Quote Originally Posted by Ken White View Post
You are correct in the political economy sense but very wrong in the political and practical senses. It isn't a red herring, it drives the train and it is wasteful, inefficient, ineffective all too often, unresponsive to true military needs. Far more importantly, it is a very significant contributor to that total level of spending..
Ken, I think it would be a real shame for ideas like yours, and those of others, to not happen due to undue pessimism about the political economy of the thing, so I'm going to stay with this a bit more.

It is true that as a historical matter total defense spending and very big and expensive systems have gone up together, that historically those two things have been correlated. But that correlation isn't inevitable. Part of creative engineering is imagining one's way around what seem to be inevitable correlations, say as between the weight of an engine and the torque it generates. To the extent a clever engineer can figure out how to relax such a correlation, say by the use of innovative materials, she can engineer an improvement in zero to sixty.

Replacing five big packages costing 50 Bil apiece by fifty small packages costing 5 Bil apiece is quite possibly such engineering from the viewpoint of political-economic selling. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if it is actually easier to sell the fifty small than the five big packages...not only from a strict political economy perspective, but also from a psychological one.

Salesmen well understand the principle of dividing a large cost package into its components and selling them one at a time...the cost of each part being smaller, it is easier to sell it. This is a frequent tactic when you buy a new pair of glasses or a car...it is to get you to accept a sequence of small additional costs. The same principle has been studied in the realms of the psychology of political persuasion and escalation of commitment.

I submit that, if anything, the intuition that it is politically easier to get to total budget X by means of 5 large steps of size X/5, versus 50 smaller steps of X/50, is probably backwards, given almost everything I know about political economics and the psychology of selling. If y'all would rather have the fifty small packages rather than the five large ones, and fifty small ones will generate the same or even more total pork for legislators to deliver back home at equal total defense spending, the thing seems doable to me. All that is needed here is to imagine the 50 smaller packages...and this is what you do so well, and I enjoy learning so much from you.