It takes 400 companies >2 years to build a Patriot missile. Perhaps this is why USA suddenly gave up in Iran.

Incompetent manufacturing will cause us to lose future wars too. Boom is building vertically integrated factories that can do in 24h what otherwise takes years. 🧵

While Boom is focused on turbines and jets, we'd gladly lend support and advice to any credible startup working to do this. The free world depends on fixing America's defense base.

LFG

This creates costs and delays. For example, an engine component that takes ~3 days across a handful of processes, takes 9 months to obtain—because the part spends more time on trucks than on machines, winding its way back and forth between baby factories.

We need missile defense startups taking a similar approach. It should be possible to speed run a new design anti-ballistic missile in the time it takes Lockheed to make a single unit.

This is great for turbines and jet engines—and it's also what we desperately need in the defense manufacturing base.

@bscholl Harvard MBAs with their secular religion of outsourcing, offshoring, and minimal supply chains is cause of all this.

This is why everything we're building at Boom is designed for speed—speed of manufacturing, speed of iteration.

We are building a state of the art factory where engineering and manufacturing are in one building—where we can go from idea to part in <24 hours.

@bscholl @SimoneSyed then fking do it you noise making shitposter moron CEO.

go fking do it and make a trillion dollars!!

We call this Slacker Index—the time required to get a part divided by the time required to get from the the supply chain.

As one example, inertial welding a turbine shaft takes ~minutes. Standard supply base quoted us 88 weeks—Slacker Index well over 100,000.

Worse, many of the supply contracts are based on cost-plus contracting, where suppliers make a fixed percentage profit on dollars spent. In this model, the only way to increase profits is to drive up costs. Inefficiency and incompetence pays.

The remedy is simple: build factories that go from raw materials to completed products under one roof, with every production process and QA in one place. This shortens lead times from years to weeks—and sometimes to days, hours, or even minutes.

@bscholl It's also less robust in the case of a war. If any of those 400 sites are destroyed, the whole production stops.

Defense supply chains should be optimized for production reliability and elasticity rather than congressional votes.

When it takes months or years to do something, it's not possible to iterate. Designs must be one-shotted, meaning analysis paralysis because the cost of rework is so high.

When lead times are short, iteration becomes possible. Speed begets speed, and speed begets improvement.

@bscholl Blake, the words you’re looking for are:

1) Generative Capacity, and 2) Adaptation Velocity

The are the two organizational properties that convert potential into capability.

The nature of the DoW / Program Executive Office / Defense Prime system of business reduces both.

@Franz_Albrecht_ @bscholl Huh? This isn't an MBA problem. This is a political one: Programs only get approved by Congress if everyone gets a bit of the pork, which is why hundreds of companies are awarded bits and pieces of the work.

@bscholl How do I long your company?

@bscholl One questions is how to improve access to the machines that make the machines. Will boom go deep vertically to make the machines that make the parts? Seems like the backlog on machines is part of the re-industrialize America bottleneck

@CygnusNYC @Franz_Albrecht_ @bscholl True

But the MBAs read the political room and went happily along with it for profit

@bscholl @boomsupersonic Bro you can’t say we lost the war/gave up…

@bscholl made softwares during Boeing Everett's Go to LEAN Mfg It was all good until the multi national parts diaspora happened