US Army materials study

Million-dollar Army study to identify which material the Army would purchase most over the next 20-30 years. Answer: steel. Tom's example of waste in government materials research — he could have told them for free.

Anyway, the National Academies also have the National Research Council, which has been around since around 1910, and they do studies for the government. Congress might commission a study, or the Defense Department — some Undersecretary of Defense wants to know what we're going to spend our money on in the future, rather than listening to their own scientists. The US Army about five years before this had spent over a million dollars trying to study what material the Army was going to purchase the most of over the next 20 or 30 years. They came up with a study I could have told them, and I wouldn't have taken ten million dollars to study it. It is steel. Why? You don't throw stones at the enemy. You shoot missiles, or you bring a big tank in. There's a reason why we use steel, and we'll talk about all that.

Million-dollar study, ~mid-1990s, asking what the material of the future for the Army would be. Conclusion: steel. Used as the punchline of the cost-strength-toughness Ashby argument.

If you look at strength, which for structural materials is a pretty important parameter, and we look at strength versus relative cost, again we want to be up here. We've got brick, stone, and concrete. Among the ductile materials, mild steel and glasses are way up here. Engineering ceramics are way back over here, which is a bad thing — you really want to be above this line. Plastics are down here. By looking at a plot like this, you can conclude something that a few years ago the US Army did a million-dollar study to figure out — this is about 15 or 20 years ago — what was the material of the future for the US Army. Because the Army buys billions of dollars worth of ordnance and materials every year, and if they could figure out the material of the future, it would give them a significant advantage and help them figure out where to better spend their research money. What did they conclude?