War and peacetime are two different things. During wartime you need lots of materiel quickly, so value for money estimates, anti corruption practices all get reduced in the name of production numbers at all costs. Verification is easier because you go directly from the assembly line to the front line. If it doesn’t work, you find out and make changes quickly. You know what you need because you’re in the process of using it.
In peacetime, everything is different. You don’t know who your next opponent is going to be, so you need to keep options open. You don’t know if you’ll have a war before the equipment you just bought rots away. You don’t want wartime production levels and stifling your wider economy. You also don’t want a Russia situation where you ignore value for money estimates and audits only to find the money you spent on missiles went in the back pocket of a random colonel.
> During wartime you need lots of materiel quickly, so value for money estimates, anti corruption practices all get reduced in the name of production numbers at all costs
Everyone keeps saying this yet it seems to be the opposite, results for dollars tradeoffs are better in wartime.
If anything it seems like the difference is that during wartime it's easier for the end users to tell the bureaucracy to get out of the way and as a result value for money is unchanged or even improved.
>You also don’t want a Russia situation where you ignore value for money estimates and audits only to find the money you spent on missiles went in the back pocket of a random colonel.
There is no difference to the taxpayer or the soldier in the trench whether the money went into one specific colonel's back pocket or got pissed away on running organizational process. The money is gone and the missile isn't there.
At you can least throw colonel in jail (or out a window, because Russia). Imagine if instead of a colonel's pocket the money was spent pushing papers around to no end? It would be the Spiderman pointing at Spiderman meme and nobody would be held responsible except perhaps an unlucky scapegoat.
> Everyone keeps saying this yet it seems to be the opposite, results for dollars tradeoffs are better in wartime.
Do you understand what economies of scale are? Of course some production costs go down because you're producing far more. You're producing at this high level because the enemy is busy blowing up your equipment!
This is also why it's easy to show results: you have live test subjects in the form of the enemy you're trying to blow up and who's trying to blow you up.
Hell, the article also makes clear that this "low-bureaucracy nirvina" that you seem to believe in was costing the US taxpayer huge sums of money in waste and inefficiency.
> At you can least throw colonel in jail (or out a window, because Russia).
What planet are you on? Russia only found out because their tanks ran out of diesel and got towed away by Ukrainian farmers! Are you seriously suggesting the optimal result is for NATO forces to find out our equipment never got manufactured right when we need it?
Every comment I've seen from you has been "bureaucracy bad!" without any clear knowledge beyond some handwaving, usually ignoring the topic at hand.
Do you understand what results are? Not having something because people lied and took money is no different to the guy in the foxhole or the guy ordering those guys around than not having something because nobody lied and the money got spent paying people to do work that did nothing to get that something closer to being actually available.
>Hell, the article also makes clear that this "low-bureaucracy nirvina" that you seem to believe in was costing the US taxpayer huge sums of money in waste and inefficiency.
The article literally spends approximately 1/3 of its scroll bar talking about the problems with the system and how all the steps, all the process, all the tangential work that must per the rules be done despite not being part of the critical path of fielding systems prevents said systems from being delivered on time or on budget.
>Are you seriously suggesting the optimal result is for NATO forces to find out our equipment never got manufactured right when we need it?
It speaks volumes that your responses are constantly attempting toward strawmen and false dichotomies rather than assess what the right amount of procurement process is.
What happens if we go to war? We just gonna build a new fast procurement process from scratch when we decide we need it? How do you even decide that for a low intensity conflict?
You ever heard the phrase "you fight how you train"? We're training our suppliers to be crap.
>> Do you understand what economies of scale are?
> Do you understand what results are?
So I take it, no, you don't understand. You're comparing costs and processes that exist outside of wartime to costs and processes that exist during wartime and haven't considered why, despite being told.
> It speaks volumes that your responses are constantly attempting toward strawmen and false dichotomies
I find it hilarious that you state this after your first 2 paragraphs.
> the right amount of procurement process is.
This childish fixation on a flat number is why you don't seem able to understand the problem.
Let's go back to the top, where you said:
> If we toss the process when effective expenditure of resources toward results matter and consequences are the most serious then the process must be less efficient at producing good results for the expenditure than the corruption (or whatever else the process is replacing). So then why are we running it at all?
This was in the context of comparing wartime to peacetime procurement processes. My entire comment addressed the difference between those environments, which you completely ignored to have a childish rant about "too much process." This isn't the first time you've responded to my comments by ignoring the substance and instead trying to (badly) strawman it.
In peacetime, everything is different. You don’t know who your next opponent is going to be, so you need to keep options open. You don’t know if you’ll have a war before the equipment you just bought rots away. You don’t want wartime production levels and stifling your wider economy. You also don’t want a Russia situation where you ignore value for money estimates and audits only to find the money you spent on missiles went in the back pocket of a random colonel.