The Rising Cost Of Weapons & War

nietzschefan said:
Nonsense. The military will probably rely more on technology and hardware if there is cutbacks in manpower.
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Not likely. Today's Military and our Government (FBI, CIA, Commerce etc.) are reluctant to take chances on new technology...we know, we tried that and keep going back to the old boys network (like Lockheed Martin) to get crap over and over.
 
kmguru said:
Not likely. Today's Military and our Government (FBI, CIA, Commerce etc.) are reluctant to take chances on new technology...we know, we tried that and keep going back to the old boys network (like Lockheed Martin) to get crap over and over.
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Then you are screwed.
 
kmguru said:
are reluctant to take chances on new technology...we know,
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The exact opposite is true. The USM is the utterly obsessed with the newest techniques and technology.

The Army's Delta Force & AWG as well as the Navy's DEVGRU and the Air Force's 24th STS, all come to mind. And these are just the "tactical" innovations.

As for taking chances on new technology, that's pretty much all the USAF does, though all three branches tend to have the newest piece of technology available.

Can you--for example--name any new or experimental technology which does not make its way into the hands of the US military a good deal before making its way to your hands?

~String
 
superstring01 said:
Can you--for example--name any new or experimental technology which does not make its way into the hands of the US military a good deal before making its way to your hands?
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Yes I can but would not as we are rebidding it to the DoD. I can tell you what did not work. Several year ago we proposed an innovative AI solution to the FBI that was well received by the MIT Research Group (Government Technology Reviewer) to connect the dots for massive counter-terrorism related information over time domain. That was too innovative for them from the question they asked - Has anybody done this before? Well if it was done before, it would not be innovative. Would it? :D

I can not talk about bleeding edge military technologies ( I am too close to them) on an open forum but I can say about civilian technologies such as dynamic modeling of economic intelligence that could have prevented our economic bubbles. The Chinese are using it to their advantage.

Related matter: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/03/AR2010090302200.html
 
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kmguru said:
Yes I can but would not as we are rebidding it to the DoD. I can tell you what did not work. Several year ago we proposed an innovative AI solution to the FBI that was well received by the MIT Research Group (Government Technology Reviewer)
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I can stop you right there. Louis Freeh, who directed the Bureau in the 90's was passionately anti technology. He was not a lone. The upper echelongs of the Bureau had many like him. Audits, after 9/11 showed a drastically under serviced federal agency that had outdated technology. It has taken the better part of the last decade to play catch up from the weird, Luddite thinking that had grown within the Bureah:
Revolutionary Wealth
By Alvin Toffler, Heidi Toffler

A key source of the problem was said to be Louis Freeh, Muller’s predecessor. Reputed to hate computers, Free allowed the bureau to fall farther and farther behind the sniper with a laptop in his car and the FBI’s own Robert Hanssen, a computer geek who just happened to be spying for the KGB.
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The culture that dominated the FBI was weirdly anti-computer or apathetic on it. The culture that dominates the ranks of the military--for better or worse--is obsessed with anything cutting edge. There are numerous independent groups--kept isolated and given varied environments--who are tasked with thinking of the unthinkable and reporting on what the DoD needed to do to prepare for them. Thus you have DoD agencies, dividions and groups like: AWG, 24th STS, Delta Force, DEVGRU, The US Special Operations Command (who's job it is to unify all the creative fighting the AWG, DEVGRU, 24th STS and Delta Force do and write policy on it), The National Security Agency, The Defense Intelligence Agency, The National Reconnaissance Office (who gets to develop, build and manage all the spy satellites), The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, The Defense Threat Reduction Agency, The Operational Test & Evaluation Directorate (who gets the FUN job of thinking, developing and buying the most advanced shit on earth), and The US Strategic Command who gets to manage the space based assets not directly tied to intelligence gathering.

A very different culture than the FBI.

~String
 
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superstring01 said:
A very different culture than the FBI.

~String
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Perhaps. We shall see. I have not had any bad experience yet with the DoD. But our other Government agencies are really Luddites, otherwise, we would not be in this mess!

As to the OP, we do spend too much money compared to our real GDP (based on production not consumption) and revenue that is going sideways from the trend line.

That is very interesting about FBI. Thanks for sharing. One of my NSA friend was nice to say, those FBI people are cowboys! :D
 
kmguru said:
Perhaps. We shall see. I have not had any bad experience yet with the DoD. But our other Government agencies are really Luddites, otherwise, we would not be in this mess!
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Our agencies aren't at fault. They are what we make them. Some are highly efficient. Some are backwards. The ones in the DoD are--by design--technology and innovation driven. Other agencies are a bit slower to change because resisting change is sort of in their makeup.

In the end, each of our government agencies does exactly what they are charged to do. If they don't, it's because we--the people--failed to change their direction.

kmguru said:
That is very interesting about FBI. Thanks for sharing. One of my NSA friend was nice to say, those FBI people are cowboys! :D
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I have a friend who worked as a uniformed officer in Secret Service for four years. He hated it and quit to become a--much higher paid, sadly--district LP manager for JCPenny. He said the agency was the worst run thing he'd ever seen. A million redundancies, wasted payroll all over the place. He worked at the mansion, on the property, sitting around doing nothing all day long. I asked him of the extra payroll and overlapping nonsense would be helpful in the event of a presidential attack and he said, "Yeah, probably, but all we do is sit around waiting for it." Me: "That's sort of the point, no?"

~String
 
superstring01 said:
I asked him of the extra payroll and overlapping nonsense would be helpful in the event of a presidential attack and he said, "Yeah, probably, but all we do is sit around waiting for it." Me: "That's sort of the point, no?"

~String
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Well, they could make life more interesting by giving the SS men/women some interesting work to do like data analysis and collaboration where they are busy and yet productive. But then again - it is the government ...doing the same thing over and over expecting different results...
 
kmguru said:
Well, they could make life more interesting by giving the SS men/women some interesting work to do like data analysis and collaboration where they are busy and yet productive. But then again - it is the government ...doing the same thing over and over expecting different results...
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I don't think you understand. These are uniformed officers who's primary job is to be seen, but not heard. Hundreds of them on duty at a given time, all within fifteen-hundred feet of the White House lawn. Their job is, specifically, to be seen by any would-be attackers. That is: stand around the Mansion, watch the entrances, check ID's, guard the gates, the lawn, the streets around it, on top of the buildings around it and in cars driving around within a couple blocks of it. That's it. That's all they do. It's all they're supposed to do. They are, literally, meat-blockades, body-shaped warning signs and uniforms to make the area look impenetrable.

In the off chance that something does happen, they usually secure all the visible areas, block traffic, hold down buildings and make the occasional arrest of harmless trespassers.

~String
 
I guess that is even more boring than being a traffic cop. Maybe even more boring than being a tollkeeper. You can't give those guys some other work if you value their alertness as watchers.
 
A dog on a chain...that is sad. May be there is a technology solution like traffic light replacing traffic cops....and automated toll booth...
 
kmguru said:
A dog on a chain...that is sad. May be there is a technology solution like traffic light replacing traffic cops....and automated toll booth...
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They're working on it kmguru. . . they're working on it. Believe me.

ed209.jpg


One day soon!

~String
 
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