re: Will Ukraine expose incompetence of our defense contractors?

The military is very inefficient and wastes billions of dollars

This was my problem with Hegseth banning reporters. Y'all were cheering it on because of leaks.

Well, there is another side to it. Makes it much harder to find Pentagon corruption.

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and according to The Atlantic

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you must be kidding

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Will Ukraine expose incompetence of our defense contractors?

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They already have.

They won't be building licensed Patriots. They will be building an alternate system that is cheaper, more effective, and takes less time to produce.

The US is behind in the incredibly quickly changing times in warfare. That's not new. We usually catch back up after learning the hard way. And usually by outspending/out producing everybody. China as a player makes this more difficult.

I don't think Lockheed built the F-22 so if they got paid for it, the government really messed up.

Looks like I was wrong. Lockheed is part of the deal on the F-22 with Boeing and seems to be working on an update.

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and according to The Atlantic


you must be kidding

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That wall of text is from the fricking Atlantic? without a link?

Currently the US spends over $1 trillion annually on national defense. Since WWII the US has outspent all other developed nations combined on national defense funding.

When a nation ^^^^ spends that much money on their military there shouldn't be any nation who would dare to stand up to a well stocked and superior US military but here we are today with the DOW requesting another $4-5 hundred billion in additional funding.

The services deserve some blame. The Constellation class was based on a proven, in use, design used by the Italians. But, leave it to the USN to frick it up:

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…the United States Navy’s Constellation-class frigate program (was) not as a case of technical failure or flawed contracting, but as a breakdown in sustained stewardship over a sound acquisition construct. The program was conceived to adapt a mature, serially produced parent design; expand the U.S. surface-combatant industrial base; and impose cost discipline through a fixed-price structure that depended on preserving design stability and commonality. That construct remained coherent through early execution and even through extraordinary external disruption during the Covid-19 pandemic. The program did not fail because it proved infeasible. It became vulnerable when the continuity of senior ownership eroded. During a narrow period between mid-2022 and mid-2023, the program’s central premise—reliance on a proven parent design to control risk, cost, and schedule—was no longer actively defended as directed changes accumulated to comply with historical Navy shipbuilding specifications. Absent deliberate reconstitution of that premise, contractual and technical alignment degraded, and the program’s recovery pathways narrowed.

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There are other ways to expose dod failures. Outsourcing military contracts to foreign nations remains a worse idea than relying on China and India for our pharmaceuticals. We would better focus on improving our systems' efficiency and drill down into the corruption and other failures at the dod.
As always, the best solution is at home.