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The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

(steveblank.com)
285 points ridruejo | 1 comments | 11 Nov 25 14:34 UTC | HN request time: 0.215s | source
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chiph ◴[11 Nov 25 21:14 UTC] No.45892948[source]▶
> Design For Rapid Scale In a Crisis

One of the things that I think Anduril (Palmer Luckey and other founders) is doing right is designing for manufacturability. The invasion of Ukraine has shown that future conflicts will use up weapons at a very high pace. And that the US capability to build them at the rate needed to sustain conflict isn't there anymore. But that one thing that could help is making them easier to build. (the decline of US manufacturing is a related but separate topic)

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1. trhway ◴[12 Nov 25 02:28 UTC] No.45895737[source]▶
>The invasion of Ukraine has shown that future conflicts will use up weapons at a very high pace.

That has been shown even in WWII. And the war was won by US/UK/USSR specifically because their mass production of weapons were several times higher than Germany/Japan/Italy.

The war in Ukraine actually haven't yet reached the levels of weapons use of WWII. (for example 500K-1M/day artillery shells in WWII vs. 20-60K/day in Ukraine war)

These days i so far see only China capable and ready to produce weapons, say drones, at that scale. And i so far don't see anybody, including Anduril with their anti-drone systems, able, or even preparing, to deal with 1M/day (my modest estimate of what China would unleash even in a small conflict like say for Taiwan) of enemy drones. No existing anti-drone systems/approaches are scalable to that level, and we can only hope that something new is being developed somewhere in top secret conditions, and that is why we don't know about it.