If contractors have to be hired to monitor contractors, what is left for the govvies to actually do? Oh well, if you hire people to do the actual work, and you hire people to "monitor" that work, I guess you just dont have any accountability for anything other than being sure to blame one set of contractors or the other when the wheels fall off! :-) Accountability is a horrible thing, you know!

Yep, its sarcasm, son! Sarcasm, I say!

Hmmmm..... Gotta wonder if there is a contract clause that makes the vendor responsible for any credit checks/repairs and or identity thefts that might result from a "hack" of the protected information that will be inherently contained in these records? Wonder if there would have been any proposals if such a clause existed? Just a few musings from one who was obviously compromised by the OPM hack! I see an excited news anchor talking about this one in our future!

On the program management side, I would be very interested to see a list of IT programs from the last 20 years, executed under the current federal procurement processes and practices, with a dollar value of 4+ billion dollars. The interesting part would be to have those programs annotated with respect to failure or success. I believe that there is a saying that its not a good thing to continue to do the same things when the results are not satisfactory. On one hand, you have people with very little real experience managing large IT development programs (at least successfully managing these). On the other, a typically long drawn out development process, dripping with "management" oversight and reviews by these same inexperienced managers, where technology s continually moving out from under the basic requirements. When a development program is measured in tens of years, while H/W and S/W technology moves from state of the art to obsolescence in three years or less, successful development is not just a challenge, its pretty much an impossibility even with the best people trying to execute the process.

Sorry to disappoint you, Christopher, but at least in some circles the advantages of the IRST (against stealth and even conventional aircraft) were NOT ignored. In Red Flag (early 80s) we often used F-106s as aggressors just so that our pilots would be able to appreciate (during debrief at least!) the advantages of a passive intercept. After sitting through many debriefs where the first the innocent young F-16 trainees knew of their "deaths", in spite of their very credible RWR, was the gun camera pictures from an F-106, I was very disappointed when the planned IRST was dropped off of the F-22! Seems that our Russian buddies never did figure out that an IRST was too expensive to put on front line fighters! :-(

Stu, I think that we totally agree. In the F/A-18 WSSA the military/civilian team worked exceptionally well, and in my 35+ years in DoD and DoD contractors, I never saw better. A few years back the organization got one of those big fancy awards for their excellent work. One thing that I did notice was that China Lake had a long standing tradition of putting the end users first. Didn't always work that way, SOMETIMES we had the "social climbers" in positions of authority, but the tradition was undeniable. Maybe its just the airline miles from the Beltway that makes the difference. Or it could be something in the water! LoL!

No, my friend, the PROCESS that is documented actually includes a great deal of "good practices", the problem is that there is no enforcement! There is always a "reason" to avoid the process and SOMETIMES that reason is good. More often than not, that "reason" is only that avoiding the "rules" avoids accountability.

Garry, my friend, the problem arises when the SSO (or his minions, or his suppliers) put their advancement, or the continued health of the procurement bureaucracy, or simple monetary profit, or even just their own personal egos, above the needs of the end user who will have to live (or die) with the product of their procurement.

You can almost excuse the congressional excesses, they are politicians doing what politicians do; but. . . . that does not excuse the self inflicted agony DoD inflicts on itself during the procurement processes and people who are allowed to run amok without accountability for their actions or the results.

And we manufactured F-4s, F-14s, F-15s, A-10s and F-16s at once, all fighters but each with its own missions! What you want to bet that there were a lot of 2nd and 3rd tier divisions being equipped with brand new t-64s while the Guards divisions were getting T-80s!

Im thinking that you might be familiar with an M-16 or one of its derivatives? Do you know what the 5.56mm bore wear gauge is? Ever see an equivalent gunner's tool for a 7.62mm AK-47?

The old Soviet weapons procurement system was a brutally unenlightened system that rewarded successes and as often as not sent failures or even perceived failures to Siberia! They engineered very thoroughly and very rarely "gold plated" (Anyone who has ever shot a Russian-designed and manufactured AK-47 in a swamp while thoroughly coated in mud and green slimy stuff will know exactly what Im talking about!).

Interestingly enough the "personality driven" German military procurement agencies of WWII and their pervasive "high tech" infatuation, and bureaucratic processes look all too familiar. In that day and time we (with our Shermans) and the Russians (with their T-34s) smothered the German Tigers 10+ to 1, yet our "modern" procurement agencies seemed to have learned more from the NAZIs than from the victors!

It doesn't matter what "uniform" the procurement officers wear, unless under that cloth there is the integrity and accountability that "the system" has rather scrupulously distilled out of its culture.

The problems we see should be no surprise to anyone when the only acceptable measures of success for a procurement agency is Cost Performance Index (CPI) and Schedule Performance Index (SPI) with no index even formulated for weapon system performance! The money was spent, the scheduled was expended, the procurers get their attaboys and far too often the procured system either fails at OT&E, slithers through OT&E because its too big and important to fail, or far worse, fails on the battlefield where the self-serving pressure from the bureaucrats is not worth diddly!