[Milsurplus] Stinson's Law of Technological Progress

[David Stinson]

Just a good "war story" about how all this 
came-about for me:

I worked for many years at a large government range
in Nevada.   We maintained a great many communications "nets,"
on VHF-Lo, VHF-Hi and UHF.   The UHF system was conventional
analog, with powerful repeaters on high mountain tops serving the 
"Great Basin" terrain, which is moutains, mesas and plateaus with 
many canyons and draws in them ringing big valleys.  
It had been doing a pretty good job for like that for decades.  
You could find "dead spots" in places you would expect,
but there weren't many.

Them something happened- I don't remember
the exact details, but it was one of those "someone with 'juice'parked
his jeep back in a canyon and couldn't talk to the Command Post"
 kinda deals.   A short time later and I'm in a big meeting.
This brilliant engineer (he looked all of about 25 years old) is telling 
us how we're going to "bring our communications systems into 
the (then) Twentieth Century"  by tearing all that old junk out
and replacing in with many smaller transmitters, all simul-cast.
Sortta like a paleolithic-cell phone.  We radio guys looked at each
other, but knew better than to say diddly- the 'juice" guys 
don't want to hear it.  In those kind of  meetings, telling the truth
is the quickest way I know to get your dinky knocked in the dirt

So anyways... we rip-out the system that works and put this 
clown-party in.... and it don't work.  So then the brains decide
we need to lock all the oscillators together... yeah yeah that's 
the ticket!  So we gotta gave a pricy-as-gold backbone system 
to all these sites so we can lock all these pricy-as-platinum
rubidium oscillators together, then when that doesn't work,
add more $$$$ and barrel-loads of time trying to set time-delay
lines to compensate for the backbone, etc. etc.

Someone was fool enough to say: 
"You're in a high-reflection environment with complex 
terrain.  This isn't going to work,"  for which he promptly got
his head knocked.  Still hurts when I think about it.

Last time I checked (and that was long ago), ten years had gone
by.  My poor, long-suffering compatriots were still trying to make
this multi-million-dollar train wreck of a system work half 
as well as the old, dirt-cheap analog system.  No one was going
to admit the thing was a bad idea from the start, so 
they had to keep putting band-aids on it and fielding the
endless stream of complaints.
And no; we haven't gotten better.  Check-out the new
clown-parties and train-wrecks they call the F-35 fighter
and the Littoral Combat Ships.  Pitiful.

Just because we can make something more complex,
just because we can make it "more capable,"
doesn't mean it's always wise to do so.

I like the Russian attitude on this:
Don't waste time and money doing the needless.
What is the mission?  Address the mission.
Do not address that which is not the mission.
Tell your engineers to keep their eyes on the mission,
 not their dreams of covering themselves with glory 
for their engineering prowess.
There are lots of projects going begging 
because of such egotistical nonsense.
This comm system was supposed to help dispatch janitors 
and welders, not send probes to Alpha Centauri.
The old analog system fulfilled the objective completely
and it still would to this very day.

So that's where I got the "Law" ;-)

.... and of course, I'm a Luddite anyways...

73 DE Dave AB5S