Ah, the [cough] wisdom of [gag] outsourcing mission-critical military activities to private enterprise.<p>If you look at history - the British Crown started making their own gunpowder at the Tower of London, in the middle of the <i>13th Century</i>. The British Board of Ordnance was formally constituted in <i>1683</i>, by HRM King Charles <i>the Second</i>.<p>And if you look at the more-recent era, when the US started shutting down most of its own government armories, arsenals, etc. - that happened fairly shortly after the old tradition of leading American families having their sons (at least the ones who wanted to becomes notable leaders themselves) serve in the military faded away. If you no longer have any skin in the game...
>Today, it is a specialty commodity with few commercial applications—mostly for rocket hobbyists—but it’s still used in more than 300 munitions, from cruise missiles, to bullets for M16 rifles, to the vital 155mm shells.<p>I don't know about the others, but M16 rifle rounds don't use black powder, they use modern smokeless powder. By modern, I mean invented in 1884. I would be surprised if any of those other things mentioned use black powder. The author seems to think black powder is all gunpowder but it isn't. Black powder is reserved for old guns that can't handle modern powder that were made before the late 1800s, early 1900s. There is a classification of hunting rifle called muzzle loaders that also use it, but they are niche. It's also used in fireworks, that's why they are so smokey.<p>When you see a movie where they depict an old battle where there are huge plumes of smoke coming out of the rifles or muskets, that's black powder.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smokeless_powder" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smokeless_powder</a><p>Here's what black powder looks like when used in a firearm.<p><a href="https://www.saobserver.net/community/in-photos-monashee-mountain-men-black-powder-shoot/" rel="nofollow">https://www.saobserver.net/community/in-photos-monashee-moun...</a>
> The U.S. Military Relies on One Louisiana Factory. It Blew Up<p>In June of 2021. That doesn't invalidate some of the concerns expressed here about redundancy but it also isn't the "oh f!" moment you may have gathered from the headline.
When it comes to defense spending this is abnormal<p>Most of the time they want to put the supply chain across as many congressional districts as possible to make it politically hard to close any program as it would "cut jobs" in more districts<p>much hard to cut spending if 10,000 jobs across 250 districts are impacted, then if 10,000 job across 5 districts are impacted
If your job includes risk management-i.e. you could be terminated over it-then please make sure to look through every thread of the operation and identify all of the single points of failure. Then, find a redundant solution for each.
As someone who was in the military, in this exact field, we are trained on the importance, nay, necessity of redundancies. Interesting how those at the top never follow the directives/lessons they put out.
This is frustrating to square with the large military expenditures we make in this country. What is the use of the most advanced weaponry if you cannot produce them yourself when shit hits the fan?
related to a bigger risk I see for the US. if the US gets into a war with China its going to hurt us massively. We're heavily dependent on them now during peace time as it is -- and all those two-way flows can stop in war. and they have much greater ship building capacity.
I get that this sort of headline makes for a great circle jerk but let's be real here, the military isn't as stupid as HN likes to imply. Rife with perverse incentives that keep things from being done ideally? Yes, but not stupid. The military is also rife with ass-covering careerists so if some nobody on HN can think of a way they can do it better then someone in the system has almost certainly thought about it and looked into it and sent out an email letting everybody know about it. The fact that they're only buying something from one of their suppliers doesn't mean they can't get it from another with less lead time than their stockpile. This goes for a whole class of products. Typically if you are a contractor or a sub contractor and you are the only source for a unique product that can't easily be substituted you're required to provide a sufficient technical data package such that someone else could make the same stuff. If this factory was really a serious priority it would a) be redundant b) be fixed already. Because some careerist would have sniffed out the brownie points and then made sure it got done and that they got credit. It's also possible that there's internal politics involved and letting it turn into a dumpster fire is being done on purpose in order to make the situation get remediated in a specific way.