And the Cold War ended more than three decades ago, about the time we went from piston aircraft to the teen series jets making up the bulk of US inventory even today. Imagine that there isn't a single engineer today at Boeing who has gone through a clean sheet fighter aircraft development cycle throughout his career.
Boeing and LM, 2 of the biggest manufacturers of aircraft, have spotty reputations.
I'm pretty sure the US gov. is absolutely eager to create more competition of the space.
And honestly at this point the Air Force is handling this much better than the other branches. Despite all the delays and cost overruns on the F-22 and F-35 projects, at least we ended up with really fantastic and capable platforms. The B-21 is also basically on time and budget, which is nice.
Compare that to the Navy's LCS program, a massively expensive clusterfuck with very few redeeming qualities.
The Army is somewhere in the middle.
"At one point the Constellation design shared about 85 percent commonality with the original FREMM design, but the alterations have brought that commonality down to under 15 percent, a person familiar with the changes told USNI News."
https://news.usni.org/2024/04/02/constellation-frigate-deliv...
— Kelly Johnson
Shocking that this quote still rings true a half-century later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Johnson_(engineer)#Kelly...
Which, to be fair to the Navy, is as much Congressional meddling and military procurement seeding--if you stop paying your contractors, they stop being military contractors and the knowledge you'd like walks out the door, which doesn't excuse the LCS program but does explain some of it--as anything else.
When we say that we're bad at procurement in the United States, there's a lot of targets for blame. (I think you're right that the Air Force tends to have the best project execution of the service branches though.)
The Navy builds years-long expensive ships, then sends them halfway around the world under command of someone. It has a structure to facilitate that.
The Army (at best) efficiency organizes a huge amount of people and material, and it deploys and sustains it wherever needed. It has a structure to facilitate that.
The Air Force procures, operates, and sustains the most technical platforms. So it's gotten halfway decent at doing that, or at least learned some lessons from repeated mistakes. It has a structure to facilitate that.
(And the Marines scrounge through everyone's trash bin, cobble something together, and come out armed to the teeth)
Point being, if you look at the people who have risen to the ranks of power, they've been moulded to fit their service culture. Which means some services might not be as good as procurement...
Space force. It is like flying a billion-dollar fighter jet that you will never be allowed to repair after it takes off for the first time.
The DOD actually is the reason the defense companies consolidated. They literally told them to do it. I think they explained it in the Acquired episode on Lockheed Martin from a year ago.
It was pretty explicit.
That said, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing.
Everyone forgets that system complexity increases generation by generation: an F-35 is not an F-111 is not an F-86 is not a P-51.
The unconsolidated, smaller defense companies of yore likely couldn't have managed a project of F-35 A+B+C complexity.
https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2023/03/01/the-last-supper-how-...
Immigrants have helped a lot in building the tech sector's innovation in the last half of the century. But the defense industry often requires naturalized citizens to work on these projects. I think there is a difference between immigrants coming to North America to work and eventually settling down, and offshoring work outside of North America. Immigrants cannot work in the defense sector while private companies are more than glad to have them work on their projects. The challenge is that the current framework for innovation may not qualify for the defense industry.
In the pre-Cold War era, the concept of American innovation was largely fueled by industrialization and academic participation in government sectors. Post-2000s, I feel like American innovation is rooted in the idea of diversity and America's ability to bring talent from across the world and concentrate it in major cities.
My thesis is that the US wants one or two American companies with monopolistic nature to build their future defense sector.
The US is not the country, nor do they have the reputation in front of the public that led to the Manhattan project, where the greatest minds would willingly work on defense projects, not just willingly but eagerly.
The breakthroughs are also less than they used to be. We have the nuke. We have reached space. We've hit the peaks. Everything else is just automatic turrets and AI to choose who to kill.
I remember being in college. I went to a top CS school (perhaps the top CS school), and it was often considered a black mark if you went to work for a defense company (even Palantir). It was also a different time, when we had our pick of companies to work at, not like today. But that sentiment is hard to shake off. I'm not convinced it is not still large in academia and the CS world today
If nobody stands up for our rights and freedoms at home they could easily be eroded, or lost entirely.
The idea that "this one bad thing could happen, therefore I will do nothing that could remotely cause this one bad thing" is childish reasoning.
I think the conclusion is that there is very little justified technology development that actually betters society, except for things that actually save people from dying. Things like healthcare, utilities, civil engineering, defense, etc. However, almost all of those industries are mired in bureaucracy and are the ultimate examples of such.
Regarding defense specifically, there is no shortage of ways for maniacal dictators to raze entire cities to the ground under the justification that "bad guys were in the tunnels". That is, in effect, a solved problem – many times over. Accordingly, that is not where the research money is being spent. Rather, the goal of most new "Defense" is to achieve those same mission goals (kill the bad guys) with as little civilian casualties as possible, or to protect our own assets against such attacks as well as possible.
Take for example the R9X [0]. Instead of an explosive warhead it has a set of blades on the tip. The US has used it to assassinate single people in the passenger seat of a car while leaving the driver untouched. I'd rather this than dropping bombs on terrorists that come with a blast radius that takes out everyone else nearby.
This seems net-good to me. There are certainly people alive today because of the R9X team's work.
> I made changes that impacted
> tens of millions of users in...
> no significant way whatsoever.
> Certainly not anything they'd
> remember on their deathbed [...]
Yeah, this always tickled me. Obviously smart people should just go work somewhere innocuous like Meta or ByteDance.
Also FWIW this is Palantir and Anduril's bread and butter. They get to vacuum up all the wrongthinkers.
How it creates perverse incentives that result in more people being imprisoned?
We have a private war apparatus.
We have been at war for 30 years without even a clear objective.
This is just looting.
Germany's in one piece.
The Balkans aren't on fire.
Granted, the Middle East is still its perpetual religious/sectarian/ethnic clusterfuck...
You can make a lot of complaints about the defense industry like waste and corruption, but a lack of a clear objective is no longer an issue.
Looks interesting I’ll check it out, thanks!
Also Boeing was developing the F-32 (which lost out to the F-35) in the mid 90's, so it's conceivable that an engineer on that program might still be around in some role.
Weird nitpick, I know.
There's also a slew of drones that may or may not use efficient small piston engines or rotary varients which may or may not count as piston.
On the data aquisition side I'm willing to bet there's still a place in the US military for low, slow, ground hugging piston engine craft that run radiometrics or EM mapping.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L3Harris_OA-1K_Sky_Warden
It looks like someone is abusing a small prop plane that's normally used for crop dustin and just duct taping some cheap weapons to it.
Because that's exactly what it is
I'm getting strong PAC 750XL family vibes from that, we had a modified version hardened to fly 80 m drapes across all of Mali some years back .. locals were taking random potshots as it passed over: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_MO5Wfomks
Our civilian aerospace industry had a scandal a decade or two back because apparently various African countries were buying our trainers, discovering that as shipped the trim was a little off, and rebalancing by mounting MGs in the too-light-because-it-was-empty space.
Crop dusters carry weight, excel at STOL (Short Takeoff and Landing) on "Oh shit, that's not a runway".
US Special Operations Command is into the sneaky stuff - intelligence gathering, quick in | out person on ground infil and exfiltrates.
Stubby little planes that pull like tractors and can depart flying upside down underneath a bridge are ideal, they get overshot by fighter jets and have engines too cold for air to air missiles (fingers crossed).
I'm guessing that these days there are two kinds of airborne objects: multi-modal drones and targets.
Oddly enough, heat seeking air to air came in ca.1950s, so self-flying has been around a while, and now people (especially those with heavy logistics requirements) are talking about land based self-driving, but shouldn't the seas be an intermediate problem? Where did all the self-sailing vessels go?
Is this article really equating Palmer Lucky to Oppenheimer?
Having interacted with Luckey in a number of unpleasant ways, I think we'll just have to agree to disagree.
And if so, you are saying his achievements are nullified by his behavior?
As near as I can tell, he is successful for advocating for VR headsets.
I do not believe that's equivalent to splitting the atom. But hey, I guess we all see things our own way.
The dude's a hacker, not a god.
> Essentially, Luckey’s aim is to make the US and its allies almost impossible to harm — “a prickly porcupine” in his words — as well as to supply weapons powerful enough to put adversaries off attacking in the first place. “We want to build the capabilities that give us the ability to swiftly win any war we are forced to enter,” he says.
> The thesis is not original. It’s the same idea that led to Robert Oppenheimer’s development of the atomic bomb. America’s attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the second world war, killing more than 100,000 people, and nuclear weapons have not been deployed in conflict since.
Newspaper headlines are usually added by the copy editors, not the author of the article.
The implication is that Palmer is Silcon Valley's Oppenheimer.
EDIT: Although, now that you mention it, Oppenheimer is in quotes. I guess it's possible that the FT is being sarcastic.
Their whole thing is to move fast and produce shit that breaks often and a lot. Pretty unreliable overall.
Their major success is marketing and B2G (business to government) and funding. Ultimately it is these three things that will make them successful. You iterate on crap long enough (which defense contracts tend to allow) eventually there's a good chance it will get good.
I would say anduril can't hold a candle to any chinese company in the same space. That being said Chinese companies can't yet hold a candle to the old US defense contractors.
The hype for anduril is through the roof though. Many people in the company and outside have drunk the koolaid and will vehemently deny what I'm saying here.
to sum it up:
When I was there, there was a story of this general who suddenly (off schedule) told anduril to test their drone ramming system to see if it worked. The startled field operator turned it on, and the entire thing fucking failed. And Anduril STILL won the billion dollar contract. Oh yeah this is supposed to be "classified" but I could give a flying shit. Very flagrant misuse of government secrecy protocols to hide incompetency.
It's probably better now, but I'm positive Even to this day, if you launch 8 cheap ass drones simultaneously at their defense system you WILL overwhelm it.
Oh, never change Hacker News. Got to love the casual breach of classified information.
The main problem is, there are more than enough drones. All I’m saying above is you probably just need 8 of them to get through Andurils system.
Also, the method to defeat such systems is not classified. It’s quite obvious and china can even easily overwhelm carrier defenses using this method.
It's probably much easier to make a deal with a company that is able to meet pricing and delivery dates
They still sell their products in the same way the other contractors do, though. Specifically, you have to flash a badge to even get in the door.
Civilians, if they have the resources, should be able to procure these systems and vehicles if they so choose.
I'd much rather protect my property perimeter with one of their Lattice systems than with the hodgepodge array of Ubiquiti cameras and PIR sensors I use now.
I'd love to play with an ALTIUS out in the desert, even if I'm limited to civilian munitions.
But they won't even talk to you unless you are a Pig, a Fed, or a Glowie.
I am genuinely curious. I was in the whole retail investor space since early 2010s which saw the EV hype. Workhorse was supposed to supply vans for federal postal vans, Nikola had that GM deal going on etc.
Hanging around retail investor space helped made me be very skeptical about the idea of enterprise led innovation. Contract like this in my opinion requires seasoned engineering managers who have survived decades of bureaucracy but never forgot the essence of no-BS engineering. I believe SpaceX was able to bring some of these people in before they had a functional rocket. Where does Anduril stands with their management and innovation?