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| "If We Run Out of Batteries, This War is Screwed." |
| 2004-03-18 |
| Not news, but interesting background on the recent news of the need to selectively call up technical people. Also some good quotes. Go read the whole thing. They tote M16s, but their job is to jump out of helicopters and set up packet-based wireless networks. "What’s funny about using Microsoft Chat," he adds with a sly smile, "is that everybody has to choose an icon to represent themselves. Some of these guys haven’t bothered, so the program assigns them one. We’ll be in the middle of a battle and a bunch of field artillery colonels will come online in the form of these big-breasted blondes. We’ve got a few space aliens, too." The further down the line I go, the easier it is to see the holes in the system. "Who the fuck do we look like, Lewis and Clark?" Private Jared Johnson blurts out when I ask him how we ended up lost in the Iraqi desert. |
| Posted by:phil_b |
| #10 Despite his biases, the author makes being a patriotic geek seem pretty cool. Seems to me this article will help, not hurt recruiting the right sorts of people. |
| Posted by: someone 2004-3-18 2:42:03 PM |
| #9 A P-3 Orion deserves a $2000 toilet seat. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2004-3-18 1:50:12 PM |
| #8 Good article, too bad it was written by a preening weenie. |
| Posted by: Carl in N.H 2004-3-18 1:25:28 PM |
| #7 Anybody know if this whiner was ever in the military? I suspect not, because if he had been (as so many Rantburgians have already recognized), he'd know this is exactly why duct tape ("100-mph tape") was invented. Jeebus, Joshua, war doesn't go according to a production schedule. You want planning and time lines, buy a box of cake mix. And, just for accuracy's sake, there never was a $600 hammer. It is more or less a political urban legend - a bit of truth, some conflated facts and a good story: Steven Kelman, professor of public policy, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard, U, National Review, 12/7/98: "It was an accounting artifact. The government bought the hammer - originally $15 - "bundled" in a bulk purchase of many different spare parts. Because of contract accounting rules, when the contractor apportioned its allowed expenses (comment: these are things like R & D, overhead, etc - see Federal Acquisition Regs), the hammer picked up the same amount of additional expenses ($420) as all the other parts included in the purchase, making the total "cost" of the hammer $435. Later news reports inflated the price and rounded it off at $600." Kelman points out that, because of the accounting rules, the hammer received the same amount of overhead charges as jet engine - "but no one ever says, 'Gee, what a good deal the government got on that engine!'" I haven't researched many of the other cases, but I do know that the $2000 toilet seat for the USN P-3 Orion sub-hunting plane was pretty much the same case. |
| Posted by: Sofia 2004-3-18 12:25:06 PM |
| #6 Um, the $600 hammers most likely did go to buy hammers. Its overbilling and it easy when the receipt is a million items long and the hammers are listed as HA56801-bp instead of Hammer. The whole thing came to light when someone finally recognized, or cross-indexed the names with the numbers. Milking the government has a long history. |
| Posted by: ruprecht 2004-3-18 12:10:40 PM |
| #5 I dunno. I built $200 diodes once and it wasn't black ops, just lousy specs. |
| Posted by: 11A5S 2004-3-18 10:13:24 AM |
| #4 Hehe, its always really hard to figure out just how much goes into black ops even in the US where stuff is "usually" reported to the pentagon and GAO. Theres basically an official black ops project list and theres the list that no one ever even gets to hear about even in passing. |
| Posted by: Valentine 2004-3-18 5:13:22 AM |
| #3 Shhhhh... I know. Mum's the word on the black ops, bro. Pass it on... |
| Posted by: .com 2004-3-18 1:50:14 AM |
| #2 Um, those $600 hammers didn't go to buy hammers... |
| Posted by: someone 2004-3-18 1:46:51 AM |
| #1 This is a fun read - and exactly the way the Military would have to do it without making everything itself -- and haven't we had enough with the $600 hammers and toilet seats - i.e. everything custom made and spec'ed to withstand 500 G's? Cobbling it all together is what you do when it's pretty much all available - somewhere - just not all avaiable in a single convenient catalog of solutions... like the real world. It just takes brains, innovative thinking, and some gardcore geeks. We got 'em - in spades. Things go right, things go wrong. People encounter the unexpected and improvise. Shit happens. Toilet paper appears. They adapt. They overcome. The only problem is the author, Joshua Davis. Mr Davis (Not to be confused with RB's Mr Davis - who exhibits far more class!) seems hell-bent on whining, disparaging creativity and "can do" attitudes, or off-handedly ridiculing what he himself describes as a "revolution in military affairs." Revolutions are messy chaotic affairs. This one was no different and it was, indeed, revolutionary. As the story clearly demonstrates, a surprisingly few individuals with the right skills and creative mindset in the pivot points can do some amazing shit. Only in an open society would all of these qualities and decisions meet in such a nexus. About to miss his ride, he begs for a lift to catch his disappearing convoy. Without a horn, he must lean out, flail his arms and scream: "Stop you goddamn motherfucking bastards!" I finally scream. It's good old-fashioned Army communication. It worked. Indeed - they can do that, too. So thanks, Joshua for the info, now fuck off, weenieboy. Thx for the post - this is the kind of story that warm's an old geek's heart!!! 8-) |
| Posted by: .com 2004-3-18 1:39:24 AM |