Good, would be nice to see spacex style startups start to win contracts for the military. Reduce cost, break up the boeing / lockheed / northrop / etc. lock on hardware contracts and optimally produce new dynamic ideas.
For example a company of a dozen people that make just a laser sensor which is then integrated into defense products.
What would be nice is more like defense contract interaction as a service. How to navigate the defense contract acquisition and compliance environment is hard and boring and part of why defense systems actually work and why they’re so expensive.
Generals have to make judgement calls about what will work in the next conflict - talk about incomplete information - while the future enemy’s preparations and even identity is unknown. Then this has to be translated into something that can slot into existing military systems.
To say nothing of political and career considerations, moving budgets, revolutionary new ideas that will come along, training and culture.
And if they get it wrong, the bad guy wins the next war.
it's called bribing politicians and generals
I want SV/Texas enterpreneurship to completely dismantle the MIC and start afresh. Even if you disagree with defense applications and its ramifications, simply from ROI perspective (tax payer dollars), instead of increasing military budget, we should be asking how can we do more with current budget. Or even cut down the budget and expect 2x more productivity from these fat military contractors with moats like no other.
"Hey the missile doesn't work in v1, but we still shipped it"
"Sorry, we just didn't see enough users of this product, so we remotely bricked it."
"We didn't QA this properly and now people are dead."
Move fast and break things is supposed to apply to the missile, not the process to write the guidance system.
> "Hey the missile doesn't work in v1, but we still shipped it"
Yes, that’s how we won WWII: we shipped prototypes based on the new ideas, and improved them based on the lessons from the field. In war, stakes are higher, and you can’t always afford to delay for a long time to ship perfect product: by the time it arrives, the war might already be lost.
Although that was more of a Bureau of Ordnance / Congressional fault, for insufficient interwar funding and testing.
An extreme but absolutely relevant and potentially devastating example of the current system is the F-35.
SpaceX has absolute massively iterated in every single thing they do, what the heck are you talking about? The Falcon 9 more than doubled it's payload from v1.0 to FT Block 5, and gained first stage landing/reusability through a host of iterative improvements. Starship's development has been all about hardware rich iteration with plans to enable it right down to the basic material level. They've been big on MVPs and then iterating from there.
They were not "big on MVP"
Their engineers from the start delivered a very solid vehicle tested, and re-tested probably more than NASAs own rockets.
All improvements they had since were enhancements over the original masterplan, nothing like "throw it on the wall, and see if it sticks"
Isn't the F35 developed like that though?
And you think that doesn’t happen at Boeing & Lockheed?
It sure was not a lack of technology.