A Boston Globe story on an upgraded GPS system caught me by surprise. Apparently by the year 2022 we’ll have the “GPS OCX” system that, in theory, won’t let a 10-year-old from China send all of the cars in a major metropolitan area in the same direction at roughly the same time, thus causing massive traffic jams.
[The Globe reports that the upgrade is taking longer than it took to build the original GPS system, consistent with our local Longfellow Bridge project, and will cost 3-4X what was originally budgeted. But that would make it above-average for a military program, according to John Lehman, the Reagan-era Secretary of the Navy (WSJ article: “With so many layers and offices needed to concur on every decision, it now takes an average of 22½ years from the start of a weapons program to first deployment, instead of the four years it took to deploy the Minuteman ICBM and Polaris submarine missile system in the Cold War era. … it takes only seven years for Chinese and Russian procurement systems to produce the advanced ships and fighters of the so-called fifth generation … Today’s procurement consists of beauty contests to see who gets a 30- to 50-year competition-free monopoly.”).]
Thank God we are spending 6x as much on defense as all our enemies combined. If our OODA loop takes 3 times as long as our enemies’, they would be eating our lunch if they had the budget to do so. Our air force is flying 50+ year old B-52s – by the time they are retired they may be over the century mark. Imagine if we had tried to get away with this during WWII or the height of the Cold War.
Jack: I irritated one of my fellow airline sufferers who was a B-52 pilot in the reserves. I said “The plane has a gross weight of only 360,000 lbs and isn’t certified for more extreme maneuvers (G limits) than an airliner. Why not replace it with an Airbus A380 and throw bombs out the side? The Airbus has a vastly higher gross weight (1,268,000 lbs.) and is much cheaper to operate.”
Always aware when stuck behind minivans slowly driving kids to school that most of the kids are going to die in 20 years, when US is 50 years behind every other military in the world.
The USAF would figure out a way to make the Airbus much more expensive to buy and operate. Reference the recently abandoned effort to replace the president’s helicopter.