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Comment by rdl | Hacker News Reader

As a counterexample: Military logistics tends to be centrally planned/standardized, not market based, and while it's rarely efficient, part of that has to do with the environment (where P(success) > unit price; it's perfectly ok to have ammunition which is marked up 100x at the front line vs. manufacturer's door if you're certain to have enough at the right time/place).

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The risk of not having ammunition is factored in to the price in this example. For the same reason, I may pay 2x for marketing collateral I need for a trade show from a local supplier instead of purchasing online because the risk of not having it for the show is reduced. The price of goods in a free market is never necessarily the same in all contexts where transactions take place.

I spoke with military logistics folks about ten years ago. They told me that at one point, DoD had over 40,000 containers missing in Iraq.

40,000.

But yes, if you keep throwing money at a problem, it tends to go away. Or at least disappear.

For as long as there have been armies, good logistics continues to be a critical need. There's a reason large army deployments are always accompanied by large black markets.

Also, US military procurement could not possibly work without a free market in which they could buy supplies in. There's entirely too many different kinds of things they need, from uniforms to food to parts for materiel. It would be utterly impossible to manage the production and distribution of these things of these things without a robust market that rewards everyone involved.

The F-35 alone is $163 billion over budget, with each plane costing hundreds of millions. Meanwhile, the $77 billion F-22 planes have been barely used, and probably won't be in the near future.

But hey, as the Lockheed Martin VP says, "the best weapon is the one that's never used".

Because the best case scenario for a weapon is that merely having it prevents an attack.

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