The problem is always expectation, anticipation and experience.<p>With any new technology we expect certain performance - we get this from the “The Economist effect” - where the simple one paragraph explanation of a complex field enables us to have a grasp on a concept but not the full difficulties.<p>So we expect the nuclear missile to hit its target whereas the thing about nukes is they were designed to be used despite being horribly inaccurate.<p>Anticipation is time bounded - we get depressed when the thing we expect is not done today - we can imagine it so why can’t we have it. This is the problem behind all crunch development times, all VC funded CEO replacements and every lying progress report ever.<p>And experience is what tells us where we really are - it is looking at a Trident missile spiralling round in front page photos and saying … what have we missed.<p>Weapons operate always at the frontier of what is possible. Nuclear weapons probably are not really there - we can fly the prototype over unchallenged airspace but launching rockets is hard.
The flaw exhibited by the losing side was "retrofitting" effective and functional ships in the middle of a war. A similar attitude happens that I've seen countless times in live applications where decisions were made to allow the existing system to stagnate because a new shiny rewrite was going to come online "by the end of the year". Four years later, the new system isn't ready, and the "old" one (i.e. the one in production) is hitting scaling cliffs because it wasn't kept up to date.<p>But I suspect this post was in response to the "it's obsolete" comments on the F35 post earlier today, with lots of calls for work on drones.<p>The warning in Clarke's story is not that we shouldn't build new tech, however. We should absolutely build new tech, and have skunk works and the like. But we shouldn't stop building the existing tech as long as it is effective in battle. The concern comes when we don't have the capacity to build "what's next" because the most important piece is made in a little island off the coast of another continent full of potential adversaries.
It's incredible how Arthur C Clarke foresaw the downsides of full codebase rewrites and putting all organizational weight behind untested and cutting edge technologies all the way back in 1951. Truly prescient sci-fi writing.
Nowhere is the zero-sum nature of research vs materiel clearer than in real-time strategy games. The fundamental choice is actually three-fold: you can spend your economy on growing the economy, researching better units or building units. It's like choosing a constant in front of a first- versus second-order DE. Of course the choices vary over time, and the curve is complicated and interesting, at least in well-made games.
The obvious parallel right now would be the introduction of AI (a known flawed technology, IMHO), replacing jobs of experienced engineers and experts in most fields, in a moment of social and political instability...
A contemporary echo to that story: "US Navy Procurement Disasters - The Littoral Combat Ship and Zumwalt Class Destroyer"<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odS3Kn5oGl0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odS3Kn5oGl0</a>
I’m surprised not to see any comments on Ukraine here yet.<p>USA and the west focussing on ‘super weapons’ like f22, f35, super carriers etc etc. and Ukraine is losing the war because they don’t have enough bullets and mortars, and we don’t have enough factories to increase production.
I’ve always loved how this bit of super-science is utterly obsolete...<p><i>The Analyzer contained just short of a million vacuum tubes and needed a team of five hundred technicians to maintain and operate it</i><p>...and yet it in no way invalidates the point of the story, which hits home just as hard as ever.
Like all good scifi stories in general and ACC stories in particular, this is a story about A which is actually a story about B.<p>There is wisdom here that is directly applicable to the work of the average HN denizen. Boring beats cool almost every time.
I remember reading a saying that the Germans fought WW2 with the weapons of the 1950s, while the Allies fought it with the weapons of the 1930s. Guess who won.