Of course it's trashy. Everything is. Many readers of HN are well aware that most of software is shit. It's not surprising that this extends to military equipment too.
As an example from the other side, the British BOWMAN comms system used to be understood as Better Off With Maps And Nokia.
This is a pattern I've been seeing again and again ... from the outside everything looks neat and nice, but under closer inspection, it's trash and wired together with duct tape and hopes... from software to military to medical to... you name it
I believe the name for this thing is "the devil in the details" - reality has a surprising level of detail, and the more you go into detail, more murky and shitty things appear to be.
In fact I am amazed that complex things, like, say, the internet, work at all !
This is the absolute worst in the intersection of the public and private sector (hence military and medical being prime examples). The private sector can afford to invest in quality and when the public sector is given the funding to have in-house experts working full-time, the results are excellent. But as soon as there's an open tender, quality takes a dump. Every corner than can be cut, will be cut, and what's worse, even competent contractors are incentivised to produce broken and rigid systems in pursuit of lucrative maintenance contracts.
Exactly, you need to work in tech to understand the sheer unprecedented achievement that the JWST is, for instance. To be frank, I quite don't believe it yet, and I hope they will one day publish a postmortem (postvivem?) on how they did it.
The internet itself is really, stupidly simple. There is a fair amount of complexity in managing it, and that bites back fairly frequently, but the vast majority of the complexity and crazy stuff is above the level of basic connectivity.
As we saw with the Facebook outage on October 4th, there's an insane amount of hidden complexity at the lower levels that end users never ever see. For home consumer uses its simple enough, but those methods aren't good enough for industry usage? AWS isn't buying off the shelf gear and plugging in cat-5 ( or 6) cables like a consumer-level user would.
There's nothing really complex about BGP. The management system Facebook uses, as I said, bites back occasionally. AWS does a lot of fancy things, but from the actual networking perspective it's not any different than plugging in cables.
As I said, the crazy complexity is above the network level.
As an example from the other side, the British BOWMAN comms system used to be understood as Better Off With Maps And Nokia.
https://immortaltoday.com/battlefield-digitisation/