Is that what's happening here? No, this a way to get the existing functions out from under the oversight and constraints of acquisition laws to reduce friction for corruption and war profiteering.
If you fell for DOGE don't fall for this too.
Which is fucking frightening. We don't want "good enough", we want weapons that are fully capable and best-in-class. After all, that's why the Department's budget is nearly a trillion dollars a year. We aren't paying for good enough, we're paying for the best of the best of the best.
We should first solve for why we've allowed massive scope creep in the development of our flagship fighters, and why that scope creep has come at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars to our nation. Yet we can't ask why the likes of Boeing or Lockheed Martin are allowed to function as entities that need to please Wall Street and lobbyists instead of scaring the living shit out of anyone who wishes to do us harm via pure technological prowess. We've allowed the management class to take over our defense manufacturing at great cost to our country.
His work to create the "hacking for defense" project to modernize things is not at all like DOGE and preceeds it by many years
OK...
> We should first solve for why we've allowed massive scope creep in the development of our flagship fighters, and why that scope creep has come at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars to our nation.
Because we want best-in-class, and best-in-class means "better than everything else that currently exists", and that's really hard.
Then why is he calling it Department of War when the official name is Department of Defense?
No.
By now, its battlefield lethality exceeds that of small arms and artillery shells.
Take that as a lesson on "best in class" systems. The "best" system is often one that's barely "good enough", but can be manufactured at scale.
And, what can US manufacture at scale today? Oh.
It's one thing to chuck software at DoD, it's another to try and put together a new IFV when a bunch of competing interests have their opinions and you are trying to balance it all.
"Got Mine!"
The war in Ukraine seems to be showing this to not be true. Drones are used as much as they are because they do not have enough artillery. Are they useful, yes. But they do not replace artillery. Maybe in another type of war, but that is another issue, what is the next war we expect to find ourselves in? For all the talk of China deterrence, we're seeing a pivot away from China now.
It is often better to have 1000 things that are "good enough" then 100 things that are "best-in-class".
In the current Ukraine conflict, the US provided something like 50 M1 abrams tanks all of which have currently been destroyed or out of commission. Russia threw something on the order of 3500 tanks (around the same number Hitler threw at Operation Barbarossa, but with each tank far far more capable) and virtually all of those machines have been destroyed or put out of commission.
In a real war, you need to come up with new solutions rapidly as the situation changes, and that's a capability the United States seems to have lost. The quality of US tech is fantastic, but the quantity is probably not going to be there when it matters.
We pay a lot of money because we want a giant fuck off Navy (literally by doctrine required to be able to "Take on the next two largest world navies and win) and because we spend a lot of money on training the human resources in our military. Pilots cost millions of dollars a year to keep proficient, and we do not shirk from doing ten times the training of other air forces. Russian pilots at the start of the Ukraine war for example had very few yearly training flights, and that applies to maintenance crews as well, and several planes were lost on takeoff from system failures and similar.
America actually has a great history of winning wars with average equipment. The Sherman tank wasn't the most fancy or had the biggest gun or the most armor. It was ergonomic, survivable, and we made like 80k of them and gave them to anyone willing to shoot germans. The B-17 bomber was not exactly good, but hey they bombed a lot of Europe.
>We should first solve for why we've allowed massive scope creep in the development of our flagship fighters
This is primarily because the theory of "Actually planes are a great item to gold plate" has proven true. The fighter mafia that insisted missiles were a fad and we want cheap planes was just wrong. BVR fighting is the norm. Large radars are required. "Tech" pays huge dividends. If you still think the F35 is anything other than a very very good plane after China has demonstrated they intend to follow in its design footsteps and our 26 year old stealth bomber was able to fly over Iran and drop munitions with no real threat to speak of, I don't know what to tell you.
>why that scope creep has come at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars to our nation.
The massive numbers you have seen are for the entire F35 program, which is thousands of planes over 50 years or so. Currently, the per plane cost of an F35A in July 2024 was $100 million. A fully upgraded F16 is about $70 million. An F35 costs about $40k to fly per hour, which is a lot, but is also about what the F14 cost to fly per hour
The "military industrial complex" is overstated. Raytheon does about $70 billion revenue a year. Walmart, by comparison, does over $650 billion. FedEx does over $80 billion. Pepsico does $98 billion. Raytheon's revenue isn't even all government related. They used to own Otis Elevators.
The actual military dollars spent on "Procurement" of guns and tanks and missiles is about 1/6th the total military budget.
> We've allowed the management class to take over our defense manufacturing at great cost to our country.
The management class is the exact group of morons that are currently elected. Insisting they are magically brilliant even though they have no real track record, insisting that everyone else is at fault, and absolutely cracking down on any and all mention of their imperfections, and sure that if they just vaguely push hard, magic will happen, because that's just how good they are.
The department that DOGE brainslugged and killed was a government department for building that skill and hiring talent so they could use fewer shitty software contractors. They built software to replace TurboTax and save americans money. That wasn't getting the right people rich so Musk and Trump killed it.
Much of what the US deploys is best-in-class: ships, planes, subs, etc.
The key advantage of the drone ecosystem is that it spans from tactical to strategic applications, from short to long distance, at very low-cost compared to traditional multiple platforms. It's not an artillery alternative, or at least not in the way you think. There are ambush-drones that go behind enemy lines, land on the ground, and wait. There are 10 flavours of FPV stuff, and by now none of it is "off-the-shelf." There are of course the fixed-wing stuff that would completely overwhelm enemy air defense and hit key strategic manufacturing and oil processing plants. There was operation Spider Web where a handful of FPV drones took out 20 or so russian strategic bombers (sic!) many thousand kilometers behind enemy lines. Most importantly, drones present a major advantage in that the operator does not have to be physically present in the target area. Moreover, the operator himself is no longer necessary in many modes of operation, like "last mile targeting"
Your opinion reads like it has been formed by exposure to some contrariant analysis by BigBrain western analyst that would go for soundbites like "drones are artillery."
e.g.