Watch the video at this site. It’s short. The first 35 seconds are key.
Cuban tries to get back to his point, but he misses the point. The inventor, Staff Sergeant Travis Alton, has presumably already shown that his device is better and cheaper than the one the U.S. Air Force has adopted. (Later in the 2-minute video the guy gets back to the merits of his device.) Cuban asks him why the military has adopted the much more expensive one. The guy answers succinctly, maybe a little too succinctly for Cuban. But he answers, with four devastating words, and anyone who knows anything about Pentagon procurement knows that it has a high probability of being a good answer.
One of the people who probably has some familiarity with Pentagon procurement is Heather Wilson, secretary of the Air Force. Watch her reaction in the video.
HT2 Glenn Reynolds.
READER COMMENTS
Benjamin Cole
Mar 2 2019 at 8:56pm
The National Interest website, hardly a left-wing nest, has published articles that the F 35 fighter jet is no longer stealthy, but makes up for that by limited range and payload. The $400,000 helmets that pilots wear may be too complicated to use, and the plane requires 50 hours of maintenance for every hour of flight.
Drones, in contrast, can be programmed to fly very close to the ground (thus evading radar) and no one really cares if you lose a drone or not as there is no human pilot.
Mark Bahner
Mar 3 2019 at 5:23pm
Hi David,
Yes, Mark Cuban really whiffed on that. And military guy really nailed the follow-up after Mark Cuban asked again.
This reminds me of something that’s slightly off-topic, but not terribly so. Following Hurricane Katrina I started thinking about, “What could be done to protect New Orleans from the storm surge that caused New Orleans to flood?” That morphed into, “What could be done to protect anywhere on any coast in the world threatened by storm surge?”
I came up with the idea of impermeable tubes filled with air and water, deployed offshore (sometimes well offshore). The air in the tubes floats above the water, and the seawater in the tubes provides mass so that the tubes don’t get pushed too quickly to the shore. There is a skirt from the tubes to the seafloor, and the end of the skirt is weighted to keep it on the sea floor. The wind blows water so that it piles up behind the tube, and then when the storm passes overhead to make landfall, the water behind the tubes floats back into the level sea.
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that a portable system something like what I conceived of is better than levees, sea walls, and storm surge gates (like protect London and Rotterdam). My portable system is cheaper (the main ingredients are air and seawater!), and it can be deployed anywhere a few days before a storm is expected to make landfall. Further, it would rely significantly on accurate modeling of storm surge (where the surge will occur, and how much there will be) so the system will be constantly improving. Finally, the system will be challenged many times every year (especially if it’s used everywhere in the world), so it will be constantly improving.
Mark Cuban might well ask me why my system isn’t already in use. I’d use almost the exact same four word response…but substitute “government procurement” for “Pentagon procurement”. (Although levees, seawalls, and storm gates are often funded by the Army Corps of Engineers, so probably my answer would include “Pentagon procurement” also.)
I would also answer Mark Cuban’s followup questioning almost the same. The world does not already use portable storm surge protection systems of the type I’m proposing because no one had thought of it before I did.
john hare
Mar 3 2019 at 7:58pm
Cheaper yet would be to not build in the danger zone unless you can afford to build it to handle the problem, or can afford to replace it when it has one. Amazing how people make different choices when they know they are responsible.
Mark Bahner
Mar 3 2019 at 11:28pm
I don’t agree with that at all, and I doubt you have seriously studied the problem. Look at a Google Maps of Miami Beach or Long Island. Per one account, the value of beachfront property (not including infrastructure) in Miami alone is about $15 billion, and all of that would suffer significant damage if a major hurricane hit Miami. Long Island (and NYC) has a similar situation. It has been estimated that in a major hurricane that had a direct hit on NYC:
It’s just silly to think that LaGuardia and JFK could simply be demolished and put somewhere higher. Or that we should just rebuild them after they’ve been put under 20 feet of water.
That’s precisely the thinking I’m criticizing as obviously wrong. It doesn’t make any sense–when someone actually thinks about it, as I have–to have permanent, fixed, man-made protection systems everywhere in the world that is vulnerable to storm surge. (And “natural” defenses are basically also worthless for storm surge…any unbiased reading of the literature shows that to be true.)
The best solution is to have a temporary system that can be put up just in the day(s) before a storm hits, to protect those places are likely to be damaged. Further, a system involving permeable tubes containing air and water (and with a skirt to the seafloor) makes a great deal of sense, because the main ingredients of air and seawater are essentially infinitely available and free.
P.S. And I haven’t even touched on countries like Bangladesh. What should they do, move their country to higher ground? Where are they going to come up with the money for that? In contrast, they potentially could afford to pay for the deployment of a portable air-and-water tube system if rich countries had already developed the system. Or rich countries could simply also pay for the deployment of the system (which potentially would cost “only” tens or hundreds of millions of dollars for a single deployment). Cyclone Bhola killed more than 500,000 people in Bangladesh in 1970. Are we going to let something like that happen again simply because we’re unable to think outside the box?
john hare
Mar 4 2019 at 5:39am
Technically, your temporary seawalls need serious anchoring and continuity if they are to work. Obviously you couldn’t address everything involved in a short blog comment, but it would be interesting to know how it would hold back many feet of water unless it had a serious grip on the sea floor.
New Orleans is below sea level. I question the value of much of the rebuilding. Use whats there as long as possible. But do a serious cost analysis before doing it again.
john hare
Mar 4 2019 at 7:08am
Apologies for the double reply. This is the wrong forum for a serious technical discussion. If you like, we can continue at selenianboondocks.com. I can set up a post on this subject as I am one of the authors there. Email me if interested. ltolmasonry at gmail dot com
Mark Bahner
Mar 4 2019 at 9:57pm
Hi John,
I agree it’s the wrong forum for a serious technical discussion. My blog–gotta dust off the cobwebs! 🙂 –is better:
A potential portable storm surge design
But I still think this is a good place for a discussion of the policy. If Mark Cuban asked me the same questions, my replies would be very similar. Why don’t we already have a portable system?
A significant part of the answer is that my idea is very innovative. (I have awards to prove it, to riff on Sheldon Cooper’s defense of his sanity.)
But another big part of it is that the people who would be most likely to fund it (the Army Corps of Engineers) don’t do portable systems. They get paid to fund/design/think about levees, storm walls, and storm gates. A portable system would put them out of the business they’ve done for more than 100 years.
Insurance companies would get a lot less money. And builders would get a lot less money…nothing to rebuild. Lots and lots of creative destruction. (In order to avoid destruction.)
Mark Bahner
Mar 6 2019 at 11:50am
Hi,
John Hare and I have moved our technical discussion of my proposed portable storm system design to my blog. (Many thanks to John for his input to date, and I’m looking forward–as free time allows–to addressing his and anyone else’s future questions/comments/doubts.)
A potential portable storm surge system design
However, I want to bring part of his comments back here, because I think it’s very relevant to policy discussion about why things are designed the way they are…essentially Mark Cuban’s question (paraphrasing): “If your design is so great, why isn’t it already being done?”
On my blog post referenced above, John Hare wrote:
As I responded to John, I totally disagree with that assessment about “policy.” As I commented to John, the Manhattan Project is a perfect example of something that was elevated to “policy” even before anybody had any real confidence they could make it work. They undertook the Manhattan Project simply because it had a chance of ending WWII sooner.
Other examples of things elevated to “policy” way before anybody had any real confidence they would work are the Apollo Project…and–on the failure side, at least to this point–a malaria vaccine, and an AIDS vaccine.
A portable storm surge protection system should be investigated because the cost of not investigating a portable storm surge protection system is so great. A reasonable estimate of the cost of storm surge damage in the United States is $40 billion per decade, and a reasonable estimate of the global cost of storm surge damage is $100 billion per decade.
The cost of developing a portable storm surge system to full scale deployment is unknown at this time, but let’s take a wild guess of $5 billion to develop it to full scale, and then $1 billion per year to deploy it to protect the U.S. East and Gulf coasts, and $4 billion per year to deploy it around the rest of the world. Let’s further say that it takes a decade to develop it to full scale. So in the first decade, we have the $5 billion capital cost. Then in the second decade in the U.S., we have an operating cost of $10 billion. That’s against the current damages in the U.S. of $40 billion per decade. And around the rest of the world, in the second decade, the operating cost is $40 billion, versus the current damages of $100 billion per decade.
Contrast that to–oh, I don’t know–let’s say Trump’s proposed spending on the Mexican border wall. He’s proposing to spend $5.7 billion, and that (theoretically) was going to create about 200 miles of wall. What is the return of that investment?
And in fact, let’s look at the whole U.S. military or specific Pentagon programs. If some country was invading every year (like hurricanes invade the U.S.) and causing $40 billion in damage every decade, and that invading country killed 1800+ people (as died in hurricane Katrina)…how much would the federal government be spending to stop or at least reduce those invasions?
john hare
Mar 6 2019 at 5:53pm
On the policy side, there is something I believe you missed. Ignoring the utility or not of the wall, $5.7B for 200 miles of wall works out to about $$28.5M per mile. Over $5K per linear foot. I am in the concrete business and would love to have a contract a a quarter of that price if someone would keep the bureaucrats at bay. Ten feet in the ground and thirty feet up would be about 2 yards of concrete per foot, roughly $250.00. Double that for rebar and it leaves about $750.00 per linear foot labor, and that’s at a quarter of the price.* The vast majority of those wall costs are going elsewhere. Do you really believe bureaucracy would not feed from your project as well?
Technically, on your barrier I have gone from no way to remotely possible. It might be worth a phase one SBIR. I have to check a few things technically before going further at your site.
*Technical note. See those concrete panels going down the road on trucks? Many of them are 40 feet long and 8 feet wide. Trench down and crane set them with stabilizing concrete poured on both sides. $6K per panel labor at the price I quoted, leaving about $25K for the jackals. With the right equipment, setting several dozen a day shouldn’t be a problem.Do you think there is even an outside chance that someone with my ideas and price structure could get in on that type project? Do you think you would be able to circumvent the jackals either?
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