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by maxerickson 3218 days ago
The snag is funding. The level of resources they have is inadequate for the mission they are carrying out.
3 comments

I understand that it looks this way, but in my experience, human time is EXPENSIVE. Even a low pay grade soldier/sailor costs us a lot in benefits, insurance, medical, support, etc.

That cost may be coming from a different bucket and thus not visible to the folks who decide whether to invest $X in a systems upgrade, but in the grand scheme of things, getting humans to do the job that machines today do well is a big waste.

When you hear arguments that a badge reader is expensive and instead we will just put two soldiers at this or that door (24x7, btw) and no one jumps and calls BS on it, it is a strong indication of a broken system.

That's hard to believe, considering how much the US spends on the military.
The ships are understaffed (see the discussion here about people having 16+ hours of duty per 24 hours) and under maintained.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15120636

Add crew and duty hours would go down. Reduce hours of operations and maintenance would be better. More crew obviously costs more. Reducing hours of operation means a smaller mission or more ships.

Crashing and repairing ships is expensive, too :-P