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A Texas defense contracting operation moving fast and breaking shit? I guess this is pretty relevant to me.
I started your post thinking most of your observations were correct, but the more I read, the more convinced I was that you’ve missed the forest for the trees. I’m going to argue that our MIC has been too disciplined over the last twenty-odd years. What we’re seeing now is whiplash.
But first, a few comments.
If you find this surprising or disqualifying, you don’t understand corporate structure. No matter who comes up with an idea, at some point, finance has to sign off on this kind of expansion. This is more a matter of pragmatism than regulation: most engineers do not want to spend their time on budgets and accounting. We hire specialists.
If you want to suggest that he hired a Turkish contractor out of racial kinship bias, say it. Then put in the work to actually defend it, because this mealy-mouthed aside isn’t enough. I guess the source article does the same thing. But I digress.
Slashing the red tape, skipping the wait times, greenlighting lenient deals—none of that inspired any competition? No, the Army was authorized to throw money around without a competitive process. There’s the first problem.
Setting aside any journalistic bias (though I do wonder if ProPublica is as credible here as on abortion), these are embarrassing. Inexcusable. People lose their jobs over less. They might well have lost some here; I don’t think we’d hear about it below Gezen’s level.
You’ve got it backwards. Clusterfucks like this factory exist because the MIC has been obsessed with discipline. Since the war in Iraq, we’ve favored low-volume, high-tech “exquisite” solutions with long development cycles. It wasn’t like the Afghans were going to leapfrog us, right? Low-rate production fit our low-intensity conflicts.
Trying to scale that to the levels needed for Ukraine, let alone China, led the government to wildly overcorrect. Letting the Army issue UCAs is a high-variance strategy. Spend too much money and hope that some of it pays off.
ProPublica says it’s still in effect. I agree. Our business development teams get excited about OTAs and follow-on contracts. If we pitched something that could be assembled in a year, no matter how stupid, I suspect we’d see funding. The whole industry is operating with a sort of frenzied growth mindset. Build it and they will come.
Ahahahahahahahahahaa! Every one of these fields is also full of grifters and incompetents. There’s more competition, so sometimes the rentiers get forced out. But GD is an aircraft and tank producer, too. It is vast, it contains multitudes.
So how do we fix it? Arguably, we don’t: this will at some point get us more military production, if not from this assembly line. I think that’s dumb and inefficient, and we have a duty to handle it better. For pure production, that probably means monopoly-busting. Running a high-variance strategy with one competitor is stupid. GD needs to feel like a rival will eat their lunch.
I also agree that there should be serious consequences for this particular incident. Gezen’s possible forced retirement isn’t enough. If nothing else, switching to an AI buzzword startup should have lost them the contract. I have no way of knowing if GD bought the hype, if the government did, or if nobody actually wants AI artillery shells but it’s too expensive to fire them. It sucks.
This may be true, but I suspect we’re closer to justice than anarchy. I’m not convinced that there’s some weird hack which only keeps the useful parts of law.
I…what? Which is it? Do you want a command economy or not? I get the impression you’re envisioning a sort of Randian nationalism, where the patriots Just Do Things and everybody else recognizes their innate greatness. Kind of like you mentioned in the Afghanistan section, where
Jesus Christ. How would that have helped at all? More importantly, how do you distinguish between the patriotic, the misled, the stupid?
If your theory relies on hindsight, it’s not a workable theory.
Yeah, US corporate structure is not optimal. Better engineers running engineering projects than finance tricksters. It's not that hard to learn the mathematics, they could pick it up.
Aerospace is actually hard. Shells are not hard. Why is there any need for high-risk acquisition processes? This should be really easy. It's not low-rate production of a guided missile with rocketry and guidance, it's boring high explosive shells.
The US is supposed to be a serious industrial power, this is a simple industrial task.
I think people working in high-ranking, decisionmaking parts of the military-industrial complex should be patriotic and love their country more than money. There should be selection processes in that direction, instead it's 'how smarmy and snake-like can your monopolistic business tactics and contractual manipulation possibly be'.
Excessive greed is why the 'discipline' that the US MIC seems to obsess over consists of cutting costs and production output, producing a tiny quantity of high-end weapons. They should've been more responsible and retained production. In Iraq in the 2000s the US had to import small arms ammunition because they somehow lost the capacity to supply a relatively small war, even with a huge civilian arms sector.
Somehow Russia managed to keep more shell production than America, despite going through a complete political, economic and societal collapse in the 90s. Somehow they managed to avoid selling off all those shell factories and tools in the 1990s. Corruption-ridden Russia had a law mandating that enterprise directors retain in full volume the mobilization capacities decreed for the USSR. Otherwise 5-10 years in prison. They actually had some semblance of the discipline I'm calling for, while the US lacks it.
It's pretty simple as an idea.
Hindsight doesn't come into it. There were secret reports showing that the war was lost early on. Senior officers knew that it was lost. It was pretty obviously lost, ordinary people could discern that by the mid-2010s provided they were independent thinkers and didn't watch too much television. The 'lessons learned' report showed a litany of damning farce and that got published in 2019 only by FOI requests.
There was no shortage of information earlier on about how shoddy, treacherous, corrupt and drug-addled the ANA was, only a shortage of honesty.
You’re telling me that we can fix our corrupt, inefficient corporate incentives by…imitating Russia?
But only the good parts, I assume. The ones where you jail your businessmen if they don’t meet quotas set in 1991. Also, all of them need to be engineers, because having too much knowledge of finance turns you into a greedy trickster.
Yeah, the Soviets had a long history with this management style. Ours is better.
Consider that the Army did, in fact, decide its 155mm production was fine until the shooting started in Ukraine. Could they have been, and I know this is outlandish, right? If turning up production went as smoothly as you expected, would it actually have been “responsible” to demand 80s level production for 30 years of low-intensity conflicts?
Or maybe they knew it would be hard. Maybe they, as serious America-haters, decided to cripple an essential war industry. If only there were a strong, patriotic individual with the foresight to demand more 155mm. Need drones? Nope, the law says 155. Pivot to naval production? Nope, I’m not going to prison for that.
It’s a batshit insane model of procurement which would have avoided this problem at tremendous cost. I don’t think you understand procurement, project management, or engineering. As dumb as this Turkish contractor was, I expect you’d have done worse.
One of the tradeoffs in government project management is that if you loosen up procedure, you can move with greater speed and agility (and spend less money navigating bureaucracy) but you also increase the risk of embarrassing fuckups. Whereas if you stick to the normal procedure, everything takes forever (which adds costs), but you get fewer headlines about how some inept contractor failed to deliver in some comical fashion.
Of course, you can never foreclose the possibility of embarrassing fuckups (especially with how poorly aligned incentives are) and it's entirely possible to do both at once. In my little corner of the federal contracting world, we threw out the rulebook and are presently paying through the nose for a facilitating/coordinating contractor that has no idea what it is doing and hasn't even sped things up significantly.
As the kids say: many such cases.
Our customers are signaling the same thing. Visible lack of interest in existing R&D contracts. It’s always “what can you demo within a year?” or “how fast does this enter production?” If someone, even a sketchy startup, gave them a pitch for X units starting in 8 months, I suspect they’d throw money at it.
That hasn’t been very effective for something as complex as my product. Apparently, it’s not even that effective on shells, which are harder than the OP thinks, but at least have clearly defined requirements. I bet there are a couple dozen other contractors in various states of panic as they try to make good on promising the moon.
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How arrogant can you be to see a second-rate great power outproducing America in something as simple as shells? Not just outproducing America but making more shells than the entire Western bloc? All that corruption and they're still ahead?
And then decide 'no we aren't doing anything wrong, we have nothing to learn from Russia.' Guess what, there are always things to learn from other countries. Especially if they're outperforming you with fewer resources.
Wow, I didn't realize drones or 'naval production' were made in the same factory as 155mm... Obviously keeping shell factories that already there to enable production surges is just too radical of an idea, we needed to sell the tooling and shut them down to save a few pennies. So true!
They were dumb and wrong. This is obvious, we can see it in how they suddenly realized they needed shells. Serious ground wars need lots of shells. That's not a mysterious secret, we've known this since WW1. The cost of keeping production infrastructure for shells is tiny compared to the cost of not having shells when they're needed.
Seeing as the US loves hiring random, totally inexperienced AI fans to run these shell factories, maybe I will be the next contractor - if I brush up on my powerpoint slides, buzzwords and kickbacks. What a great system!
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Isn't that the snag? If what prevented public opinion from pressuring the government to end the war was not a lack of information, but simply biased focus in the media, additional leaked memos wouldn't have helped unless they got picked up by mainstream media. And you need more than conscientious anonymous generals for that.
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I'm a little cautious about stating anything too specific given ProPublica's involvement (and, more notably, that Biden shows up twice in an article about an award in 2022, while Trump shows up seven times). That said...
The macroscale industrial problems look pretty bad and I can't come up with an alternative explanation, but a lot of the individual stuff -- especially conveyors, but maybe the smaller fires and interlock failures -- could be pretty plausible teething issues... if they were small number incidents. Absolutely unacceptable in a final assembly plant, but you'd be amazed how easily shit gets everywhere in these environments; it's very much an exercise in directing it.
Of course, they might have been repeated and recurring, given that the timeline looks like several months or issues.
There's a couple stop-work orders, and given the scale and timeline involved that's usually in the tens of jobs, albeit probably lower on the totem pole.
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I'm sure you know Texan business, but I know Turkish business, and I would want journalists (or the FBI) to take a serious look at the decision to use Repkon. Gezen being a US-born citizen, I'll suspend judgment, but in this sort of area in Turkey, corruption is the null hypothesis.
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I'd generally agree with this, with a nod to history as well. When countries start to mobilize their military industrial bases for war / ramp up, the general balance of 'cost vs speed vs quality' gets upended. You are lucky to consistently get one and sometimes two of those inn peacetime, but then it's fortunate to get even one as the money race begins. Between corruption, inexperience, and incompetence amongst all the new blood chasing the new money, process quality often goes down.
This is normal, and predictable, and possibly even unavoidable in same way that accidents happen if you bring enough teenage boys and girls together without sufficient supervision. You can find tales of procurement corruption in American history (feel free to laugh at the American Civil War), the most militarized police states (see the Nazi war econnomy), and state-command economies (see China metal production in the great leap forward period... and quality scandals over the last few decades). None of this predictability makes it a non-issue or 'acceptable,' but it's not exactly uniquely ruinous, or unique in any real sense.
But really, one of the nice things about a relatively free media ecosystem is how such media environments provide almost free quality-control prods for public awareness. It's rarely the countries with easily pointable corruption scandals that do worse, despite having more stories. It's the countries where the corruption scandals are rarer because the corruption isn't brought to light, or even crime against the state actors to do so.
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I think there's an important distinction between the Army being authorized to throw money around without a competitive process and the Army being instructed to. I think a lot more of the blame from this lies on the civilian side than the Army side, with the latter primarily being the designated scapegoats and Army leadership accepting that designation as part of their duty.
I’m inclined to agree, with a caveat that nobody at the Army probably expected consequences. So far, they’ve been correct.
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