Posted on 07/02/2013 4:03:44 PM PDT by Nachum
Jay DeFrank, vice president of Pratt and Whitney, urged for continued military innovation Tuesday morning at the Brookings Institution.
DeFrank, among other distinguished panelists, answered questions on the effects of sequestration on the Department of Defense.
Mackenzie Eaglen, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, went on to point out that this is the first time in DoD’s history that they currently do not have a fighter aircraft in development.
“If we’re not innovating, we will have gap,” DeFrank said. His remarks were meant to highlight the potential pitfalls of a military that becomes stagnant and relies on dated technology to attempt to broadcast supremacy in a world where geopolitical rivals continue to innovate.
(Excerpt) Read more at freebeacon.com ...
The list, Ping
Let me know if you would like to be on or off the ping list
So let me get this strait. We are supposed to have sequestration and lay off airline employees and diminish our military technology, but we have plenty of money for Obama’s 100 million vacation plus another 100 million to California to initiate the Hitler Youth to promote Obamacare in the schools Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
I had an idea for Future Combat Systems. It was to use folding seats, as the seats in the model made it impossible to get into and out of the vehicle. It took a month to find the right guy at GD to present it to. So, I had him on the phone and was giving my presentation and he said, “Man, that’s brilliant. I don’t want to rain on your parade, but we don’t go to the customer with innovative ideas. They come to us with a requirement and we tell them how much it’s going to cost them.”
I’m certain that most old line military contractors behave similarly. GD had a policy that it would not invest $1 of its own money unless that dollar could be earned back in one year.
That sounds eerily familiar. While working for a defense contractor, I found a design issue with one of the systems on the vehicle project I was assigned to. So I told my boss about it and made a suggestion as to its resolution. His response was something to the effect of “I don’t want to fix it because that’s what the customer signed off on. If they want it fixed, they’ll have to pay us to fix it.”
When government can fund any defense project it wants because it has the means of creating infinite perpetual debt or print an ocean of paper money, it can pay top dollar for whatever workers it needs.
This money can fund “innovation” by hiring inventive minds to create things that go zoom and boom, none of which have any everyday use to create more wealth. As a consequence, private entrepreneurs looking to staff their next company are forced to compete in a labor market.
The claim that defense cuts is easily shown to distort innovation at best, but such distortions don’t take us to more sustainable jobs or more jobs that create tools by which we improve business efficiency or increase wealth.
This is not to say that transferable innovation doesn’t take place. But only a fraction of new military technology can be transferred. What innovation it brings to civilian life is very expensive indeed.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.