U.S. Can't Make Weapons Fast Enough to Meet Demand | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Can't Make Weapons Fast Enough to Meet Demand

fortune.com

31 pointsprostoalex65 comments

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. … Is there no other way the world may live?"

-U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, shortly after the death of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin

How did we get here from there?

> How did we get here from there?

The rest of that speech was unheeded.

where is that quote from? It sounds old.

500,000 bushels of wheat is only about $4m. What fighter plane is this a comparison to?

For that era, most likely an F-86 Sabre or equivalent.

For those who aren't familiar with it, the parent is quoting from Eisenhower's 1953 Chance for Peace speech [1].

There's an interesting piece from the NY Times in 2013 about what a bomber would buy today [2]. The situation has become considerably worse.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chance_for_Peace_speech

[2] http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/16/what-would-a-fight...

"Software saved the aerospace industry. Every other way of adding cost to an airplane also adds weight."

For fun, looking at numbers today: a B-2 bomber is around $2B/aircraft. A 500MW gas powered power plant could be around $0.5B, and would serve maybe 50K homes. So you could buy 4 power plants today for the cost of one advanced bomber.

Side note: I wish discussion boards had a feature where you could upvote literature or some basic articles relating the to topics covered in the OP. This way people who are not familiar with the matter, or perhaps just curious about alternative interpretations could see other sources that the community deems worthy.

For the article above, it would likely be an intersection of "War on ISIS", "Military Industrial Complex" and some less relevant, smaller topics, e.g. Weapons Manufacturing.

Having a mechanism for storing background knowledge would be quite a bit nicer than just saying "I recommend 'War is a racket'. Especially since communities will downvote comments they think are prosaic, but are still helpful for newcomers.

Awesome I'd never heard of 'war is a racket', thanks! In return let me reccomend "the ruses for war" by john quigley and confessions of an economic hitman (and others) by john quigley as well as "a game as old as empire" with foreward by the same.

'war is a racket'

@dools, history isn't considered that important for learning. I found out about 'War is a Racket' reading about Smedley Butler USMC [0] and his warning on the attempted overthrow of FDR and the US government. [1],[2]

If you followed the press carefully this month you'll see a AUD 49 Million dollar boost for Victorian CT, [3], Dassault saves 10,000 jobs, £12 billion goes to UK BAE and in Germany, €8 billion earmarked for defence. [4]

Smedley was the Snowden of his era. [5]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

[2] http://www.npr.org/2012/02/12/145472726/when-the-bankers-plo...

[3] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-11-25/funding-boost-to-victo...

[4] http://www.smh.com.au/business/paris-attacks-war-on-islamic-...

[5] "Book of the Month: War Is a Racket | Jesse Ventura" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h30FE0MxEMc

Thank you in return: judging from google it seems like Quigley can teach the nontrivial stuff.

Indeed! And once you're through with that check out Modern Money Theory by Randall Wray which puts the whole shitfight into a solid economical context!

Agree. Current patterns in discussion board designs are very unsophisticated and drive content toward uninformed debate and reader exhaustion, rather than constructing understanding.

Our entire news infrastructure (blogs/articles, television, etc) also suffers from similar problems.

Its like we can't break orbit of much shallowness, except in relatively esoteric, insular communities online and offline.

Perhaps unrelated, but are there any groups (deliberately non-specific) working to address this?

Very good question, I don't know!

I'm unfamiliar with the structures of working groups but I imagine it'd have to be pretty heavily social sciences weighted (ethnography, sociology/psychology, media studies, education, etc). Personally, I'd like to see a mix of rapid prototyping, science fiction (engaging in hypotheticals on systems and cultural impact), and solid research. Evaluation is going to be challenging due to the uniqueness of experiences in social systems (e.g. in social networks every feed is different, so less unified starting point). I think surfacing the problems-behind-the-problem like understanding / capturing the different starting points of each readers knowledge would play prominently in any truly transformative solution.

On the business end, right now I can't imagine there's much of a business vehicle for driving this forward, as the market would favor general solutions applied to pre-existing properties (e.g. bolt-ons like Disqus) or incremental changes (e.g. better mod tools on reddit or something), whereas my strong suspicion is that deeper innovations probably need to be developed alongside wholly new online properties - you know, the medium is the message and all that. Evaluating success would be difficult given the need to create and verify new metrics of success, and I'm not sure many startups have the patience, knowhow, or desire to dig deep into research required for this.

I guess its worth mentioning I started an online news company so I've had more than a passing chance to think about / be frustrated with this problem space. In the challenging environment of growing a journalism startup (not exactly a high $$ biz), I wasn't able to sink my teeth enough into creating new designs for media publishing and community tools, and was so unsatisfied with the present offerings that we just avoided going down the discussion board route altogether. It remains my belief that a 'news' is a sense-making and ultimately educational problem being solved (poorly) by publishing systems, and the field of 'journalism' lacks imagination in what ways they can create said news, assuming everything just becomes an article written by a journalist because thats how newspapers did it.

A lot of good points you brought up!

At least on the business side: right now the only noteworthy product that seems to be innovating in the general discussion space is http://try.discourse.org/. I'm not following this field closely, so I'm probably missing out on at least 10 interesting possibilities.

At first I said to myself "that is a startup." Then I recognized it bascially exists in the form of the sidebars on reddit's subreddits.

It really helps with content quality because you can somewhat assume hopefully everyone is working from the same knowledge set to discuss a topic.

Subreddit sidebars tend to be chosen by moderators. Not saying they don't represent their communities, more that there is a limit to how much time they can invest into the task of bringing the community up to speed on this or that.

Factoring in the constraints of the sidebar makes it a somewhat less appealing option.

I experimented with automating something this in a side project by scraping any outbound links on a submitted url - for articles and blog entries those tend to point to references or related material. It works moderately well, but spam links and login links are a problem.

Hacker News could add something like that, and attach it to whatever code is being used to vouch for dead comments, so users could upvote the relevant ones. Combined with something to auto-merge similar stories, you might be able to tease out a decent web of context from posted material alone.

Because there's no other way around this but to be political, can't we sort out our crumbling infrastructure, education, and healthcare systems before worrying about blowing up a middle-age, middle eastern cult? Can we not let them get the better of us? Or have we entirely sold out to the arms industry?

I think the saner view being minority, it isn't possible unfortunately.

They've already launched direct attacks on our allies, and more recently inspired attacks on US soil. They are holding territory, are self funded (generously), and are recruiting around the globe. Arguably they are more dangerous than Al-Qaeda ever was.

Doesn't this merit a military response? If not, what on earth would?

No. Just stop supllying them weapons and buying their oil.

If you want to cut off the snake at its head, cut the money supply. Its not like we live in some great era of terrorism - there's always been deranged people who wish to destroy and whom get a few followers. The difference between that phenomenon and ISIS is they've secured some land that produces oil, and have a buyer - Turkey. This suggests hard-nosed diplomacy before military intervention, especially as the result of the latter 10 years ago is literally the reason we have this current mess.

Islamic State needs oil money to sustain its military, not the terrorists that it sends into Europe. The most expensive cost there is airfare and weapons/munitions.

Additionally, cutting off funding doesn't solve the issue of homegrown terrorism, a la Sayed Farook who is a salaried employee and set up an IED factory in his home. He probably paid for that himself.

First, I'd bet that ISIS money is spent on a lot more than military - what about providing a cushy experience for previously recruited western radicals, so that they tell others back home how great it is? Can't find the link, but varieties in accommodations for recently recruited western radicals vs others is causing some internal strife. If you came over to ISIS from some nice first world place like London, only to find yourself in a very uncomfortable, foreign desert environment eating crap food, you probably wouldn't send message back that everything's great. That costs money.

Second, you assume the cost of propaganda is 0, which it is not. ISIS has gone so far as to publish a very high production value magazine [0] and high quality recruitment videos. You can bet that there are tons of people on message boards and other corners of the net that are on ISIS payroll out there trying to radicalize as many people as possible, offering a (twisted) sense of purpose and meaning in their lives. And people collecting and disseminating content on how best to make IEDs, kill people, etc. They undoubtedly have many social media managers.

In my first comment I was going to add another point which was that if we were able to completely wipe out ISIS that will not all of a sudden stop people from being radicalized, it will only stop those being radicalized by ISIS. ISIS happens to recruit better than most (due to their money), but there will always be people, often marginalized, who will fall prey to radicalization - and some who seek it out. Sayed seems like he was that kind of guy, ISIS or no.

Everyone's all up in arms about ISIS because we're being blanketed by news about them, which is not proportional to the threat they actually pose to us. Paris was a manifestation of longstanding troubles with european countries integrating muslim immigrants which likely created necessary conditions for radicalization by [insert crazy people]; San Bernardino was very likely a manifestation of mental health issues and cultural marginalization/domestic political climate. These issues are unlikely to go away when ISIS does - the latter we have an example of from just the week prior with the Planned Parenthood shooter.

[0] http://www.clarionproject.org/news/islamic-state-isis-isil-p...

A military response plays directly into their hands so no, this does not merit a military response. What it does merit is isolating them and making sure they have no further access to weapons or funds and to assist those that want to flee.

You can't tackle the threat already within the borders without a France-style state of emergency, unfortunately.

And that may be what it will take for a while. But that's a different problem than what to do about IS on territory that they currently hold. One thing that we can do is make it impossible for IS supporters abroad to go to their territory to receive training.

False. This is exactly what they want. With an idea as "viral" as theirs that is about the dumbest thing you can do i.e. give them more evidence of their bankrupt cult-ish ideas.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isi...

tl;dr: The Islamic State awaits the army of “Rome,” whose defeat at Dabiq, Syria, will initiate the countdown to the apocalypse.

Copy pasting this from below:

Who gives a fuck what Islamic State wants us to do? This is the most intellectually bankrupt argument tossed around. It literally makes no sense at all.

We need to do what is strategically sound.

If that happens to be what IS wants, why should that matter one iota beyond the strategic calculus?

Because bombing the shit outta them, won't fix it? Boots on the ground means a larger surge of extremists turning into combatants rushing into the place to make their apocalyptical dreams come true (that is the connection to 'what they want').

For America (or Europe) to rush in seems like the most intellectually bankrupt and strategically inept thing to do. A ground war has barely ever solved a problem in that region. The Taliban and Al-Qaeda (the last targets of our ground wars) are both alive and well and would be flourishing even more if it wasn't for ISIS sucking up new recruits.

"A ground war has barely ever solved a problem in that region."

Sure it has. Ever heard of the Ottoman Empire? Where is it now? What happened to it? What happened to Pharaonic Egypt? The Crusader States? The Achaemenid Empire? Carthage? Troy? Akkadia? Babylonia?

Many others could be named; the history of the region is rife with examples of ground wars quite decisively solving problems in the region.

Huh? None of them had the power of videos online and twitter. The wide mass spread of ideas worldwide is what makes the 'idea' more potent than anything ground troops could go door-to-door to kill. We have to face it, we cannot shoot and bomb our way out of this.

The wars you mention had battles drawn out on big fields. That hasn't been relevant in a century.

"Huh? None of them had the power of videos online and twitter."

Okay, now you're just trying to spin. Naked force has settled more issues ("solved more problems", as you put it) than any other human activity.

"The wars you mention had battles drawn out on big fields."

What they had was an opponent willing to carry out a policy of utter destruction. ISIS doesn't have such an opponent. Yet.

ISIS is not an opponent that will meet you out on a big field. They don't care if its USA or Russia. What they would rather have is Russian and American troops invading. They'd love that. Film it all, post it up on twitter to convert a large swath of the population that is 'on the fence' to join their death cult. A show of naked force is EXACTLY what they want, because it means they WIN.

P.S. With respect to "battles drawn out on big fields. That hasn't been relevant in a century"

Umm...Stalingrad? 1943?

Dude, I really think you need to read some more history, and I'm not saying that to be condescending. Your grasp of historic events seems to be a little hazy.

Also, for some reason both the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. thought the Fulda Gap was quite important, right up to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

I believe pj_mukh was referring to asymmetrical warfare in the style of Stalingrad being what is more common nowadays rather than before.

Regardless, we got a clear picture of the cost and lack of result of such a strategy from the last 15 years, so the idea that this time will be different has a very high burden of proof.

Ummm... no. The last 15 years have been anything but a full-scale war-to-the-knife strategy, ala WWII.

While the United States may not be willing to do that sort of thing, others may (cough...Putin, aka the honey badger of heads of state).

Also, such policies have a way of changing if the perceived threat level becomes high enough, as the former inhabitants of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden could attest.

I am not arguing (or interested in an argument about) whether those things were justified or not. I am merely pointing out that those things can and do happen.

Generalizing from Afghanistan is also not justifiable. Many have tried (and failed) to conquer and hold Afghanistan (in no small degree because there's not really anything there worth owning). Syria, by contrast, has been successfully conquered, and held, many times.

Apologies I was only trying to give benefit of the doubt to pj_mukh's comment. Tho 100 years is a stretch, he does have a point about the past ~60. I believe we're saying the same thing aside from that distinction.

Also, I was generalizing from Iraq. We didn't do such a great job holding that.

This thread is ultimately about military intervention in a place that could be charitably called a total f'n mess, in order to wipe out a terrorist group we helped create from the last total f'n mess we made in the region. Compounding that is the modern challenge of a highly connected world in which every intervention down to the smallest altercation can be caught on video and propagate, creating strife and leading to future acts. Whether or not the territory has been held in the past, the option is not realistically available to us now, nor do we wish to hold the territory, and nor is there a qualified group that could fill the power vacuum that would result if we intervened in a serious way.

I don't think Honey badger Putin (btw hilarious) can afford to commit necessary resources to secure Syria in any meaningful way either. Maybe if oil was trading in the $100s and he didn't have Ukraine to worry about, and it was far earlier in the conflict.

We obviously have to keep the problem contained with use of both military and non-military means (cut off ISIS $$ for one), but ultimately have to accept that getting mixed up in this is nuts.

D-day would've have been a more apt a comparison for a war out on the naked field with full blown charges. There was definitely an evolution of warfare (to more asymmetrical styles) in WW2 when compared to WW1 (which I was comparing as my 'century' mark) and its Passchaendale-like battles.

Either way, if you had taken the time to not just focus on such a 'Eurocentric' view of history, you would have brought up Sri Lanka and its take down of the idea of Tamil independence (I don't condone this), but they did successfully take down and all but obliterate the Tigers using pure ground naked force. It is the one example I can think of (I'm sure there are more outside Europe), where a ground force was able to neutralize a virulent idea. However, they had the advantage of having a localized idea (i.e. people outside South India and Sri Lanka didn't care), in which case a ground war was more effective.

Islamism is an idea with global reach. Cannot bomb an idea with global reach.

Who do you think created ISIS? It's US allies including funding, hardware. Cut them instead. You murder far too many civilians than terrorists with military response which in turn creates more terrorists.

But enough about Saudi Arabia, what's your opinion about ISIS?

When US Forces decided to engage an ISIS convoy transporting Illegal oil - they first droppped leaflets warning ISIS of the incoming attack.

US forced then used weapons (mostly machine guns) to destroy Just 116 out of 300 trucks. But then US FORCES RAN OUT OF AMMO WHEN DESTROYING ISIS' ILLEGAL OIL TANKER CONVY and US military did Not bother to send drones or additional Air Support to destory the oil tankers which is the BIGGEST SOURCE OF REVENUE for ISIS.

> "So these trucks were -- they were just sitting there, not moving. So, you know, we dropped the leaflets. We did a low pass. We chased any of the -- you know, the truck drivers away, and we destroyed them. So, they weren't moving. They were all, as you saw on the video, they were all stationary. Nothing was driving anywhere. So it was a pretty straightforward, you know, attack." ...

"Just three quick clarifications on the trucks again. If -- sorry if I missed it, but why didn't you guys go back on the other trucks? There were 300, I think, to begin with, and then you hit 116. Why didn't you go back?" [0]

"So, on the other trucks, so -- frankly, the -- the -- the aircraft expended 24 500-pound bombs, and -- and all of their ammunition. So they -- they shot everything they had and then they had to go home." [0]

Why would US military do this? Well this week, we got this news about the Oil tankers [1]

Keep in mind all "ISIS propoganda" and news comes Exclusively out of a single group - SITE Intelligence group. It's worthwhile to look into the background of the founder & CEO of this group.

[0] http://www.defense.gov/News/News-Transcripts/Transcript-View...

[1] www.reuters.com/article/2015/12/02/us-mideast-crisis-russia-turkey-idUSKBN0TL19S20151202

They've already gotten the better of us because they're within our borders.

Now the choice is between doing nothing, thereby accepting the risk of us or our loved ones getting blown up or shot going while we go about our daily routine (see: Israel during the second intifada) or trade liberties for security (see: Brussels and France today) until we come up with a more sustainable solution (see: Israel today).

They've already gotten the better of us because they are here and they will kill us because their ideology is fundamentally opposed to Western concepts such as freedom of speech, press, religion, and association. Not to mention gay people existing and women having independence.

This is a real choice we must make. I doubt most will choose the first one once its them or someone they know that gets murdered/maimed in this way.

> Now the choice is between doing nothing, thereby accepting the risk of us or our loved ones getting blown up or shot going while we go about our daily routine (see: Israel during the second intifada) or trade liberties for security (see: Brussels and France today) until we come up with a more sustainable solution (see: Israel today).

That risk will always be there no matter what we do.

> They've already gotten the better of us because they are here and they will kill us because their ideology is fundamentally opposed to Western concepts such as freedom of speech, press, religion, and association. Not to mention gay people existing and women having independence.

No, that's not why they kill people. They kill people because it serves their goals indirectly, it allows them to recruit, get more funding and credibility.

> This is a real choice we must make. I doubt most will choose the first one once its them or someone they know that gets murdered/maimed in this way.

As unfortunate as it is sometimes solutions are not simple, easy and quick.

This on is complex, will be very difficult and will take a lot of time (likely: a generation or more).

Of course that's not going to get you voted in anywhere so instead we'll act rashly, counterproductive and quick and in the process we will be a willing partner of IS doing exactly what they want us to do.

> That risk will always be there no matter what we do.

Yeah, you're correct. I meant significant risk. It's always a risk.

> They kill people because it serves their goals indirectly, it allows them to recruit, get more funding and credibility.

The stated goal of Islamic State is to establish a caliphate across the world. The stated values and de facto policy of Islamic State is in opposition to Western values such as freedom of speech, press, religion, and association.

Yes, these attacks also double as recruiting tools.

> we will be a willing partner of IS doing exactly what they want us to do.

Who gives a fuck what Islamic State wants us to do? This is the most intellectually bankrupt argument tossed around. It literally makes no sense at all.

We need to do what is strategically sound.

If that happens to be what IS wants, why should that matter one iota beyond the strategic calculus?

> The stated goal of Islamic State is to establish a caliphate across the world.

With a bit of our help they might just achieve that. Are you aware that IS is trying to establish itself in Pakistan?

> The stated values and de facto policy of Islamic State is in opposition to Western values such as freedom of speech, press, religion, and association.

Yes, and why does this bother you?

The same goes for many other countries and I don't see us bombing those.

> Who gives a fuck what Islamic State wants us to do?

Well, I do. If my opponent wants me to make a certain move to further his own goals then the worst thing I can do is to give in to the temptation to act against my own interests and in his interests. That's not 'intellectually bankrupt', that's seeing two moves ahead and deciding that the outcome of the most tempting option is actually a net-negative for our side.

> We need to do what is strategically sound.

Precisely.

> If that happens to be what IS wants, why should that matter one iota beyond the strategic calculus?

Because the strategic calculus should involve the long term result of our actions and not taking that element into account will make matters much worse. This is how we got into this mess in the first place. Lots of things that seemed to be good ideas at the time with a very limited strategic horizon in mind and no long term plan.

Would it really be so bad to give a death cult what it wants for itself? Oblivion? With our technology we could disrupt their lines of communication and means to recruit among the civilians. But you'll have to actively target them. As people. And you'll have to actively target their message. Their keywords, you could even target them by keywords.

This would however dragnet target the entire religion.

> thereby accepting the risk of us or our loved ones getting blown up or shot going while we go about our daily routine

A risk which is orders of magnitude smaller than the risk that you or your loved one will perish in your car. Smaller even than the risk you'll choke on your next meal, or harm yourself putting your pants on tomorrow.

> the choice is between doing nothing

It really isn't. The alternative to bombing isn't doing nothing. The alternative is politics, dirty, compromising international politics. Which, because it involves prime trading partners and sacred cow industries (like arms and energy), that's less palatable than dropping bombs to most politicians, unfortunately.

And it is very very dubious that international bombing campaigns will even 'do' anything positive for our security. I doubt anyone knows, but let's not blindly assume that 'doing something' by dropping bombs is necessarily equivalent to 'doing something constructive.'

+1000

Arguably, doing absolutely nothing different would be the better option. Knee jerk reactions from a scared population make us much easier to control. ISIS and similar groups want a fight. Unfortunately our sports saturated culture doesn't allow us to see past 'winning', no matter how small the victory. 30 people dead is tragic, but still is quite small compared to the other dangers present in our daily lives.

"A risk which is orders of magnitude smaller than the risk that you or your loved one will perish in your car."

By that reasoning, we should just let murderers go free since the chance of being murdered is less than the chance of dying in a car wreck?

Sorry, it doesn't work that way. People, in general, don't think that way.

> By that reasoning, we should just let murderers go free

Perhaps you should read what I said, because I specifically said what I feel should be done.

But if you want the facile analogy, then at least stay with the question being addressed. We do not, for example, bomb areas with high numbers of murderers in them. There may be some LEOs who kill potential murders without due process of law, but it is not a tactic we should endorse. In general we respond to murder through the justice system, as we should.

The choice isn't doing nothing. That's just a straw man used by people who make a false equivalence between not agreeing with them and capitulating. You can make your own position sound very reasonable if you exclude the middle.

I did read what you said. I just found it unserious and at odds with the way that human beings actually think, in particular your claim that the amount of relative risk is what should dictate the response.

> at odds with the way that human beings actually think

I don't doubt that, but that is no reason to suggest we let our base instincts dictate policy. The way that human beings tend to think about lots of things is problematic. We can do better.

Terrorism tries to use fear as a political tool, where democratic forms of influence would not succeed. It is used because it is very successful: we are so scared of a very small risk that our national politics revolves around it.

The president today said we "will not be terrorised", the irony is astounding.

"they will kill us because their ideology is fundamentally opposed to Western concepts..." This is perpetual lie by western media and politicians. Islam has not been more violent than Christianity until may be the last century. Why has that changed. It's because the west wants to impose its values on others. Let people choose and live their lives. If you meddle with them they will meddle with you. Isn't it common sense?

You scared bro?

This is a feedback loop. It will not slow or reverse without systemic intervention.

That's what happens when you supply both sides of a conflict.

The military industrial complex in action.

This is the real motivation behind these conflicts.

I see opportunity. US arms industry needs DevOps methodologies to increase velocity.

That comment reminded me of this twitter account: https://twitter.com/devops_borat

As a person in that industry...what do you mean by "DevOps methodologies"? And what do you mean by increasing velocity?

Are you saying, "The US arms industry needs to be more agile in responding to the needs of its customers by producing better weapons in shorter periods of time"? If so, then your real problem is not with the industry.

Some black projects and other less sensitive but desperately needed projects can be "short-circuited" by being done without the usual oversight and red tape. You will only find out about those years after they are fielded, if ever. But most programs are subject to this process: http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/dangerroom/2010/09/atl_wal...

Do you understand everything that's going on in this chart? I don't either, and I was forced to attend several weeks worth of classroom training plus more online training in the nuances of this process. Anyone who wishes to develop a major weapons system must work through this process, which is mandated by US federal law.

Honestly I'd like to verify these numbers because I can't believe them. 5bn $ in 2 days? That can't be!!!

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