China's weapons acquisition cycle 5-6x faster than the United States | Hacker News Reader

China's weapons acquisition cycle 5-6x faster than the United States

acquisitiontalk.com

24 pointsjseliger17 comments

Weapons procurement is a very difficult problem for the world's dominant power. If it does the job right (and so far the US has done it), then it prevents wars (Iraq and Afghanistan notwithstanding). And if it does not fight wars, the weapons don't get used, and the population gets the impression the spending was for nothing. In a democracy you get a lot of pressure to reduce this spending.

So the US has to procure just few enough Tomahawks to make sure the factories that can make them retain some semblance of manufacturing ability just in case. If you check the DoD budget, you'll see that every year we procure fewer Tomahawks for about the same money (which is a lot). That's because we don't pay for the missiles themselves, but for the ability to ramp up their production if the time comes to do that.

But then, how do you get healthy competition to drive down prices? Let's say you want to found a startup to make cruise missiles? Who are you going to sell to? The US is only buying about 100 per year, and thinking hard each year how to cut that number down. You can offer to sell the same 100 for 10 times less money, but they don't care about the missiles themselves. If they switch from their current supplier (Raytheon) to you, then Raytheon will shut down the plant (maybe plants?) that makes them. Can the US trust you that you can ramp up the production when the time comes? Maybe you can prove you can, but that does not happen that often. So we are stuck with whatever manufacturers we have, it's difficult to get new entrants.

What can be done? I don't know. What is China doing better? I don't know that either.

All I can see is the problem is not that easy.

The USG / DOD is a terrible customer. They want to control every thing; from suppliers to acceptance. They really don't care about what something costs, it is far more important to ensure the vendors are not making too much profit.

To move fast, you have to be willing to break things. When you go "agile" in software, you write a lot of crap that has to be thrown away. Same with weapons development, if you want to go fast and try ideas then some of them will not work. Will Not Work. That is intolerable to the procurement organization, because spending money on something that does not work is also known as "corruption".

Risk / Reward has to be changed by society. A war will do that.

China is a dictatorship war machine. They don't have to go through all these process. They just do. That's why we need to properly to recognize them as a threat at all levels or Taiwan is a goner

Nonsense. China has many of the exact same problems. Being a dictatorship doesnt actually change most of what he said.

Not sure if u r intentionally or unintentionally conflating different things. Throughput and efficiency are different things. I am not saying China is more efficient, I am saying they can achieve great throughput(might be better in US in this regard, but I am talking in general) because they are strictly top down. We have a great example right now. Don't you see they are still in lock down right now? What does it mean? It just means China gov have great power in doing 'things'.

I am not saying China is better. I am not saying China is more efficient. I am not saying China is gonna exceed. I'm only stating the process about how China operates. Please stick to the topic if you really want to discuss about China's process. If you are China's shill u can ignore my posts.

> Don't you see they are still in lock down right now?

China as a whole is not in lockdown, and has never been since early 2020. Particular neighborhoods or cities with particularly large (by Chinese standards, meaning tiny by outside standards) outbreaks are in lockdown. The vast majority of China is not under lockdown.

This is something which is very poorly understood outside China, partly because of sensationalist coverage in Western media. It's also partly because most people in the West don't speak Chinese and are generally unfamiliar with the country, and thus have very weak nonsense detection filters when it comes to news about China. That's why complete nonsense like the "social credit score" myth continues to circulate widely in the Western discourse about China.

Military requisitioning is just as top town in the US.

Yes but they can direct all(by all I mean ALL. exhibit A, the still on going lockdown regardless of the economy condition) the resources to war at xi's whim and nobody could object his decision.

Can US do that?

Don't you know that Communists are actually magic and can just wave their wands and make technologically advanced war planes appear from mud? We gotta make sure to increase our military budget next year to combat these wizards!

> If it does the job right (and so far the US has done it), then it prevents wars (Iraq and Afghanistan notwithstanding)

The US has been at war for like 90% of its history

By similar standards, the French Fifth Republic has been at war for ~98% of its history.

>I would tell you anecdotally that China is still, after gains we’ve made in the last five years or so, about five to six times faster than us in acquisition. In purchasing power parity they spend about one dollar to our twenty dollars to get to the same capability. It’s math, ladies and gentlemen. We are going to lose if we can’t figure out how to drop the cost and increase the speed in our defense supply chains.

I mean it sounds scary until you realize that a large part of our military spending is a jobs program and wealth redistribution platform. We're not serious about cost optimization because it's not a significant limitation at this point. Being behind the leader has its advantages, you let them do the hard work and you copy|steal it at a much lower cost. This does not mean you can easily become the leader without massively increasing your spending (and now having everyone steal your technology). Especially when you are both nuclear powers that are not going to directly attach each other without risk of annihilation.

Lose what is also a question that should be asked here. I assume ally nations like Taiwan would be the primary risks, though loss of other trading partners is a serious risk over time. As for prevention of these risks we're already funding pulling processing manufacturing back into the US, but again, this is going to be expensive. There is also nothing like a war where the stakes increase to spur innovation and decrease costs.

Here's what Navy Adm. Charles A. Richard, commander of U.S. Strategic Command, has to say about this [1]:

"As I assess our level of deterrence against China, the ship is slowly sinking," he said. "It is sinking slowly, but it is sinking, as fundamentally they are putting capability in the field faster than we are. As those curves keep going, it isn't going to matter how good our [operating plan] is or how good our commanders are, or how good our forces are — we're not going to have enough of them. And that is a very near-term problem."

One area where the U.S. still dominates is with its underseas capabilities — the U.S. submarine fleet, Richard said.

"Undersea capabilities is still the one ... maybe the only true asymmetric advantage we still have against our opponents," Richard said. "But unless we pick up the pace, in terms of getting our maintenance problems fixed, getting new construction going ... if we can't figure that out ... we are not going to put ourselves in a good position to maintain strategic deterrence and national defense."

[1] https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/32...

“Asymmetric” has taken on a fuzzy definition in the military, kind of like “agile” or “disruptive” in more familiar domains. He states that submarines are the one true asymmetric advantage they have, but the nature of asymmetry implies that one need not match force in kind. Submarines exploit a characteristic weakness of surface ships and nuclear first-strike, but they have their own characteristic weakness, so the asymmetric label is apt, but direct comparison of force-in-kind is irrelevant.

As a different way to think about it, consider that the history of warfare is entirely dominated by strategic failures leading to symmetric attrition warfare. Historians do not classify asymmetric success as war, unless it comes at the culmination of symmetric attrition. We have an industry and a profession based on the study and execution of war, which, I suggest to you, is tautologically strategic failure. The Chinese have traditionally seen the bigger picture in their strategy of “unrestricted warfare”, and they seem to recognize that their struggle is not against a specific military power or system, but perhaps the emergent unstoppable power inherent in the lack of a system or strategy. It certainly was this way for us in our recent engagements, as it will be for the aggressors of today. And yet, I don’t see the adaptation. We grow the war in scope but lose the objective. There is too much in the Chinese and US system that secures its own existence through a war of attrition against itself. All great powers end up competing in the same race.

And we aren't going to win this battle by putting up symmetric forces against China either. At this point in their development curve they will gladly let a large number of ships and manpower sink because of their massive populations. Building more stuff that requires people simply isn't going to work. Most of our population isn't gung ho about going off to die somewhere and our replacement rate and excess population is low. America simply cannot field the world itself with 300 mil population, and instead must partner in alliances like NATO and grow allie militaries to share the burden that make any attack by China expensive on a worldwide scale.

> Most of our population isn't gung ho about going off to die somewhere

This is the media's job: if the US accepted 1M covid deaths, it can accept a similarly massive death toll in whichever military confrontation the US might want to embark on next.

> instead must partner in alliances

The numbers are different, but the same incentives apply to China. That's why they have also been putting a lot of effort into making friends (funding infrastructure efforts abroad, covid relief, belt and road, etc.)

The American people have been at war ever since 9/11. Good luck convincing them to dump more cash into weapons when they can't afford to eat or fill their gas tanks...

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