Newmark's Door

Short interview with Edward Luttwak who sharply criticizes government regulation of our defense industry:

The American R&D system is governed by 5,000-plus rules designed to avoid waste, fraud, and mismanagement. Unfortunately, these rules make everything terrifically elaborate and costly, and they also seemingly make it impossible to do anything in less than 20 years’ time. When you do things slowly in the R&D world, it means that components and elements like microprocessors become obsolete while you’re still working on a system. Then you have to go back and bring all those obsolete systems up to date. This is how we end up taking years and years—decades, in fact—to develop new weapons, at a huge cost.