[paulz_]

I have no knowledge of this field. Certainly not enough to know if the article is accurate (haven't ever heard of this blog till now). But many of the claims seem well cited.

If this is true...how maddening. How can you spend more than the next 10 countries combined and still mismanage your way into this predicament? Is there anything lumbering bureaucracy cannot destroy?

[AussieWog93]

There's a dead reply to this original comment that reads: "I also liked this article but then remembered the F-35 and have a super hard time thinking we need more investment. Blame the bureaucrats all you want (I'm with you), but I'm no longer sure we even know how make the right things."

I think he makes a fair point. It's not just the bureaucrats. At least in the civilian space, we don't know how to make the right things any more. The ambitiousness of new projects as well as the quality of consumer goods have both been in decline for decades.

In the military space, the deliberate undermining of field serviceability in order to secure more profitable maintenance contracts is a genuine security risk to the entire democratic world.

Given the amount of blatant corruption in the industry (look at the Halliburton contracts in Iraq for a recent example), it is more complex than simply "increase the budget". The fact that private industry in China serves the interest of the government (and not vice-versa) is a massive advantage they hold over us.

[nemothekid]

> I think he makes a fair point. It's not just the bureaucrats. At least in the civilian space, we don't know how to make the right things any more. The ambitiousness of new projects as well as the quality of consumer goods have both been in decline for decades.

I don’t think it’s something that was lost. Rather, as time went one, more and more focus went into financialization of these firms to the detriment of providing people with actual stable jobs and growth. Every industry other than software is pretty much unattractive for anyone talented. Why would you slave away at Boeing making maybe 75k when you can make almost triple that at Facebook?

I make the comparison to software because even though we, the hacker news reader & software guru, complain about boneheaded product decisions from Google; American software is just a leagues better than the rest of world (even if it’s in ways we don’t like, like Surveillance). This level of quality is driven by motivated individuals with great incentives, respected by peers and somewhat clear career paths driven by launching great products.

Contrast that with the 737MAX, which engineers knew they were building a clown car and felt powerless to do anything about it. Not to say that FAANG doesn’t have internal power struggles, but the 737 is Boeing’s baby at the largest aeronautics company in the world. I doubt you would see similar dysfunction on Google’s AdWords team.

While the CCP is able to completely bend private industry, I don’t think it requires an authoritarian government, but I have no solutions. In the case of Halliburton, it’s unsurprising that when you focus on figuring out how siphon government funds into the pockets of executives while doing the bare minimum to deliver on product you end up with crippled infrastructure 20 years later. It’s not that we forgot how to make things right, we simply never invested the resources to do things right at all

[torstenvl]

I'm not going to claim that everything in the DoD is well-managed, but don't discount the advantages China has in gaining more advantages. The PLA never has to cut its budget due to a lack of political will, and China has no qualms about riskier espionage that may get more agents killed or captured but results in being able to steal more advancements in military tech.

[refenestrator]

'Lack of political will to shovel money through the DoD' doesn't seem to be an issue in the US.

[torstenvl]

That is objectively and obviously false. Why would you say something you know (assuming you read the OP) to be untrue?

Military spending has gone from 4.89% of GDP in the first year of the Obama Administration to ~3.3-3.4% of GDP in recent years. That's a huge decrease.

There's also alllll the times that military appropriations have been a political football. A lot of DoD folks have had to report to work unpaid multiple times over the past couple years. Many of them later got backpay when a budget was passed, but not all.

You may not care about the morale and dedication of those people, but this isn't a values-based or tribal-loyalties based discussion. It is an objective fact that China doesn't have to deal with this process and the resulting inefficiencies.

[refenestrator]

It's gone way, way up in dollar terms over that time frame, in a low-inflation economy. Abrams tanks aren't billed by '% of GDP'.

I'm not questioning anyone's morale or dedication, but I AM questioning competence at the top levels when it comes to spending all that money wisely. You can blame 'political footballs' for some of that but there are plenty of failures where the military and their contractors have straight squandered fortunes. And it's not because of "too much democracy", it was after the money was allocated to a purely military-contractor relationship where nobody's voting on anything.

[torstenvl]

> It's gone way, way up in dollar terms over that time frame, in a low-inflation economy. Abrams tanks aren't billed by '% of GDP'.

Something costing a constant or decreasing percentage of GDP, but going up in dollar terms, is indicative of inflation.

    Year   Budg $bn   Budg/GDP   YOY Infl   Budg $bn ('21)
    ----   --------   --------   --------   --------------
    2009     705.9      4.89%      --           865.4
    2010     738.0      4.92%      1.6%         890.2
    2011     752.3      4.84%      3.2%         879.6
    2012     725.2      4.48%      2.1%         830.8
    2013     679.2      4.05%      1.5%         766.8
    2014     647.8      3.70%      1.6%         719.7
    2015     633.8      3.48%      0.1%         703.3
    2016     639.9      3.42%      1.3%         701.2
    2017     646.8      3.31%      2.1%         694.0
    2018     682.5      3.32%      2.4%         714.9
    2019     731.8      3.41%      1.8%         752.9

Within a decade, the budget varied so greatly that there was a 22% difference between the high and the low in real terms. When you have drastic budget cuts, you have to cut projects. Those projects can't just be picked up again where you left off when you get more money - contractors will have moved on, and in most cases the new contracts need to be re-competed.

These are structural disadvantages we as Americans place on our own military, and from which the PLA does not suffer.

Data from:

- https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/mili...

- https://www.statista.com/statistics/191077/inflation-rate-in...

- https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

[refenestrator]

I appreciate the data, especially the real $ pulled forward from 2009.

My impression was the drop-off from 2009-2013 was all about reducing investment in Iraq and Afghanistan rather than cancelling super promising projects. Do you have an example of a great project that was cancelled? I know we reduced our order of F-22s but that was concurrent with a way bigger, splashier investment in F-35s so I'd call that 'bad priorities' rather than 'lack of resources'.

I'd say that the PLA's big advantage was not invading Iraq. I almost added something about a lot of our defense spending being glorified jobs programs but I'm pretty sure that's also true over there too, just with a differently-shaped politics driving it.

[AnimalMuppet]

Your point would stand on its own just fine without the accusation. Even if your data is correct, refenestrator may not know that data. Don't make accusations like that unless you know (like, provably) that he knows it.

[pseudo0]

> There's also alllll the times that military appropriations have been a political football. A lot of DoD folks have had to report to work unpaid multiple times over the past couple years. Many of them later got backpay when a budget was passed, but not all.

GEFTA (signed into law in 2019) guarantees retroactive pay for furloughs due to lapses in appropriations. Before that, anyone exempted who still had to show up was guaranteed pay, and Congress would virtually always still backpay the people who were furloughed. It wasn't legally guaranteed, but I can't think of any cases in the last 10-20 years where retroactive pay didn't happen.

It's still pretty disruptive though, and it definitely sucks for contractors if they get sent home, as they don't get retroactive pay.

[zambon12]

While opionated Christian Brose's 'The Kill Chain' was an enlightening read for me. Interested if you have read it?

[toiletfuneral]

I also liked this article but then remembered the F-35 and have a super hard time thinking we need more investment. Blame the bureaucrats all you want (I'm with you), but I'm no longer sure we even know how make the right things.