[Milsurplus] Stinson's Law of Technological Progress

[Thomas Adams]

Dave,

An interesting tale of bureaucracy generated woe, but it can be 
easily topped on a
massive scale.

To paraphrase the Late, Great Mister Rogers...

"Boys and girls, can YOU say 'High Definition Television?' "

After 29 years in the biz, I'm MORE than happy to be approaching RETIREMENT!


Mr. T.  W9LBB



At 13:27 28-07-12, David Stinson wrote:
>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
>
>
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