Abstractions in Defense Analysis
12th January 2025
Buying something as expensive as a modern warship is inherently going to involve politics, which limits engineering options.
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Unfortunately, the practice of abstracting away a lot of detail seems to be spreading to the Pentagon, in particular with the adoption of the Navy’s new Distributed Maritime Operations concept. The problem is that while a lot of the buzzwords involved sound fine when you’re looking at a powerpoint, it doesn’t work quite as well when you sit down and start to ask what ships are carrying which missiles and how they’re getting targeting data. Despite this, the Navy appears to be investing heavily in the concept, presumably because former SecDef Mattis finally met an enemy he couldn’t defeat: PowerPoint.
This discusses (in greater detail than I have patience for) what I call the Aggregation Fallacy, which underlays most political and military decisions these days. “Follow The Science!” doesn’t work when you have several to pick from and you pick the wrong one because it’s less effort.