Ouch.
Pretty close to the bone.
There was the time when somebody was designing instruments for aircraft
cockpits for the French organisation SA. When SA wanted to sell the 'glass
cockpit' to the Indian Air Force, through HAL of course, the somebody concerned
was commandeered and ordered to work out the cost structure of SA, so that
bargaining could take place, for the first time, with some insight into the
costs and the profit margin that was being added to Indian effort.
This completely ignored the prior R&D and productionising effort at the French
end, and enraged the French so that the negotiations were extended over years
instead of weeks. We still landed up paying - rather, HAL and through their
cost-plus policies, the IAF, landed up paying whatever was originally asked;
it's just that a few idiots in HAL got their jollies off and the entire effort
was hugely delayed. And of course, the work still got done at grunt level at
less than $20 an hour in Bangalore.
bonobashi
--- On Wed, 20/8/08, . <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
From: . <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: [silk] Vir Sanghvi on Kashmir
To: silklist@lists.hserus.net
Date: Wednesday, 20 August, 2008, 2:20 PM
On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 10:24 AM, J. Andrew Rogers
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> One of the basic strategies of the US military that has served it well
over
> the last several decades is to convert the operational expense of massive,
> region-covering hardware into research-fueled CapEx that creates a buffer
at
> least as hard but with a much smaller logistical footprint -- militaries
> live and die on logistical footprints. It turns out that for modern
> military systems, the reduced OpEx of more modern designs can fully
amortize
> the research and CapEx within a decade or so. It is a virtuous cycle of
> sorts; the more research that is done, the cheaper a given level of
military
> power actually is, in inflation-adjusted currency. It is not intuitive
and
> so many people resist the notion. It might be better to invest the money
> for supporting a huge land buffer into research and technology that
obviates
> the land buffer in the military calculus. It is not only less costly on
many
> different levels, but investments in technology research tend to pay off
for
> the broader economy in ways that are hard to predict.
....something which India lacks (hard technology wall). It reminds me
of a discussion where the person opined that the USA had no industry
and everything was outsourced, either China or India. IMO, he missed
seeing that the outsourced work was all repetitive and mundane in
nature. The meatier part : thinking, designing and research was still
handled by them. A look at the well-endowed research departments of
each university is proof of the exciting stuff they are working on
whether its agriculture, bio-science, CS, ..... all of which hardly
have immediate practical applications, maybe in a few years. That is
the crucial difference between India and USA, we buy the technology
they create, sometimes paying for out-dated stuff.
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