finally got around to reading this: The Military Industrial Virus in Harpers...
it's a long, very well researched tour de force of just how fucked the military budget has become.
here is the link and a snip...
https://harpers.org/archive/2019/06/the-pentagon-syndrome/
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Of course, some sections of postwar U.S. manufacturing indebted to defense dollars still led the world, most notably civilian aircraft as represented by the Boeing Company. The airliners that rolled out of its Seattle plant were well designed, safe, and profitable. Boeing had a huge defense component as well, but senior management reportedly enforced an unwritten rule that managers from the defense side should never be transferred to the civilian arm, lest they infect it with their culture of cost overruns, schedule slippage, and risky or unfeasible technical initiatives.
That began to change in 1997, when Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas, a defense company. In management terms, the merger was in effect a McDonnell takeover, with its executives—most importantly CEO Harry Stonecipher—assuming command of the combined company, bringing their cultural heritage with them. The effects were readily apparent in the first major Boeing airliner initiative under the merged regime, the 787 Dreamliner. Among other features familiar to any student of the defense industry, the program relied heavily on outsourcing subcontracts to foreign countries as a means of locking in foreign buyers. Shipping parts around the world obviously costs time and money. So does the use of novel and potentially risky technologies: in this case, it involved a plastic airframe and all-electronic controls powered by an extremely large and dangerously flammable battery. All this had foreseeable effects on the plane’s development schedule, and, true to form for a defense program, it entered service three years late. This technology also had a typical impact on cost, which exceeded an initial development estimate of $5 billion by at least $12 billion—an impressive overrun, even by defense standards. Predictably, the battery did catch fire, resulting in a costly three-month grounding of the Dreamliner fleet while a fix was devised. The plane has yet to show a profit for the corporation, but expects to do so eventually.
The two recent crashes of the Boeing 737 Max, which together killed 346 people, were further indications that running civilian programs along defense-industry lines may not have been the best course for Boeing. The 737 had been a tried and true money-spinner with an impressive safety record since 1967. Several years ago, however, under the auspices of CEO Dennis Muilenburg, previous overseer of the Future Combat Systems fiasco, and Patrick Shanahan (currently the acting secretary of defense), who had headed up Boeing’s Missile Defense Systems and the Dreamliner program before becoming general manager of Boeing’s commercial airplane programs, the airliner was modified in a rushed program to compete with the Airbus A320. These modifications, principally larger engines that altered the plane’s aerodynamic characteristics, rendered it potentially unstable. Without informing customers or pilots, Boeing installed an automated software Band-Aid that fixed the stability problem, at least when the relevant sensors were working. But the sensors were liable to fail, with disastrous consequences. Such mishaps are not uncommon in defense programs, one such instance being Boeing’s V-22 Osprey troop-carrying aircraft (supervised for a period by Shanahan) in which a design flaw, long denied, led to multiple crashes that killed thirty-nine soldiers and Marines. But the impact of such disasters on contractors’ bottom lines tends to be minimal, or even positive, since they may be paid to correct the problem. In the commercial market, the punishment in terms of lost sales and lawsuits are likely to be more severe.
so much more at the link....
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quite frankly, after I read articles like this, I become down right hopeless for the future of this nation.
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