Defense Procurement

Tucson, Arizona, July 9, 2012. Colombian Air Force begins training for night refueling with Kfir combat jets and a Boeing KC-767 tanker aircraft at Davis Monthan Air Base.

Twenty odd years ago when I lived in Phoenix I took a tour of the Apache helicopter factory. I expected to see all kinds of miraculous machinery. I was greatly disappointed. The first thing we saw when we got there was three ten-story office buildings. One was for engineering, one was for administration and the third was for government contracts. Well that's all very nice, but where's the factory? The factory was a tin shed out back where they did the final assembly. The only thing they made there was hydraulic lines and wiring harnesses. Everything else, like fuselage, rotor blades, engine, transmission and hub were shipped in from somewhere else.
    Comrade Misfit put up a post today contrasting how long it took Colombia to procure a new aerial tanker and how long it has taken the U.S. to not get one. Certain advantages to not being The Great and Benevolent USA [tm] there. Just look around on the market and see what's available. If you find something you like, buy it.
     Our success in kicking ass has given rise to a professional class of security experts who are paid to worry about everything that could possibly go wrong. One of the first things they worry about is where we get our weapons. You can't depend on any other countries because a) they could become our enemy and then we wouldn't be able to get any more of those weapons just when we need them the most, or b) they could get overrun by our enemies and we wouldn't be able to get any parts, so we have to build everything ourselves, and we have to make it out of stuff we already have, which makes the new fangled, high powered electric motors problematic, because all the ore for the magnets for those motors comes from Red China.
   If you are someplace like Colombia, or anyplace else that isn't one of the superpowers, you don't have to worry about that kind of thing. Well, you can worry about it, but there really isn't much you can do about it. You don't build giant jet powered aircraft in your country, you are going to have to get them from somewhere else.
    The other problem we have is that we are too successful. We are busy designing weapons for a future war that the rest of the world won't be ready to fight for a hundred years, if ever. If gives the tech-heads something to do, which is important. You are going to want some sharp tech-heads on hand the next time we run into some kind of sticky situation.
    Our success means there are no useful standards to gauge our new weapons by, so we argue about it. Everyone has a solution to a potential problem, and everyone wants a piece of the defense budget, so everyone argues for their solution. And that's why it takes so long to get anything done. When you already have the biggest and sharpest sword on the block, there is no real pressure to make it even bigger and sharper.