One of my best buddies is a mid-level exec at Boeing/Lockheed/Northrop. I just met him a week ago and we had a discussion about the utter waste of Tax Payer dollars in these companies. He was getting compensation beyond his contributions (par for the course in large corporations), but his job was to make sure billable hours continue to exceed the budget - like a boiling frog, projects continue to get delayed bit-by-bit and after 10 years you realize that your program is 3x over budget (F-35 Program?).
I want SV/Texas enterpreneurship to completely dismantle the MIC and start afresh. Even if you disagree with defense applications and its ramifications, simply from ROI perspective (tax payer dollars), instead of increasing military budget, we should be asking how can we do more with current budget. Or even cut down the budget and expect 2x more productivity from these fat military contractors with moats like no other.
> Yeah, that's just what we need, Tech company's approach to defense.
> "Hey the missile doesn't work in v1, but we still shipped it"
Yes, that’s how we won WWII: we shipped prototypes based on the new ideas, and improved them based on the lessons from the field. In war, stakes are higher, and you can’t always afford to delay for a long time to ship perfect product: by the time it arrives, the war might already be lost.
This is one end of the extreme, the other is spaceX.
New tech companies are very capable of iterating quickly and producing well tested reliable hardware far better than existing versions of it.
An extreme but absolutely relevant and potentially devastating example of the current system is the F-35.
They did not "iterate," SpaceX, from the start, had a very senior engineering team which they got on a wave of layoffs in aerospace undustry, and NASA basically doing their V1 work.
SpaceX has absolute massively iterated in every single thing they do, what the heck are you talking about? The Falcon 9 more than doubled it's payload from v1.0 to FT Block 5, and gained first stage landing/reusability through a host of iterative improvements. Starship's development has been all about hardware rich iteration with plans to enable it right down to the basic material level. They've been big on MVPs and then iterating from there.
Not really a convincing argument. Had most of those engineers worked on reusable rockets before? It's like saying stripe, netflix, uber, or Facebook did nothing new because their software engineers had written software before. No one is suggesting that the company needs to compromise of novices in the field, only that they are a new aggressive organization that seeks to upset the status qou.
The discipline for program management on the government side is shit and as a result contractors can be too. Some in a malicious or wasteful way. SV startups don’t operate with that mindset (during their scrappy phase). It’s just two ends of the spectrum. There is opportunity it’s just not going to produce these headlines.
I want SV/Texas enterpreneurship to completely dismantle the MIC and start afresh. Even if you disagree with defense applications and its ramifications, simply from ROI perspective (tax payer dollars), instead of increasing military budget, we should be asking how can we do more with current budget. Or even cut down the budget and expect 2x more productivity from these fat military contractors with moats like no other.