>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.

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.

At leaking war plans on Signal?

Indeed that is a low bar to cross.

What about this is showing competence? So far it’s just a wild promise of success

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.

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.

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/

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.

War.gov seems pretty official, so according to the USG official site, it is Department of War.

Department of Defense always sounded too close to Ministry of Truth.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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!

> 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.

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.

It does. https://www.war.gov/

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?