Life critical software that gets visibility by congress tends to be a very bureaucratic process. Your boss doesn't want your commit being the one that causes a worldwide diplomatic issue.

I assume that smaller/cheaper drones avoid a lot of this because the stakes aren't near as high and quite a bit of the development occurs in private industry first.

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matwood 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> visibility by congress tends to be a very bureaucratic process

See also SpaceX vs. NASA. No way would NASA have been allowed to blow up as many rockets as SpaceX did to finally get to their working solution.

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3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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throwaway894345 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, the anti-regulation people when NASA experiments: "look at all these failures! Cut NASA funding and give public funds to the guy who purchases elections!"

The same people when SpaceX blows up a bunch of rockets: "wow, look at the innovation, they move so fast! Cut NASA funding and give public funds to the guy who purchases elections!"

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ACCount37 2 hours ago | parent [-]

NASA's failures as of late are less "dramatic explosions" and more "delays", "cost overruns" and "lack of ambition so severe it borders on criminal".

The last time NASA caught any serious flak was what, the Starliner shitshow? And that was just splash damage from Boeing getting dunked on by everyone at once.

	▲	throwaway894345 27 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> lack of ambition so severe it borders on criminal I'm not sure what timeline you're thinking about, but JWST was launched pretty recently and it's pretty ambitious. But more to the point of my earlier post, NASA's "lack of ambition" is probably directly attributable to the "small government" people who penalize ambition in the public sector and praise it in the private, government contractor sector. The incentives to be ambitious in government are perverse when every "failure" is scrutinized and condemned by people who want government to fail so that they can justify taking public money and dumping it into private bank accounts.

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quickthrowman 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I would guess that DoD procurement rules have more to do with it than Congress, but perhaps Congress defined DoD procurement rules.

Milspec is expensive and process heavy, see what a B52 replacement trash can costs, for just one example.

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dragonwriter 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

DoD procurement rules are largely the outcome of Congress trying to prevent executive-industry corruption through mandated process.

	▲	dboreham 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		But aren't the politicians also corrupt? (or at least most of them) One therefore assumes that any action by congress must be corrupt. This appears borne out by the evidence over the past few decades.

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CoastalCoder 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If you think Milspec is expensive, you should see the cost of not having a Milspec supply chain while still being risk-averse.

	▲	throwaway27448 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		We could always be less risk averse. We still seem to kill civilians at high rates and our own soldiers signed up to die. Gold-plated weapons aren't much good against peer powers anyway; it's production volume that wins those wars.

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4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]