[HN Gopher] China's weapons acquisition cycle 5-6x faster than t...
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China's weapons acquisition cycle 5-6x faster than the United
States
Author : jseliger
Score : 15 points
Date : 2022-11-06 19:59 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (acquisitiontalk.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (acquisitiontalk.com)
| credit_guy wrote:
| Weapons procurement is a very difficult problem for the world's
| dominant power. If it does the job right (and so far the US has
| done it), then it prevents wars (Iraq and Afghanistan
| notwithstanding). And if it does not fight wars, the weapons
| don't get used, and the population gets the impression the
| spending was for nothing. In a democracy you get a lot of
| pressure to reduce this spending.
|
| So the US has to procure just few enough Tomahawks to make sure
| the factories that can make them retain some semblance of
| manufacturing ability just in case. If you check the DoD budget,
| you'll see that every year we procure fewer Tomahawks for about
| the same money (which is a lot). That's because we don't pay for
| the missiles themselves, but for the ability to ramp up their
| production if the time comes to do that.
|
| But then, how do you get healthy competition to drive down
| prices? Let's say you want to found a startup to make cruise
| missiles? Who are you going to sell to? The US is only buying
| about 100 per year, and thinking hard each year how to cut that
| number down. You can offer to sell the same 100 for 10 times less
| money, but they don't care about the missiles themselves. If they
| switch from their current supplier (Raytheon) to you, then
| Raytheon will shut down the plant (maybe plants?) that makes
| them. Can the US trust you that you can ramp up the production
| when the time comes? Maybe you can prove you can, but that does
| not happen that often. So we are stuck with whatever
| manufacturers we have, it's difficult to get new entrants.
|
| What can be done? I don't know. What is China doing better? I
| don't know that either.
|
| All I can see is the problem is not that easy.
| bdavis__ wrote:
| The USG / DOD is a terrible customer. They want to control
| every thing; from suppliers to acceptance. They really don't
| care about what something costs, it is far more important to
| ensure the vendors are not making too much profit.
|
| To move fast, you have to be willing to break things. When you
| go "agile" in software, you write a lot of crap that has to be
| thrown away. Same with weapons development, if you want to go
| fast and try ideas then some of them will not work. Will Not
| Work. That is intolerable to the procurement organization,
| because spending money on something that does not work is also
| known as "corruption".
|
| Risk / Reward has to be changed by society. A war will do that.
| gloryjulio wrote:
| China is a dictatorship war machine. They don't have to go
| through all these process. They just do. That's why we need to
| properly to recognize them as a threat at all levels or Taiwan
| is a goner
| pixl97 wrote:
| > _I would tell you anecdotally that China is still, after gains
| we've made in the last five years or so, about five to six times
| faster than us in acquisition. In purchasing power parity they
| spend about one dollar to our twenty dollars to get to the same
| capability. It's math, ladies and gentlemen. We are going to lose
| if we can't figure out how to drop the cost and increase the
| speed in our defense supply chains._
|
| I mean it sounds scary until you realize that a large part of our
| military spending is a jobs program and wealth redistribution
| platform. We're not serious about cost optimization because it's
| not a significant limitation at this point. Being behind the
| leader has its advantages, you let them do the hard work and you
| copy|steal it at a much lower cost. This does not mean you can
| easily become the leader without massively increasing your
| spending (and now having everyone steal your technology).
| Especially when you are both nuclear powers that are not going to
| directly attach each other without risk of annihilation.
|
| Lose what is also a question that should be asked here. I assume
| ally nations like Taiwan would be the primary risks, though loss
| of other trading partners is a serious risk over time. As for
| prevention of these risks we're already funding pulling
| processing manufacturing back into the US, but again, this is
| going to be expensive. There is also nothing like a war where the
| stakes increase to spur innovation and decrease costs.
| T-A wrote:
| Here's what Navy Adm. Charles A. Richard, commander of U.S.
| Strategic Command, has to say about this [1]:
|
| _" As I assess our level of deterrence against China, the ship
| is slowly sinking," he said. "It is sinking slowly, but it is
| sinking, as fundamentally they are putting capability in the
| field faster than we are. As those curves keep going, it isn't
| going to matter how good our [operating plan] is or how good
| our commanders are, or how good our forces are -- we're not
| going to have enough of them. And that is a very near-term
| problem."
|
| One area where the U.S. still dominates is with its underseas
| capabilities -- the U.S. submarine fleet, Richard said.
|
| "Undersea capabilities is still the one ... maybe the only true
| asymmetric advantage we still have against our opponents,"
| Richard said. "But unless we pick up the pace, in terms of
| getting our maintenance problems fixed, getting new
| construction going ... if we can't figure that out ... we are
| not going to put ourselves in a good position to maintain
| strategic deterrence and national defense."_
|
| [1] https://www.defense.gov/News/News-
| Stories/Article/Article/32...
| pixl97 wrote:
| And we aren't going to win this battle by putting up
| symmetric forces against China either. At this point in their
| development curve they will gladly let a large number of
| ships and manpower sink because of their massive populations.
| Building more stuff that requires people simply isn't going
| to work. Most of our population isn't gung ho about going off
| to die somewhere and our replacement rate and excess
| population is low. America simply cannot field the world
| itself with 300 mil population, and instead must partner in
| alliances like NATO and grow allie militaries to share the
| burden that make any attack by China expensive on a worldwide
| scale.
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