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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.
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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