Agreed. You can really tell commenters' ages based on whether they recall this. The Gates you describe is the one I remember from the '90s.
I have to assume that anyone who thinks of Gates as a rich old man who just wants to cure Malaria is quite a bit younger (or their memory is easily overwritten).
Steel-manning: Gates has run a deliberate PR campaign for decades to rehabilitate his reputation. In the 80s & 90s (before the Gates Foundation) he was known as a ruthless corporate tactician who crushed competitors like ants and earned a federal antitrust suit against Microsoft. Prior to his divorce he had a widely-publicized affair with a subordinate. He befriended Jeffrey Epstein and appeared in his flight logs after Epstein had already been convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor. (Gates has worked very hard to distance himself from Epstein since then - another example of the PR machine at work).
Someone who wants to paint the least charitable picture possible of Gates could factually describe him as a cutthroat businessman and a philanderer who associated with a pedophile on at least a few documented occasions. And that's ignoring the nuttier Gates conspiracy theories (e.g., Covid microchips).
Sure, everyone knows him. But he'd rather be known as a voracious reader who fought polio & malaria and provided drinkable water to millions. Not a bad use of his billions - what else could he spend those on that would materially affect his life?
I really enjoyed American Prometheus. Might be a bit too focused on Oppenheimer for the original request, but it covers the Manhattan Project more broadly too.
> That September morning, Krebs didn’t take up Waifu’s chess challenge. “What am I going to do, play him at chess?” he said. “He would have just screenshot what I said and send it to his friends.”
I'd argue that working on the right projects reduces the likelihood of collateral damage.
Take for example the R9X [0]. Instead of an explosive warhead it has a set of blades on the tip. The US has used it to assassinate single people in the passenger seat of a car while leaving the driver untouched. I'd rather this than dropping bombs on terrorists that come with a blast radius that takes out everyone else nearby.
This seems net-good to me. There are certainly people alive today because of the R9X team's work.
It's actually exactly correct. That comment is referring to 1993's "last supper" in which the SECDEF gathered the defense CEOs at the time and literally did tell them to consolidate/merge.
Even this is almost certainly an underestimate. Open source intelligence that just the bill of materials for a Shahed is more than the tens of thousands previously estimated. These are probably more on the order of ~$400k [0]
You're mostly correct that the older tech is the bulk of what's been sent, but there have been lots of batches of newer tech that the US has delivered. [0]
These newer companies (Anduril, Skydio, etc.) do it for a few reasons. Some are obvious: they get paid and their systems have a chance at influencing real-world events that the leadership & rank-and-file employees might care about personally.
But from a pure product development perspective, fielding these systems is a valuable test opportunity. You've built a great drone but you're not sure how it'll perform in a GPS-denied environment with S-band radio completely unusable? Russian Electronic Warfare teams are happy to curate that environment for you.
Optionality, even for a monopsony like the Defense industry, is good for the consumer (Pentagon). They still want suppliers to compete.
What incentive is there for a company to innovate if the DoD allows their competitors to die out? When it's time to buy a new fighter jet (or whatever else) those acquisitions chiefs want several options, same as any consumer.
The OUSD for Acquisition & Sustainment publishes lengthy analyses on competition within the industry and how to stoke it. [0]
I have to assume that anyone who thinks of Gates as a rich old man who just wants to cure Malaria is quite a bit younger (or their memory is easily overwritten).