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RobertC

Junior Member
Registered Member
The War Zone reports on Admiral John Aquilino's (INDOPACOM) remarks during the National Defense Industrial Association's Emerging Technologies and Defense symposium in Washington, D.C. yesterday.
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The TWZ article focused on
A massive network is being constructed to give everyone from soldiers to allied countries a “single pane of glass” view of the battlefield.
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Navy ship platforms and shore facilities are comprised of hundreds of mostly independent acquisition efforts initiated, implemented, deployed, operated and sustained by tens of mostly independent organizations of widely varying charters, funding sources, responsibility chains and abilities.

So here you are with your little acquisition effort building a small shipboard subsystem, important to you and the people being funded, but maybe not so important in the larger scheme of things. Your government-industry team is a little over budget, a little behind schedule and performance a bit less than promised. But infosec is under control, integration is proceeding in the testbed and the team is focused on IOC delivery next year.

Suddenly one of Admiral Aquilino's staffers shows up and says
... the approach is to be able to deliver a common operational picture for every node in the battlespace — the same exact targeting level quality picture for everyone. And in that mesh node of delivery, any fighting formation is able to employ and carry out their responsibilities in the battlespace, whether there's an attempt to impact those command and control nodes. But that mesh allows it to occur. And again, the network that we're talking about, we refer to as the Joint Fires Network.
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Your response will be, quite reasonably, I need written requirements, more money, more time and permission from my sponsor. The staffer says "Keep your sponsor out of this and take it out of hide."

This sad story has played out in the past. And here we are today with the same acquisition system...
 
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RobertC

Junior Member
Registered Member
The righteous fire at Cdr Salamander has dimmed into cooling coals
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Even the comments are tired. The good Cdr ends with
Are those in DC responding properly?
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Sorry Cdr but is INDOPACOM, much closer to China, responding properly? To ask the question is to answer it.

Another story, mostly true. Many years ago I was chatting with my Aegis buddies and they were so proud they had only one combat system configuration to build, deploy and sustain. I told them that was a weakness they must correct. I said imagine the senator from NJ calls and says I have $200M to upgrade your ships. You respond the upgrade costs $20M and have 12 ships. The senator says if you don't want the money the Air Force does. You take the money but in trying to spread it across 12 ships you botch it resulting in only 8 ships upgraded. My lesson fell on fallow earth. A decade later they were asking for my help, which of course because I love my Navy, I gave.

The stunning picture opening the Cdr's article is emblematic of the Navy's way-ahead. China has a plan and is turning it into a PLAN (and CCG and MM). America doesn't so its Navy is downsizing faster than upsizing. And here we are...
 
BoraTas

BoraTas

Major
Registered Member
pevade said:
That's because the entire defense industry is just Erdogans retarded attempt at "revitalizing" the country. (at the severe detriment to everything else) He for some reason beloved that the military industry ( and related industries) will be the future for turkey and wants to be the China for military needs. His little idiots club has poured absurd amounts of money into everything military. You guys remember TEKNOFEST? I went there, and every freaking university has some rocket model sitting outside their booth hoping to get some of that MIC cash.
In the uni there is also an innovation center called TEKMER. One of the many "innovations" they showcase proudly are hexacopter drones (all built from Chinese parts lol) , and a "high speed 3D printer" (Copy of A Voron 0 (how do I know? There was some boron branding still on the x axis belt tensioner lol.) with some badly made sheet metal parts. Won an award from KOSGEB (they run and supervise TEKMER ), a "drone jammer gun" ( that weighs like 8-10 KG , lol how dafuq is that practical?) A company that produces gears (shitty inaccurate gears with stupidly high backlash. MF was proudly showing off his planetary gear that was produced and you could feel several degrees of backlash (basically shitty tolerances) , you can get significantly better planetary gears from alibaba for the same cost lol). And he showed me a proposal to make a "new" and "innovative" machine to make gears. It was a hobbing machine that have existed for more than 40 years that you can get off alibaba (undoubtedly at significantly higher quality given his "best" product). His office is littered with various projects that with some forethought he would have noticed that they were doomed to fail like a freaking 3d printer whose chassis was made from thin ass ACRYLIC. Another one is a projection machine for making large screen printing masks (which failed because he somehow couldn't figure out how to get the target areas aligned with the projector.) There is of course the usual littany of DOA projects that rode the "metaverse", "AI" and "block chain" hypewave to get into TEKMER and anyone with any knowledge of their promises would have noticed that their promises were hollow and their confidence was through the roof. These "companies" ended up becoming nothing more than gathering clubs for friends to eat and drink fastfood.
There is also a company that is run by a guy studying computer science but wants to make one of those DOA "city air prurifiers" scams and wants to propose it to the Saudi government (no idea what happened).

Anyways this a short list of what I remembered
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This is off-topic so I won't write long.

I completely agree. The defense industry really vacuumed all the capital and qualified people from all other industries. And as you said, outside ~10-15 large corporations (Aselsan, TAI, STM, Roketsan, Baykar, etc...) and 3-5 universities (BOUN, METU, etc...) it is rife with scams. For example, we still have corporations that enter the industry and make AKM variants. Like... the point? Gajillion entities already produce such weapons throughout the world. What you are trying to achieve unless your goal is getting govt benefits through being a defense industry company on paper? And yes, we have our good share of scammers who buy drones from Alibaba to join the unmanned systems gravy train. The Turkish Defense industry did achieve things that are truly impressive for a country like Turkey, but it is important to not get high on the govt's supply.
 
Helius

Helius

Senior Member
Registered Member
Atomicfrog said:
They will need to ramp up production, they are discarding them faster than they are replacing them.

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[snip]
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Boeing's third F-15EX is the first to be built in the exact configuration ordered by the U.S. Air Force.

[...]

Although technically the first two F-15EX aircraft, the first Eagle IIs delivered to Air Force testers are equipped with provisions for a missile approach warning system that is not part of the U.S. configuration.
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f3rltkrwuaa3lm4.jpeg

... Still has provisions for the "MAWS that is not part of the U.S. configuration", from the looks of it.

But instead of housing an actual MAWS they're now just a couple of protrusions that serve no purpose, just like the first two airframes, yet Boeing still elected to include them anyway, and the Air Force let them.

MAWS on the QA -

F-15QA_6.jpg
 
Bellum_Romanum

Bellum_Romanum

Brigadier
Registered Member
gpt said:
Stealth drone by Anduril

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High quality production marketing and of their missions along with the talents they've assembled together. The founder is the guy that used to head or founded Oculus VR back in 2017. The money and team was provided by the founders of Palantir and Space X plus interestingly enough, the initial government contracts may have come about since the founder was a big TRUMP supporter and fundraised for his presidential runs in 2016 and 2020.
 
G

gpt

Junior Member
Registered Member
Bellum_Romanum said:
High quality production marketing and of their missions along with the talents they've assembled together. The founder is the guy that used to head or founded Oculus VR back in 2017. The money and team was provided by the founders of Palantir and Space X plus interestingly enough, the initial government contracts may have come about since the founder was a big TRUMP supporter and fundraised for his presidential runs in 2016 and 2020.
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I listened to one of Palmer's speeches and he's like "yeah I did a lot of business in China back in the day for Oculus VR but now I understand what a mistake that was and I started Anduril to defend America's interests and way of life". Seems like he found his cash cow in military contracts.
 
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