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.
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.
Wartime is more agile, you quickly close the loop but downside is sometimes does not work and when it does not work, there might be a people cost. US has done it with fighters before, F-4U Corsair was disaster initially in carrier landings and killed some pilots in training. However, this was considered acceptable cost to get what was clearly very capable fighter out there.
Obviously this will have to change if war breaks out for real, but in theory they won't be scrambling to hire people and will have at least some production capability. They will be scrambling to expand the production lines, but they won't be starting from 0.
A lot of people see defense contractors as an enormous waste of money, but to the government it is a strategic investment.
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_.
Is it? By what criteria? IMHO the point is to get new tech out quickly enough that you aren't falling behind other major powers in the international arms race. The F35 seems to be ahead of the competition because countries around the world are lining up to buy it over much cheaper alternatives from Russia (Su57) and China (J35).
Not to mention that the Su57 also had about a 20 year development cycle. Maybe that's just how long takes to develop a new stealth fighter?
Hell F-35B does vertical takeoff and still mostly uses the same systems as the other designs, that should tell you something.
Conversely, the Navy's first SSBN went start to finish in something like 4 years.
And unlike the F-35, which could easily have been an evolution of the existing F-22 design, the Navy had to develop 4 major new pieces of technology, simultaneously, and get them all integrated and working.
1. A reduced-size nuclear warhead (the missile would need to fit inside the submarine for any of this to matter) 2. A way to launch the nuclear missile while submerged 3. A way to reliably provide the nuclear missile with its initial navigation fix at launch 4. A way to fuel the nuclear missile with a safe-enough propellant to be usable on a submerged submarine without significant risk to the crew
The USAF's Century series of fighters were turned around quick. So was the B-52.
Having been involved in defense innovation efforts during my time in uniform, I cannot overemphasize how much the existing acquisition system is counter-productive to the nation's defense, despite 10+ years of earnest efforts dating back to before Trump's first term.
Most of the aspects to it are well-intentioned and all, but as they say the purpose of the system is what it does, and what America's defense acquisition system does is burn up tax dollars just to get us a warmed-over version of something grandma and granddad's generation cooked up during the Cold War.
Its turned into a death spiral because as these programs get more onerous the cost goes up, and who in their right mind thinks it's a good idea to just let people go off on a $1B effort with less oversight?
Until it's even possible to deliver things cheaply through the DAS (or WAS or whatever it will be now) we'll never be able to tackle the rest of the improvements. I look forward to reviewing the upcoming changes but Hegseth isn't the first one to push on this, it's a huge rat's nest of problems.
I used to work for a defense contractor. My former coworkers are probably cheering right now.
I'm also convinced this is a primary driver of "emergency/urgency culture".
Everything is hyped as an emergency to justify bureaucratic meetings/rule writing
The top American fighter pilot of WW2, Richard Bong was killed test piloting the Lockheed P80 jet fighter.
He had a list of rules for managing the design of aircraft. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Johnson_(engineer)#Kelly....
There's an unwritten 15th rule (from the above-mentioned webpage):
"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."The future isn't in pilot-in-seat aircraft at all.
Is this truly the case or are the criminals and other people who misuse money dragging people towards this position?
Your options are corrupt procurement or corrupt procurement with a 15% administrative surcharge of make-work patronage jobs for someone’s mistress or friends. I think that we’re in the “let’s pay our centurions in salt because the treasury is empty” stage of administrative innovations to allow the dead empire to linger. Personally, my hope is the next thousand year dark age we are stepping into comes with a knightly aesthetic.
And the solution to date has been to "start another program". That program promises to move fast, and often does, but it will eventually metastasize with process and review.
I just don't think we can add any more "same but faster" programs. It is time to cut back a lot of process, and thereby bring these programs back to parity so we can then cut down the number of programs.
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.
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...
But the key feature making this a horrible decision is that the people responsible for getting our people killed will not be discoverable, and they will never face the consequences. Heck: they might not even know, because they're doing good by their standards.
That's exactly how you make a broken but persistent and entrenched system: incentives without consequences for exported costs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...
https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/air-force-blames-oxygen-depri...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Andersen_Air_Force_Base_B...
https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/2017/07/21/f-35b-helmets-ni...
(etc)
The reality is that developing bespoke solutions with bleeding edge technology is going to result in brand new jets crashing, no matter how much bureaucrats and processes slow down the process. Nothing can substitute for using it.
> Federal Acquisition rules are written in misuse of money, sometimes criminally.
Where "misuse of money" means money not being spent a manner convenient to those who wrote the rules. Which means starting illegal wars, cost-plus contracts, lies about WMDs, no-bid contracts, arms trafficking to dictatorships, pork barreling, and *nudge* *wink* 7 figure do-nothing "consulting" gigs for bureaucrats and generals after they leave the government. Nothing is going to solve that, but if you threw out the whole rule book and started again, it would require a monumental effort to do worse than things have been.
In the timescales of some of our military planes, cars have gone from metal dashboards to collision avoidance in cars with cocoons of safety with 10 airbags.
I think moving faster might also move faster with safety equipment.
Idiocracy vs kleptocracy.
The thing is, we waste so much money it's better to crash 15 jets but build 2000 of them than waste the same amount of money and build 5 jets.
Even us SWEs out in the wild, we sometimes... disable tests (gasp heard everywhere) so that a refactor can work.
I mean it's why we have the expression "sometimes you have to crack a few eggs".
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)
That has been shown even in WWII. And the war was won by US/UK/USSR specifically because their mass production of weapons were several times higher than Germany/Japan/Italy.
The war in Ukraine actually haven't yet reached the levels of weapons use of WWII. (for example 500K-1M/day artillery shells in WWII vs. 20-60K/day in Ukraine war)
These days i so far see only China capable and ready to produce weapons, say drones, at that scale. And i so far don't see anybody, including Anduril with their anti-drone systems, able, or even preparing, to deal with 1M/day (my modest estimate of what China would unleash even in a small conflict like say for Taiwan) of enemy drones. No existing anti-drone systems/approaches are scalable to that level, and we can only hope that something new is being developed somewhere in top secret conditions, and that is why we don't know about it.
Anduril, Palantir, Lembas have I seen so far.
[1] https://qz.com/1346926/the-hidden-logic-of-peter-thiels-lord...
[2] https://fortune.com/2025/07/07/peter-thiel-palmer-luckey-ere...
One common rhetorical tactic, commonly used by their political allies, is to use their (perceived) enemies' most powerful words and ideas against them, to disarm and counter-attack. 'Woke' was a term on the left; racism became descrimination against white people, diversity becomes affirmative action for conservatives, banning and mocking and even embracing discussions of Nazis, etc.
(EDIT: thanks to a reply for researching; it is the same people.)
As for the rest, I think because it's many of the same people and the same VCs.
China has no issue with manufacturing so they will be happy to sell weapons to US at better prices than US manufactured weapons. :)
I was under the impression that US manufacturing output is at an all-time high—is that not the case?
That means anyone can build them.
Be wary of advances that benefit your enemy as much as you, and make more of your enemies capable of war.
Sorry I’m unable to link to the source time on the episode.
[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...
1. let's make the "next-gen airplane"
2. (work 5 years)
3. ok now we want it to have better radar cloaking
4. (work 5 years)
5. ok now we want it to be faster
6. (work 5 years)
7. ok now we want it to lift off vertically
We saw the same thing with the new USPS vehicle.
The better way is focused products/specialization. Make something that fills a specific niche very well at a good price.
You'll might need more products to get complete (or close to complete) coverage, but you'll end up paying FAR less in the long run on R&D, maintenance, delays, etc.
Edit: from 1798 until 1949
Following post-WWII reorgs, the DoD was created and the Secretary of War became the Secretary of the Army, reporting to the Secretary of Defense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_th...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...
Calling it the Department of War is accepting that Trump's the King.
Gulf of Mexico, or Gulf of America?
"Department of Defense" has always been a weird doublespeak term. I welcome the new old name.
"Gulf of America" is a stupid way to antagonize the world and accomplish nothing. Even if we controlled some area on a map, we ought to disguise our control through proxies rather than attract attention and to it and all that comes with the evil eye. If I was a trump supporter I would be skeptical of even accepting this as a "win", considering it is just words on paper and doesn't reflect a change in material conditions for the demographic.
However, it's risky to assume that scrapping a crappy system will result in things being better. The current shitty system was almost certainly the result of scrapping and replacing something else that had some problems.
Anyway, hopefully this works well, because we'll probably end up copying it at NASA.
Is there a non-crappy system for managing projects and organizations that large?
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.
In the history of war I find very few examples where an obscure secret technology was the key to military victory.
Isn't it unwise to rely 'alone', in any way, on a clearly partisan article like this one?
"The equal allocation method calculates prices for large numbers of items in a contract by assigning "support' costs such as indirect labor and overhead equally to each item. Take a contract to provide spare parts for a set of radar tracking monitors. Suppose a monitor has 100 parts and support costs amount to a total of $100,000. Using the equal allocation method each part is assigned $1,000 in such costs, even though one item may be a sophisticated circuit card assembly, which requires the attention of high-salaried engineers and managers, and another item may be a plastic knob. Add $1,000 to the direct cost of the part and you get a billing price. This is what the government is billed, though not what the part is really worth--the circuit card being undervalued, the knob being overvalued. The need for billing prices arises because contractors want to be paid up front for items that are shipped earlier than others."
But maybe it’s just graft.
I don’t think we would have had decades of stability without the Marshall plan investing in western Europe. Similarly the US investment in post-WWII Japan and South Korea gave the US strong allies that had common purpose.
It’s not separate; soft diplomacy made the extensive network of US military bases palatable to foreign governments.
I think pointing to nukes as the only factor neglects a lot of other important work. Stability requires the status quo to be another intolerable for governments and their people. The mutually-assured destruction of nuclear deterrence alone doesn’t give you that.
I think this happened in spite of nuclear warheads. US naval dominance has had far greater material impact, even vs other world powers.
> And in case the things escalate we are all to a sudden death than to a painful recovery.
I don't think nuclear war ever implied the complete extinction of the human race.
It seems... debatable? Close? Obviously a challenging dataset to gather accurately.
https://www3.nd.edu/~dhoward1/Rates%20of%20Death%20in%20War....
Where am I goin'? I don't know! Where am I headin'? I ain't certain! All I know is I am on my way.
When will I be there? I don't know. When will I get there? I ain't certain. All that I know is I am on my way.
the department was not built with a single country as their focus, and their target will come and go with the times. would have read the whole article the blatant bias is off putting.
I quit reading at this point. Figured I could find something not so full of braindead nonsense.
> On September 5, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order authorizing "Department of War" and "secretary of war" as secondary titles to the main titles of "Department of Defense" and "secretary of defense." The terms must be accommodated by federal agencies and are permitted in executive branch communications, ceremonial settings, and non-statutory documents. However, only an act of Congress can legally and formally change the department's name and secretary's title, so "Department of Defense" and "secretary of defense" remain legally official.[10][11] Trump described his rebranding as an effort to project a stronger and more bellicose name and said the "defense" names were "woke".[12]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_De...
Any citizen, of course, can use whatever fake names they'd like for people or places or government organizations. It's a free country. But I don't see any reason to choose this particular fake name except for the purpose of delivering propaganda to your readers.
Yes, it's a sign that they are writing for partisan political reasons and aren't an impartial observer.
The Congressionally-legislated actual name of the department is still Department of Defense.
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?
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]
[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...
not as sexy as drones, but ask the ukranians if they'd rather have drones or artillery
Artillery was more decisive till cca 2023 when switch to new warfare model happened. Its still important, but not #1. You have (ukraine-made since US switchblades proved inefficient overpriced piece of shit) drones now that have 2-3x the reach, can carry same/bigger payload, steer them till last second, some can come back home for reload. Drone teams are much smaller and more agile compared to artillery, they can drive around in normal SUVs.
They're using what they have but the remaining pieces will clearly be mostly irrelevant by next year.
Department of War hasn't been in used since 1947:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Wa...
I'm quite concernedd by the decision to use again terms such as department of War. It feels we are going back to war-driven nationalism.
* They and the private sector ran out of TNT because of UA-RU and Israel's flattening of Gaza and so they won't have enough for 2 years from now because corporate consolidation leads to unpreparedness because it's more profitable than keeping essential supply chain infrastructure alive. (It used to cost $0.50/kg but now it's $20/kg.) OTOH, they forge the barrels for tanks and artillery mostly themselves. This inconsistency and creeping of megacorp profiteering never lends itself to security or capital efficiency.. privatization isn't "flexibility" or "efficient", it's price-gouging and risky.
https://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+case+for+the+%24435+hamme...
My ship threw tools and parts overboard before pulling into a long shipyard overhaul because they knew they would get more.
I knew shipyard workers who got told to come to work and do nothing so they could mark billable hours (worker gets paid, contract is making money on the workers hourly, so who loses? Not counting the dipshit American taxpayer, of course)
New equipment installed with copy and pasted filters, except new equipment has 100x flowrate so filters last weeks instead of years.
Whole system overhauls descoped from the shipyard maintenance plan so the ship could be delivered "early" and bonuses paid.
Cheney and Halliburton?
Stories too numerous to mention. Only someone who's never seen this up close could think we're doing the cost efficient, safe thing.
It's wiser to enact change before the next big war happens and the same exact failures pop up in the US MIC too.
If we assume that we'll have a Ukraine-like scenario, then we might as well start with nationalizing industries like US steel, snatching "untrustworthy" residents to put them into internment camps, start rationing how much food people can eat, and... Heyyyyy waitaminute...
How will success be measured for this reform?
"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.
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.
Hey Hegseth. You could use SAP - that's off the shelf & I'm reliably informed by an army of consultants that they can customize it to fit the exacting needs of the department of war!
(psst China - if I pull this off you better slide me a couple billion as thanks)
There's not much reason to follow FAR when you don't have to account for cash flows in the first place
Yes everything is easier without controls, until something goes wrong. Fast cars have the best brakes for a reason.
Removing budgetary controls makes development much easier. That is until you spent so much money on a space laser that you can no longer afford to feed your Navy.
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.
His work to create the "hacking for defense" project to modernize things is not at all like DOGE and preceeds it by many years
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.
Then why is he calling it Department of War when the official name is Department of Defense?
"Got Mine!"
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.
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.
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.
It is often better to have 1000 things that are "good enough" then 100 things that are "best-in-class".
We pay a lot of money because we want a giant fuck off Navy (literally by doctrine required to be able to "Take on the next two largest world navies and win) and because we spend a lot of money on training the human resources in our military. Pilots cost millions of dollars a year to keep proficient, and we do not shirk from doing ten times the training of other air forces. Russian pilots at the start of the Ukraine war for example had very few yearly training flights, and that applies to maintenance crews as well, and several planes were lost on takeoff from system failures and similar.
America actually has a great history of winning wars with average equipment. The Sherman tank wasn't the most fancy or had the biggest gun or the most armor. It was ergonomic, survivable, and we made like 80k of them and gave them to anyone willing to shoot germans. The B-17 bomber was not exactly good, but hey they bombed a lot of Europe.
>We should first solve for why we've allowed massive scope creep in the development of our flagship fighters
This is primarily because the theory of "Actually planes are a great item to gold plate" has proven true. The fighter mafia that insisted missiles were a fad and we want cheap planes was just wrong. BVR fighting is the norm. Large radars are required. "Tech" pays huge dividends. If you still think the F35 is anything other than a very very good plane after China has demonstrated they intend to follow in its design footsteps and our 26 year old stealth bomber was able to fly over Iran and drop munitions with no real threat to speak of, I don't know what to tell you.
>why that scope creep has come at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars to our nation.
The massive numbers you have seen are for the entire F35 program, which is thousands of planes over 50 years or so. Currently, the per plane cost of an F35A in July 2024 was $100 million. A fully upgraded F16 is about $70 million. An F35 costs about $40k to fly per hour, which is a lot, but is also about what the F14 cost to fly per hour
The "military industrial complex" is overstated. Raytheon does about $70 billion revenue a year. Walmart, by comparison, does over $650 billion. FedEx does over $80 billion. Pepsico does $98 billion. Raytheon's revenue isn't even all government related. They used to own Otis Elevators.
The actual military dollars spent on "Procurement" of guns and tanks and missiles is about 1/6th the total military budget.
> We've allowed the management class to take over our defense manufacturing at great cost to our country.
The management class is the exact group of morons that are currently elected. Insisting they are magically brilliant even though they have no real track record, insisting that everyone else is at fault, and absolutely cracking down on any and all mention of their imperfections, and sure that if they just vaguely push hard, magic will happen, because that's just how good they are.
The department that DOGE brainslugged and killed was a government department for building that skill and hiring talent so they could use fewer shitty software contractors. They built software to replace TurboTax and save americans money. That wasn't getting the right people rich so Musk and Trump killed it.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/02/pete-hegseth...
So move fast and break things, and now the thing we’re breaking is our national defense?
Trump's EO that "renames" it only applies to Federal employees as guidance. No one else needs to call it that, and it's still legally the Department of Defense.
But if you take these checks and balances away, say goodbye to "good" governance.
Feature / bug
We're so screwed.
Issue 1: “using fast-track acquisition processes, rather than the cumbersome existing Federal Acquisition Regulations.” This is just plain wrong. The FAR always applies. It has special considerations for buying COTS products, but you’re still required to follow the FAR.
Issue 2: “Instead of buying custom-designed weapons, the DoW will prioritize buying off-the-shelf things that already exist” this isn’t something that Hegseth thought up, it has been a priority since at least the late 2000s, it’s in my FAM training material. The issue is that there are no COTS fighter jets or tanks. So we might prioritize COTS but the big ticket items are going to be custom.
Issue 3: (paraphrasing) “We’ve created PAEs, and there so much different than the clunky PEOs!” They actually sound like almost the exact same thing to me. The General Officer, whatever you call him, might notice a few different people showing up to his meetings. He’s still calling the shots. There is a slight difference that we seem to be trimming the number of portfolios, which means that each GO will have a few more programs to be responsible for.
Issue 4: (paraphrasing) “The PAEs will be able to trade cost, schedule, and performance!” This has literally always been the only job of acquisition. This isn’t new.
Issue 5: “Companies selling to the DoW previously had to comply with the impenetrable DFAR and FAR – the Defense and Federal Acquisition Regulations – with over 5,000 pages of complex rules. … Now the DoW is telling PAEs to toss those and use Non-FAR regulations like OTAs (Other Transaction Authorities).” I researched options for OTAs for my program director during the Biden administration. They are a great way to do research and possibly even get a prototype made with significant participation by a non-traditional contractor. Unfortunately you can’t get anything mass produced under an OTA, so it allows you to speed by without a contract until you actually need to order a production run, and then the FAR applies. So any contractor that hopes to get a big order has to be planning for FAR compliance during development anyway. The profit isn’t in the prototype.
“Weapons Will Be Able to Talk to Each Other” Yup, we’ve had that one since at least the late 2000s. This is just rewording the “Net-ready KPP” that all major systems have to meet. Modular open systems aren’t new. (Okay, a few years ago this was downgraded from a KPP, but literally all modern weapons systems are still networked on common standards).
“To retrain/reeducate contracting and acquisition officers, the “Defense Acquisition University” will become the “Warfighting Acquisition University.” Fine. I’ll start using the word sex instead of gender and I’ll start sprinkling the word “merit” in my reports. It doesn’t change the end product.
“In JCIDS’ place the Secretary of War created three new organizations…” Holy shit, I thought we were streamlining this process! You cut off one dysfunctional organization and three grew in its place! Is this Hegseth or the Hydra?
Anyway, nothing has actually changed until Congress changes the laws that we have to follow. Until then it’s all window dressing.
So of course he's excited about this.
sigh
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...
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.
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.
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.
He is indeed the worlds tallest midget.
Personally, I think we are in WW3 right now and we have already lost.
Americans are just too lazy and insular to read anything involving Chinese military strategy. I can't think of more basic Chinese military strategy than to avoid a head-on battle with a strong enemy.
You beat the strong enemy by every means other than a head-on battle.
We are waiting for another battle of Normandy that will never come as we slowly bleed out.
Granting for the sake of argument the (gravely-unrealistic) premise, we have to "skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it is" — the father of hockey legend Wayne Gretzky, a.k.a. The Great One.
Russia and China definitely love this: choosing time over features or quality is a recipe for failed products and corrupted contractors who specialize in defrauding the government.
This turned the universal hatred of bureaucracy against our greatest capability.
The US has both more features and more quality in all its armaments, which has given us enduring advantages (notwithstanding being spread too thin).
Unlike making products, time actually matters less than feature or quality in war-making because you avoid war as long as possible, and you choose to engage/deploy based on your actual capabilities.
Yes, in rare occasion when you've stumbled into an assymmetrical quagmire, you need to catch up, with armor against roadside bombs in Iraq or drone swarms now. But it's critical to be better by default, and be faster as needed.
The US military has expressly countered the sclerosis of bureaucracy by pushing decisions down to local commanders and funding a broad swath of experimental technologies. But a program like the F35 necessarily involves a ridiculous amount of integration, and it's just hard to get that right. Saying "just do it faster" is an armchair quarterback fantasy.
Never let your enemy use your weaknesses against you.