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Comment by blackeyeblitzar | Hacker News Reader

Why General Atomics? They are also yet another defense incumbent that needs to be disrupted. They make the Predator and other current UAVs, which are all expensive and uninteresting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_Aeronautical_S...

In general I think the government needs to move contracts away from older companies and fund young innovative ones. Partnerships between young and old simply sustain the incumbents and everything that comes with them (price structure, leadership, lobbying, etc). I would rather see many smaller companies in healthy competition for contracts.

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Because that's how the government operates. Same with the initial COTS and Commercial Crew awards to SpaceX: it was paired with a similar contracts to Orbital and Boeing, to make sure that if the untested startup failed there would be a traditional contractor ready to take up the slack.

Hopefully this time the incumbent doesn't get paid twice as much for a worse outcome, as happened with Commercial Crew...

NASA paid Boeing 4.5 billion and counting, SpaceX 2.6 billion. SpaceX launched astronauts to ISS 7 times, completely fulfilling the original contract, and continues to launch on new contracts with NASA. Meanwhile Boeing has yet to fly a single astronaut and required NASA to pay them extra for their own delays and failures.

Oh that's pretty much guaranteed.

If those are the two lowest bids what else are you going to do?

Tried this kind of contract they don’t award to the lowest bids. There are 3-4 other factors that take higher priority.

From what I recall from NASA Artemis contracts selection process, all bids are weighted with two parameters in addition to the proposed cost: technical merits of the proposal and the confidence score based on the company's management and previous performance.

That's just one contract. SpaceX will win the rest. ULA is dead. They're being sold for parts.

Boeing not ULA. But yeah Starliner isn’t flying any more missions than they are contractually obligated to fly.

DoD wants a high level of confidence that your company will still be around and delivering the exact same product to the exact same specs 20 years from now. It's why startups are basically never the primes on defense acquisitions.

Because try to come up with a cooler name than "General Atomics," and I'll bet you can't.

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I assume andruil is doing the controller and consults on design, while GA largely does the aircraft. Building big aircrafts takes huge facilities, so it's not unreasonable to have a big incumbent doing this.

My point is we should be redirecting some funds to also support startups for those pieces, rather than resigning ourselves to the status quo.

No, Anduril and General Atomics will work separately on competing prototypes and at the end likely only one of them will win a final order for production aircraft.

>They are also yet another defense incumbent that needs to be disrupted.

The first and arguably only mission of the Department of Defense is to win wars. Diversifying the economy is none of their concern beyond having a economy with which to fuel their war machines.

If you want diversification of the economy, look towards the Department of Commerce.

Or to put it another way: Thumping your diversity drum doesn't win you wars.

Diversifying the economy is a pathway to winning wars. Limiting themselves to a few expensive and stagnant vendors is a way to lose in the future. Other countries make these things much more efficiently because they don’t have lazy governments captured by old companies.

Also I have no idea what this has to do with “diversity” or what you even mean by that.

What country has more efficient and effective military aircraft?

> Other countries make these things much more efficiently because they don’t have regulatory capture by old companies.

This contract is for cutting edge unmanned fighter jets. Other countries don't make them at all!

Probably because it's way better to make swarms of dirt cheap drones

No one makes swarms in any real sense of the word, either.

These unmanned Wingman jets will be the first in the world to do that too.

Look up Rogozins comments about how Ukrainians operate drones for a Russian loyalist perspective

Those are cheap consumer drones not “swarms”, cheap airplanes, and drones from other countries.

If they could make an F16 equivalent combat drone, they’d jump at the chance.

I meant other countries make the plane portion (not Anduril’s unmanned controls) that General Atomics is responsible for. Predators and Reapers are very expensive.

>Also I have no idea what this has to do with “diversity” or what you even mean by that.

Diversity, or "the condition of having or being composed of differing elements"[1], in this case a wide variety of suppliers.

I assume most of us are speaking English here.

[1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/diversity

>Limiting themselves to a few expensive and stagnant vendors is a way to lose in the future.

You win wars by buying your equipment from the most capable suppliers. If that happens to be a centralized cabal of suppliers (this stuff is expensive, after all), then it is what it is. It's not the mission of the DoD to diversify the economy, its mission is to win wars as effectively as possible at any cost.

…and at the level of the DoD your goals include ensuring that there ARE as many capable suppliers as possible, using your commercial power, to increase your chances of “winning wars as effectively as possible”.

Wars are won on logistics; a corrupt, stagnant, or under-innovating market is a barrier to successful defence.

You aren't going to win wars by procuring from second and third rate suppliers just to keep the market diverse. You have to ask for proposals from across the market, but it's natural that suppliers will become centralized given how much money, time, and expertise is required.

The mission of keeping the economy healthy lies upon the Commerce and Justice Departments, whose missions are to manage the economy and keep industries within the confines of the law respectively.

Optionality, even for a monopsony like the Defense industry, is good for the consumer (Pentagon). They still want suppliers to compete.

What incentive is there for a company to innovate if the DoD allows their competitors to die out? When it's time to buy a new fighter jet (or whatever else) those acquisitions chiefs want several options, same as any consumer.

The OUSD for Acquisition & Sustainment publishes lengthy analyses on competition within the industry and how to stoke it. [0]

[0] https://media.defense.gov/2022/Feb/15/2002939087/-1/-1/1/STA...

Competitive procurement is intentional US military method expressly for military purposes. Saying the DoD shouldn't care about it because it needs to win wars is a meaningless statement. Part of how it wins wars is by having effective equipment and part of how it has effective equipment is that it has a competitive process. Cultivating supplier diversity is intentional.

Honestly, quite an absurdity of a comment. Just says words without any coherent meaning.

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