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Dead Reckoning posted:Really terrible stuff. I would certainly read more about this as well. It's disgusting how much the rot of terrible but trendy business practices has penetrated into the government/military. You hit the nail square on the head when you said it could be sold to the government even after failing in the private sector. After all ideology triumphs over reality there. When I heard the entire concept of Just In Time being applied to military logistics early last decade I couldn't believe it. But then they took it a step further with contracted (disposable) supply runners. I mean poo poo, how can you think that is a good idea? How can you not see that people will die if it breaks down at any point? Taerkar fucked around with this message at 18:08 on Jun 24, 2013 |
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Jun 24, 2013 18:05
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Taerkar posted:When I heard the entire concept of Just In Time being applied to military logistics early last decade I couldn't believe it. But then they took it a step further with contracted (disposable) supply runners. I mean poo poo, how can you think that is a good idea? How can you not see that people will die if it breaks down at any point? It also rather pointedly ignores the existence of an enemy who is dedicating everything he has towards ensuring that it does break down/get delayed/etc.
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Jun 24, 2013 18:09
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Dead Reckoning posted:We've been slapping ourselves on the back for "disrupting networks" and killing/capturing "high value targets" for years, but if any of those guys had really been that important to the insurgency, I don't think we'd be negotiating for a dignified withdrawal in Qatar right now. I was going to make a joke here about HVTs but then I realized I was getting into an area I probably shouldn't talk about openly so I'll just say that I agree completely. Also that married couple should've been at KAF, they could've just banged in a bunker. Cyrano4747 posted:No bullshit, this is among the most interesting things I've read in TFR in years. Basically consider Dead Reckoning's response to be my thoughts on the subject, because they're about 110% the same. Regarding the culture of the military stateside, the worst part about that is that it's infiltrated into while you are deployed too. All of the stupid poo poo you have to deal with at home station (meaningless but "high priority" bullshit taskers, people who spend more time volunteering than they do at their loving jobs, Master's degrees, PME, bullet chasing) is just as bad out here, except out here I can't drink, I can't gently caress, the food is lovely, I work 12-13 hours a day (wait that's the same as home station), and occasionally I get shot at. Of course this is on a base that is more built up than most AFBs stateside, so this experience of course will vary quite a bit compared to being on some COP out in the boonies. e: Taerkar posted:When I heard the entire concept of Just In Time being applied to military logistics early last decade I couldn't believe it. But then they took it a step further with contracted (disposable) supply runners. I mean poo poo, how can you think that is a good idea? How can you not see that people will die if it breaks down at any point? Don't get me started on the supply chain and military logistics. Don't loving do it. Why is it that the part that I am MICAP for, that is keeping my jet from flying in a loving combat zone, is dependent on approval from 50 different people across 8 different agencies just for it to ship from the depot back in the states, which doesn't work weekends or holidays, and then is shipped via the lowest contracted package delivery company, who are going to route it halfway to Timbuktu and then have it sit for a week in Dubai because some Pakistani shoe clerk chucked it on the wrong conveyor belt and asdj;iasdfjioa;sdflkjasd;lfk 
iyaayas01 fucked around with this message at 18:17 on Jun 24, 2013 |
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Jun 24, 2013 18:11
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iyaayas01 posted:I was going to make a joke here about HVTs but then I realized I was getting into an area I probably shouldn't talk about openly so I'll just say that I agree completely. I'm going to imagine that a "high value target" is simply "some kinda bad dude we've actually managed to identify".
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Jun 24, 2013 18:16
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Cyrano4747 posted:It also rather pointedly ignores the existence of an enemy who is dedicating everything he has towards ensuring that it does break down/get delayed/etc. That's not a bullet-point on the presentation therefore it's not an actual concern. Not like these systems work properly without people shooting up your supply lines
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Jun 24, 2013 19:06
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Sooooo Sikorsky is up to $86million in late penalties with the CH-148 Cyclone contract for the Royal Canadian Air Force. http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/06/24/u-s-aerospace-giant-racks-up-millions-in-fines-over-delayed-chopper-deal-with-canadian-military/ I think this is in addition to $89million in penalties that were accrued earlier but got waived by the gov't for some reason. Already the project is 4 years late in replacing helicopters which were originally scheduled to be replaced in the 90s. loving procurements are such a god drat mess  The choice to go with these is yet another governmental fuckup, honestly why not get something that is already a tried and true airframe in service elsewhere but noooooooooooo.
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Jun 24, 2013 20:13
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Just to be clear, any actual business (that isn't a government defense supplier, at least) that tries any of that crap, in a similar manner to how the military does, is going to fail miserably as well. Things like kaizen / TQM / lean have their place, and are very successful if implemented properly, but it's also very difficult to do. First you have to recognize an appropriate scenario (which is not common), you have to dedicate the extensive resources necessary, then you have to implement the solutions properly, which are generally highly short-term disruptive to rigid command structure and conventional management methods. There is no way that's going to happen in the US or most other militaries absent some catastrophic organizational collapse. Instead you get 'have a hammer, look for nails' programs where freshly minted MBAs (because they need the degree to get promoted) look to fling their key words and fancy phrases at unsuitable dilemmas, consuming tremendous man hours with zero intention of actually using the program results. I mean almost all of the fancy business buzzwords boil down to "When your junior employees, who are closer to everyday problems than you are, describe an issue they are having and maybe a solution, you should listen." That's it. You don't have to do deep analysis of military history to see how rarely and ineffectually that happens. This all gets back to the Peter Principle stuff. If the modern military had a mechanism of recruiting and admitting people that were already successful managing civilian organizations, they could put that expertise and experience to good use. Back when you were drafting officers or even prior to the standing militia, this was where military leadership came from. But that mechanism simply does not exist today. (And no, I'm not talking about McNamara / Whiz Kid style nonsense at the very top, because that's highly ineffective in actually changing anything.) Hell, people genuinely successful at running businesses generally don't go back and teach in business schools either, especially not in the kind of third-tier schools active-duty mil are going to be able to attend, further reducing the value of the MBA degree. Even the nature of the major defense contractors prevents much fresh blood flow in and out, as the business methods successful in dealing with government contracts are completely alien to normal markets. Compare and contrast this to, say, Israel, whose existence depends on the military not loving up and wasting time. Look at the analysis and soul-searching done after the Second Lebanon War, and then try to imagine anything like that occurring in the US after our Middle East wars, or even looking back with distance on Vietnam or other minor conflicts.
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Jun 24, 2013 20:27
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priznat posted:Sooooo Sikorsky is up to $86million in late penalties with the CH-148 Cyclone contract for the Royal Canadian Air Force. It has been said, and with good reason, that the Canadian Forces would struggle to procure chlamydia in a whorehouse.
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Jun 24, 2013 20:43
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Cyrano4747 posted:No bullshit, this is among the most interesting things I've read in TFR in years. This would be even more interesting to tie in with the recent article in The Atlantic contrasting rates at which Generals and other field officers were relieved of command during world war two versus the present unpleasantness. It seems like, as usual, the fish rots from the head.
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Jun 24, 2013 21:04
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Nostalgia4Infinity posted:You could call it "Style over Substance". If it were a paper, it'd be "bullet points over bullets: how a culture of management mediocrity took over the US Armed Forces" If it were a book, it would be a single word followed by a subtitle. Example: "HOGFUCKED: why the world's most powerful military values appearing effective rather than being effective. priznat posted:The choice to go with these is yet another governmental fuckup, honestly why not get something that is already a tried and true airframe in service elsewhere but noooooooooooo. The DND recently completed a study where it discovered the main delays in procurement were the fault of the DND Seriously
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Jun 24, 2013 22:20
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On the discussion of officers leaving the military early, there were a few good posts over at The Best Defense regarding junior officer morale and why they're getting out. They're a ways back so it's easier to find them with this Google search: https://www.google.com/search?q=junior%20officers%20site%3Aricks.foreignpolicy.com
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Jun 25, 2013 14:01
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^That article is spot on. I sent it to a lot of my active duty friends a while back. I had a guaranteed job with the local ANG unit when I got out. Never called them back, never took a second look. No loving thank you. I like seeing my kid every few days rather than going 3 years between visits.Scratch Monkey posted:I hope this makes it over to GiP That post IS GiP. People wonder why everything's hosed in that forum, it's because this is what everyone in there has been living and dealing with since the first day they walked into a recruiter's office...they just didn't realize what it was until it was too late. Edit: DR, print that poo poo and send it to your congressman. Godholio fucked around with this message at 17:22 on Jun 25, 2013 |
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Jun 25, 2013 17:16
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Dead Reckoning posted:Our reliance on contractors lets us see exactly how much we're getting screwed. We work shoulder to shoulder with people doing the same job as us, often people who recently retired from the same unit and came back to work as civilians. Contractors make more money, can't be compelled to attend mandatory fun, do less bullshit, and are nearly impossible to fire. If they do go overseas or work overtime, they get paid ridiculous amounts of money, because the government can't get away with giving them a bit of ribbon and calling it square. Perhaps most compellingly, their boss does not care if they spent their weekend drinking whiskey and marathoning Game of Thrones instead of volunteering at the animal shelter as long as they show up to work on Monday. When you look at it that way, there really aren't a lot of reasons to stay in. Been failing lately in my efforts at fixing the DoD by managing upwards, though. Think my cynicism is leaking through. grover fucked around with this message at 22:57 on Jun 25, 2013 |
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Jun 25, 2013 22:53
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBKvlLzGkvU
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Jun 25, 2013 23:12
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Boner-inducing.
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Jun 26, 2013 02:56
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National Geographic started to throw up some old pictures on their tumblr, saw this one. Apprentice air traffic controllers train with model aircraft at Andrews Air Base in Maryland, March 1957.
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Jun 26, 2013 04:33
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Holy poo poo
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Jun 26, 2013 04:43
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Thanks for this. It's the show I posted earlier (http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3373768&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=178#post416633518), but backed out enough to where you can tell what the gently caress is happening. Airshows where they zoom in on the plane til you can't tell what it's doing in relation with the Earth get old.
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Jun 26, 2013 05:13
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mlmp08 posted:Thanks for this. It's the show I posted earlier (http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3373768&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=178#post416633518), but backed out enough to where you can tell what the gently caress is happening. Airshows where they zoom in on the plane til you can't tell what it's doing in relation with the Earth get old. drat I totally missed that post the first time, usually I watch the hell out of any russian fighter demo video because they're amazing. Even the one I posted annoyed me a couple times with the cuts though, like when it was just about to do a tailstand and then BLOOP flying straight. Dammit. Saw the vid on Popular Science's wrap up on cool stuff from the Paris Air Show. The local airshow here (Abbotsford) used to be really good but it's a shadow of its former self now. Every year I look at the list of planes scheduled to perform or be on static display and say "meh, not worth the sunstroke!" edit just looked it up, the only fighter jets this year is a CF-18. The F-22A team demo is cancelled due to budget cuts 
priznat fucked around with this message at 05:21 on Jun 26, 2013 |
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Jun 26, 2013 05:18
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Yeah, I'm going to be in St. Louis over the 4th for family stuff, and it looks like all the major military aircraft have cancelled.
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Jun 26, 2013 05:35
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Oceana in Va Beach cancelled this year too. That show had been really fun the last few years...
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Jun 26, 2013 14:23
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And this is the only way people have any insight into what the budget cuts are doing to the military. "Oh no, the air show doesn't have any cool poo poo this year." Don't worry about the 17 Air Combat Command squadrons that are grounded, or the scores more that have cut their personnel readiness to the lowest possible level so they only have to fly once every few months. Or that promotions are effectively on hold for over a year. Nope...it's the airshows and the grass growing too long because they can't pay the contract and having milfolks do it would be illegal because of the contracts.
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Jun 26, 2013 17:08
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Godholio posted:And this is the only way people have any insight into what the budget cuts are doing to the military. Well, yeah. That's kind of the way it is with all sorts of poo poo. The average guy no loving clue how much sequestration fucks up internal staffing at the IRS or whatever, or how the maintenance schedule at the white house suffers, or what the hell is going on behind the scenes at their university. They sure as poo poo notice when tax returns are a couple weeks late, the number of tours of the west wing get cut, and the number of classes to choose from gets cut. If anything it's good that these visible areas take a hit as well, otherwise you hollow the institution out from the inside with the voting public thinking everything is hunkey dorey until it all caves in.
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Jun 26, 2013 17:27
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Cyrano4747 posted:If anything it's good that these visible areas take a hit as well, otherwise you hollow the institution out from the inside with the voting public thinking everything is hunkey dorey until it all caves in. Problem is, that's exactly what's happening. The average person seems to think "oh, they cut these extra programs to keep paying for important stuff" which is absolutely not the case.
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Jun 26, 2013 17:41
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Godholio posted:Problem is, that's exactly what's happening. The average person seems to think "oh, they cut these extra programs to keep paying for important stuff" which is absolutely not the case.  what are you going to do about that? The 'average person' thinks a whole lot of stupid poo poo about all manner of things, especially with regard to areas that they aren't personally involved in. The fact that the American voter is terrifyingly ill- and under-informed about any number of things is scarcely news.
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Jun 26, 2013 18:01
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Cyrano4747 posted:
Scream into the sky impotently like Shatner in Wrath of Khan.
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Jun 26, 2013 18:43
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You could strap twenty lasers onto the F-35 and it wouldn't be half as cool as this plane.
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Jun 26, 2013 18:57
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The Offutt airshow is totally canceled this year and they even closed the off base swimming pools of which there are two. And then StratCom donated like $90k to open one back up for the summer, which I don't quite understand.
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Jun 26, 2013 19:15
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Opentarget posted:The Offutt airshow is totally canceled this year and they even closed the off base swimming pools of which there are two. Different pots of money.
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Jun 26, 2013 19:20
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Cyrano4747 posted:
The entire point was to demonstrate how bad the cuts were for defense, so maybe the whole thing should've actually been thought out first? Or at least publicized...this is an issue where it's clear the media is giving the government a pass...it's been reported but not hammered the way it was PRIOR to actually taking effect. It was a big deal until it happened, then it basically vanished and we're left with long grass and no airshows, but that's all. My actual answer to the problem wouldn't sit well with a lot of people here, so I'll just say ditch all the morons in that big domed building and go from there.
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Jun 27, 2013 00:27
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Weather is looking sketch for the scheduled day, but I'm booking a flight to ride on this guy over the holiday.
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Jun 27, 2013 00:43
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Godholio posted:My actual answer to the problem wouldn't sit well with a lot of people here, Please do tell. I finished reading Blueprints for Battle: Planning for War in Central Europe, 1948-1968 btw and ehhhh it isn't that illuminating if you've already been reading other stuff about the subject matter. I'd be happy to answer anyone's questions about early Cold War stuff now thouh 
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Jun 27, 2013 00:59
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Godholio posted:so I'll just say ditch all the morons in that big domed building and go from there. This is how well the sequester was planned: disruptions in ATC services caused lots of problems until the session in the big domed building ended and the morons inside said to themselves 'poo poo, we're going home now and flying is a pain' so they found some money for the ATC.
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Jun 27, 2013 15:48
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Godholio posted:so I'll just say ditch all the morons in that big domed building and go from there. You can add a lot of the idiots in the five sided wind tunnel. The lack of planning within DoD for the sequester was simply staggering, especially since it's not like Congress passed the law on Monday and it took effect Wednesday...we had over a year and a half to plan for this and everyone basically shrugged their shoulders and said "it's not gonna happen" up until a few months before it actually went into effect. I'm not saying it would've been painless, but the Pentagon could've made this a lot less painful if they had actually done some real planning ahead of time.
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Jun 27, 2013 16:42
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 What' can't we apply that to?
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Jun 27, 2013 17:00
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Not to get into a political derailing, but lets just say cuts in social services are starting to have an effect out in the street. Not a huge uptick in crime, but the cuts in substance abuse programs, mental health inpatient treatment, and housing for the marginal members of society are now being dealt with by the social workers of last resort. Fun times.
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Jun 27, 2013 17:55
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Smiling Jack posted:Not to get into a political derailing, but lets just say cuts in social services are starting to have an effect out in the street. Are you sure that wasn't just an effect of NYC's own lovely budget?
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Jun 27, 2013 18:00
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gfanikf posted:Are you sure that wasn't just an effect of NYC's own lovely budget? Well, NYC residents pay way more in state and federal taxes than we get back, so sort of. If NYC ever manages to break away from upstate, upstate NYS would become even more of a desolate economic wasteland than it is now and I would ride to work in a gold plated subway car. However, a lot of social programs are administered locally but funded through federal aid.
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Jun 27, 2013 18:59
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So to shift gears back to the original focus of the thread, GiP's resident Jewish schizophrenic pothead poster, Gas Cures Kikes (formerly known as Shimazu) requested that I do up the post I promised on nuclear strategy waaaaaaay back near the start of the thread that was...holy poo poo, over two years ago. Anyway here goes. At the start of the nuclear age, the US was the world's only nuclear power, but we were hardly a nuclear power by any modern definition. With only a handful of weapons and relatively short ranged delivery systems (B-29s), the attempts at deterrence against the Soviets using our arsenal were almost all smoke and no fire, but hey, this didn't matter all that much because we had nukes and they didn't. Our attitude towards nukes changed once the Soviets exploded their first bomb in 1949. Suddenly what had been a stick to wave at everyone else was now a dagger pointed at the heart of America (or so every terrified American thought in 1950). However, strategy wise delivery systems had not advanced much since WWII...the plan was still to use bombers to deliver the weapons against major targets like enemy cities, and the U.S.'s main delivery system was the B-36 (designed during WWII) backed up by the B-50 (improved version of the WWII B-29) while the Soviets' main delivery system was the Tu-4, an all but carbon copy of the B-29. Nuclear weapons were supposed to be the cherry on top of an already very destructive conventional war. Even the development of jet bombers like the B-47 and Tu-16 did little to change this, as the basic principles from WWII were still in effect: get as many of your planes into the other guy's territory while seeing his planes from as far out as possible and shooting down as many of them as possible. All jets did was compress the timeframe involved for a one way trip from 20 or so hours to more around 10, and all the development of hydrogen bombs did was scale up the destruction: if you let one bad guy get through instead of only leveling part of a city while significantly damaging the rest now that bomb was consuming the entire city in a fireball. The basic warfighting concept wasn't all that different from the strategic bombing campaigns of WWII, just some changes in equipment, timeline, and destructive power. This all changed on the 21st of August 1957, when Sergei Korolev's R-7 became the world's first successful Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. With the US developing their first operational ICBM (the Atlas) a few years later, the Cold War suddenly got quite a bit more serious. Now discussions about a POWER OF DECISION like protracted scalable nuclear conflict were much less relevant (can't recall an ICBM like you can a bomber) and there was much more focus on early warning networks as well as better intelligence gathering over the other guy's territory. This second point was particularly relevant to early ICBMs, as liquid fueled rockets took a good 15-20 minutes to go from a cold start to launch, and due to the fact that the propellants were cryogenic and also rather unstable they weren't able to be stored fueled, and the facilities used to store them were very large and had to be above ground/not hardened. This meant that early intelligence was particularly important, because if you got intel that an adversary was fueling/preparing their missiles you still had a little while before he would be capable of launching, meaning you could take preemptive action and/or start civil defense processes. These early ICBMs had a circular error probable (CEP) measured in the thousands of feet. This was good enough for blowing up cities, but a CEP of almost a mile means half of your warheads are going to land over a mile away from the target...not exactly conducive to destroying hardened facilities. This meant that these ICBMs were only good for threatening the other guy's cities/population/industrial centers, in what is otherwise known as a countervalue strategy: instead of targeting (or threatening to target) the other guy's fielded military forces (strategic or otherwise), you threaten to target the things he values, with a credible enough threat that he is deterred from acting too aggressively towards you. This is the logical extension of the concept of strategic bombing (at least in practice, if not in theory) as executed during WWII, except instead of attempting to compel your adversary into doing what you want and/or punishing him for being a big enough rear end in a top hat to start a war with you by burning his cities to the ground, you are deterring him from pulling the trigger by assuring him that if he does, you will turn his cities into fireballs. The Eisenhower Administration took this policy a bit further by establishing the policy of Massive Retaliation: any attack by the Soviet Union on Western countries/interests could possibly be met by a massive U.S. strategic nuclear strike. This is the start of the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction, although it still has a little ways to go before we get to the "one guy pushes the button, other side sees it, launches their missiles, missiles pass in space, entire world is blown up in 20 minutes" stage of things. The development of later liquid fueled ICBMs like the Titan got us closer to that stage. These did away with the cryogenic fuel in favor of hypergolic fuel...the fuel was chemically reactive enough that simply combining the two substances was enough to create a terrific amount of energy. On the plus side, this meant the missiles were able to be stored fueled, reducing response time from the previous 15-20 minutes from launch order to engines firing to right around 60 seconds. On the downside, the fuel was extremely toxic, unstable, and would literally melt your face off. But that was a small price to pay for the relatively massive increase in response time. This decrease in the amount of time required to go from a steady state missile in the silo to launching drove some changes in how national command authorities approached their nuclear strategies. Even with the development of extremely long ranged early warning radars like BMEWS and later Pave PAWS the amount of warning you would have even for a relatively long lead time strike like one solely involving land based ICBMs was still measured in the low double digits if you were lucky. The U.S. began to develop a launch on warning policy, where instead of waiting for the bombs to start falling or for there to be incontrovertible evidence of a strike (like intercepting Soviet bombers inside U.S. territory or something similarly concrete), the U.S. would fire their missiles upon an initial warning that the Soviets had launched theirs. As should be pretty obvious, this is a rather precarious policy that increases the chances of a false alarm leading to a real world strike (something that happened many, many times during the Cold War.) The implementation of Launch on Warning is really the beginning of the true MAD reality, as commonly understood today. Solid fueled ICBMs like the Minuteman didn't really change too much with this calculus, they just made it far less likely that your missiles would blow up while you were servicing them. While that is a pretty good thing for the dudes working on the missiles and the people living near the silos, it didn't really reduce the response time all that much, nor did it change the strategic calculus from a time standpoint (the introduction of MIRVs is a different matter, but I'll get to those later.) So I'm going to shift gears for a bit and talk about SLBMs. The first true SLBM was Polaris, which entered service in 1960. While early SLBMs were generally shorter ranged and less accurate than land based ICBMs from the same era, they had two main advantages: they could be launched from much closer to their intended targets, and they were much more difficult to take out than land based missiles. The latter meant that countries with SLBMs had a survivable second strike capability, as opposed to facing the choice between launching on warning, flushing their missiles before the other missiles hit (and running the risk of it being a glitch in the system or some other error) or riding out the initial strike and then retaliating with what forces remained (which would almost certainly be significantly reduced, to say nothing of the other human and materiel costs of just sitting and taking a nuclear strike.) The nature of this relationship is inherently destabilizing, as that choice may lead countries to believe that if they strike quickly enough and effectively enough they would be able to destroy enough of the other guy's forces that he would not be able to retaliate effectively, basically "winning" the war. The introduction of SLBMs and their survivable second strike capability meant that (provided you had a robust C2 network, more on that later) even if the other guy took out all of your land based forces your SLBMs would still be able to gently caress his poo poo up (reference the British letters of last resort). This is an inherently stabilizing weapon/capability, as it a) frees countries from that burden of being on hair trigger alert in order to retaliate at all and b) it adds doubt to the other guy as to whether he can successfully pull off a first strike. Paradoxically, while the survivable second strike nature of SLBMs makes them inherently stabilizing, their other difference in capability compared to land based ICBMs is a destabilizing one: their ability to be much closer to their intended targets. This is because their being closer to the target means a shorter initial warning time and a shorter flight time, reducing reaction time. Any capability that reduces warning time is inherently destabilizing, because it forces the other guy to be on more of a hair trigger and it forces him to make a decision in a more compressed timeline under more pressure, which is the recipe for less than optimal decision making. The nightmare scenario for US planners was Soviet submarines parked off the Eastern Seaboard launching a depressed trajectory strike against DC. A depressed trajectory launch is when instead of traveling in a true ballistic fashion, the missile is fired at a more oblique angle, trading off throw weight (more on that later) in exchange for a lower and faster trajectory. The concern among US planners is that instead of the standard 10-15 (later more like 20-30) minutes worth of warning of a Soviet launch they would have less than 5, bringing into question whether the necessary members of the NCA could be evacuated from Washington in time to escape the warheads. This is what is known as a decapitation strike, and it is why the US developed such extensive lines of succession regarding the NCA as well as why we developed such an extensive and survivable C2 network. Which is where we will pick it up iyaayas01 fucked around with this message at 19:09 on Jun 27, 2013 |
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Jun 27, 2013 19:00
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I totally understand the reasons for it, but I'm still surprised the US didnt relocate its capital to Omaha during the Cold War.
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Jun 27, 2013 19:25
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