Military Procurement

[selenite0]

Safer 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.

Comments

the danger

[thegameiam.livejournal.com]

The only danger I see with this is that of graft: I've written several responses to government RFPs from an industry perspective, and the gov goes through a tremendous number of hoops to make sure that all competitors are treated equally.

If we didn't have the formal bid process, we could be in a situation where an agency head says "I want all of our data circuits to be delivered by bob's house of telco, and all of our voice circuits by Jane's exchange hut," even though neither of those two firms would be competitive financially or technically.

In the 70's there were a bunch of scandals about the pentagon buying $70 hammers, and $600 toilet seats, and these were the result of no-bid purchasing.

[dekarch.livejournal.com]

Those procurement procedures actually come from the turn of the last century. During the war with Spain in 1898, there were huge scandals as a result of troops being delivered substandard food, uniforms, blankets, and other equipment. As a result, hundreds of detailed regulations were put in place to prevent it.

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.

Re: the danger

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Life is full of tradeoffs--I think what we're losing to overhead and delays now is worse than having to deal with some graft. I've worked on proposals for billion-dollar contracts. Treating everyone perfectly equally adds months, sometimes years to the process. And a lot of the hoops are to screen out con artists, not deal fairly with real responses.

When you look at the amount of paperwork required in some contracts I wouldn't be surprised if Lockheed lost money on those hammers and toilet seats.

The best way to deal with graft is sunlight. Have a quick, efficient procurement process, and every few years toss some guys in jail for abusing their authority for personal benefit. Accept that something things will go wrong regardless of how much CYA paper you have and get stuff to the troops so they can see how it works--in peace and war.

No, it's not going to happen. But I can dream.

Re: the danger

[thegameiam.livejournal.com]

The best way to deal with graft is sunlight. Have a quick, efficient procurement process, and every few years toss some guys in jail for abusing their authority for personal benefit. Accept that something things will go wrong regardless of how much CYA paper you have and get stuff to the troops so they can see how it works--in peace and war.

That's awesome - deal with graft the same way that police deal with prostitution? hehe

Re: the danger

[(Anonymous)]

>In the 70's there were a bunch of scandals about the pentagon buying $70 hammers, and $600 toilet seats, and these were the result of no-bid purchasing.<

Actually in congressional hearing they found the $100 hammers and screwdrivers actually were billed at about $1. Literaly the other $99 was gov required paperwork, billed at the rates specified by congress - in some case by bills voted in by congressman in said hearing.

The congress panel closed the hearings by launch time and looked really embarased when reporters asked about the findings.


Oh, the $600 tolet seat, wasn't a tolet seat. It was a custom hand crafted aluminum panel covering the tolet in a certain mil plane. Given they were only going to make a couple dozen of them - it was cheeper to do it that way then work up a mass production run of them.