses.
Which 3M PPE factory folded?
Cursory searching says in 2020 they created a new production line in Wisconsin and moved it to 3M Aberdeen.[1][2]
If you look on Google street view dates for the Aberdeen factory and compare 2019 to 2023 it had a big expansion that's still there.
The other major 3M PPE factory, 3M Valley, was expanded in 2024. [3]
Edit: For the curious, Honeywell did fire their pandemic mask factory workers, closed a pandemic mask factory, and then exited the PPE business entirely. [4][5][6]
[1] https://www.startribune.com/3m-says-it-s-on-track-with-n95-p...
[2] https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/company-us/coronavirus/us-policy...
[3] https://news.3m.com/2024-05-03-3M-expands-facility-in-Valley...
[4] https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/honeywell-manufactured-...
[5] https://www.wpri.com/business-news/honeywell-smithfield-faci...
[6] https://www.honeywell.com/us/en/press/2025/05/honeywell-comp...
I feel uneasy about the govt taking the "move fast and break things" approach.
It's what Ukraine was forced to do, because the more traditional approaches failed them.
It's wiser to enact change before the next big war happens and the same exact failures pop up in the US MIC too.
But Ukraine was/is forced to "benchmark" their approaches with the reality of the war.
How will success be measured for this reform?
The Pentagon is a giant grifting and fraud machine, that's why they can't ever pass a financial audit. New changes to how the grifting works from the pedophile rapist grifter-in-chief who is hoping we forget the files showing how he is a child rapist will change nothing.
Embarrassing regurgitation of propaganda. This is basically the military DOGE. Are these systems dysfunctional in some ways, could well-intended sweeping reforms improve them? Sure, maybe, I don't know much about it.
Is that what's happening here? No, this a way to get the existing functions out from under the oversight and constraints of acquisition laws to reduce friction for corruption and war profiteering.
If you fell for DOGE don't fall for this too.
Steven Blank (the author) is a respected member of the startup community and is not partisan. He's been working with the defense department for 10 years (across both administrations) to modernize the way the military buys technology.
His work to create the "hacking for defense" project to modernize things is not at all like DOGE and preceeds it by many years
https://www.h4d.us/
He's also never worked on any project involving delivering physical goods to DoD.
It's one thing to chuck software at DoD, it's another to try and put together a new IFV when a bunch of competing interests have their opinions and you are trying to balance it all.
And he has a huge house which can be seen at the top of each page.
"Got Mine!"
Steve is great, but everyone is partisan.
> Steven Blank (the author) is a respected member of the startup community and is not partisan.
Then that makes it more disgraceful for him to regurgitate propaganda.
I think the setup is that our society needs a lot of reforms, and everyone has their pet reforms they've focused on the need for. But rather than have any sort of coherent constructive plan, the fascists will shamelessly say multiple contradictory things that each sound good in isolation. So then people get drawn into playing "4d chess" trying to pick out signal from the noise, assuming that there must be some kind of sensible plans in there beyond embezzlement and deprecation of the Constitutional government in favor of some corporate oligarchy.
>> Steven Blank (the author) is a respected member of the startup community and is not partisan.
Then why is he calling it Department of War when the official name is Department of Defense?
He’s using partisan terminology like Department of War. Fairly certain he’s a partisan
1. If you've been in business for 10 years, you're not a "startup". 2. The "startup community", such as it is, is loaded with hucksters and not particularly respectable. 3. What he wrote is partisan. 4. Putting "Department of War" in the title is heavily partisan.
It's also allowing for "good enough" solutions to enter the field of battle.
Which is fucking frightening. We don't want "good enough", we want weapons that are fully capable and best-in-class. After all, that's why the Department's budget is nearly a trillion dollars a year. We aren't paying for good enough, we're paying for the best of the best of the best.
We should first solve for why we've allowed massive scope creep in the development of our flagship fighters, and why that scope creep has come at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars to our nation. Yet we can't ask why the likes of Boeing or Lockheed Martin are allowed to function as entities that need to please Wall Street and lobbyists instead of scaring the living shit out of anyone who wishes to do us harm via pure technological prowess. We've allowed the management class to take over our defense manufacturing at great cost to our country.
Is an off the shelf FPV drone with a grenade strapped to it a "best in class" weapon?
No.
By now, its battlefield lethality exceeds that of small arms and artillery shells.
Take that as a lesson on "best in class" systems. The "best" system is often one that's barely "good enough", but can be manufactured at scale.
And, what can US manufacture at scale today? Oh.
>By now, its battlefield lethality exceeds that of small arms and artillery shells.
The war in Ukraine seems to be showing this to not be true. Drones are used as much as they are because they do not have enough artillery. Are they useful, yes. But they do not replace artillery. Maybe in another type of war, but that is another issue, what is the next war we expect to find ourselves in? For all the talk of China deterrence, we're seeing a pivot away from China now.
If the SNAP and Healthcare debate didn't convince you that they don't care about people or soldiers then perhaps this will...
In case of a conventional land-war against either Russia or China (or both at the same time) good-enough will be best, because you'll need quantity, and you can't have quantity while also maintaining the "best-in-class" attribute. I think this war in Ukraine has been a great wake-up call for the Western military establishment, one which had become way too enamoured with the tech-side of things.
> We don't want "good enough", we want weapons that are fully capable and best-in-class.
OK...
> We should first solve for why we've allowed massive scope creep in the development of our flagship fighters, and why that scope creep has come at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars to our nation.
Because we want best-in-class, and best-in-class means "better than everything else that currently exists", and that's really hard.
> The DoW is being redesigned to now operate at the speed of Silicon Valley, delivering more, better, and faster. Our warfighters will benefit from the innovation and lower cost of commercial technology, and the nation will once again get a military second to none.
So move fast and break things, and now the thing we’re breaking is our national defense?
Department of Defense... unless Congress changes the name.
Department of Defense always sounded too close to Ministry of Truth.
Yeah… just in the use of those glorified nicknames tells me a lot about the author’s standpoints, and dictates the size of the grain of salt I take their opinions with.
He launched the "lean" movement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Blank
So of course he's excited about this.
sigh
War.gov seems pretty official, so according to the USG official site, it is Department of War.
De facto vs de jure. The Trump admin can create any .gov domain they want (doge.gov, trumpcard.gov) and use whatever terminology they want but it doesn't adhere to the law necessarily.
I was very confused until I realized the author was Steve Blank not Steve Klabnik.
I'll be honest with you: every time I see a link to his blog here I go "oh no why is a post of mine on HN I didn't even write anything" and then realize it isn't me. Ha!
Out of all of the hires of this new administration, Hegseth is the most surprisingly competent.
A competent person does not summon every senior leader in his worldwide organization to be physically present for an hour in an auditorium while he blusters and attempts to deliver TV-ready one-liners. A competent person also does not take over a massive organization that relies on these senior executives’ decades of experience and immediately fire a non-trivial number of them because of their gender or skin color.
What about this is showing competence? So far it’s just a wild promise of success
At leaking war plans on Signal?
Indeed that is a low bar to cross.
He is competent at firing more competent people than himself.
> Out of all of the hires of this new administration, Hegseth is the most surprisingly competent.
He is indeed the worlds tallest midget.
More weapons more quickly. This is what I want.
I'm sure they will be used for good.
/s
I'm sure there are good reasons for this, and the approach doesn't seem totally unreasonable, to be fair. I'm just personally woefully unequipped to understand how to deploy weapons humanely and morally, and naively think less weapons is better. Thankfully there are adults in the room making these decisions for me...
>deploy weapons humanely and morally
A bit of an oxymoron there wouldn't you say?
>naively think less weapons is better
This I agree with. We should really only have a few dozen nuclear weapons, and nothing more. The whole point is to have a clear line of "DO NOT FUCKING CROSS AT ALL", and that's it. You cross us? We nuke you. We don't bother you, you don't bother us unless you want to face nuclear annihilation. Seems to work for North Korea.
> You cross us? We nuke you.
It's a nice theory, but it works only if every act of war is clearly an act of total war and there's a responsible party to nuke. Who were we supposed to nuke after 9/11? Who do we nuke if the next big North Korean hack takes out Microsoft instead of Sony? Or if it disrupts the US power grid for a week? Who do we nuke if Russia props up the regime in Iran and Iran props up a terror group that attacks our close ally?
That's the thing: nuclear wars appear to have a good track record of preventing conventional war in the mold of "we show up at your border with tanks". But it doesn't prevent the kinds of conflicts in which nuking another country might not be a defensible reaction.
The threat only works in an existential crisis. As in, if you legitimately attempt to destroy our government then we will nuke you. Using nuclear weapons successfully in a war that doesn't result in a full exchange between all super powers demonstrates the feasibility of limited nuclear war which is just nuclear armageddon in slow motion. Nations (and the earth) want to avoid that just as much as a full nuclear exchange.
> You cross us? We nuke you. We don't bother you, you don't bother us unless you want to face nuclear annihilation. Seems to work for North Korea.
I think this is interesting on a few levels.
One issue with North Korea is that they have an enormous number of uneducated, malnourished citizens that no country can reasonably absorb. I feel that the potential chaos from the fall of NK was part of the brinkmanship that led to them getting nuclear capabilities.
Second, if you only have nuclear weapons then you lose a lot of tactical possibilities (bunker busting bombs for example) and you lose the ability to dial up/down aggression as we've seen with Russia.
In all, I think have a continuum of force options is rational. What is scary is that this continuum may no longer involve soldiers - and if there's no risk of soldiers' dying, force projection becomes a lot 'cheaper' in a political sense.