alt Hacker NewsUkraine technological flexibility reflects their organizational incentives. Front line users are in communication with the manufacturers; those same front line users choose the weapon (and vendor) they want, so feedback is rapid and since word gets around, good equipment is quickly adopted and becomes popular until something better replaces it.
The US military procurement is the opposite of this.
One reason procurement is slow is to avoid fraud.* Ukrainse hasn’t managed to eliminate that. Perhaps there is a balance, when you’re under fire at least.
* in the US, procurement fraud looks quite different (e.g. having anpart for your weapon made in every congressional district, a tactic developed for the B-1)
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> Front line users are in communication with the manufacturers; those same front line users choose the weapon (and vendor) they want, so feedback is rapid and since word gets around, good equipment is quickly adopted and becomes popular until something better replaces it.
Do you have any pointers to a good write-up of this?
Matters of life and death, when there is (as you describe) direct contact between those whose lives are on the line and the industry, tend to prevent some of the usual corruption, I would think.
History has shown that countries at war become about an order of magnitude better at producing weapons than countries in peacetime.
I wonder if it wouldn't be better to have a Lowe level of constant military spending and have the ability and reputation to be able to quickly spin up and scale military production, so that you don't need to maintain as much military spending 24/7
Or all small arms serviceweapons made by SIG.
The gamified precurment system is just neoliberalism taken to the extreme. I mean Goodhart's Law is a warning not a guide.
When the dust settles I think the precurment system will be seen as detrimental. Military power structures need to be boring such that it doesn't eat it self.
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Everything made in Ukraine is just assembled Chinese parts though (nothing wrong with that, entirely different difficulty however).
Like all corruption in the USA the fraud is just baked into the system.