After 15 years of being a DoD contractor, it is frustrating to see yet another sole source entity getting the contract. Prices will inflate and there is no competition.
HP and Oracle have been reaping the benefits of this for at least two decades now. We put databases on Oracle that should be handled by Postgres or MariaDB since DoD prefers Oracle. We would buy useless HP software because we were a HP shop. I fought to get a non HP solid state array for our data, it was an epic battle (in the end I won, on the extreme we had 6 to 7 hour processes cut down to under an hour, the HP equivalent could not replicate that at the time).
So i can see DoD moving to Azure and then get the vendor lock in and in 10 years if they want to move the cost will be so extreme it will either cause taxpayers a ton of money or not be realistic.
As impossible as it sounds, and somewhat impractical, i would rather see a vendor agnostic approach and DoD spread across multiple gov clouds. i guess years has gotten me jaded with government spending (wait, what, how did we buy 2 extra $50k Cisco chassis and then keep them in storage for 3 years....).
> We put databases on Oracle that should be handled by Postgres or MariaDB since DoD prefers Oracle.
I mean, if you’ve already budgeted the CapEx for some additional Oracle licenses, the OpEx efficiencies of having unified tooling and a unified ops doctrine are no joke.
I haven’t worked with an Oracle DBMS, but I think this is analogous: I’d sure hate to have to manage a cloud infrastructure where parts were on AWS, parts on GCP, and parts on Azure. Sure, there are generic tools that treat all three the same, or over-layers like K8s that don’t care about substrate—but what if the projects on each platform were taking advantage of that platform’s specialties? What if I was using SNS on AWS, or BigQuery on GCP?
To bring that back through the analogy, what if our Oracle projects were tuned using Oracle-specific query-planner hints, while our Postgres projects did their ETL using PG-specific Foreign Data Wrapper connectors?
In both cases, the only real solution is hiring and retaining O(N) specialized ops headcount, one team for each stack. And that cost gets a lot higher than just paying for another darn Oracle license.
Even with an abstraction layer like kubernetes you still have a lot of duplicate work if you're multi-cloud. Services need to be exposed with load balancers, and those will have different configurations to be setup. Same with any Volumes. And then you have platform updates on both sides, bugs, quirks.
plus the maintenance and upkeep of two clouds - two bills to inspect, two account managers to deal with, two sets of permissions and overall account configuration to setup, maintain and audit.
Multi-cloud is really a set of requirements that changes the whole game in terms of operational overhead. And we limited our example to kubernetes. I imagine any non-fictional-for-the-sake-of-example company would want to make use of other platform specific tools as you mention.
I think a lot of this speculation requires inside knowledge of what the DoD's use cases actually are.
Are they doing a lot of compute, a lot of ingestion, a lot of output, and a ton of networking? Are they primarily just doing one of these things?
Who knows?
There's a lot of cases where having multiple clouds could be fine -- maybe even a big benefit. There's also a lot of cases where it could be a major headache.
I know a little about it from a previous employer.
Even the narrow slice I saw was all of "a lot of compute, a lot of ingestion, a lot of output, and a ton of networking", and more.
I think that the internal inefficiencies in the DOD datacenters are so enormous that any kind move to something more 'standardized', no matter what company it is, even with all of the artificial overhead, etc, will likely be a big win.
I'm sure that these deals are complicated at the size they're going at and maybe laymens pricing models just get tossed aside, but one of the biggest things I spend time on in cloud architecting is all around data ingress/egress in order to control costs. I simply don't understand how it's possible to go multi-cloud and control those costs, I feel like you'd either blow costs out not caring, or blow costs out throwing engineers at very complex solutions.
Not just governments. I worked at a F100 company that had a special type of internal funding called SQP for spending on (mostly) IT people-hours on projects. Year after year, the biz would penny-pinch on their SQP to the point that we struggled to keep core contractors on staff. Then around Oct/Nov, biz would come to us begging to spend their SQP on anything (else they could lose it next year) as long as that project stop billing at fiscal year end (not a day afterwards; as that would be charged to next year's SQP). That meant we now struggled because we didn't have enough people on staff to burn up all the SQP. Famine then feast! I would suggest (half jokingly) that we should head over to the nearest retirement home and get a bus load of old folks to join us at $150/hr for two months to just sit there doing nothing but burn SQP.
We are always seeing threads with junior people/new grads talking about how they are having so much trouble breaking into the industry. Just hire them and give them interesting tiny projects. Would be super helpful to so many people to get going and still allow you to spend all your money.
What's hysterical to me is that Microsoft was actually making this point in their proposal because they very much expected for AWS to solely receive go-ahead with this contract.
As a former longtime contractor I totally agree. One thing often overlooked is this 'Silver Tsunami' that will wreak havoc on the old guard (existing giant contracting companies). The existing workforce is aging, the new blood is uninterested in the old ways (cruft, old tech) and frankly there's tremendous opportunity for a 'Space-X' style small contractor to get a serious foothold.
Some of these companies need to replace 40% of their workforce in the next decade. Who would a new grad choose?
> there's tremendous opportunity for a 'Space-X' style small contractor to get a serious foothold.
Sure, but the procurement process is incredibly difficult to crack into for small companies. There is tremendous amounts of red tape designed to keep other players out.
> Some of these companies need to replace 40% of their workforce in the next decade. Who would a new grad choose?
Most will go to where the money is...unless you go FAANG, it's harder to find the kind of high salaries that defense contractors can throw around in the private sector.
> Most will go to where the money is...unless you go FAANG, it's harder to find the kind of high salaries that defense contractors can throw around in the private sector.
There is a reason the DC suburbs of Northern VA and Southern MD have some of the richest counties in the US...
Is it really unusual or inefficient for the Department of Defense logistics chain to have lots of spare capacity all over the place w.r.t the Cisco chassis? Especially with global force projection, I'd expect there would be massive, unavoidable waste just to maintain operational capabilities, stretching into every corner of the industry.
This was an accident, they meant to buy 2 blades for more SAN ports and they ordered the wrong parts.
They did this with a few database servers as well, they were supposed to order 8 core processors, but they ordered 10 core instead (it was a typo), they had 4 processors per machine it was a $40k extra mess not including the extra Oracle licenses needed to buy since Oracle licenses by cores (8 extra cores per machine and 3 machines).
But i do understand the spend it or lose it, which is another reason no one tries to be efficient.
My cubicle at my last job was surrounded by a mountain of expensive printers because they would loose some funding if they didn't spend all of their budget each year.
If we ordered a server it would show up in 6 to 12 months and sometimes would be sent to the wrong place. The people in charge of ordering would replace SSDs with spinning disk and we wouldn't know about the change until the wrong parts arrive months later. Fun times.
I understand that the existing approach results in a worse and more expensive product, but doesn't this approach also allow agencies to focus their efforts on assuring the vendors of their critical infrastructure aren't comprimised by bad actors etc...?
(This isn't my area expertise, so I'm open to the idea of being super wrong)
You can lock down YOUR infrastructure, but then are 100% dependent on the cloud environment to maintain and patch theirs. Since you have no insight to what the underlying infrastructure consists of you really have no way of knowing if they are secure. Do their storage arrays have open CVE's? are they employing people who are mentally sane? You just need to trust them.
So in the cloud just migrates the a lot of the security to another team. I do not know for a fact, but I am pretty sure the DoD cannot just show up at the AWS or Azure facilities and start auditing them (maybe they can and it is in a contract, someone else might know).
Considering AWS already has 2 entire airgapped dataceters for the US government, I'm pretty sure this contract will entail microsoft building entirely separate airgapped datacenters for the DOD and thus they probably will be able to just show up to their datacenter because nobody else is going to be running anything in those datacenters.
Correct, but those air gapped data centers already exist- there are separate Azure regions for certain restricted civilian government workloads, DoD unclassified work, and cleared work.
My view is that Amazon did help write the requirements, and then lost the contract thinking it was in the bag. So now they are taking it to court because they were shocked their in the bag contract wasn't rewarded.
I hadn't heard of that side of the argument. According to
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/05/oracle-argues-jedi-defense-c..., Oracle had complained about this before, then kinda dropped it, then revived it one week after Amazon launched their new complaint.
There were some improprieties found as it relates to the conduct of Amazon's agents and in the RFP process, but it got the greenlight overall. This might be the problem with Amazon litigating the changes to the RFP process. Oracle already litigated the previous version of the RFP. It looks like the process changed in part to head off the perception that it was rigged in favor of Amazon. Now, Amazon alleges that this re-rigging made it rigged out of its favor.
So, it went:
Oracle: "This is rigged for Amazon! These requirements can only be met by Amazon! Also it's unfair that it can only be won by a single entity!"
Judge: "The Pentagon didn't want to have multiple clouds because it would defeat the reason for the project. We didn't find that the RFP was corrupt to the point of breaking the law, but it was definitely sort of corrupt, particularly in the case of the dude who was on the committee creating the RFP while simultaneously selling a startup to Amazon while simultaneously telling the Pentagon that he wasn't breaking the law and telling Amazon he was not breaking the law, but he was totally breaking the law."
This obviously put the Pentagon between the rock of leaving the RFP as-is and being sued again for corruption and the hard place of changing the RFP and being accused of improper political influence. If Trump had avoided taking a public stance on the issue it would have been much better for the Pentagon's situation, as this now creates a situation in which no matter what the Pentagon decided they could be credibly accused of corruption.
This is standard procedure in these kind of contract fights. I get so sick and tired of government IT contract squabbles. They drag on for years, little usually changes, and, in the meantime the work doesn't get done.
The question shouldn't be whether it's standard, but if the office has the authority to intervene. You can then work backwards to legislative hot fixes to governance deficiencies.
Which is why it's important to craft policy of strong checks and balances, regardless of which party has a majority. Today you're the Rebellion, tomorrow you're the Empire. Design systems resilient to subversion or tyranny by anyone.
That's somewhat irrelevant to the question of what people's opinions are of the power the president should have though, isn't it. I'm not defending Trump, I'm saying that D's are currently arguing he shouldn't have power that they would be happy to see exercised if it wasn't an R in office.
Sure, if this had precedence. Would you say illegal actions taken by the president are relevant to whether they should continue to have power? This is the question that non-partisan people are considering.
>> Would you say illegal actions taken by the president are relevant to whether they should continue to have power?
Absolutely and immediately, once convicted, but that hasn't happened. And to emphasize my point about party lines - how much do you want to bet it won't happen?
But let's be clear that my first comment was tongue-in-cheek. I'm not saying the president ACTUALLY has more power depending on the party. I'm saying that things people were fine with under Obama are suddenly a problem under Trump. And I will expect the same thing next time there's a Democrat in office - suddenly Republicans will flip-flop on the way the office is supposed to operate.
edit: Maybe a more appropriate question is, among people who label themselves as "Democrat" and "Republican", who thinks that Trump should lose power after his impeachment, who also thinks that Clinton should have lost power after his impeachment?
It's a bit of an apples to oranges comparison since one of them was impeached for lying to a grand jury (about a topic that was outside the scope of the investigation and more than a little irrelevant to any questions of high crimes and misdemeanors) and another was impeached for abuse of the power of his office to solicit aid from a foreign country in collecting damaging information on a political rival.
Intent and outcomes matter if the question is "Should this person lose power?"
That's my whole point. Increasingly, people's idea of the rule of law is their subjective opinion of this person. Trump could have been impeached for the exact same offense, and 99% of people opinions of what should happen next wouldn't change.
Oh, absolutely not, because they don't think the way I do. The GOP has made it clear in this generation they care about power to rule and very little else; not their legacy, not the stability of the US government long-term, not quid pro quo or fair play. They seem to see their situation as one of existential threat, and they're operating as if the moment they lose control of Congress and the Presidency at the same time they will cease to exist as a political party.
Almost as if... it's basically a party-line vote. Which is exactly what I've been saying since my first comment in this thread. Why are we even discussing this? You keep proving my point by bringing it back to party lines. Trump was impeached on a near-perfect party line vote. Clinton was impeached, 2.5% away from being a perfect party line vote. It's virtually always a party line vote when it's a question of which president should have which power and get away with what.
I don't think "virtually always parties" is a useful observation if it has little predictive power, and I don't think one can make predictions on a three-data-point event.
But on the other topic (apples to oranges comparison): it's possible for both votes to be party-line regardless of the fact pattern if one party is corrupt and just always votes to maximize party power independent of fact patterns, and the fact pattern would induce a more objective juror to vote one way in one case and the other way in the other case.
(The difference would be one would anticipate were a Democrat to do what Trump did, they'd be roundly impeached and convicted).
I disagree that any vote on the matter of how much power the executive should have, or if any specific executive should be punished for an abuse of that power, would fall along anything other than party lines, with those in the same party as the current executive voting in his or her favor.
Yes, I've noticed this too: whenever the party I favor is in office, the office is a lame duck, unable to lift a finger without Congressional approval. Whenever the enemy party is in office, they're absolute tyrants answerable to no-one. This sure is convenient, as it saves me from all kinds of cognitive dissonance!
Well, he is head of the executive branch which the DoD falls under. He can issue whatever order he wants. It's up to the court to decide if they are/were lawful. SOP doesn't mean a whole lot here.
It is quite clear whether Trump's interference constituted foul play. Everyone who has been paying attention understands very well that he is motivated strongly and solely by his enmity of and hatred towards Bezos.
That's not substantiated. There are a lot of reasons that Azure could have won this project, highlighted by the fact that they have decades long relationships in terms of executing on government contracts.
The claim is not substantiated publicly because Amazon's filing is currently under seal. Of course, there are many other possible reasons but those are not substantiated either.
Either company could have won the project - this isn't about their merit. It's about whether the decision was personally influenced by Trump because he hates Bezos.
That's straight from AWS's U.S. Court of Federal Appeal case. This kind of claim is part of the standard government contract protest package. I'm not convinced.
That is not yet proven. Azure has plenty of other business, so there exist reasons to select it other than corruption. If there wasn’t an openly corrupt president waging a public war with Jeff Bezos there wouldn’t even be the suspicion of this, but given the facts of the man I think Bezos is right to file suit and have it investigated.
If Trump had even a hint of a whiff of a modicum of a crumb of subtlety, he could have gotten a similar result in a way that would preclude such a challenge.
I think you are misreading Trump. The flagrant openness is part of the power play. By doing it openly he denies plausible deniability to his foot soldiers and limits their future ability to defect.
Trump attacked Amazon because of business; he seems to think Amazon is profiting from the US taxpayers' money.
Now Amazon has a strong financial incentive to go to court in this case as winning can lead to potentially securing a 10b$ contract. Whereas losing costs maybe some millions?
Both Bezos and Trump are very pragmatic business men. I think this is all just about money.
If you really thing Trump dislikes Bezos because of "profiting from the US taxpayer" instead of "owning The Washington Post", I don't even know what to say.
So you mean zero, right? There's no evidence benchmark for a party taking legal action in a civil matter. Saying "you'll be hearing from my lawyer" doesn't strengthen an argument.
>So you mean zero, right? There's no evidence benchmark for a party taking legal action in a civil matter. Saying "you'll be hearing from my lawyer" doesn't strengthen an argument.
In the United States and other common-law legal systems (I don't know about other codes at all) there is the concept of "summary judgement", which would absolutely be invoked if Amazon presented no "no genuine dispute as to any material fact and the movant is entitled to judgment as a matter of law" [1]. A summary judgement can be sought with full evidentiary presentation. Amazon's evidence may well be weak, but if they presented "zero evidence" the case wouldn't go to trial at all. It's perfectly reasonable to expect and assume a certain basic level of competence from an established megacorp's legal team. They will have filed a cause of action to which they could at least potentially be entitled relief and assertions of material facts that a jury could at least potentially be convinced by.
No, it isn't. Legally it might be zero, but multi-billion dollar companies don't enter legal processes that last years and cost them millions just for the sake of it. This isn't the same as "you'll hear from my lawyer".
>This isn't the same as "you'll hear from my lawyer".
How isn't it? You keep speaking authoritatively on this; where is your evidence? And any derivation of "Amazon is a big company and they don't enter lawsuits they won't win" isn't evidence.
> "Amazon is a big company and they don't enter lawsuits they won't win"
this simply isn't what I said.
Second - my evidence? We're not in court and I'm not trying to prove anything to you. I just explained my thought process - if you disagree or if you think there's a flaw in my reasoning, you can point it out. Or you can move on and ignore what I've written.
I tend to have discussions with people online to understand their point of view. Will you indulge me and share why you think there's merit to the case or is this thread just another pair of soapboxes where we each squawk from our megaphones and leave without mutual understanding?
1. Anyone who has rightfully-obtained access or knowledge of any such evidence is most likely obligated (legally or otherwise) to keep it secret.
Given #1, asking for evidence isn't the most salient question. Since it can really only be speculation, the most interesting questions probably start with "Given what we know, what is most likely?"
It is strange to me that there are even rules about this. Imagine if we decided to halt the Manhattan Project for a few months so the courts could work out whether contracts were properly awarded.
Actually, millions of people would have died unnecessarily. Japan wouldn’t surrender, and was planning to slowly sacrifice its entire population to bleed the allied invasion of the home islands.
Somehow people forget Japan started the war in the Pacific and murdered tens of millions of Chinese, Koreans, and other Asian civilians in the process.
I wonder how often system implementation delays are caused by excessive government contract litigation? How much does it cost taxpayers because Amazon or Oracle are litigious?
This reminds me of a time where the Department of Work and Pensions botched a bid for a Universal Jobmatch system and ended up awarding the contract, to methods consulting, re-tendering the contract and paying close to £1m to methods consulting
I would not be surprised if something similar happened here, although the payout would likely be far higher and I'm in no way comparing Methods Consulting to Microsoft.
The federal government cannot compete with private industry salaries and benefits for rare technical talent because of caps on federal salaries. Federal salaries are capped because attacking "government waste" and "lazy overpaid government workers" is popular with politicians and the electorate.
So instead the government outsources technical projects to private contractors... which means ultimately the government is paying those big salaries, and the profit margin on top of them.
One of many many "penny wise / pound foolish" problems with the way we do government services.
Yeah I'm aware of how this goes down: in addition to what you say, government management types get their beds feathered by working for the for-profit companies they contract the work to after they "retire" (aka everyone involved in F35 procurement ends up working at Lockheed; total coincidence I am sure). Yet, somehow the NSA manages to run their own data centers[1]. It even looks kind of cost effective!
Part of that may have been the times. That project started construction back in 2011 which means it was in planning for a while before that. The cloud vs on-premises debate was at a different state back then iirc.
Also it's for NSA's questionably legal spying on US citizens vs the more standard legality of DoD's work.
I've worked with federal government, and I can say is if rather that they pay private contractors. I used to find all paid government devs sleeping in toilet cubicles all the time. If rather Amazon or the squeeze on its employees to perform than shirt unmotivated public sector management.
And this comes from an unabashed hard left big government voter.
For AWS, Amazon does not hire employees that it needs to "squeeze" in order to get acceptable performance. Amazon [1] aims to recruit and keep the best employees, who are talented and driven to build the future. It deploys the resources necessary to do so, and operates in a way that empowers them to innovate and find success.
The federal government, in the name of cutting waste and fighting corruption, largely is forced to do the opposite in the IT space (with a few rare exceptions).
[1] Not implying Amazon is alone on this; all the big cloud operators do.
Amazon's reaction seems quite defensive, and constantly keeps reminding us how Microsoft is seen as the better overall provider to be trusted in this case. Tech wise they are both capable, no doubt.
I think Amazon should have just acknowledged it, congratulate Microsoft and move on - plenty of other growth ahead in cloud computing. That's what Satya Nadella would have done.
If you are a purely-Microsoft shop (AD/Exchange/Visual Studio), using Azure could give you better integration within their ecosystem (i.e. native Azure tooling within Visual Studio). I realize AWS has similar tools and plugins, but there is something nice to having first-party support down the entire vertical. Making your Microsoft account rep responsible for everything really does help to consolidate business administration concerns.
If you are not a Microsoft shop (i.e. >50% of your stuff runs on Linux), I would almost say avoid Azure because of how focused it is on their stack. I know you can run arbitrary Linux on Azure and generally get everything done, but AWS (and all other non-Microsoft cloud vendors) always seemed more friendly/cheaper for non-Windows/Office concerns.
So, it's not just about the cloud platforms and their respective costs per feature consumption unit. It's also about your business and the ecosystem required to support and operate within these cloud platforms.
As Microsoft is proud to boast, the majority on instances on Azure are Linux based.
The tooling that matters to me (az cli, terraform, vscode, kubectl et all) runs absolutely fine on Azure. I use Linux to create and manage Linux and open source infra on azure every day.
The majority of complaints I hear about azure tend to revolve around their AzureRM templating, which is admittedly terrible, but irrelevant since terraform exists (and cloudformation is not much better imo).
Also a lot of people dont/didn't like their portal. I don't frequently use the portal, and besides have you seen the aws portal? It's woeful.
One benefit of azure is they name their products logically, like "azure virtual machine" instead of "magic beanstalk" or w/e
Majority of our issues with Azure revolve around some of their services, which are still slow to evolve, due to their pre-cloud underpinnings.
An example of such service is their Azure AD B2C service, which is their competitor to AWS cognito. We have been using it and as a baseline login service, and it works fine. However, the service doesn't see much upgrades. Their "user flow" templates, which control the logon process, have been in preview for years.
Yes, Identity Server 4 exists but it would be nice to have decent competitors to Spot Fleets, ECS, Cognito, etc.
Yeah, they get things done because they're a totalitarian, completely opaque regime. I'll take western governments with all their faults and inneficiencies, thank you.
Also this is completely ignoring that in China the government would have picked Microsoft over Amazon, and there would be zero legal recourse because there is no rule of law there. And as Chinese subjects we would not be allowed to say anything critical of the government because it threatens the "national dignity." Even if it's obviously cronyism perpetrated by the leadership, like if Microsoft in this case were owned by one of the party officials or a relative. We would be expected to trust our government explicitly even in cases where we personally know that it's wrong.
So sure, you can get a lot done in those cases, but it might not be the right things to do, and there's zero process for remediation except to hope that another party leader takes over and changes it for you.
So when anyone says China is totalitarian this is what is meant and why the US is ideologically opposed to China and Chinese rule.
I did. I mean, I /could/ focus on only one sentence of a post, argue from that point alone, and insist the conversation hinge on that point but that would be ignorant and rude.
Imagine that they aren't suing simply because they lost.
Imagine that there was actual evidence for corruption, and Amazon lost a $10-billion contract because Trump put his finger on the scale. How would the whole story look different from our perspective and on what basis did you decide that it's one and not the other?
Normally this might seem like a case of sore loser.
But here's the thing: in government it's very important that contracts are awarded on objective merit, because otherwise there's shockingly large opportunity for corruption and favoritism. Billions and billions of dollars of opportunity.
And also in this case, Trump's deep antipathy towards Bezos is well-documented, as well as his willingness to use government means for personal ends. Trump instructing the Pentagon to drop the objectively best bid seems to fit his established pattern of behavior.
So in this case, Amazon's suit seems to be an entirely reasonable response. If what Amazon alleges is true and they win, it will be a victory for good government and correct use of taxpayer dollars. Presidents aren't kings -- it's vitally important for democracy that objective procedures are followed, and that personal grudges aren't allowed to influence multi-billion dollar deals.
When the process has costs exceeding the costs of the corruption there is a problem. Look at CA and how Tudor Perini still wins contracts despite a history of failure to deliver and bilking the taxpayer with change orders.
Not necessarily corruption in the traditional sense... We have a law that requires the government to accept the lowest "technically acceptable" bid... Tudor Perini knows how to game this system: Low ball the bid and then make up the difference with change orders later. Everyone else who is honest and submits good faith bids comes in higher and looses.
Nope. There's this great concept called the "rule of law". Also "free speech" which allows you to criticize the government without retaliation. These are absolute bedrock principles of liberal democracy.
I'll admit it's the reality in countries with less developed governments, sure. But it's a reality we ought to fight against for the benefit of all, not to blindly and meekly accept. And historically, court cases are one of the primary tools in waging this fight.
No they're elected, which rather complicates the point you're trying to make here. In a representative democracy, the voters speak through their representatives. That is your democracy. Courts would be undemocratic when they intervene based on a "higher" authority (like constitutional rules no one voted for). Not saying it is a bad thing, voters can be dumb and a good code of rules would be better to the degree it is upheld.
This thread is kind of chilling, because everyone within is treating it like it's just chat software or something.
With quotes from this thread like "in the meantime the work doesn't get done," and "bid for contracts that [enable] government to make some real progress," you'd never guess this stuff is going to be used to and to enable murder.
So many people were focusing on how Microsoft Ɛ> Linux or Open Source or whatever (so much so that even rms went to Microsoft and complimented them) yet completely ignore the harm they're still trying to cause.
Nothing is perfect, but we are trapped on a planet with a bunch of violent, highly intelligent apes. Certainly the military does things I disagree with, and things could always be improved, but generally what is the alternative?
There's a huge, gigantic difference between not having a military at all and spending 1 trillion a year to be an imperialist superpower. It's almost like... there's a middle ground.
The thing is, we spend that much and we're not even good imperialists. When was the last time we annexed any territory? Declared a lesser state a protectorate? Or established a new colony? We spend trillions/year to be the world police so our "allies" don't have to while they mock us on twitter.
Annexed? In 2020, there is no need to annex a country to get everything you want from them - on the contrary, it's an administrative nightmare to annex a country when you can stick your military bases there, export your goods there, and make their economy dependent on your country's and your money without it.
How about shaping countries like Venezuela, Iran, Vietnam, Iraq, Syria, South Korea, Japan, etc etc etc, all in ways (intended to be) economically beneficial to the US?
If you can stage a coup or rile up and train a militia to fight your proxy war, there is no need for an outdated notion of "imperialism".
The US has the most powerful military the world has ever seen, and that power is not simply being tossed into the dumpster.
The US is not imperialistic, that's just a cute talking point.
That said I do agree we spend too much on our military. We should always spend more than any other nation to ensure dominance, but I'd imagine cutting the budget down would force efficiency and actually improve the military at this point.
However it seemed the person above was saying that militaries in general are bad or murderous which is very different from saying the budget just needs to be reduced.
The US has nukes. Nobody's ever going to attack it directly. Why do you need overwhelming military dominance in conventional forces then? I suspect it has something to do with being able to force point of view by having big stick available to back it up.
There's also a lot of middle ground between a "point of view", by which I assume you mean interests which are not justifiable defense, and behavior so beyond the pale you'd want to melt an entire city to prevent it. Particularly since the pollution and lingering health effects of nukes are so unacceptable compared to conventional alternatives.
Somehow I do not notice middle ground. All I see is the overwhelming force present virtually everywhere you can point your finger on the map bar couple of places where the US dares not to go. Meanwhile I think even with 1/10th of it current force the US can surely defend its territory and citizens. I agree about pollution: depleted uranium and agent orange for example are way more preferable then the alternative.
Sure, there can be a middle ground in spending. But that doesn't change the GP's point: whether it's a massive military or a modest one, the purpose of a military lies in its potential to injure & kill people. As such, so long as you agree that some level of military is needed, you've already crossed the "no killing" line.
There absolutely is a middle ground. It starts with actual audits of the DoD, which requires no reduction of capabilities and have never even been completed once.
> Please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
It's something a teenager might write, yes, because teenagers often aren't hypocritical enough to ignore the murders just because it's a nation-state doing them. That doesn't make it wrong.
Answer to the first question: in the United States, yes. Whether that is a bad thing is debatable and not suited for the site we're on; try a philosophy subreddit.
The United States military has lost its privilege to play any form of moralism or rational justification after their actions over the past 30-50 years. It's no longer defense in most cases, it's assault. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, the second Iraq, invading Afghanistan for funsies, there's no point to most of it.
We've only had one success in decades, and it still wasn't even related to defense!
There's a difference between defense and imperialistic invasions, and the United States military hasn't defended much of anything at home in quite a while.
If you think that the only thing the U.S. military does is "assault" then you haven't really done any research at all, have you? Read up on force-projection, specifically as it relates to soft-power.
Oh, okay. Unless you're relying solely on your "intuition" of what the U.S. military uses resources for, please post sources or figures for your quantification of U.S. force projection and how it's "mostly" used for assault.
So, you'd rather we keep spending too much, using too little information, and putting too many innocent people at risk? I mean, it's not like we dropped more ordinance under Obama than every president before him combined, or that the trend didn't decrease by very much after him or anything.
Personally, I do think our foreign deployments and presence should absolutely be dramatically reduced. I also think most federal spending is bureaucratic fluff. That said, I have less problem when there are efforts to stabilize or reduce spending via technology. And I find that people who try to take an ethical stance over companies offering any kind of service to the government is short sighted at best, and dangerous or destructive at worst.
In the end, this will happen, and I'd rather it go to a company that is focused on the problem (technical infrastructure for computing resources) over the government trying to build a bureaucratic mess that costs a significant amount more.
Not that everything should be outsourced. For example, I think privatized prisons are far, far, far worse for society than providing a cloud network for the federal govt.
The end result of your stance is essentially arguing that the only problem with American intervention in the Middle East is that it isn't efficient enough.
My point was, the subject at hand isn't really necessarily about what is happening with DoD, and if anything would more likely be reduced harm.
I'm not a proponent of our foreign engagements at all... however, this isn't the place where such a line should be drawn. I find that anywhere the government can more effectively reduce costs and/or improve it infrastructure should generally be preferred.
Did you miss the part where I specifically said, "Personally, I do think our foreign deployments and presence should absolutely be dramatically reduced."
I didn't, I was trying to point out that the unintended and inevitable outcome of making war cheaper to wage (either in dollars or lives of your own soldiers) is more war.
The only difference is drone operators don't speak out publicly at the same rate when they get home as boots on the ground who saw the carnage more directly and personally back then.
Here's an article with stats from 2015 and 2016... I spent a few minutes trying to find an article I recall from around 2014 or so, but unable to find it. There's a lot of information out there, and the number of drone strikes are incredibly large. I think the record under Trump has been roughly the same, but it's a dramatic change over before Obama. The kiloton size may or may not be smaller. More targeted drone/missile strikes vs bombs. But I believe the number of drops is much larger.
Frankly, I'd love to see most of our foreign deployments dramatically scaled back. I just don't think the mentality that nobody should provide any kind of technical services to the government would only make things worse, not better overall, and that specific criticisms shouldn't be part of decisions of infrastructure use.
That article seems to imply in the 10s of thousands per year, which is certainly a lot of airstrikes. US and Britain dropped something like 3 million tons of bombs during the strategic bombing of WW2, though. IIRC the 500 pound bomb was the most common.
And then there’s tens of millions of artillery shells, if you’re counting all ordnance.
Vietnam war had a huge amount of bombing too, with cluster bombs and the like.
I’d be a bit surprised if Obama made the top 5, but maybe.
How is Obama relevant, here? I don't believe I mentioned him. HN has always leaned libertarian, and just because Ron Paul isn't running right now doesn't mean suddenly every argument that's against authoritarianism is liberal.
The point was that drone strikes / bombings were dramatically increased under Obama and never really stopped. I also noted that it didn't decrease with Trump.
In either case, offering cloud services to the Government isn't really an authoritarian position.
Yes, there is harm that will happen, but harm will happen whether it's Microsoft or Amazon. Amazon is throwing their weight around because they didn't get the multi-billion contract. It has nothing to do with Amazon or Microsoft being better stewards of ... anything. They're both massive companies with horrid business practices, led by boards who don't give a shit about war or human suffering or the poor or anything outside growth and economic goals and shutting out their competitors.
> you'd never guess this stuff is going to be used to and to enable murder.
This is only true, if you take it as axiomatic that armed forces have one job, which is killing and that all killing in armed conflict is simple murder. That's not a position I take.
Last I checked, Torvalds wasn't getting billions of dollars from the DoD to install Linux on servers. That's a false comparison, and a lazy one at that.
Almost every government lab I've seen has a rule that says you aren't allowed to use free software in the lab. Everything was supposed to have a vendor that was responsible for it that you were paying.
Development labs end up using Linux and other open source software all over the place, but it gets a bit more iffy when you're going into production.
And that is the reason Red Hat is making so much money: Whether it is free or not is not relevant but that you can pay a vendor who will fix your problems in production
We had to verify everything was approved through DADSM (potentially navy specific), but other than that as long as we had a legal license to run we were good.
This is what forced me into using centos for our deployed infrastructure, and mIRC as our chat client of choice.
Differing views I suppose. To me I look at the new type of weaponized technologies coming out of China (that we know about) such as hypersonic missiles able to defeat most conventional mission defenses. Then I look at the salary differences between “defense” work and adtech, and I worry that our best and brightest are not working on deterrents the same way our rivals are.
Combine that with a persistent stigma against working in defense and we have a recipe of losing our technology edge within the this century if not sooner. What will our rivals decide to do once that happens?
Reality is such that militaries are necessary both for self defense and defense of the weak and vulnerable.
The US military has ensured peace and prosperity for billions around the world for decades given its formidable global presence.
Imagine the chaos and crime that would descends on a community without police or law enforcement. The world operates the exact same way. There will always be a most powerful country enforcing stability and global compliance, and I would much rather it be the US than Russia or China.
Vietnamese are friendly to Americans and see America as an ally in their struggle against Chinese imperialism. The hatred of China in Vietnam is near-universal and explicit.
I've lived there but if you don't believe me, ask a few Vietnamese yourself, they're not shy about it.
I actually met couple of Vietnamese (not in Vietnam though). They were not very fond of Americans to speak softly. No real hatred either (well they're very polite and I do not really now what their actual feeling were). I do believe that modern Vietmamese people are tolerant and welcomed to a tourists including the Americans. Tourists are income and people that actually did suffer war effect and immediate aftermath are mostly dead now.
Also the US did not bring "the piece and prosperity" to Vietnam unless you mean withdrawing from that murderous war that they started in a first place. What brought a relative prosperity was that their communist government did soften their stance towards market based economy. And feeling some guilt US probably contributed few pesos.
Interesting thoughts. I wonder if anyone here has heard of the Principle of Double Effect? [1]
On one hand, we need to be thoughtful and mindful of the ethical implications of all that we do. On the other hand, every action always has a context inside a larger system and has unintended consequences and being an ethical purist can sometimes be more harmful. Most people who are older fall somewhere between striving to do the right thing but also recognizing they cannot control all the consequences and even if they could, they cannot predict what greater harm or good may result.
"The cloud" is such a scam - of course a "war cloud" - why not, just triple the security billing invoice and collect obscene cash and power. Every sucker buys into "the cloud" when running a server yourself is elementary. We are doomed.
One server is elementary, yes, but hundreds of thousands working together is an entirely different beast. There’s nothing easy about cloud computing and there’s a definite reason why it’s worth buying into.
There's the deceptive mantra repeated mindlessly over and over, yet again. And there is nothing hard either. It is just complex. So everyone mindlessly pays too much because some marketing has successfully sold them that this is "too hard".
HP and Oracle have been reaping the benefits of this for at least two decades now. We put databases on Oracle that should be handled by Postgres or MariaDB since DoD prefers Oracle. We would buy useless HP software because we were a HP shop. I fought to get a non HP solid state array for our data, it was an epic battle (in the end I won, on the extreme we had 6 to 7 hour processes cut down to under an hour, the HP equivalent could not replicate that at the time).
So i can see DoD moving to Azure and then get the vendor lock in and in 10 years if they want to move the cost will be so extreme it will either cause taxpayers a ton of money or not be realistic.
As impossible as it sounds, and somewhat impractical, i would rather see a vendor agnostic approach and DoD spread across multiple gov clouds. i guess years has gotten me jaded with government spending (wait, what, how did we buy 2 extra $50k Cisco chassis and then keep them in storage for 3 years....).