The fact that cost-plus contracting is bad at producing efficient technology is not about outperforming at specific metrics.
Palantir wouldn’t have needed to sue the Army if the Army leaders would have been competent.
Palantir/Arduril/SpaceX which are the main big new defense contractors are all opposed to cost-plus contracting.
I think this is very strong evidence against a “hypercompetent” inner regime, and a somewhat strong update against inner regime competence, and such stagnation in a key military area definitely explains the assumption of uniform incompetence that I’ve frequently encountered. I argue that it’s a strong update, but not an extremely strong update, since an inner regime will be concerned with spreading it’s VIPs thin, increasing surface area for infiltration, by sending trusted people to be immersed in the leadership AND middle management throughout the armed forces and defense industry. Doing so would make the US better at vastly outproducing and outperforming Russia and China at military production, and the status quo between the US and Russia and China only started declining in value ~10 years ago; before then, when these systems were set up, it potentially wouldn’t be worth it for a competent survival-focused inner regime to spread itself thin in order to get the country really good at building up its forces. There’s still the fact that ballooning costs at least indicate short time horizons in such an inner regime, which is extremely difficult to distinguish from incompetence and even uniform incompetence. But it still seems reasonable that a highly competent inner regime in the 90s and 2000s would just assume that these things have always been inefficient and wasteful and thus realistically always would be. A failure of imagination there is not incompatible with high levels of inner regime competence.
I think this is very strong evidence against a “hypercompetent” inner regime, and a somewhat strong update against inner regime competence, and such stagnation in a key military area definitely explains the assumption of uniform incompetence that I’ve frequently encountered. I argue that it’s a strong update, but not an extremely strong update, since an inner regime will be concerned with spreading it’s VIPs thin, increasing surface area for infiltration, by sending trusted people to be immersed in the leadership AND middle management throughout the armed forces and defense industry. Doing so would make the US better at vastly outproducing and outperforming Russia and China at military production, and the status quo between the US and Russia and China only started declining in value ~10 years ago; before then, when these systems were set up, it potentially wouldn’t be worth it for a competent survival-focused inner regime to spread itself thin in order to get the country really good at building up its forces. There’s still the fact that ballooning costs at least indicate short time horizons in such an inner regime, which is extremely difficult to distinguish from incompetence and even uniform incompetence. But it still seems reasonable that a highly competent inner regime in the 90s and 2000s would just assume that these things have always been inefficient and wasteful and thus realistically always would be. A failure of imagination there is not incompatible with high levels of inner regime competence.