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Jeff Bezos warns US military it risks losing tech supremacy

27 points| DyslexicAtheist | 6 years ago |ft.com

17 comments

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[+] aurizon|6 years ago|reply
China and Russia have a number of advantages. The biggest one is the top down ossification in the US military where aged milpols (military politicians) with old ideas and low mental capacity are in charge of all R&D as well as purchasing. The USA has a lot of Aircraft Carriers, none of which could withstand 50 time-on-target (hit at the same time) ship killers at 5000 MPH. China could easily deal with them all. Russia less so, due to lack of missiles due to budgetary limits. The same thing rules in the air, where unmanned drone fighters that cost less than .1% of a new fighter each, with enough AI internal to wiggle through. The USA planes will be swamped. Drones will also take out tanks and risk no pilots. Drones are dirt cheap compared to F35s.

Military production and procurement is also 10 times as costly per unitof weaponry compared to China or Russia.

This is due to the want-of-a-nail POV. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Want_of_a_Nail

So much attention is placed at the nail level that costs can climb to 100 times as much as what a civilian pays for the same thing. Modern electronic parts are made robotically and have very very good reliability - yet the MIL-SPEC procurement process often demands xrays for each part = $$$. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Military_Standar...

Have you ever wondered why Russia was able to maintain it's place in line as to space matters, to get the first satellite etc? People in the USA wanted to make and launch satellites well before Russia, and even conceived the geostationary communications nets. The same old farts sat on it. Those same old farts pushed Amazon off-the-puck for the AWS contract. We have all seen the mess Microsoft has made of the cloud services they launched, now the US military will suffer through that same waste of time, money and performance due to that same old boy network. So get used to it. China is going on top and will stay on top, Russia will carry on being robbed by it's own milpols, but will still hit waaay above it's weight due to the US Milpols..

[+] friendly_fren|6 years ago|reply
>The USA has a lot of Aircraft Carriers, none of which could withstand 50 time-on-target (hit at the same time) ship killers at 5000 MPH. China could easily deal with them all.

Do you have any source on China's missile defense?

[+] mlinksva|6 years ago|reply
No idea whether you're right about eg aircraft carriers and drones but on what I think is your core point...

> The biggest one is the top down ossification in the US military where aged milpols (military politicians) with old ideas and low mental capacity are in charge of all R&D as well as purchasing.

...I've been enjoying a little window into this sort of debate by reading https://acquisitiontalk.com/

[+] chelovek89|6 years ago|reply
If we're ever at the point of a carrier group getting missile spammed isn't there a risk that the next step in escalation is nuclear?
[+] acroback|6 years ago|reply
Not sure why are you correlating unrelated reasoning with MS deal with US Military.

You seem to suggest that MS is poor at Cloud game, which is not exactly true. They are cost effective compared to AWS and catching up.

Maybe military wanted to save money. May be this is all about a better deal after all.

[+] bmiller2|6 years ago|reply
Jeff Bezos built a website / online marketplace. Why does anyone care about his opinion on global military matters?
[+] kevas|6 years ago|reply
Supply chain & logistics is a huge part of what the military does. Don’t understand why you’re so sour.
[+] godzillabrennus|6 years ago|reply
The technology infrastructure behind that marketplace now powers many innovative concepts. His opinions should not be so easily dismissed.