Ah, the [cough] wisdom of [gag] outsourcing mission-critical military activities to private enterprise.
If you look at history - the British Crown started making their own gunpowder at the Tower of London, in the middle of the 13th Century. The British Board of Ordnance was formally constituted in 1683, by HRM King Charles the Second.
And if you look at the more-recent era, when the US started shutting down most of its own government armories, arsenals, etc. - that happened fairly shortly after the old tradition of leading American families having their sons (at least the ones who wanted to becomes notable leaders themselves) serve in the military faded away. If you no longer have any skin in the game...
The problem here would not seem to be the outsourcing, but the single-sourcing. That's entirely on the purchaser; whether they single-source it from a single private contractor or a single-source internal government provider isn't going to change anything, the problem is you need multiple sources.
A large purchaser may well have to go out of their way to ensure that too. No good having three sources for your gunpowder if they're all pulling the raw materials from the same single point of failure.
> American families having their sons (at least the ones who wanted to becomes notable leaders themselves) serve in the military faded away. If you no longer have any skin in the game...
I think we can see this expressed in the decline of architecture and new, grand, important public works projects. Why build everlasting institutions and monuments to mankind's glory when you can buy a second yacht? Really disappointing.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. - President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Farewell Address, 1961
> I’m not convinced that outsourcing it to private enterprise is bad.
Counterpoint:
In every war that involves a substantial conventional component, there has been a huge ammunition shortage. Even though people know this, the phenomenon still exists.
Private industry isn't going to maintain huge "burst" capacity. It's simply completely uneconomical.
It's possible that a sort of public-private partnership could exist where the government pays companies to maintain huge excess capacity, but I don't really see a substantial difference between that and the government just owning everything.
And it's important that this excess capacity gets used often, otherwise there's a big risk that it won't work when it's eventually called upon.
Which isn't to say that there's no place for private enterprise to supply ammunition to the government. Just that it probably shouldn't be the only source.
> Private industry isn't going to maintain huge "burst" capacity. It's simply completely uneconomical.
not in the US, many ammo providers have substantially expanded production in response to civilian demand, and only recently have prices come down
so if you limit your worldview to 9mm and .556, the US is far more capable of producing in volume than anywhere, perhaps well beyond the rest-of-the-world
Based on what happened with the Strategic National Stockpile [1] right before COVID hit, I don’t have much confidence in government run capacity either:
> From 2017 to 2019, the Trump administration failed to replace masks and other supplies used in earlier disasters. In May 2020, in a House subcommittee meeting, whistle-blower Dr. Rick Bright, previous director of Department of Health and Human Services’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, explained that the Trump administration had ignored his early warnings to stock up on masks and other supplies to combat the coronavirus.
I’d like to think that we’ve learned our lesson with COVID and we can blame it all on the-administration-that-must-not-be-named but that’s naive. The supply problem has been growing in magnitude for decades and is likely caused in part by the same policies that lead to anticonsumer consolidation in the rest of the market.
We had a similar situation in the UK where most of the emergency supply of masks, etc. had expired when covid started. The obvious way to handle this seems to be to make a deal with a big wholesaler or wholesalers where the government pays them to maintain a much larger buffer than they normally would. This would ensure the stock was always being rotated. The pre-covid scheme of paying some randoms to keep a warehouse full of mouldering stock seemed doomed to failure.
One problem with masks is that they are statically charged and that charge depletes pretty rapidly. So it's not as if you can create a bunch of stock for 'some unspecified time in the future', you'll have to continuously renew it at that level every couple of months. This is certainly going to raise eyebrows if there isn't a demand for a longer period of time and someone figures they can cut that cost without impacting safety. Which works. Right up until the next pandemic and then you're back where you were before. This sort of vigilance is very costly and it is hard to get everybody to agree on the appropriate level over time.
Cost cutting combined with mismanagement at work here. As the saying goes - two is one, one is none…
It would make sense to pay for at least 3 or more of these to be open (privately or military operated) at any given time. Hopefully the military have a plan for a rapid buildup in case of an acute need.
I see the following problem here. When the war starts citizens are forced to tighten the belts. Military industry meanwhile gets rich so they're inherently supportive of wars.
No way. Military contractors are barred from hiring overseas, or giving up ownership stakes to overseas entities. It's why they're great places to work if job security is your thing.
In the west almost all but a small fraction of military procurement is satisfied by private industry. That was just as true in WW2 as it is today. The question is how you manage that.
At the height of a massive modern war, yes. But look at (say) the histories of most of the weapons used in WWII. How many of the major small arms, artillery pieces, guns, tanks, warships, etc. of WWII were developed directly by the government, in-house, and then produced at scale during the war at government armories?
Yes...but at the bottom of that web page - "JMC employs 21 military personnel, more than 5,000 Army civilian personnel and more than 6,000 contractors nationwide throughout the organic industrial base."
So more contractors (head count of corporations) than army folks (head count of humans)? Sounds like the Army's side of it amounts to little more than "Purchasing Dept." and "Warehouse". :(
> If you look at history - the British Crown started making their own gunpowder at the Tower of London, in the middle of the 13th Century. The British Board of Ordnance was formally constituted in 1683, by HRM King Charles the Second.
This is true, but is far more about the scarcity of saltpeter at the time than anything else.
>Today, it is a specialty commodity with few commercial applications—mostly for rocket hobbyists—but it’s still used in more than 300 munitions, from cruise missiles, to bullets for M16 rifles, to the vital 155mm shells.
I don't know about the others, but M16 rifle rounds don't use black powder, they use modern smokeless powder. By modern, I mean invented in 1884. I would be surprised if any of those other things mentioned use black powder. The author seems to think black powder is all gunpowder but it isn't. Black powder is reserved for old guns that can't handle modern powder that were made before the late 1800s, early 1900s. There is a classification of hunting rifle called muzzle loaders that also use it, but they are niche. It's also used in fireworks, that's why they are so smokey.
When you see a movie where they depict an old battle where there are huge plumes of smoke coming out of the rifles or muskets, that's black powder.
This factory produces black-powder, which is a mixture of charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter.
All modern ammunition uses smokeless powder, which is stabilized nitrocellulose and nitroglycerin.
(This confusion likely is due to the term gunpowder, which when used as a technical term only refers to black-powder. Unfortunately it is also used colloquially to mean any kind of explosive powder put into cartridges that are detonated to launch projectiles from guns. In this sense of gunpowder, almost all of it is smokeless powder, and thus its colloquial meaning is almost completely at odds with its technical meaning.)
To my knowledge, the US military does not rely on blackpowder in any meaningful way. Even if my knowledge is incomplete and they do depend on it in some odd way (e.g. I suppose they might have a pre-existing inventory of weapons designed to use black powder primers, where it is cheaper to keep sourcing black powder rather than retrofit the weapons to use smokeless powder primers) there are several corporations manufacturing large quantities of 1:1 black powder substitutes.
Black powder is used in booster charges. In artillery fuzes, there can be up to four different types of explosive in the explosive train which ignites the main charge, according to my half-assed Googling and Wikipedia.
In this image, the olive-drab component is the warhead-and-rocket assembly, and the forest-green component is a full fucking pound of black powder which launches the rocket to a minimum safe range before the ignition of the main propulsion motor.
I'm presently unsure about the propellants used in other recoilless systems, but I can presume that there exist designs other than the RPG-7 which are currently being provided in bulk to Ukraine, while simultaneously utilizing some amount of black powder in the propulsion system, while some further subset of those will prove difficult to redesign to use more modern double- or triple-base smokeless propellants due to the much higher operating pressure of these propellants, especially in the context of thin-walled light-weight launchers.
Yes, I suspected that if there were dependencies on black-powder, it was because it was being used in older weapons systems and those were being supplied to Ukraine.
There are plenty of black-powder substitutes that are carefully designed to match various characteristics of standard black-powder, including 1:1 volumetric substitution and similar pressures https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_powder_substitute
If black-powder is strictly necessary and not just convenient, these substitutes would be used.
Lead-free primers are a thing. The US military prefers to minimize lead wherever reasonably feasible, because the VA is expensive, and when they have to pay to clean up their ranges during routine maintenance, extremely high amounts of lead dramatically increases the price of this scheduled maintenance.
Their primary objective is still to close with and destroy the enemy, so if they still need to use lead or uranium to get the job done, the mission comes first. But if they can save money by using lead-free training ammo, that's more money they can spend on training the troops and ammo for them to practice with. And more money to issue everybody a bazooka of some flavor or another, as Ukraine is demonstrating is a really useful idea right about now.
Remember: Amateurs study tactics. Professionals study logistics!
> The U.S. Military Relies on One Louisiana Factory. It Blew Up
In June of 2021. That doesn't invalidate some of the concerns expressed here about redundancy but it also isn't the "oh f!" moment you may have gathered from the headline.
When it comes to defense spending this is abnormal
Most of the time they want to put the supply chain across as many congressional districts as possible to make it politically hard to close any program as it would "cut jobs" in more districts
much hard to cut spending if 10,000 jobs across 250 districts are impacted, then if 10,000 job across 5 districts are impacted
>>Additionally, why in the world is this even public knowledge?
Why would it not be. Government Secrecy should be opposed by anyone that wants a free society
You can not have a "Government for the people by the people" if the government is allowed to keep secrets from the people. Nor can voters properly select and hold representatives accountable if those people do not know what the government is doing
We have a MASSIVE problem with government secrecy right now, too much of what the government does, especially in military and "intelligence" is deemed to be "secret" for "national security". We need to be clawing back the power to hid things, and making more and more activity transparent, not hiding more
Not that I disagree, but I'm curious, what benefit to the public is provided by this information being known? It seems to me like this information being public does not really lend to (or take away from) a free society.
> Why would it not be [public knowledge]?
I can think of multiple ways in which this information could be useful in the hands of enemies of the United States. An example: this publicizes weaknesses in the US military's supply chain.
Is there a reason this particular piece of information (a Louisiana factory blew up and is causing supply chain issues for the US Military) should be public -- or was this more of a general commentary on more transparency?
First and foremost it shows the incompetence of leadership, and misaligned priorities when it comes to public finance. Why was there only one factory, were funds not allocated properly to ensure a more robust supply chain? where political favors exchanged for the monopoly? As a result of the monopoly was the military paying more per unit of product since there was no competition? That is just off the top of my head for questions from the story.
Hiding things like this ensures corruption will follow
From the article, they moved to Louisiana for the humid climate, which prevents static electricity buildup and reduces the risk of the whole plant blowing itself sky-high.
If your job includes risk management-i.e. you could be terminated over it-then please make sure to look through every thread of the operation and identify all of the single points of failure. Then, find a redundant solution for each.
As someone who was in the military, in this exact field, we are trained on the importance, nay, necessity of redundancies. Interesting how those at the top never follow the directives/lessons they put out.
This is frustrating to square with the large military expenditures we make in this country. What is the use of the most advanced weaponry if you cannot produce them yourself when shit hits the fan?
You mean both the current and last president? Our military strategic leaders well know the predicament, and have been pulling back outsourcing of strategic necessities. Look at their actions, not the bluster.
And for factual information, try The Truth of the Matter podcast by CSIS.
related to a bigger risk I see for the US. if the US gets into a war with China its going to hurt us massively. We're heavily dependent on them now during peace time as it is -- and all those two-way flows can stop in war. and they have much greater ship building capacity.
We have much greater ship sinking capacity. Uncle Sam's Misguided Children have even practiced putting truck-mounted launchers on the decks of under-armed ships and using them from that platform; in tests, I believe it worked well.
I'm not the only one who has doubts about Chinese missiles, both their numbers and their performance. I think it's probable that only the high end of their systems will work, and of that, the precision components will all have to be made in Russia because the extreme precision and insensitivity required of missile guidance systems is silly hard to get right.
Low-tier systems don't need precision parts to work acceptably, so they'll have plenty of that.
But all the medium-tier stuff like Harpoon equivalents will be hamstrung by a lack of Russian parts because they're a little … ah, distracted right now by current events.
I get that this sort of headline makes for a great circle jerk but let's be real here, the military isn't as stupid as HN likes to imply. Rife with perverse incentives that keep things from being done ideally? Yes, but not stupid. The military is also rife with ass-covering careerists so if some nobody on HN can think of a way they can do it better then someone in the system has almost certainly thought about it and looked into it and sent out an email letting everybody know about it. The fact that they're only buying something from one of their suppliers doesn't mean they can't get it from another with less lead time than their stockpile. This goes for a whole class of products. Typically if you are a contractor or a sub contractor and you are the only source for a unique product that can't easily be substituted you're required to provide a sufficient technical data package such that someone else could make the same stuff. If this factory was really a serious priority it would a) be redundant b) be fixed already. Because some careerist would have sniffed out the brownie points and then made sure it got done and that they got credit. It's also possible that there's internal politics involved and letting it turn into a dumpster fire is being done on purpose in order to make the situation get remediated in a specific way.
Guess: Most folks on HN realize that "the military", in the sense of "the current general and admirals", have damn little influence over these outsourcing, single-sourcing, etc. decisions. That is mostly controlled by Congress, via the budget purse-strings. And Congress in term is mostly controlled by...
>Most folks on HN realize that "the military", in the sense of "the current general and admirals", have damn little influence over these outsourcing, single-sourcing, etc. decisions. That is mostly controlled by Congress,
I think your claim is way to optimistic in light of the fact there are other people claiming that the LCS boondoggle is the fault of faulty procurement and not Congress.
And yet, you don’t have the stomach to reply to me about it — or to discuss the procurement failure regarding munitions outlined by CSIS.
The LCS is the fault of the Navy in at least three ways:
- they didn’t bother to make sure the gearbox worked
- they didn’t bother to make sure the structural framing was sufficient, leading to shoulder cracks
- they didn’t design it to have sufficient arms or ability to perform ASW roles
None of which has to do with Congress, and every bit of which has to do with military design, procurement, and contract management.
Congress doesn’t design ships for the fleet: the Navy proposes what they want and Congress funds (or doesn’t) the project. The only role Congress played was forcing the Navy to keep them after it became clear they were such a total failure, the Navy scrapped the class while still in production.
But keep making excuses for abject failure — that’s sure to fix the problem.
What's really irritating about the LCS is that the Danish StanFlex system is exactly the capability the LCS was supposed to offer, and StanFlex works. Pure NIH syndrome. In addition, someone has already done the legwork to make sure that a half-dozen different hulls compatible with StanFlex modules are proven technology…
I'm rate limited for not towing the line so I wasn't gonna burn a reply on it. The LCS is basically the Navy's Orion but worse. Like Orion it's congressionally mandated garbage. Unlike Orion the Navy DGAF about it, put no effort into making it workable. So of course it's spec'd out poorly (no ASW) and has a ton of teething problems (gearbox, hull structure). It was a B rate project nobody really cared about from the get go. No wonder it flopped. Nobody cared to make sure it didn't.
The Navy didn’t perform at the level of making the gearbox work, because despite getting their admirals’ request for a modular super ship, they’re not ninja problem fixers but in on the MIC grift.
To me, that seems a fractal of stupid choices — which make sense when viewed through the lens of financial corruption and backroom dealing, but not through the lens of capable careerists succeeding by preventing problems.
Also, it fails to predict the reality that we can’t build munitions to fight a serious war — because we can’t even build them to fight a year-long proxy war. Or does CSIS not understand the MIC either?
The purpose of the military is not to be an effective fighting force. That is, at most, a happy side effect. The purpose is to shovel as much public money as possible into the private companies comprising the military industrial complex. So your efficient-market-hypothesis-but-for-the-military idea is essentially just not even wrong.
> The military is also rife with ass-covering careerists
This is true, and I believe it's nigh impossible for a normal person to understand the level of politics and fuckery that goes on at all levels of the military; hence the down votes!
