photos of Moffet Field (NUQ)

On Sun, 28 Dec 2003 21:27:05 +0000 (UTC), Merlin Dorfman wrote:

Alan Minyard ) wrote:
: On Sat, 27 Dec 2003 19:25:22 +0000 (UTC), Merlin Dorfman wrote:

: miso ) wrote:
: : You can't make a blanket statement that every toy requested by the
: : military saved the lives of troops. Look at how few of the Reagan era
: : projects ever worked, though we added trillions to the national debt.
:
: : Dellums did much to investigate Agent Orange.
:
: I worked at Lockheed at the time and just about every crazy idea
: was being funded. Even in an emergency that kind of thing is not
: justified because the good ideas get insufficient funding. (The bad
: ideas were being funded way beyond the point where it was obvious that
: the money could be better used elsewhere.) The money was coming in way
: faster than we could effectively spend it--we were hiring people who
: could only charitably be described as "marginally qualified."
: I understand that this was part of a conscious strategy to force
: the USSR to try to match us which they clearly could not do. But it
: had many negative consequences for the US, for the defense industry,
: and of course for the individual employees who were inevitably the
: first and worst hurt when the time of reckoning came.
: SDI ("Star Wars") is of course one of the best examples...

: Of course you, through your "special knowledge", know better than
: the US Military what its needs are. Yeah, right.

Much is forced on the US military by Congress, which the military
doesn't want or need. Congress knows better than the military what it
wants and needs of course. Starting with many useless/needless bases
that the military would love to close, but Congress won't give up the
pork barrel. And much is funded by Congress based on industry lobbying
that the services don't want or need.
As for my "special knowledge," I believe I have enough knowledge
to know when money is being wasted. Whether the military wanted or
needed what was asked for, they were _not_ getting it, for reasons as
described above.
In other words, any relationship between what industry was asked
to build (much less what actually got built) and what the US military
believes its needs are, was highly coincidental.
And if you don't know that, your knowledge of US military needs
is far from special.

I spent a lot of time operating some of those systems. If the US Military
was not getting what it needed, the why did the FSU go broke trying
to keep up?

No, you do not enough knowledge to know when money is being
"wasted". Defense procurement is an extremely complex
beast, and "Monday Morning Quarterbacks" generally have
no clue.

Al Minyard