The same was done the Canadian Avro Arrow plane, and the British Black Knight rocket. What happens once you join government, they take away your brains?
The government doesn't have consistent communication between and even within departments, that's all really. There is no holistic understanding of things, it's just a conglomerate of BoundedContexts without good interfaces to talk to each other.
I mean if instead of discussing a topic freely on HN you were supposed to share your information using some I-1969 standard form with sections of one word answers, how many compelling and sensible posts would we usually see.
F-14 as well. In all of those cases, it was decided that the cost to secure and account for the tooling to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands was more than they wanted to spend.
How smart people behave depends a lot of context and incentives.
Many people are reasonable shrewd with their own money, and about stuff that directly impacts them. But people in charge of government organisations often have very different incentives and concerns.
(Other big organisations in the private sector can also go haywire. Especially when the threat from competition is low.)
The Avro Arrow being destroyed is a meme in Canada, but there's a lot of questions at least in the historical community on whether that was a blessing in disguise. The state of the art was rapidly moving away from bombers coming over the North Pole (which an interceptor like the Avro Arrow) which would have rendered a fleet of Arrows expensive and useless.
That being said, it destroyed a large part of the Canadian aeronautical industry since Avro ceased operations soon after and the well trained workforce was scattered to the States. There's a long history of Canadian governments doing shortsighted things like killing industries and then paying out of the nose to try to restart the industry every generation/ See shipbuilding in Canada and how Canada can't build ships for its own navy now, despite being one of the largest shipbuilders in the world in the early 20th century.
With a globalized economy, does it make sense for every country to have a manufacturing base for every industry? Especially for a country with small/moderately sized population like Canada?
I agree though, the government has been short sighted and procurement of ships, planes has been a debacle for years. It seems that either way a lot of money is going to be burnt, either by propping up a non-competitive industry locally, or burnt buying something insanely expensive like F-35s from an ally.
For critical defense needs, likely. If you can't meet those needs you are beholden to the people who can, and they may not have your best interests in mind.
The Avro Arrow and Black Knight were just prototypes whose movement into production could only be justified for nationalistic reasons. They did not have a proven track record or offer cost savings. They aren’t comparable to the blackbird at all, and destroying their tooling isn’t comparable either.
Robert McNamara as a deep-cover KGB "illegal", there's an 80s espionage potboiler I'd love to read. I'm honestly a little surprised no one actually wrote it.
I mean if instead of discussing a topic freely on HN you were supposed to share your information using some I-1969 standard form with sections of one word answers, how many compelling and sensible posts would we usually see.