I heard about this earlier. The Constellation class was supposed to be the pragmatic fix to other failed over-engineered LCS ships the US wasted billions on, but it got cancelled itself because of how poor the state of US ship building is.
The LCS with a single gun and then ammo costing 1 billion USD (with a „b“) will always be a hilarious example of MIC grift.
The Army just tried to get its soldiers to use the new XM7 rifle which was seen as a crapper version of previous M4A1 rifle. https://archive.is/IWR94
I think the military higher-ups are making crap versions of stuff to pay military contractors because they know tax payers are paying the bill.
It’s contractor graft and military incompetence. The US has not been in a war that forced it to actually innovate since WW2 and has not had a military rival for 40 years. There is no actual enemy to measure new ideas against, so the idea has become to be ready for anything, without knowing what that anything is or what that anything needs as a countermeasure.
I would argue that the last thing the military needs is new rifles. What can even be improved in that field any more? You are throwing the same exact ammo as ever, the delivery mechanism doesn’t matter that much and you already have uncountable millions of surplus guns collecting dust in warehouses. Every arguably cool way to do it differently (mainly that’s caseless ammo, lasers aren’t really man-portable weapons and gyrojet is just kinda stupid) has run into myriad problems that mean it’s not gonna be as good as cased ammo and that will stay true forever, because we need the new innovation today and not when it’s ready after many more years of research and optimization!
Because if there isn’t a new rifle now to sell tens of millions of, then the contractor would run out of money. And if that happens, they can’t make new rifles. Which we don’t need, but we have no one else to make them, so they gotta keep making them. And since the rifle maker needs to make a profit (and more profit then last year too), because capitalism is a sane system with no flaws, these new rifles gotta get more and more expensive. Why they are more expensive doesn’t even matter, They just gotta be more expensive to keep the company afloat. Put AI in them next, that can tell the soldier made up facts about why they fight. It’s only a matter of time.
Best system, best country, best empire.
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So this actually does use different ammo then?
Yes, it does.
Well good for them for actually iterating on that!
I am sure the ability for an infantryman to kill another infantryman is highly, highly crucial in tomorrow’s wars, where everything will be a drone that explodes.
Drones are important but the infantryman isn’t getting replaced any time soon. Still the backbone of the army.
Yea, to hold ground, die and kill civilians. None of these activities require particularly cool guns.
Since WW2? Both the Soviets and Americans pulled out some insane engineering feats throughout the Cold War, I’d say that with Reagan consolidating the military industrial complex in the early 80s in light of the Soviet Unions imminent collapse, the stage was set for corporations to kick up their feet.
There has to be some corruption and/or grift going on with Sig Sauer somehow getting the contracts for both the Army’s new pistol and new rifle within a few years of each other. Though i have also read rumors that Sig made the cheapest per-weapon offer of all the companies that submitted for both programs – that might be the real answer.
Worse, the new Army handgun is based off the Sig P320, which is an extremely dangerous pistol and is getting people (including police) killed by firing on its own. I have even heard that the military guns have this problem and some Army MP’s (the most frequent carriers of pistols) have seen accidental discharges. Sig is handling this in about the way you’d expect a dirty capitalist company to: they’re publicly denying there is any problem with the guns and seem to be refusing any kind of investigations or recalls or refunds. There is speculation that if they were to issue a recall it would bankrupt them given how many P320’s and variants are out there.
Military procurement is such a dirty industry.
Can anyone track down the source on the 9 billion figure? The DOD source the article links gives a figure of around 4-5 billion, and I’m wondering if I missed something. Some news articles claim 20 billion was spent, some claim 3 billion, and no one seems to have a primary source.
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over budget and fall behind schedule
Completely normal. The US government rewards contractors with “cost plus” contracts and typically no or minimal late penalties. Cost means “whatever you end up spending to build the thing”, the plus is a nominal margin on top.
If that model sounds like it’s ripe for corruption and exploitation, that’s because it is.
Navy officials compounded all those problems by committing one of the major deadly acquisition sins: starting production before completing the design. The practice of concurrency, the official term for the overlap of development and production, has been described by one former Pentagon acquisition chief as “malpractice.” Building a ship, tank, or aircraft before the constituent technology has been proven through testing all but guarantees the program will go over budget and fall behind schedule, yet it happens all the time.
That’s funny. I thought “iterative design” was an ingenious idea. (/s)
