• Gates9@sh.itjust.works
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    17 hours ago

    I thought these MIC assholes were working on this for 40 fuckin years? I thought they were making hundreds, THOUSANDS of these things? The “tomahawks” and “THAADs” and “patriots” and whatever the fuck else. It’s rather alarming how glaringly obvious and fundamental the problems with the American preparations for this war are. I understand there graft but Jesus fuckin Christ it’s like they didn’t even want to win the fuckin war. The ships are broken, we don’t have enough missiles, the bases are uninhabitable, the radars are blown up, the glorious F35’s are getting shot down by the Kuwaiti Red Baron, supposedly “on accident”, and apparently the Iranians are just getting started.

    A lot of this shit seems like blocks on the bottom of the Jenga pile…

    • baaaaaah@hilariouschaos.com
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      5 hours ago

      No they weren’t, they were drinking from the firehose for R&D

      A missile sells for like a million dollars and the profit margins aren’t going to change much.  R&D can cost any amount

      So they’ve been playing with lasers and self guided bullets instead of building a stockpile of tried and true munitions

    • eli@lemmy.world
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      11 hours ago

      Honestly if you worked with any government entity at any level you’d see how flawed, inefficient, and broken the system is.

      Government contracts out everything to the lowest builder. Yeah we get “more” for our money, which in turns fucks us in the long term as our infrastructure is compromised in different ways, and once it’s truly tested you’ll see the cracks form and the eventual collapse.

      What does this mean for the US military going forward? Idk, but it gives me the same vibes we were seeing with Russia back in 2022, all of us expecting a steam roll and huge military force and it turned out to be a gigantic flop.

      • MerryJaneDoe@lemmy.world
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        4 hours ago

        Government contracts out everything to the lowest builder.

        This is not always the case. In reality, the bid often goes to the company with political connections.

        They might also look at things like timeframe and job creation. So, supposing that all other things are equal: One company plans to use robotic labor, one is using human labor. There’s going to be a lot of pressure from unions to hire the human labor. Or one company is using imported materials and the other is using local materials.

        That’s not to say that the system isn’t biased and flawed. It most definitely is. But this idea that the “lowest bidder” always gets the job is just not true.

        • 🌞 Alexander Daychilde 🌞@lemmy.world
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          1 hour ago

          Also, any large system is inefficient. People point to governmental inefficiency as a reason to privatize everything, but not only are large enterprises also inefficient in ways, but they must seek profit.

          In reality, while many areas do have legitimate problems that could use better oversight, a decent amount of what our government does for us works pretty well, outside corruption and fascists working to break our democracy. It’s also a fact that a lot of people think a lot of things are much easier than they are.

    • WanderingThoughts@europe.pub
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      17 hours ago

      Reminds me a lot of the muscle bros at the gym. Very impressive, show off with lifting big weights and they do have a mean punch, but some have such a bad cardio they keel over after a few minutes of cardio. And Iran is taking muscle bro USA for a run through the mountains.

    • ms.lane@lemmy.world
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      17 hours ago

      They have, but the best part about MIC is they need repeat sales, can’t have DOD saying ‘whelp, we got enough missiles now’

      So missiles have volatile propellants and explosives, with expiry dates.

      It’s why the first few rounds of materiel sent to Ukraine were ‘free’ since they were all close to or had already ‘expired’.

      • 🌞 Alexander Daychilde 🌞@lemmy.world
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        1 hour ago

        It’s amusing to me that you suggest the reason they use fuels that break down over time is not because those are the better fuels, but only to require replacement.

        That said, I’m not necessarily disagreeing with the sentiment behind that, just that particular suggestion as a method for it :P