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What's Wrong With the US Defense R&D Budget?
Harperdog writes "Here's an in-depth analysis of what constitutes defense R&D spending and how some of those projects are classified. From the article: 'But much of what transpires in the name of military research and development is not research in the sense that it produces scientific and technical knowledge widely applicable inside and outside the Defense Department. A large part of defense R&D activity revolves around building very expensive gadgets that are often based on unsound technology and frequently fail to perform as required.'"
A large part of all R&D activity revolves around building very expensive gadgets that are often based on unsound technology and frequently fail to perform as required.
FTFY.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
I see this first hand every day. A big part is the government not having any engineers on it's staff and being led around by the nose by contractors every day (hence my sig).
Which is why we buy these expensive, unsound, unnecessary gadgets... it's congress idiots bringing money home to local defense contractors.
The DoD budget should be written by DoD administrative staff based on actual, military need, not by a bunch of congressional staffers trying to appease big donors.
It's all about scamming up those DoD contracts. Who cares if they ever deliver a viable weapon system, they can make payroll with feasibility studies all day long. The most hillarious of the 'urban legend' proposals I ever heard of was a couple physicists talking at a party during the Ronny Ray-Gun years, when 'Star Wars' funding was damned near bottomless. Their idea was, develop a tachyon beam weapon, deployed in space, that would shoot down enemy missiles 20 minutes before they were launched.
Rumor has it, they copped a cool 50 mil for a feasibility study before somebody at the Five-Sided Funny Farm figured it out.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
At least try to come up with a true example. That space pen one is bullshit.
http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp
John
The graphite dust that writing with pencils gives off is tremendously bad for electronics and breathing in zero-G environments. An ink system actually makes quite a bit of sense in this regard. Furthermore, it was developed privately and then sold to NASA.
'But much of what transpires in the name of military research and development is not research in the sense that it produces scientific and technical knowledge widely applicable inside and outside the Defense Department. A large part of defense R&D activity revolves around building very expensive gadgets that are often based on unsound technology and frequently fail to perform as required.'
I thought that was the definition of practical research?
Copyright © 2011 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Oh no, it isn't research in the pure scientific sense. It's the damned military: they don't do research in the sense you want. In the practical field, a failure is a success, of a sort. You now know what doesn't work. I mention this because TFA specifically brings it up. The military did a missile test that failed, and called it a success because it was the first of it's kind, and now they know what went wrong and how to fix it. TFA criticizes them for it. Maybe the program is a waste: faulty arguments like that do little to convince me of it.
There is a crapload of waste in the defense department, but this doesn't exactly seem the most sound way of attacking it. And as producing little of value: well, I'm not exactly in a position to judge, but things like the Keyhole program, GPS advancements, UAVs, even the F-22 (as bloated as it was) seem like they are pretty valuable. And that is all we know about: the stealth helicopters that were supposedly used in assassinating Osama seem like, well, like a massive advantage.
I'm also aware that Mr. Subrata Ghoshroy is far more well informed than I am. This just seems like a really lousy argument.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
But, But, the corporations.
If you are going to link to an article as a means of making a point, it's often best to read the article.
I think that statistically, this doesn't happen much here.
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
This reminds me about the billions that were spent on the so called space pen. The Soviets showed us common sense, (and sadly continue to do so despite their economic troubles), by employing the time tested and proven hard black (HB) pencil.
Your own link debunks you:
"Be that as it may, beginning with the Apollo program astronauts did begin using a specially-designed zero-gravity pen called the Fisher Space Pen. The nitrogen-pressurized space pen worked in "freezing cold, desert heat, underwater and upside down," as well as in the weightless conditions of outer space.
It was developed not by NASA, however, but by one enterprising individual, Paul C. Fisher, owner of the Fisher Space Pen Company. By his own account, Fisher spent "thousands of hours and millions of dollars" of his own money in research and development — not billions.
The Fisher Space Pen is still used by both American and Russian astronauts on every space flight, and you can even buy one yourself direct from the company for a measly 50 bucks."
From http://www.spack.org/wiki/SpacePen:
"I hate to spam you, but on your quotes page you've tripped one of my pet peeves. The Space Pen. There is a common email circulating that describes how much money NASA wasted on making a pen that writes upside down, in vacuum blah blah blah. You know how much it really cost the US Gov't? Nothing. Fisher developed it at TREMENDOUS cost, all of it absorbed by them. In return they got to be the sole provider. Normally this means that they would sell these pens to NASA at some obscene amount. They charged just a few dollars. Admittedly, a few dollars for a pen was a lot in the 60's, but 1/100th what they could have charged. Fischer did this out of True Faith, True Faith that knowledge and research is its' own reward. And since that day, they have sold so many of their pens to the private sector, that they have made their money back a ten times, and still never charged that much. I have one of these pens, you can buy them at any stationary store, even Hallmark stores carry them. I recommend them, they're damn good pens.
Oh, and the bit about the pencil is true, the russians did use pencils. Remember the space station fires that they had? At least one of these, I forget which, but it caused a fatality, at least one was caused by airborn pencil shavings mixing with sensitive electronics. Their solution? Mail order Fischer Space Pens."
The thing to attack in terms of defense spending is wasteful spending, or just over all spending levels. There are plenty of times when the military buys or develops things it doesn't need, or gets ripped off by contractors. Also you can make a very valid argument that we simply have more military than we need, that we should downsize it and spend less.
However that the R&D gadgets often fail? Well duh. The military is willing to do real, long term, R&D which often means a ton of failures before you have success. It can be very lengthy, expensive, have lots of false starts, and so. That is life when you are doing long term research.
However for all that, we get things that are often useful, and not just to the military. GPS and the Internet would be the two greatest recent examples. GPS in particular because it was the kind of thing no private enterprise would try. Massively expensive and hard to do, and yet now it is the navigation system used the world 'round, everything else is a fallback for if GPS fails. It is so important that Europe has recognized the need for one outside of US control and for all that the technical and monetary challenges have been enough they STILL haven't gotten theirs working. Yet the military did it, and back when nobody had done it before.
I don't mind failures in any R&D. They happen. All I mind is waste. If the military tries to develop something it needs, like say a better rifle, and fails, I'm ok with that. I'm ok with them continuing to try until they get it right. Where I get annoyed is if the military spends money on something they don't need, or more often if contractors rip them off on the things they get.
Mr. Ghoshroy has a long record of disagreement with Defense contractors and programs. I am not saying that he is wrong on this one. However, other people do say that he is. To accept Mr. Ghoshroy's assertions without adequate rebuttal or background knowledge is, well, ignant. Note also that Mr. Ghoshroy has been very happy to allow some well known anti-defense agitators to exploit him in the name of making his case. This really has the smell of a personal vendetta. He may be right, but his approach does his credibility no good.
http://www.nriinternet.com/NRI_Sciectists/USA/A_Z/G/Subrata%20Ghoshroy/index.htm
http://openmediaboston.org/node/1084
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
-- Pablo Picasso
Just look at Lockheed Martin's F-22 and F-35 programs for sterling examples of why the U.S. is going broke buying weapons we really don't need, that don't work right, cost vastly more than Lockheed said they would when they won the contracts, and are years to decades late being delivered.
For those too young to remember. Those were *exactly* the same complaints made about the F-15 back in the day. You know the F-15, the fighter that has a 150 to zero win/loss aerial combat record.
I've been part of the military-industrial complex for the past ten years. The real waste is not in risky projects that sometimes fail. We need more of that, especially as today's wars wind down and we reset the force to handle a full spectrum of threats and missions, from terrorism to a major conflict with a "near peer" competitor like China or Russia.
The real waste is in the mind-numbing, innovation-stifling bureaucracy. For every person (usually a contractor, despite the bad press) trying to actually *do* something, there are 10 people (government and contractor) worrying about budgets, funding, politics, endless layers of architecture and governance, ineffective security protocols, and, most of all, territorial "rice bowls." Almost every time I've tried to actually *do* something, I would promptly run into someone who claimed that it was their responsibility:
"OK, great! The war fighters I'm supporting need a thing that does exactly that. What do you have?"
"I have this PowerPoint presentation that shows my charter, my org chart, my budget, my made-up timeline, and some hand-waving architectural diagrams that don't even meet the [overwrought] DODAF standards never mind speak to the actual need."
"What about the actual [widget]?"
"It should be done in 2017."
At this point, an actual military officer (not a civilian bureaucrat), usually with boots-on-the-ground combat experience, points out that the present wars will be over in 2017. He already knows that I could build a 70% solution in a few weeks if people would just get out of the way. We depart, shaking our heads in disgust.
But woe be unto us if we try to solve our own problem or find someone else to help us. The bureaucrat, marking time until his retirement in 2016, safely before his project craters in 2017, will raise holy hell: "Hey, it's my job to not do that!"
The lack of technical guidance and leadership is also appalling. Some new initiatives are improving this, but too often there are no concrete guidelines at a hands-on technical level to even follow. The technical leadership role is in the hands of career bureaucrats who know their way around the org chart, but haven't a clue about the tech. Compare this to an environment like Google App Engine or the various Web 2.0/Web services ecosystems around Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and the like where your options are clear, there is tangible guidance on what you can and cannot do, and can often go from zero to an end-to-end proof-of-concept in a few days, if not hours.
I've tried to help, but I can't stomach it anymore and am executing a "strategic re-deployment" to the Internet/mobile consumer and professional market, where innovation and agility is welcomed, nigh demanded, instead of smothered.
The American government spends so much money that even if every single income tax payer was paying 100% of their income in tax, there would still be a deficit. Most of that deficit is military spending.
2010 Federal Spending: $3.46 Trillion
2010 Federal Tax Recipts: $2.16 Trillion
2010 DoD, Social Security, and Medicare/Medicaid spending: ~$700-$800 billion apiece
(Sourced from Wikipedia, so take with the usual Wiki grain of salt.)
2010 US Per Capita Income: ~$40k
2010 US Population: ~300 Million
2010 US Income Tax receipts: $900 Billion
(Sourced from here, here, and here, respectively.
Putting on our big boy hats and doing some math, here are some interesting facts we can get from those statistics. First, defense spending is one of only three major pillars of our deficit, and it's project to expand at a far slower rate than Social Security or Medicare/Medicaid. Second, taxpayers rake in ~$12 Trillion in income but only pay $900 Billion currently, so we could easily run a surplus by raising taxes. Third, people with no knowledge of orders of magnitude should not spew FUD that will further confuse a public that has little knowledge of how much money comes into and goes out of government coffers.