Blake Scholl

You find that you order some part, and it's got one process step in South Carolina, then it goes on a truck to Wisconsin, and they do some other process step, and then it goes to California, and then it goes back to South Carolina, and then to California a second time.

Holy shit.

At first, I was like, what is going on?

Is this just stupid?

By the way, I think one of the...

One of the principles I've learned along the way about how to learn is whenever I see something that looks stupid, it's easy to just be smug and say, what an idiot did that?

And sometimes it actually is stupidity, but sometimes I find if I ask the question,

Well, what would have to be going on for this to be smart or necessary?

What might somebody who's close to this know that I don't know?

And I find that when I ask that question, I can often end up with some interesting discoveries.

So in the case of the supply chain thing and these parts ping-ponging around the country, I mean, I could have said, you know, I could have laughed and shrugged it off and said, how stupid.

But instead, I got curious about it.

And what I realized was this is an artifact of how defense procurement works.

So post-Cold War, and a certain since post-World War II, we have not had a big urgent need for military stuff.

We've wanted to keep alive a defense industrial base.

So all the defense primes say we need to.

We talk about whether we really need to.

And who controls the spending?

Well, Congress does.

How do you get the votes in Congress for your stuff?