At the end of the day it's all people cost. Just because it's fractional lives wasted in the form of man hours worked to pay the taxes to pay for unnecessary paper pushing labor instead of whole lives doesn't actually make the waste less (I suspect it's actually more in a lot of cases).
This is like asking what good do reserves do if you spend them down in a crisis.
The bureaucracy aims to keep waste and corruption to a minimum during peacetime. In war, the aims change--you're now not only ramping up production, but the penalties for fucking with a war are typically more drastic than lining one's pockets during peacetime.
You can absolutely make an argument about accepting reduced efficiency to dilute concentrated harms (e.g. keep a test pilot from dying), but none of the peddlers of process dare even make that argument so I suspect the math is questionable without hand waving or subjective valuation (e.g. face saved avoiding errors).
In peacetime, everything is different. You don’t know who your next opponent is going to be, so you need to keep options open. You don’t know if you’ll have a war before the equipment you just bought rots away. You don’t want wartime production levels and stifling your wider economy. You also don’t want a Russia situation where you ignore value for money estimates and audits only to find the money you spent on missiles went in the back pocket of a random colonel.
Everyone keeps saying this yet it seems to be the opposite, results for dollars tradeoffs are better in wartime.
If anything it seems like the difference is that during wartime it's easier for the end users to tell the bureaucracy to get out of the way and as a result value for money is unchanged or even improved.
>You also don’t want a Russia situation where you ignore value for money estimates and audits only to find the money you spent on missiles went in the back pocket of a random colonel.
There is no difference to the taxpayer or the soldier in the trench whether the money went into one specific colonel's back pocket or got pissed away on running organizational process. The money is gone and the missile isn't there.
At you can least throw colonel in jail (or out a window, because Russia). Imagine if instead of a colonel's pocket the money was spent pushing papers around to no end? It would be the Spiderman pointing at Spiderman meme and nobody would be held responsible except perhaps an unlucky scapegoat.
It is way easier to scam someone when your major output is just blueprints that everyone acknowledges aren't even ready to be used.
Okay, let's think about what risks might be associated with making a fighter plane. The plane could blow up. The plane could be hard to maintain. The plane could get fighter pilots killed.
In a war, death is already on the table and soldiers are, more or less, expendable. In peacetime, this is not the case.
It's not that when we are in war, everything goes lovey dovey and great. No. Shit goes wrong constantly.
But we don't have time to care, we have bigger fish to fry: war.
This thread is discussing bureaucracy as the cause of waste and corruption during peacetime.
Sorry, but is this sarcasm ? Pity that HN doesn't alow limited emojis to convey intent.
This is the problem though - the bureaucracy is guaranteed to add a lot of cost, both in its own personnel, the personnel in the companies employed to deal with the bureaucracy, and the additional time taken for all bids to be evaluated. This is guaranteed to slow down everything, with the promise that it will try to prevent issues. Which, if the bureaucracy is badly run, weaponised, or captured, is a terrible trade.
If your second sentence is correct, then let’s allocate taxes to digging holes and filling them in? Ad absurdum but I think it applies? Like it seems reasonable to have an opinion on whether a function should continue to be funded by tax dollars. In a properly operating economy this would open up skilled labor to work somewhere more useful. Unless they weren’t actually skilled, in which case yes you have a problem hmm…
No. They mean killing as in ordering a pilot to fly an airplane with less cautious testing resulting in a crash and the death of the crew.
> I don’t see anywhere that mentioned “killing”.
It is there. This is what stackskipton said “Your primary concern is not spending a ton of money and not getting a bunch of people killed.” They even use the example of the F-4U Corsairs mentioning how during the program pilots died.
This is the comment potato3732842 replied to and this is the context their message should be interpreted in. They compared “fractional lives wasted” which they define as “man hours worked to pay the taxes to pay for unnecessary paper pushing labor” with “whole lives”. They don’t define what they mean by whole lives lost, but since they wrote it as a response to stackskipton‘s comment from context i think they mean pilot deaths.
To me it seems they are arguing that if we accept more mangled pilot bodies pulled out of burning wreckages then we can do the program cheaper. And to understand where they stand on the question they call the work needed to prevent those pilot deaths “unnecessary paper pushing”. Is your reading of the comment different?
I withdraw my comment, I don’t feel that way, sorry everyone.
