On Aug 25, 2008, at 3:41 AM, Dave Long wrote:
Le 20 août 08 à 06:54, J. Andrew Rogers a écrit :
In short, there is substantial empirical evidence that research and
CapEx is much more efficient than dumping resources into OpEx for
military purposes
The question is how dependent said OpEx is on the availability of
oil — in the days before laptops we used to say that a computer's
attention span was only as long as its extension cord — and the US
seems to be currently willing to sustain a fairly high OpEx halfway
around the world for fairly unclear reasons; I hope present vs.
future OpEx calculations aren't major factors in that decision.
This affects procurement and R&D mostly; while the US military is the
single biggest consumer of petro products in the world, as a fraction
of US consumption it is still fairly small and a lot of the
inefficiency is in places that are not obvious at first guess. The US
DoD has been using a rough rule of thumb for two decades now that
CapEx + R&D for new weapon systems can be fully amortized in ten years
of OpEx compared to systems they are replacing. One of the arguments
for continued military R&D in the absence of a pressing need is that
it is cheaper over the long term than maintaining what they already
have if spec-ed for efficiency.
One of the major ways in which they have been reducing OpEx for a
couple decades is to greatly reduce the consumption of petroleum
products. For example, even in the early 1990s they were not changing
automotive and machinery lubricants on a schedule like most people do
today with their automobiles, instead taking samples of the fluid and
running it through gas chromatographs and a variety of spectral
analyzers to determine how much life was left in the fluid. One of
the advantages of new aircraft like the fantastically powerful F-22 is
that it actually uses substantially less fuel than the generation of
aircraft it replaces. More powerful, advanced, and compact systems
means that you burn less fuel and require fewer people lugging junk
halfway around the world. Fuel efficiency has been a big deal for a
long time and they invest quite a bit of research in it.
That said, the US military still has an active and keen interest in
massively reducing fuel consumption in forward deployed areas because
it is still a major logistical problem. Perhaps surprisingly, the
bulk of fuel consumption in active theaters tends to be for things
like air conditioning and electricity generation at semi-fixed
installations since efficiency there has largely been ignored, not
vehicles. Consequently, there is a focus now on more mundane things
like improving insulation, electrical efficiency, and portable solar
power generation systems. They still use an inordinate amount of
petro-fuels currently, but they are also actively working on very
substantially reducing that footprint, by about 30% over the next
several years in fact.
J. Andrew Rogers
