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Bryan,
This is an excellent, well written and well thought out piece. I'm probably 90% +/- in agreement with you.
Where I differ has to do with degrees and with my own experience.
I've never so much as set foot in a shipyard or dealt with shipbuilding. I cannot speak to how accurate your depiction of that process is, so I accept your assess…
Bryan,
This is an excellent, well written and well thought out piece. I'm probably 90% +/- in agreement with you.
Where I differ has to do with degrees and with my own experience.
I've never so much as set foot in a shipyard or dealt with shipbuilding. I cannot speak to how accurate your depiction of that process is, so I accept your assessment as true from your perspective.
I did spend my first 15 years after the Marine Corps as (mostly) a contractor in the Intelligence Community, which is, for the most part, served by the same defense - industrial complex.
And what I found there, almost without exception, was that former military officers and senior civilians working as junior and senior executives in those defense firms were more than capable of rationalizing nearly any action if it drove profits and their personal stock holdings.
They smelled 'wealth', and they wanted more. It wasn't enough to be successful. They wanted to be rich. And as a result, they would sell literally anything to the government, for whatever price they could get away with.
This was, to be certain, during the heyday of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the largesse of GWOT spending.
But I routinely observed former flag officers turned senior executives at these defense firms earn 7 figure paychecks for nothing more than serving as a go-between. It was all about 'getting the in'.
You might see that as how the system works. I saw all those salaries and knew that every one of those meant the baseline costs of programs that warfighters needed were being padded to pay those former flag officers exorbitant salaries or fees.
I also saw these firms routinely sell equipment, software, or other capabilities they KNEW were outdated or broken, or would never be used for operational reasons. They did this because the personnel on the government side lacked the expertise or knowledge to recognize that they were buying the wrong things, in the wrong way.
Procurement processes rarely get effective input on both how a system should be designed as well as how it should be used, and if it is even the right tool for the job.
I was nearly fired once for telling a government POC that what he was trying to buy from my firm was the wrong thing, and that he needed to re-baseline the requirement and get it right first.
And in the IC, it is far worse due to the lack of transparency.
I look to the Defense Industrial Complex (no questions as to why we never use an acronym for that ) for shipbuilding, and I see a lack of willingness to preemptively solve problems.
You make more money selling exactly what the Navy says it wants and then fixing it later.
That sounded like a rant. Believe me when I say that I still value the system I'm pointing out that I think many people, especially those who see the system from what I would describe as a 'top-down' optic, probably miss a lot of the problems that COULD be solved.
I will close by pointing out that there are some critical differences between what we have now and the private industry that won WW2 and the Cold War.
The most important of these is that all the major defense firms are now publicly traded in a market system that has grown exponentially since those earlier times.
Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop, Raytheon and all the rest, are beholden to stock-holders.
Now, I'm a free-enterprise capitalist. I value that system.
But our modern market system has moved into crony-capitalism territory. And it has shifted public ownership away from private individuals to major holding companies and funds.
We have almost no idea how much of our nations defense firms are actually owned by foreign interests.
It is possible - and even probable - that a significant minority of that ownership AND INFLUENCE comes from our adversaries.
Taken together, those factors inhibit our defense complex from making long-term choices in the nations interests, over short term gains focused less on actual reasonable profit and more on driving pumps in the stock price, because that's how all the executives -even those former flag officers - make their real money.
So, not a disagreement, so much as a 'this is also true, and we need to consider both sides of this coin' argument.
Cheers.
You get it. Like how could the Navy not have understood their mission module weights for LCS were wrong and that the fuel consumption rate of the engines and speed it would generate didn't jive with the range requirement based on the tankage available.
Then we see some former military make a start up, buy a booth at SNA and then poof, are on the cover of USNI a few weeks later as the poster child for yet another new USV program.
Or how could SAIC/BAE sit there and propose, sell and drag out production and modification of the ACV, when anyone who bothered to look at even the most high-level war-planning could see that it was never going to be able to be used for it's intended purpose.
A high-tech, very capable, USELESS tool. We will make plenty of pretty videos of Marines charging ashore in training simulations, and I'm sure we will deploy them somewhere in another pointless brush-war, but it will NEVER be used to assault a defended position from the sea.
See my recent analysis (shameless plug, I know)
https://barretttheprivateer.substack.com/p/sorry-sir-we-cant-do-that
"No one told me there'd be math involved"! How many officers like my friends son; was going to be a nuke, now a SWO. He entered engineering at OSU, but switched to International Relations. So not a nuke officer.
I'm not surprised. I was an enlisted nuke for 6 years out of high school, it was absolutely terrible duty. For all the big talk, it's a total bottom-of-the-barrel job series. On the Facebook group of my old shippies, we had a survey. 80% of us were 6 and out. Another 16% re-enlisted STAR and got out after 8 years. That means damn few actually made it a career. At sea, I made $1.83/hour (in 1995 dollars). With that pay and being treated like total garbage (constantly being sold-out by your own chiefs' mess), you're not going to retain anybody that way. For a bunch of guys that are supposedly hard to recruit and valuable to retain, the Navy sure treated us like a bunch of dime-a-dozen guys. That's why nearly all of us moved on to become civilian engineers. My old carrier has become the death-ship. There was a lot of talk for a couple of months but it has returned to status-quo now. 10 suicides a year really doesn't bother the higher-ups, I guess. The only reason anything pinged the Pentagon was that we had 3 in the same week in mid-2022. Do people really think that incoming recruits, especially officer candidates, don't see this?
"I will close by pointing out that there are some critical differences between what we have now and the private industry that won WW2 and the Cold War."
This is a topic that I frequently think about these days. I am not confident that American multinationals will support the United States in the event of a war with China. If they believe there is more to be made in holding back or playing both sides, they will do that. The Gilded Age had its issues, but you could generally be confident that the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Fords, and Carnegies would support the United States during a major war.
A good example of the above is Nvidia - a cutting-edge tech company that makes a lot of money off the Chinese market. The US placed restrictions on microchip exports to China. So, what does Nvidia do? They alter their microchips to fall just below the export control threshold so they can continue selling to the Chinese. I worry we will see this play out across multiple sectors in the event of a conflict.
I am not confident that American multinationals will support the United States in the event the sun comes up tomorrow
Hit the nail on the head. The amount of bloat and redundancy in the IC is mind boggling. So many IC agency billets are just jobs programs for retired mil officers/NCO's.
3 of the 6 wealthiest counties in America are in the DC area. It's not because it's a naturally beautiful area (if you think it is, please travel west of the Mississippi). It's because that's where the money is. And alot of it is in the MIC, there for the taking.
Well, in my defense, I live in one of those counties, in the rural western exurbs, and it is quite beautiful.
I'd still rather be back in Texas, but wife was having none of it and the paycheck is here.
No personal attack intended. With DMV salaries what they are, many of us are in the same position.
All good! Just laughin' at the reality.
I'm the po' folk out in Loudoun. Everyone around me owns horses, and horses eat money.
I have chickens and goats for fun and because store bought eggs taste like shit.