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by nostrademons 934 days ago
The issue with all peacetime weapon systems is that they necessarily have to work within the peacetime procurement system. They become optimized for capturing contracts, not capturing battlefields. Anything that's actually optimized for capturing the battlefield, in the absence of a real battlefield to capture, fails to win the contract and languishes in some bankrupt startup.

Usually the way wars go is that the first 2 years are spent in utter chaos as the belligerents realize that all their plans don't survive contact with the enemy, and then you get rapid technological development, usually from outside firms that were initially part of non-defense industries, once the belligerents actually get serious about winning the war.
1 comments
bluGill 934 days ago
The US has been at war for a long time though. Iraq, Afghanistan, Somali pirates... Ukraine and Israel are some of the proxy wars we have a hand in (how much is up for debate). While what you say is true, weapons do get tested in the field and that wins.
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jjk166 934 days ago
The weapons get tested, but there isn't the existential threat that drives people to actually change their behaviors in response to that data. If the Ukrainians jerry rig a $5k drone to work as well as a $50k missile, the US congress isn't going to cancel their contract for $50k missiles. If we were facing a peer adversary directly though, being able to get 10 times the firepower with the same resources might be a much higher priority.

Further, not everything gets tested when all you're facing are non-peer adversaries. For example the only US Navy ship currently in service that has ever sunk an enemy ship in combat is the USS Constitution, which did so more than 200 years ago.

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nostrademons 934 days ago
Against adversaries whose industrial base and social structures are 200 years behind us. That gives us weapon systems that are adapted to fighting adversaries whose industrial base and social structures are 200 years behind us.

We've been very lucky (in a sense) that ambitious leaders who actually can get technologically-savvy workers to follow them generally prefer to work within the American system and fight over ad clicks, purchases, and management fees rather than physically making war. I'm not all that confident that the U.S. military would win vs. say SpaceX, Amazon, or Google. Moot point as long as it's more profitable to sell things than take things, but we would be very screwed if we fought an adversary with peer-level technology, population, and manufacturing base.

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