Oh, Sal. Don’t you understand? “Imagine” is a much, much better plan than mere “Hope” because no one in the next SEVERAL administrations has to actually produce anything useful! Or even close to being tactically relevant or remotely sailor-proof. Does anyone remember the Great Green Fleet fiasco? It never produced anything useful, and no one was ever fired for incompetence. Because, hey, it’s Washington.
“Every key DoD stakeholder will have a seat at the table: combatant commanders; military departments, service secretaries and service chiefs; and OSD component heads.”
Is this how we got it done at Los Alamos? I think not. I’d argue that that’s the only “silver bullet” ever produced in the history of warfare. One O-6 in charge, later promoted to 1-star. No bullsh1t. Just get it done.
And BTW, CDR, would love to read your take on the movie “Oppenheimer,” if/when you see it.
Longbow, gunpowder, rifled barrels, semi/full automatic weapons, fossil fuel powered vessels, ... Silver Bullets of their time and every Silver Bullet is time-limited.
At one time, I'd considered writing a book on Silver Bullets - both technological and manpower. Tiger tanks and elite units. And the lessons learned from them.
Sounds like it would be a fascinating book. I've never seen a book that explained the significant changes in warfare implements/practices over the centuries. Sea Changes. I only remember fragments of the history of the items I'd mentioned. Never a better time than the present for that book, HMS!
"How will DoD accomplish its goals.... Every key DoD stakeholder will have a seat at the table: combatant commanders; military departments, service secretaries and service chiefs; and OSD component heads" with a meat cleaver in hand to hack scraps off a soup bone to make broth for their rice bowls. "That's the plan" as I see it.
I spent a long time in DC. Nothing was more pleasing then to have some documents signed by dozens of people in charge of different agencies. That was considered an accomplishment in and of itself regardless of whether or not anything was actually produced. And lots of medals for the worker bees who put the document together.
Awarding lots of medals for an accomplishment kind of dots the I's and crosses the T's in the word "Success", dunnit? But you are right, Pete, sometimes the illusion of progress trumps productivity itself. I suppose the upside to all that is that the knives and meat cleavers needn't come out to reach an outcome satisfactory to attendees.
Never did a tour in DC. My meetings were shipboard...Striker Board, CAP Board, Mess Caterer in the Chief's Mess and Wardroom, OOD Board, SWO Board, Welfare & Rec, others. The knives came out, to be sure, but we all knew we'd have to live intimately with the outcomes. You don't ever want to be the guy who bullied through a 10 pound block of pimento cheese for the Chief's Mess.
Couldn't agree more, except with regard to "...later promoted to 1-star."
The historical record of ~ modern successful military transformations (a heretical concept on the Porch, I know, but one that I hope we can agree does sometimes exist) tells us that the biggest, hardest 'transformations' are usually bought at the price of stars. See: Billy Mitchell, Rickover (yes he wore 4 stars for eternity, but only after his service tried to run him out at O6), Boyd, Beckwith/Marcinko, etc.
Damn it... I've got to remember to stop reading CDR Sal's work anywhere near 5:00 PM... It only makes me want to add another finger to the Knob Creek on the rocks.
Yawn. Heard it all before, never seen it work. How about every person working in DOD that has never served go put on a uniform and try to make Midrats out of the pile(s) of BS that DOD serves up?
Phib, you are one of the best salesmen for bourbon the world over… (but don’t give up brother, even if so many of us have).
I'm an Armor guy and the Biden folks have promised me all electric tanks which are gonna save lives because we won't have that vulnerable log tail of fuel trucks.
Personally, I'm waiting for the fusion powered hovertanks with the 20cm powerguns
You do need to tow a M989 trailer behind the tank, carrying the thousand square meters of solar panels you have to assemble at each stop. Or the C32 diesel generator and diesel tank for northern operations. But other than that it will be great.
How long have I been calling for the deep-sixing of DOD-5000? Fifteen years? Twenty?
Let's think about it...what systems have been fielded in the last twenty-five years that actually delivered results FAST? I can think of four: MQ-1 Predator, MQ-9 Reaper, RQ-4 Global Hawk (ACTD and Block 10), and RQ-4 Global Hawk Maritime Demonstration (later renamed BAMS-D).
All four short-circuited the DOD-5000 process. I was on the DARPA team that did the RQ-4 program - with a specification that was 10 Powerpoint slides. The result was a system that flew less than three years after contract award, delivered battle-deciding ISR capabilities in combat four years later. GHMD? The Navy's team got the airplanes and software (the latter was held up - long story) in late December of 2006. Spent 2007 sorting out operations and dissemination issues, flew wargames in 2008...and some quasi-operational tasking as well. Deployed in January 2009 on a six-month deployment - that ended thirteen years later.
Put a bullet into DOD-5000, and give me a team of bad-tempered veterans from the field activities. We'll make miracles happen.
@HMS Lion. Your namesake was launch before WWI in response to the myriad of problems facing the Royal Navy. Maybe we can learn something from Churchill and Fisher.
Whenever the Empire was in trouble which was always. - heroes always arose - Nelson, Beatty, Mountbatten etc. We seem to be short on heroes and long on flags worried about those corporate board seats and CNN gigs.
Followed a rat hole to a rat hole a week or so ago, from here I think a different movie or artists was mentioned, saw "produced by Mike Curb" and that name rang a bell. All these many years I thought the Mike Curb Congregation was some little Church in Az or SoCal.
Burning Bridges has been a favorite song (perhaps a way of life as well, in retrospect) for 50 years or more since I first saw the movie.
A favorite quote about Admiral King was from his daughter, something like "My father was the most even-tempered man I've ever met. He was always in a rage."
I nominate the ESB-3 and subsequent, well, let’s call them the Puller class ships even though USS Puller is the third, as it’s really the subclass definition ship. Those went from PowerPoint to afloat in a remarkably short time, even astonishingly short given new design recent track records. Yes it’s based on something else, but still, metal afloat and reportedly useful enough after the first two. Maybe it’s because they are SOF-centric, so they get to end-run some of the fine levels of review contributed by all those flag staffs.
In the safety business, we kept explaining why a Predator was lost, with a boilerplate quote: this system was not procured thought he normal process (or similar words) because we lost a lot and th unusual procurement path was part of the problem.
Now, did the results we got from Predator justify losing a bunch later (at $4 million each) because they came out kind of half-baked? Yes, they did. So how do you maintain a disciplined system for the standard stuff that we will keep for decades, and short-circuit the system for stuff you need right now for a few years? I guess you have tot rust the humans in charge of programs. Said trust is seemingly in short supply in DC.
So does a ground-launched rocket-boosted Quickstrike-ER air-deployed sea mine qualify as (checks notes) ADA2-worthy? It’s certainly attritable, it flies and then splashes and sinks, so that’s two domains, and it’s autonomous, counting and exploding as programmed. If it got a sat data link that works in flight, that would be THREE domains. And if it could be launched from those box launcher trucks the Marines are getting among others, and we could get thousands of them into theater in a year and a half, that would be a Good Thing Indeed.
Or is it not droney enough, nor made of cardboard?
Hmm... Sal, this from your pull-quotes of Hicks: "the PRC, has spent the last 20 years building a modern military carefully crafted to blunt the operational advantages we've enjoyed for decades."
.
Okay, yes... But left unsaid is that the PRC has spent the past 40+ years building out a modern, world-class, every-element-of-the-periodic-table, top-to-bottom, energy-industrial complex, from which to craft its military. Because (copybook heading, here): "Military Power Is the Absolute and Unalterable First Derivative of Industrial Power."
.
And deindustrialized nations do not remain military powers for long; a generation or two to burn down the legacy capabilities. Closer to pierside, nations without a broad, deep, innovative, reactive shipbuilding industry do not long remain naval powers; a point too evident to belabor here.
.
And out of that talk, I detect a Full-Strength Kool Aid-level commitment to the hardline, Biden admin Climate Change agenda, viscerally anti-oil/fossil fuels. If nothing else, there's that cringeworthy line about "distributed pods of self-propelled ADA2 systems afloat, powered by the sun and other virtually-limitless resources, packed with sensors aplenty..."
.
Oh, goody! Win the war with solar-powered sailboats. Dissuade. Deter. Detect. Defend. Defeat. With windmills and solar panels. Or something like that, right?
"But left unsaid is that the PRC has spent the past 40+ years building out a modern, world-class, every-element-of-the-periodic-table, top-to-bottom, energy-industrial complex, from which to craft its military."
Byron, all good points, but that's the money shot. We've spent the same 40 years destroying our industrial capacity and embracing a service-supreme economy.
Cheaper to send a few of us back to sea on an LCS as E-2 Messcooks, stuff us with starchy food, put us on Mando PT for being in excess of 22%BF and then give the order to ♫ Cry me a river ♪. Get the 5'3" tall MA1 to taunt me and poke me with a nightstick and I'd blubber like a baby with an ass rash.
In 1979, maybe get to work. Now? Far more challenging an environment to rebuild not just the infrastructure but the sense that infrastructure and industrial capability and achievement are important.
Calling BS on this to tough to build/rebuild crap. It’s the same environment it’s just the defeatist mindset that is different. In 20 years the US has deployed millions nodes of 2G, 2.5G, 3G. 3G+, 4G, 5G cells.
These took complex engineering and major civil construction and technical deployment effort across everything from
Blue collar to white collar to cutting edge r&d.
We still retain those with the muscle memory and can do know how.
Don’t get me started in the speed and breadth of Fiber and Broadband development and deployment. Most started the new Century with dial up and limited broadband (isdn & t1 lines).
Well your point regarding 5G rollout is well taken but shipyards are few in number (obviously self-evident) and they determine where hulls get built. We neglected developing a skilled workforce because the Navy communicated an demand signal the came and went like the tide. What demand signal did we give the shipbuilding industry to pursue capital investments and workforce development that removed the risk of a choking on sunk costs that they wouldn't eventually recover?
Close friend of 50 years has been involved in building at lot of towers for telecom. WE have excelled there, but it's different than large-capacity steel and ship building. To an extent I include telecom in service industry infrastructure. We can talk/write/read/view a heck of a lot more, but to what end?
Also, every engineer I know including me has had trouble with new talent. Many (not all of course, but many) coming out of college are woefully untrained, although they do know their pronouns, so there is that.
While we exist in the over 40 realm, the majority of the under 40 crowd are not showing can do, and many never developed muscle memory or know how.
I do not like bringing the black pill, but that is what I see. Were I leading men at the moment I would certainly adopt a different tone, but I am not on this board.
Besides, I come here for you guys to cheer me up! :)
How many more painful lessons are we going to get served up by the priesthood of the Eternal Church of Transformational Acronyms? Escalate complexity... but at an "attributable" price point? Achieve overmatch in 18 to 24 months because that's a length of time that is not too hot... not to cold... it's just right. Now I'm going to pour 3 fingers of bourbon.
Well, in all seriousness. They don't know what they don't know, and they won't know what they dont know until it's too late. Until then we will spin our wheels like the characters in a satirical Clarke or Heinlein short story, or the adults come back in the room. My bet is on the short story.
To your point of what they don't know? How about what we do know? There is a heck of a lot we do know about tech that isn't sexy & exotic but it is readily doable now. My bet is that the transformational priesthood with follow their habit of pursuing the exotic at the expense of the unsexy, unconventional and asymmetric that works
Well they know how to build AB's and VA's but the lack of industrial capacity and workers means on-time and on-schedule is an iffy proposition for some time to come.
18 to 24 months is the timeline before the fit hits the shan. I think DOD is finally realizing that they're running out of time to be ready and this is the Flail-EX to get "ready."
Only if you're empowered to make unilateral decisions, allowed to physically break heads, end careers, and publicly humiliate those who have earned the disapprobation should you consider the position.
Oh, Sal. Don’t you understand? “Imagine” is a much, much better plan than mere “Hope” because no one in the next SEVERAL administrations has to actually produce anything useful! Or even close to being tactically relevant or remotely sailor-proof. Does anyone remember the Great Green Fleet fiasco? It never produced anything useful, and no one was ever fired for incompetence. Because, hey, it’s Washington.
The three most (only?) techs that have actually significantly impacted warfighting in the last 20 years?
- Armed persistent UAV: Thank Israel
- GPS Arty and rockets: Thank ARL
- redundant, reconfigurable, low cost satellite constellations: Thank Elon
And none of them were manufactured from snake oil, which is Official Washington’s only successful product to date.
And they're trying to take Elon out.
It's almost like a plan, to lose to be weak and to have to cede the stage to China.
I'm waiting for DEPSECDEF Hicks to be more like Corporal Dwayne Hicks:
https://cdn.quotesgram.com/img/17/65/564671072-f4b74d28b85d00c6aefcb8d1de48f566.jpg
“Every key DoD stakeholder will have a seat at the table: combatant commanders; military departments, service secretaries and service chiefs; and OSD component heads.”
Is this how we got it done at Los Alamos? I think not. I’d argue that that’s the only “silver bullet” ever produced in the history of warfare. One O-6 in charge, later promoted to 1-star. No bullsh1t. Just get it done.
And BTW, CDR, would love to read your take on the movie “Oppenheimer,” if/when you see it.
Longbow, gunpowder, rifled barrels, semi/full automatic weapons, fossil fuel powered vessels, ... Silver Bullets of their time and every Silver Bullet is time-limited.
At one time, I'd considered writing a book on Silver Bullets - both technological and manpower. Tiger tanks and elite units. And the lessons learned from them.
Sounds like it would be a fascinating book. I've never seen a book that explained the significant changes in warfare implements/practices over the centuries. Sea Changes. I only remember fragments of the history of the items I'd mentioned. Never a better time than the present for that book, HMS!
"How will DoD accomplish its goals.... Every key DoD stakeholder will have a seat at the table: combatant commanders; military departments, service secretaries and service chiefs; and OSD component heads" with a meat cleaver in hand to hack scraps off a soup bone to make broth for their rice bowls. "That's the plan" as I see it.
I spent a long time in DC. Nothing was more pleasing then to have some documents signed by dozens of people in charge of different agencies. That was considered an accomplishment in and of itself regardless of whether or not anything was actually produced. And lots of medals for the worker bees who put the document together.
Awarding lots of medals for an accomplishment kind of dots the I's and crosses the T's in the word "Success", dunnit? But you are right, Pete, sometimes the illusion of progress trumps productivity itself. I suppose the upside to all that is that the knives and meat cleavers needn't come out to reach an outcome satisfactory to attendees.
As long as you stay in your lane and go along with the program.
Never did a tour in DC. My meetings were shipboard...Striker Board, CAP Board, Mess Caterer in the Chief's Mess and Wardroom, OOD Board, SWO Board, Welfare & Rec, others. The knives came out, to be sure, but we all knew we'd have to live intimately with the outcomes. You don't ever want to be the guy who bullied through a 10 pound block of pimento cheese for the Chief's Mess.
Sadly, this has become true of a great deal of civilian industry as well
Couldn't agree more, except with regard to "...later promoted to 1-star."
The historical record of ~ modern successful military transformations (a heretical concept on the Porch, I know, but one that I hope we can agree does sometimes exist) tells us that the biggest, hardest 'transformations' are usually bought at the price of stars. See: Billy Mitchell, Rickover (yes he wore 4 stars for eternity, but only after his service tried to run him out at O6), Boyd, Beckwith/Marcinko, etc.
Damn it... I've got to remember to stop reading CDR Sal's work anywhere near 5:00 PM... It only makes me want to add another finger to the Knob Creek on the rocks.
Oban on this end
Balvenie Doublewood
The 14 Caribbean cask, is money.
You make it sound like that's a bad thing. An extra finger here or there might add up in the wallet, but it still goes down smooth.
If this was a "surviving your incarceration" post your comment might be misinterpreted.
Yawn. Heard it all before, never seen it work. How about every person working in DOD that has never served go put on a uniform and try to make Midrats out of the pile(s) of BS that DOD serves up?
Phib, you are one of the best salesmen for bourbon the world over… (but don’t give up brother, even if so many of us have).
I'm an Armor guy and the Biden folks have promised me all electric tanks which are gonna save lives because we won't have that vulnerable log tail of fuel trucks.
Personally, I'm waiting for the fusion powered hovertanks with the 20cm powerguns
You do need to tow a M989 trailer behind the tank, carrying the thousand square meters of solar panels you have to assemble at each stop. Or the C32 diesel generator and diesel tank for northern operations. But other than that it will be great.
If Mark Watney could do it alone on another planet, I'm sure our dedicated tank crews can get the job done!
/s should that not be obvious
Don't get the battery compartment wet though:)
Well that may be why us Marines decided to ditch tanks, since they plan on being battery powered LOL
We need the White Mice before we get those, to deal with obstacles.
Me? I am more inclined to expect something low tech, "Shai Dorsai!" Now where is my spring rifle with the thousand round magazine?
How long have I been calling for the deep-sixing of DOD-5000? Fifteen years? Twenty?
Let's think about it...what systems have been fielded in the last twenty-five years that actually delivered results FAST? I can think of four: MQ-1 Predator, MQ-9 Reaper, RQ-4 Global Hawk (ACTD and Block 10), and RQ-4 Global Hawk Maritime Demonstration (later renamed BAMS-D).
All four short-circuited the DOD-5000 process. I was on the DARPA team that did the RQ-4 program - with a specification that was 10 Powerpoint slides. The result was a system that flew less than three years after contract award, delivered battle-deciding ISR capabilities in combat four years later. GHMD? The Navy's team got the airplanes and software (the latter was held up - long story) in late December of 2006. Spent 2007 sorting out operations and dissemination issues, flew wargames in 2008...and some quasi-operational tasking as well. Deployed in January 2009 on a six-month deployment - that ended thirteen years later.
Put a bullet into DOD-5000, and give me a team of bad-tempered veterans from the field activities. We'll make miracles happen.
@HMS Lion. Your namesake was launch before WWI in response to the myriad of problems facing the Royal Navy. Maybe we can learn something from Churchill and Fisher.
The Navy could use a Fisher, but he's a once-in-a-century find. In my considered opinion, the greatest Admiral the RN ever had, perhaps the best ever.
Whenever the Empire was in trouble which was always. - heroes always arose - Nelson, Beatty, Mountbatten etc. We seem to be short on heroes and long on flags worried about those corporate board seats and CNN gigs.
To GOFOs encamped on the Potomac, heroes are some kind of weird sandwich that doesn't pair well with their cocktails. https://media.tenor.com/40e65kLvR3IAAAAC/donald-sutherland.gif
Well played:)
Followed a rat hole to a rat hole a week or so ago, from here I think a different movie or artists was mentioned, saw "produced by Mike Curb" and that name rang a bell. All these many years I thought the Mike Curb Congregation was some little Church in Az or SoCal.
Burning Bridges has been a favorite song (perhaps a way of life as well, in retrospect) for 50 years or more since I first saw the movie.
Not easy to work with though. Of course neither was Churchill.
A favorite quote about Admiral King was from his daughter, something like "My father was the most even-tempered man I've ever met. He was always in a rage."
He was a distant relative on my mother's side, as a matter of fact.
I nominate the ESB-3 and subsequent, well, let’s call them the Puller class ships even though USS Puller is the third, as it’s really the subclass definition ship. Those went from PowerPoint to afloat in a remarkably short time, even astonishingly short given new design recent track records. Yes it’s based on something else, but still, metal afloat and reportedly useful enough after the first two. Maybe it’s because they are SOF-centric, so they get to end-run some of the fine levels of review contributed by all those flag staffs.
In the safety business, we kept explaining why a Predator was lost, with a boilerplate quote: this system was not procured thought he normal process (or similar words) because we lost a lot and th unusual procurement path was part of the problem.
Now, did the results we got from Predator justify losing a bunch later (at $4 million each) because they came out kind of half-baked? Yes, they did. So how do you maintain a disciplined system for the standard stuff that we will keep for decades, and short-circuit the system for stuff you need right now for a few years? I guess you have tot rust the humans in charge of programs. Said trust is seemingly in short supply in DC.
So does a ground-launched rocket-boosted Quickstrike-ER air-deployed sea mine qualify as (checks notes) ADA2-worthy? It’s certainly attritable, it flies and then splashes and sinks, so that’s two domains, and it’s autonomous, counting and exploding as programmed. If it got a sat data link that works in flight, that would be THREE domains. And if it could be launched from those box launcher trucks the Marines are getting among others, and we could get thousands of them into theater in a year and a half, that would be a Good Thing Indeed.
Or is it not droney enough, nor made of cardboard?
You had me at air-deployed sea mine...
Not sure if it's NEMESIS capatible but it's probably a better use of the platform than the pea shooter NSM that their supposed to employ.
“Sir, there’s a bunch of PLAN ships heading our way.”
“Okay Gunny. With our antiship rounds we need to wait for them to get close enough so we can shoot at them individually.”
Silent stare from the Gunnery Sergeant.
“Or, we could throw a whole bunch of sea mines along their route of advance, then shoot antiship rounds at them once they get in range.”
“Great idea, sir!”
Most likely scenario is that they don't get the mines, the MLR expends their NSM on D+1 and spend the rest of the war filling sandbags in North Luzon.
Hmm... Sal, this from your pull-quotes of Hicks: "the PRC, has spent the last 20 years building a modern military carefully crafted to blunt the operational advantages we've enjoyed for decades."
.
Okay, yes... But left unsaid is that the PRC has spent the past 40+ years building out a modern, world-class, every-element-of-the-periodic-table, top-to-bottom, energy-industrial complex, from which to craft its military. Because (copybook heading, here): "Military Power Is the Absolute and Unalterable First Derivative of Industrial Power."
.
And deindustrialized nations do not remain military powers for long; a generation or two to burn down the legacy capabilities. Closer to pierside, nations without a broad, deep, innovative, reactive shipbuilding industry do not long remain naval powers; a point too evident to belabor here.
.
And out of that talk, I detect a Full-Strength Kool Aid-level commitment to the hardline, Biden admin Climate Change agenda, viscerally anti-oil/fossil fuels. If nothing else, there's that cringeworthy line about "distributed pods of self-propelled ADA2 systems afloat, powered by the sun and other virtually-limitless resources, packed with sensors aplenty..."
.
Oh, goody! Win the war with solar-powered sailboats. Dissuade. Deter. Detect. Defend. Defeat. With windmills and solar panels. Or something like that, right?
"But left unsaid is that the PRC has spent the past 40+ years building out a modern, world-class, every-element-of-the-periodic-table, top-to-bottom, energy-industrial complex, from which to craft its military."
Byron, all good points, but that's the money shot. We've spent the same 40 years destroying our industrial capacity and embracing a service-supreme economy.
Well, the Chinese paid a full $12 million for the Kaiser steel mill. And about that for the Geneva Steel mill.
I was almost catalyzed to weep at reading Hick's "...systems afloat, powered by the sun...".
Careful; somebody will grant 100 mil to investigate ships that run on tears
Cheaper to send a few of us back to sea on an LCS as E-2 Messcooks, stuff us with starchy food, put us on Mando PT for being in excess of 22%BF and then give the order to ♫ Cry me a river ♪. Get the 5'3" tall MA1 to taunt me and poke me with a nightstick and I'd blubber like a baby with an ass rash.
lol
What would Bill Knudson do?
In 1979, maybe get to work. Now? Far more challenging an environment to rebuild not just the infrastructure but the sense that infrastructure and industrial capability and achievement are important.
Calling BS on this to tough to build/rebuild crap. It’s the same environment it’s just the defeatist mindset that is different. In 20 years the US has deployed millions nodes of 2G, 2.5G, 3G. 3G+, 4G, 5G cells.
These took complex engineering and major civil construction and technical deployment effort across everything from
Blue collar to white collar to cutting edge r&d.
We still retain those with the muscle memory and can do know how.
Don’t get me started in the speed and breadth of Fiber and Broadband development and deployment. Most started the new Century with dial up and limited broadband (isdn & t1 lines).
So BS on our ability to do what is needed.
Well your point regarding 5G rollout is well taken but shipyards are few in number (obviously self-evident) and they determine where hulls get built. We neglected developing a skilled workforce because the Navy communicated an demand signal the came and went like the tide. What demand signal did we give the shipbuilding industry to pursue capital investments and workforce development that removed the risk of a choking on sunk costs that they wouldn't eventually recover?
Close friend of 50 years has been involved in building at lot of towers for telecom. WE have excelled there, but it's different than large-capacity steel and ship building. To an extent I include telecom in service industry infrastructure. We can talk/write/read/view a heck of a lot more, but to what end?
Also, every engineer I know including me has had trouble with new talent. Many (not all of course, but many) coming out of college are woefully untrained, although they do know their pronouns, so there is that.
While we exist in the over 40 realm, the majority of the under 40 crowd are not showing can do, and many never developed muscle memory or know how.
I do not like bringing the black pill, but that is what I see. Were I leading men at the moment I would certainly adopt a different tone, but I am not on this board.
Besides, I come here for you guys to cheer me up! :)
Laugh and tell them they're on their own.
Our only hope is the Chinese have their analog equivalents of Kathleen Hicks and her ilk screwing up their procurement.
but they can put a bullet behind an ear of the failures. It tends to focus energies...
Here? We promote you.
"Emperor Elon, First of His Name" I needed that chuckle.
As someone put on X, looking to see if he buys Himalayan real estate and invests heavily in biotechnology.
Would that the proportions were reversed.
Sigh...yes.
Did anybody else get severe SkyNet vibes from ADA2?
How many more painful lessons are we going to get served up by the priesthood of the Eternal Church of Transformational Acronyms? Escalate complexity... but at an "attributable" price point? Achieve overmatch in 18 to 24 months because that's a length of time that is not too hot... not to cold... it's just right. Now I'm going to pour 3 fingers of bourbon.
Well, in all seriousness. They don't know what they don't know, and they won't know what they dont know until it's too late. Until then we will spin our wheels like the characters in a satirical Clarke or Heinlein short story, or the adults come back in the room. My bet is on the short story.
To your point of what they don't know? How about what we do know? There is a heck of a lot we do know about tech that isn't sexy & exotic but it is readily doable now. My bet is that the transformational priesthood with follow their habit of pursuing the exotic at the expense of the unsexy, unconventional and asymmetric that works
That's because they don't know what they don't know!
You know, if we could just get something out on schedule, on time, that worked? The sarcasm would actually drop a few points.
Well they know how to build AB's and VA's but the lack of industrial capacity and workers means on-time and on-schedule is an iffy proposition for some time to come.
While Clarke and Heinlein may have seen our characters, our government was born of Orwell and Huxley.
Huxley was particularly prescient in his later years.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7129979-the-political-merchandisers-appeal-only-to-the-weak-nesses-of-voters
That truly was prescient. Given the technological possibility, seems he would absolutely have predicted campaigning by tweet and sound bite.
18 to 24 months is the timeline before the fit hits the shan. I think DOD is finally realizing that they're running out of time to be ready and this is the Flail-EX to get "ready."
The ECTA leadership have our best interests at heart! Heretic.
Nah... just deeply skeptical.
Another brilliant analysis by Sal! If a Republican gets elected Pres, I suggest Sal for Sal for SECNAV.
Only if he gets to hand select his opnav staff...
Me! Me! Me! (raises hand excitedly)
Only if you're empowered to make unilateral decisions, allowed to physically break heads, end careers, and publicly humiliate those who have earned the disapprobation should you consider the position.
Regardless who is selected to be our president I think that would be an excellent choice.