My first boss (rip) had a internship with a defense contractor his junior year in college. They gave him one project. Design a cover for the air intake for an APC or some such.
Easy!!! No not actually easy because of all the constraints.
It had to be stowable. So a hard cover was out. It couldn't produce toxic fumes if it caught fire. So most plastics were out. Cloth was a problem because it couldn't get sucked into the intake if someone tried starting the engine without removing the cover.
He designed heavy canvas cover with metal stiffeners. And snaps. And then had to switch to a draw string because the snaps failed at -40F. And tended to get clogged with snow.
Whole thing took him three months.
Then there was the friend at college who worked on a VCR to record gun camera footage. Also a bunch of requirements. Higher video quality. And can't lose lock when the pilot does a hard pullout after firing his munitions. And the total production run? Well exactly how many fighters does the airforce have? Couple of thousand?
I think military tech has a problem that it's trying to keep up with commercial driven tech which operates on a scale that's a 1000 timers larger. Military produces a few thousand artifacts to commercials few million artifacts.
Those constraints seem a lot more reasonable than what I've seen in other aspects of the business world. At least they are grounded in the realities of the actual purpose. Well, mostly anyway. I'll leave justifications for the $1000 left-handed hammers as an exercise for later.
I've seen (and removed) plenty of requirements that were put in the specification just because. Because someone needed X amount of Y technology in their projects for the year. Because it seemed cool. Because other people were doing it. Because they wanted it on their resume. Because. But not because it was appropriate to the project or its purpose.
I'd say the majority of the work I do now is pruning these nonsense "just because" clauses out.
Its entertaining at least. I regularly shake my head in disbelief as I go through a specification and wonder, "who hired these people?" or "Why is the person who hired them still working?"
Fortunately for me I also get to hand these questions back, much like the good uncle who only needs to uncle and not actually parent: "Here, have them back!" I say at the end of the visit.
The the hammer was waaaaay more than $1000. But that's because the military said "We'll pay you a total sum of X, but to make it easier to fund the project we'll let you break it into n parts and pay X/n per part".
The contractor decided that to make their cashflow smoother, they'd include "manual impulse force generator" as one of the deliverable parts.
The hammer was "only" $435 and that price is really a reporting artifact.
The hammer was part of a larger contract that included spare parts and R&D effort linked to those parts. When the spending was reported, the same absolute amount of R&D ($420) was allocated to every item, inflating the apparent price of a $15 hammer to $435. By the same token, the engineering work on more complicated systems (e.g., an engine) was an absolute steal at $420 and since the total amount of R&D spending was fixed, nobody really got ripped off.
Because IBM was there 20 years ago and not only left behind a pure-IBM stack, but got their RUP requirements written into the policy manual as a barrier to entry for any non-IBM vendor to take over.
I'll leave justifications for the $1000 left-handed hammers as an exercise for later.
Those tend to be an accounting artifact, I heard. If you order a thousand different items for a million dollars total then each one of them will show up as costing exactly $1000 no matter what they are.
> I think military tech has a problem that it's trying to keep out with commercial drive tech which operates on a scale that a 1000 timers larger. Military produces a few thousand artifacts to commercials few million artifacts.
Not to excuse military contracting pork and cost padding, but this is a good point that a lot of people seem to miss. There's also the fact a military contract will be for a production run and follow on support.
So they buy a thousand full units and parts/tools to fix and maintain them up front. You can't just go to Autozone and pick up a new tank tread or parts for a jet turbine.
Another huge factor is the service lifetime of military equipment.
There are aircraft that were designed and created in the 1970s that are still in use today. Sure, many of the components and internal systems have been modified and upgraded, but much of the original design is still there and operating.
>> a military contract will be for a production run and follow on support.
When "follow-on support" has to last for 50 years or more, it makes a big difference.
Easy!!! No not actually easy because of all the constraints.
It had to be stowable. So a hard cover was out. It couldn't produce toxic fumes if it caught fire. So most plastics were out. Cloth was a problem because it couldn't get sucked into the intake if someone tried starting the engine without removing the cover.
He designed heavy canvas cover with metal stiffeners. And snaps. And then had to switch to a draw string because the snaps failed at -40F. And tended to get clogged with snow.
Whole thing took him three months.
Then there was the friend at college who worked on a VCR to record gun camera footage. Also a bunch of requirements. Higher video quality. And can't lose lock when the pilot does a hard pullout after firing his munitions. And the total production run? Well exactly how many fighters does the airforce have? Couple of thousand?
I think military tech has a problem that it's trying to keep up with commercial driven tech which operates on a scale that's a 1000 timers larger. Military produces a few thousand artifacts to commercials few million artifacts.