Military Procurement
Jun. 27th, 2005 02:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenite0Safer Vehicles for Soldiers: A Tale of Delays and Glitches
The NYT is covering the saga of trying to get better vehicles for the troops in Iraq. The interesting part to me is what they left out--namely, why has the procurement process become so horribly cumbersome? The article considers it a force of nature, or an accidental by-product. Nope.
Every problem in there is a product of a Congressman trying to bring pork barrel dollars to his constituents while keeping them from going to another Congressman's district. All of those things--extra tests, drawn out selections, delays in payments--come from laws passed by Congress. Pentagon bureaucrats can work around some of the obstacles, but they know a Congressional committee will call them in front of the TV cameras for a whipping when something goes wrong. And something will. New system development is always error-prone, wars are even more so.
So how do we fix it? Simple. Give the people in charge of procurement the authority to make decisions, access to the people who know what's needed, and forgiveness for the inevitable percentage of mistakes they'll make. Even if that means a contract goes to the district of a junior Congressman of the minority party, or even ::SHUDDER:: buy it from foreigners. All that's needed is for Congress to pass one law giving up their ability to grab pork from the defense budget.
Or maybe the pork will fly away on its own.
The NYT is covering the saga of trying to get better vehicles for the troops in Iraq. The interesting part to me is what they left out--namely, why has the procurement process become so horribly cumbersome? The article considers it a force of nature, or an accidental by-product. Nope.
Every problem in there is a product of a Congressman trying to bring pork barrel dollars to his constituents while keeping them from going to another Congressman's district. All of those things--extra tests, drawn out selections, delays in payments--come from laws passed by Congress. Pentagon bureaucrats can work around some of the obstacles, but they know a Congressional committee will call them in front of the TV cameras for a whipping when something goes wrong. And something will. New system development is always error-prone, wars are even more so.
So how do we fix it? Simple. Give the people in charge of procurement the authority to make decisions, access to the people who know what's needed, and forgiveness for the inevitable percentage of mistakes they'll make. Even if that means a contract goes to the district of a junior Congressman of the minority party, or even ::SHUDDER:: buy it from foreigners. All that's needed is for Congress to pass one law giving up their ability to grab pork from the defense budget.
Or maybe the pork will fly away on its own.
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no subject
Date: 2005-06-27 08:27 pm (UTC)Consider what would happen if something got rushed to the troops and it was faulty? A couple kids die, and all of a sudden in the biggest type size the editors can find, we'd have a call for Bush's impeachment and Rumsfeld's trial for murder.
Remember the furor over the no-bid contracts for Haliburton? Haliburton got no-bid contracts for both missions in Bosnia and Kosovo, but of course the media ignored them. Now Rumsfeld does the same thing to get the logistical infrastructure in place as fast as possible, and the media spent over a year frothing at the mouth, and still drags the story up on slow news days when they don't have one of my dead brothers to rejoice over.