This from SS on US Defense Reformation which I covered earlier. Yesterday President Trump signed an executive order to enforce Defence Reformation. The genesis was https://18theses.com authored by Shyam Sankar / Palantir CTO in which the argument is made for reforming Defense development procurement.
The argument and the alignment with AI is clear. Until now the development of Defense products has been dumb machines for Rand, Fairchild, Boeing with software added later. This is similar to corporate engagement with AI and how it must be viewed to ultimately engage the entire people, process, technology framework of companies.
We run a centrally unplanned process that neither has the supposed advantages of a planned economy nor the (far superior) advantages of a free market. Bill Greenwalt explains the sins of our poor attempts at copying the Communists:
This [ideology and management] approach, now deeply engrained in defense management culture, process, law, and regulation, is based on the concepts of scientific management that were once fashionable in the Soviet Union and at the vanguard of the 1950s U.S. auto industry before it was outcompeted by Japan in the 1970s. Centralized, predictive program
budgeting, management, and oversight were then thought to be superior to the trial and error and messiness of time-constrained, decentralized experimentation and the seemingly wastefulness of having multiple sources rapidly prototyping potential solutions.
BILL GREENWALT
Here is the entire Reformation document.
The Defense Reformation
It will sound revolutionary, however this ought to be considered in the context of how long we have operated this way, and importantly the digression over the last 40 years to directing internet to become a marketing tool … what a waste.
