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285 points ridruejo | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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giraffe_lady ◴[] No.45887943[source]
Embarrassing regurgitation of propaganda. This is basically the military DOGE. Are these systems dysfunctional in some ways, could well-intended sweeping reforms improve them? Sure, maybe, I don't know much about it.

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.

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andrewmutz ◴[] No.45888983[source]
Steven Blank (the author) is a respected member of the startup community and is not partisan. He's been working with the defense department for 10 years (across both administrations) to modernize the way the military buys technology.

His work to create the "hacking for defense" project to modernize things is not at all like DOGE and preceeds it by many years

https://www.h4d.us/

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1. stackskipton ◴[] No.45893246[source]
He's also never worked on any project involving delivering physical goods to DoD.

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.

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2. LarsDu88 ◴[] No.45895127[source]
I dislike Hegseth and MAGA as much as anything, but quite honestly what you are describing is just bureacracy, and it doesn't serve a country well in an actual armed conflict.

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.