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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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