If use of a specialized metamaterial can allow for 10% more glorpfinning at ten times the cost, then the committee will see this as well worth the price of other people’s money.

If a certain design arrangement makes serving and repairs impossible without significant time and conscientiousness requirements by technicians operating around well furnished bases, inflating hourly operating costs in any case, well, it won’t even come up in the powerpoint presentation, and if anyone tenders a comment about the issue, it will be forgotten about by the end of the meeting anyways.

Zuckerman proved this when he tried to reform the Newark school district. Many of his reforms ended up taking money out of the local community (an unintended consequence) because the school district was a major employer.

And that gets us to the point: you can’t reform the military procurement system because it generates too much money for too many people.

For an amusing comment on this, see Fred Reed’s book AU PHUC DUP AND NOWHERE TO GO, where he talks about a program to detect the invisible enemy fighters that a lunatic pilot was dogfighting.

American inventors used to inspire technicians outside America. Some Americans (e.g. Gordon Dahle) still invent useful, reliable tools that inspire emulation. Dahle’s designs are not entirely foolproof, but they appear to be more robust than a typical fighter jet.

https://www.gordsghostguns.com/

Of course the devil is in the details. Is it possible to apply this highly robust craftsmanship to a highly demanding product specification, such as an airplane? Bruce Simpson was able to do something comparable in 2003.

https://hackaday.com/tag/bruce-simpson/

Can the American defense establishment improve its efforts to the level of men like Wilson, Dahle, and Simpson?

1) Hindering progress
2) Inflating cost
3) Deferring accountability

While a wonderful design choice for those looking to cripple a large national government or parent company from meddling in the affairs of it’s subsidiaries, this is only ever a temporary solution until the committee is railroaded by it’s own neurotic vacillations into irrelevancy, before it’s powers are assumed by an often less than scrupulous executive, who himself can defer accountability back upon the faceless mass of the committee.

This principle is essentially the systemic reason the US is in a death spiral, from a political perspective.

And it’s all perfectly demonstrated, by jet design.

Beautiful.