Piggybacking offf the thread yesterday about weapons that never

>>34171696
>What happened to the american military industrial complex that things got so big, inefficient, and slow to produce anything of value?

Corporations got greedy, like you said. It transformed from an industry of war veterans and jock pilots into an over-regulated government sanctioned money pit.

>>34171696
>What has changed today where weapons (especially aircraft) projects take decades when in the 50's, 60's, and 70's we had dozens of concurrent development projects spitting out concept into functional weapon one after the other?
In short, technological advances and McNamara. The first point is simple - as time went on, things like aircraft have become less a single weapon system and more a system of systems, all of which require time to develop and mature.

The second point - McNamara - is that the he started the trend towards greater standardization. Before that, you had a ridiculous amount of waste because services kept trying to procure single-role aircraft for everything. Just look at a Vietnam-era carrier:
>A-5 - nominally nuclear strike, really just tactical reconnaissance
>A-3 - bombing, EW, tanker, ELINT
>A-4 - tactical bomber
>F-4 - fighter, tactical bomber
>F-8 - fighter
>A-7 - tactical bomber
>A-6 - all-weather bomber
There was plenty of overlap in the roles of the aircraft, and overall the practice was very wasteful. There was a similar trend with the Century Series. In short, both services seemed to throw money at whatever seemed cool without caring too much about budget. McNamara solved this, albeit heavy-handedly. The F-111 was a first failed attempt to do so, but he did things like forcing the A-7 on the Air Force instead of letting them develop an entirely new plane. From about 1962 on, the focus increasingly became on multirole aircraft, both thanks to people like McNamara and the fact that emerging technologies were now making them more viable.

> that things got so big, inefficient, and slow to produce anything of value?
And when has that happened? Development of aircraft may be slowing (as it has for every country across the board), but the products of the American aerospace industry nowadays are without a doubt the best in the world, and no amount of memeing is going to change that.

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Nazis might be nazis but fuck, lots of interesting tech they've played with.

>>34172597
>A lot of interesting tech
Not really. The Nazis were really only ahead of the Allies in two areas that never had a huge impact on the war - rocketry and high speed flight. Even then, the advancement was marginal. Soviet rocketry was surprisingly advanced during WW2, and German high-speed flight research was notoriously flawed to the point of being unusable had they actually attempted a supersonic flight.

Most of their interesting designs you see are the result of two big things:
>Unusual requirements due to unrealistic goals on the part of the RLM
>Every single proposal ever put to paper being released to the public, which rarely happens with aircraft firms.

For reference, I've had access to some archives with Martin design studies recently, and just from the pieces I've seen, they've had things vaguely luft '46-worthy that just never made it off paper.

>>34172807
>Soviet rocketry was surprisingly advanced during WW2
The Soviets did most of the advancement in solid-fuel rocketry at time, their liquid rocket engines were on par with Americans, maybe slightly better.

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>>34173070
Yup. They did a surprising amount of work with rocket aircraft, though, even though nothing entered service.