Love those exceptionally descriptive German compound words

Seeing as I'm going all negative on y'all lately, here's one to brighten things up. From the Economist's excellent "Defence spending in a time of austerity" (h/t Exum and Paul McLeary) here's a few words on requirements creep:

Jointly developing weapons carries considerable costs: decisions are arduous and work has to be shared out. Reconciling the needs of each can result in building countless variants, or in piling multiple requirements on a single aircraft. This happened to the A400M, which suffered a cost overrun of more than €11 billion. Germany wanted it to skim over treetops, Britain needed it to lift (now-scrapped) new armoured vehicles. Both Britain and France said it had to operate from rough airfields. One Airbus insider calls the A400M an eierlegende Wollmilchsau, or “egg-producing wool-milk-sow”.*

Hilarious imagery, and timely in light of the Army's decision last week to cancel the original solicitation for Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV) proposals. Secretary Gates has made the point repeatedly that while industry is to blame for a great many ills of the acquisition and contracting process, the government has its own responsibility to ensure that requirements are well-defined, stable, and ultimately, satisfiable with a reasonable amount of risk.

* No need to parse the translation, Positroll and other German speakers, if it's not totally accurate. Those are the Economist's words, not mine!

On the SECDEF's efficiencies initiative and the poor GOs

Slate's got a funny cartoon up -- apparently by a Jack Ohman -- about Secretary Gates' comments on the profusion of general officers at the Pentagon ("a substantial increase in the most senior leadership... a situation where personnel of higher and higher rank are assigned to do things that could reasonably be handled by personnel of lower rank").

It's not quite this bad, but it ain't far off from that with GS-15s/YA-3s and colonels.

Yet another element in the aerospace industry's insidious lobbying campaign

Everyone knows scare tactics are a favored approach of the defense-industrial lobby. "One day the Chinese will be able to defeat us in the air/at sea/from afar/in space/in cyberspace!", they say. "The Russians are looking feisty these days, ain't they?", they might hint. "You know, I understand you guys spending money on language training and tea-drinking and whatnot, but is the Taliban really an existential threat to America?"

Well, today they're supplementing all that with a novel approach: keep cutting back, and our gear might stop working. The Onion reports:

Boeing Lays Off Only Guy Who Knows How To Keep Wings On Plane

CHICAGO—With the airline industry continuing to suffer under the ongoing recession, the Boeing Company was forced Monday to lay off Al Freedman, the only guy left at the corporation who knows how to keep wings from falling off planes. "We used to have a whole team of engineers who knew how to make the wings stay on, but those days are long gone," Boeing CEO James McNerney, Jr. said. "We'll make it work, though. The wings are not necessarily the most important part of the plane, anyway." McNerney added that at least they were able to save the job of the guy who knows how to prevent jet engines from exploding.

Oh wait, it's just the Onion.

(But you'd believe it if it were real, wouldn't you?)