Wartime is more agile, you quickly close the loop but downside is sometimes does not work and when it does not work, there might be a people cost. US has done it with fighters before, F-4U Corsair was disaster initially in carrier landings and killed some pilots in training. However, this was considered acceptable cost to get what was clearly very capable fighter out there.
At the end of the day it's all people cost. Just because it's fractional lives wasted in the form of man hours worked to pay the taxes to pay for unnecessary paper pushing labor instead of whole lives doesn't actually make the waste less (I suspect it's actually more in a lot of cases).
This is like asking what good do reserves do if you spend them down in a crisis.
The bureaucracy aims to keep waste and corruption to a minimum during peacetime. In war, the aims change--you're now not only ramping up production, but the penalties for fucking with a war are typically more drastic than lining one's pockets during peacetime.
You can absolutely make an argument about accepting reduced efficiency to dilute concentrated harms (e.g. keep a test pilot from dying), but none of the peddlers of process dare even make that argument so I suspect the math is questionable without hand waving or subjective valuation (e.g. face saved avoiding errors).
In peacetime, everything is different. You don’t know who your next opponent is going to be, so you need to keep options open. You don’t know if you’ll have a war before the equipment you just bought rots away. You don’t want wartime production levels and stifling your wider economy. You also don’t want a Russia situation where you ignore value for money estimates and audits only to find the money you spent on missiles went in the back pocket of a random colonel.
It is way easier to scam someone when your major output is just blueprints that everyone acknowledges aren't even ready to be used.
Okay, let's think about what risks might be associated with making a fighter plane. The plane could blow up. The plane could be hard to maintain. The plane could get fighter pilots killed.
In a war, death is already on the table and soldiers are, more or less, expendable. In peacetime, this is not the case.
It's not that when we are in war, everything goes lovey dovey and great. No. Shit goes wrong constantly.
But we don't have time to care, we have bigger fish to fry: war.
This thread is discussing bureaucracy as the cause of waste and corruption during peacetime.
Sorry, but is this sarcasm ? Pity that HN doesn't alow limited emojis to convey intent.
This is the problem though - the bureaucracy is guaranteed to add a lot of cost, both in its own personnel, the personnel in the companies employed to deal with the bureaucracy, and the additional time taken for all bids to be evaluated. This is guaranteed to slow down everything, with the promise that it will try to prevent issues. Which, if the bureaucracy is badly run, weaponised, or captured, is a terrible trade.
If your second sentence is correct, then let’s allocate taxes to digging holes and filling them in? Ad absurdum but I think it applies? Like it seems reasonable to have an opinion on whether a function should continue to be funded by tax dollars. In a properly operating economy this would open up skilled labor to work somewhere more useful. Unless they weren’t actually skilled, in which case yes you have a problem hmm…
