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2 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2021–2023
1:43:50 · 890K views · Aug 11, 2017
The 1998 HBO dark comedy based on Col. James Burton's book about the 17-year development of the Bradley fighting vehicle. It satirizes how military procurement goes wrong.
It is recommended in threads on the F-35 and defense procurement as a funny, mostly factual look at how requirements balloon, with some warnings about its accuracy.
5 comments from Hacker News
I don't know why the military can't learn from a string of failed systems going back to at least the '80s. 1. Make Tough Requirements 2. Get Prototype 3. Prototype attracts some interest 4. Now the brass additionally wants capabilities X, Y, Z 5. Prototype now costs twice as much and is more failure prone, and actually less mission-capable due to all the bolt-ons 6. Program costs goes up due to all the changes 7. We can't afford this! 8. Cut unit acquisitions by 50% 9. Wait? Our unit cost just nearly doubled because the real costs were all in design/R&D? 10. Now we REALLY can't afford this. 11. Cut orders by another 75% 12. So finally approximately 10% of the original order actually gets built, at a total program cost 2 or 3x what it was supposed to be, and a unit cost that's massively huge. 13. Program fails in the mid-to-long term due to maintenance costs and falling spares inventory. HBO did a great made-for-TV movie on this called the "Pentagon Wars", which while fictionalized is only about 20% actually made up: this video
there is an old made-for-HBO movie called The Pentagon Wars... I presume it is accurate enough, although it was turned into a comedy so I'm sure they took some artistic license with it. Highly recommended. It's available for free on youtube. this video
> HBO did a great made-for-TV movie on this called the "Pentagon Wars", which while fictionalized is only about 20% actually made up: this video Great in that it is entertaining, but I would not take it, or the book it was based on, completely at face value: > The Pentagon Wars was made to be a comedy first and an adaptation of the Pentagon Wars book second. It was never meant to be an accurate portrayal of the Bradley program and it shows. You're getting Hollywood taking an an axe-grinding, half-true memoir as fact and then playing it for laughs. * [LINK] See also perhaps: > Although the Bradley destroyed many enemy tanks and experienced fairly low rates of casualty in the First Gulf War and the Iraq War, the vehicle’s recent battlefield performance was not acquired through efficient planning and project management. The origins of the modern Bradley span decades of troubled development; the involvement of many stakeholders; inflexible and questionable requirements; a failure of contractors to make design tradeoffs for fear of losing capability; billions of dollars in R&D costs; and numerous Congressional interventions, including House Armed Service Committee hearings investigating Bradley testing protocol.1 The Bradley has been described at different times, by military officers and historians, as a weapon that means “all things to all people,” a “quintessential hybrid,” and “a proverbial camel...that does nothing well”.2 * [LINK]
This is not untrue, but a more applicable interpretation of this conceptual framework might go as follows: In an AAR[0] operators explain risks, causes, and limitations of the system. This provides a formal structured language for describing how, precisely, supporting systems can be improved and how they impact all specific aspects of operator interaction. Since the operator is viewed simply as a networked control-system in this case, the cognitive path from structure, supporting physical system, and then physical quantities needing improvement is unmistakably clear, as is required in successful planning, acquisitions, operations, and maintenance.[1] Essentially it makes subjective experience concrete, and is prophylactic against bikeshedding/blame-gaming. [0] [LINK] [1] this video
This has all happened before, and it will all happen again. The Pentagon Wars is available for viewing on YouTube. this video