Back in 2002, I wrote (regarding the US government’s cybersecurity efforts), “adding money to a disaster doesn’t necessarily help get it done, most of the time you just wind up with bigger, more expensive disasters.”
That’s probably too broad a generalization for today’s purpose. But, if you specify procurement disasters, then I think it still holds. The key, which government seems to consistently ignore, is that you have to change the way you did things that caused the disaster, otherwise you’ll pursue the same path and wind up in the same place. “Failure to learn anything” ought to be a federal crime, but then who’d jail the jailers?
Today I’m going to briefly touch on a few disasters-in-progress. I could probably promote each one into a separate posting, but a) I don’t need to ‘pad’ this blog b) perhaps we will find enlightenment by looking across this landscape of woe instead of zooming into the nooks and crannies. So, we have three items – an unholy trinity:
1) f-35 Heroic Sacrifice
Congress’ regulation of the purse-strings has gone completely out the window under Trump. I’m not sure if the democrats even have a viable option for fighting it, but what I’m afraid of is that they’ll discover that they can do it, too, and then the budget becomes a complete mess, with billions of dollars being allocated for bombers actually getting spent on low-income housing, or something. Just kidding.
to be fair, the concrete was drying
You’ve probably already heard about the section of Trump’s beautiful wall that blew over due to high winds, and landed in Mexico. [yahoo] It would have been funny if the Mexicans had quickly cut it up and hauled it off to recycle it for scrap. In spite of paying for it, I guess they didn’t. But the really funny news is that the pentagon, which has (basically) infinite amounts of un-traceable dark money, has agreed to divert some fragrant grease from over-funded programs into wall-building. Basically, that’s the government stealing from itself, but under Trump such things are not shocking, they’re redolent of swamp-possibility.
The program they have taken some of the money from is: F-35 and VF-22 Osprey procurement. [popm]
President Donald Trump wants to shift nearly four billion dollar in the defense budget away from military procurement to fund his border wall construction project. Trump’s defense budget cuts F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, P-8A patrol aircraft, MQ-9A Reaper attack drones, C-130 transports, and other programs, as well as delaying construction on a key amphibious ship.
[…]
The president’s request, according to Defense News, would cancel two F-35B Joint Strike Fighters for the U.S. Marine Corps, two MV-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft, one P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft for the U.S. Navy, four C-130J Super Hercules transports for the Air Force Reserve and National Guard, and eight MQ-9A Reaper attack drones. It also cancels a expeditionary fast transport built for the U.S. Navy.
I still think they should build a “stealth” wall. Maybe this is their chance.
2) Amazon JEDI Night Night
This was inevitable, given the amount of money at stake, which means that at a certain size it will become impossible to award a contract unless all of the bidders merge like Lockheed-Martin-Sikorsky-GeneralDynamics-Northrup-Grumman are doing; then they can sole-source the contract. [politico]
The Pentagon must stop work on its major cloud computing contract that Microsoft won last year, a court ruled on Thursday in a major win for former bidder Amazon.
Amazon, which asked for the delay, argues it lost the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, contract to Microsoft because of President Donald Trump’s remarks disparaging the company and its founder, Jeff Bezos.
There is so much money at stake that there would be lawsuits alleging other procurement improprieties, regardless of who won and why. But the important part of the whole thing is that now “getting it through litigation and settling all the lawsuits” is a gating factor in getting a project done. For something like a cloud computing project, that’s particularly egregious since both Amazon and Microsoft have their own vendor lock-in strategies, so it’s not practical to implement a solution on one then switch to the other – that would require a complete re-write.
So, why not tread water for a couple years while the lawyers argue? That’s going to work wonders for getting projects on track and moving toward successful implementation. Since they have baked in guaranteed failure, they ought to cancel the whole thing and spend the money on the wall.
3) f-35 Antiaircraft Systems Deployed
It was only a matter of time before the F-35’s stealth was defeated and it becomes vulnerable to defensive fire. Once that has happened, the aircraft will be unusable except against defenseless targets like Medcins Sans Frontieres hospitals. Who am I kidding? The entire premise of the US Air Force is that it likes to attack defenseless targets from high altitude, and watch explosions on television screens.
The F-22 rapist raptor had serious difficulties with clouds; clouds being made of water and water causing its stealth coating to crumble and peel until the plane resembled a hotel bathroom with a shitty caulking-job. The brits discovered that F-35s are a great big sucking vacuum cleaner of … birds.
There are a number of things about this, mostly that “foreign object damage” is a big problem, especially in combat zones. The premise of jump jets is that they can take off and land in unexpected places – so long as those unexpected places are carefully cleaned, fireproof runways. It’s not an excess of caution that they stopped the flight and thoroughly checked the plane out – since the F-35 only has one engine, its failure mode during VTOL flight is to experience a hard bump.
The solution to a bird going down the intake is to send a crewman down the intake to check on the intake. Of course, everything that’s not air, which goes up the intake, becomes one more chance for the engine to chew itself to pieces.
No YOU go up it!! Check for birds!
What still puzzles the moderately intelligent reader is: since the Royal Navy has given up on having aircraft carriers, why didn’t they buy some perfectly functional helicopters? At least those can autorotate when the engines cut out.
There’s something sweet about the Brits being so stupid that they have a bird mascot on an aircraft carrier. Why not have a useful mascot, like a bucket of ball bearings? ${Something something Brexit joke}
There is a very strong argument that for almost all of the duties that the remnants of the RN actually perform these days, helicopters would be far more useful. But they’re not sexy enough or something.
As for JEDI… Surely if there’s anybody in the world that can and should maintain their own dedicated IT infrastructure, it’s the military?
Once again we see Donald Trump’s “I love the common man” talk is all bullshit. Those 4 Hercules for the USAFR and ANG they want to cut will be the aircraft that will be of the most benefit to the average soldier and airman.
If this blog has done anything over these past few years it is to thoroughly disprove that notion. Okay, maybe substitute “government” for “military”.
—
What fascinates me more than these boondoggles in particular is how governments or organisations consistently fail to procure services that already exist elsewhere. Whenever there’s a large infrastructure project to be done that other countries have already completed, you’d think it would be much easier to do it again. Just ask, “who built that for you?” and hire those guys as certified experts. It would be the one good thing to come out of our wonderful capitalist world: purchaseable expertise across national boundaries, but oh no, we’d rather do a megaproject by figuring it out for ourselves and run it into the ground 90 times out of ten (not a typo). Oh, maybe we have our fingers in the pie. Maybe it’s our little prestige project – maybe it’s that of some political rival. Maybe we’re just incompetent. Whatever the reasons, the years drag on, the budget surpasses every guess we make, again and again.
And when, or if, it’s ever done, it might be awful or fantastic or anyhting and nothing in between. But the only important thing it’ll really be is finally over. Sigh of relief and on to the next project!
Dunc@#1:
Surely if there’s anybody in the world that can and should maintain their own dedicated IT infrastructure, it’s the military?
That’s such a great question, I did a whole posting in response (I know you were probably being rhetorical). It’ll drop saturday AM unless Trump resigns and I push back the posting schedule for a little grave-dancing.
timgueguen@#2:
Those 4 Hercules for the USAFR and ANG they want to cut will be the aircraft that will be of the most benefit to the average soldier and airman.
A variant of that argument is “why don’t you shift that money to the VA hospitals, asshole?”
komarov@#3:
If this blog has done anything over these past few years it is to thoroughly disprove that notion.
Thank you, I think. That sounds like “Mission Accomplished!” Combat operations are over now.
What fascinates me more than these boondoggles in particular is how governments or organisations consistently fail to procure services that already exist elsewhere. Whenever there’s a large infrastructure project to be done that other countries have already completed, you’d think it would be much easier to do it again. Just ask, “who built that for you?” and hire those guys as certified experts.
It’s never quite that easy. What happens is you’re moving around short-term versus long-term risks and costs, as well as amortizing aggregate management costs (sometimes). It’s really really complicated. But – the US Government does it horribly badly.
What blows my mind about a lot of this stuff is how little thought people actually put into it. I think that’s one of those strategic/tactical blindness problems; so few people in government or business are thinking strategically, they miss the big picture for the weeds.
There’s a story I should tell about that, about the time I scared the NSA’s CTO so thoroughly he almost dropped his martini.
re Marcus @6:
Now THAT could have been a catastrophe!
komarov@#3:
we’d rather do a megaproject by figuring it out for ourselves and run it into the ground 90 times out of ten (not a typo). Oh, maybe we have our fingers in the pie. Maybe it’s our little prestige project – maybe it’s that of some political rival. Maybe we’re just incompetent. Whatever the reasons, the years drag on, the budget surpasses every guess we make, again and again.
…. Meanwhile, our ears will be filled with the bleatings of libertarians telling us that free markets bring greater efficiency and benefit to the customer, and how big government never produces anything successfully.
To which I usually reply, “Stalin and Beria got Russia into making H-bombs in a fraction of the time it took the US and mostly they did it by terrorizing and torturing lots of people. But they did it fast and it worked and it was the quintessential ‘big government’ approach.”
Mao’s a good counter-example. But basically, I conclude not much of this has to do with capitalism and a lot more to do with who’s got their boot on whose neck.
komarov, @ #3:
Well, when I say “can and should”, I mean “has access to sufficient resources to do the job (if deployed correctly) and a has valid reason for doing so”. I’m not making a claim about actual competence and effectiveness in practice, since those are obviously awful. However, the key elements of managing large IT projects that the government consistently screws up particularly badly are also the bits that you can’t palm off onto somebody else under the guise of cloud computing. Changing the delivery mechanism doesn’t help if your objectives are badly designed and you can’t manage a project effectively – it just adds another layer of obfuscation to the disaster.
Marcus, @ #4: I look forward to reading it.
Re: Dunc:
Fair point on the intended meaning. However, I’m tempted to treat the USG as a kind of special case. Its various branches have apparently been actively working to compromise everything since forever – in IT terms -, secure in the knowledge that it couldn’t possibly ever come back to haunt them. In other words, they really can’t build their own system because they’ve broken everything so thoroughly that there aren’t any building blocks left to work with.
Maybe the tendency of projects to fail over poor management rather than the self-constructed technical hurdles is a cause for celebration in certain circles: Thank Zod everything fell apart before someone used our own tools to break it. (Maybe that’s the spook-version, to borrow Marcus’ term, of the NASA prayer, “please don’t let me be the one who screws this up!”)
Re: Marcus Ranum:
No two projects are (quite) the same but with some things there is so much overlap that you’d have to be mad not to ask your neighbours how they did theirs. This should be especially true if we’re talking about expensive projects where its your money or your prestige project that’s meant to put you in the history books or ahead in the polls.
That’s not even “big picture” stuff yet. That’s the good governance equivalent of googling your latest hobbyhorse before you start shopping around for it. It’s the “getting out of bed” phase that precedes a hearty breakfast – difficult at times but unavoidable. In short, people are idiots. And, sometimes, corrupt.
And with how hard they’re willing – and able – to stomp their feet. It probably says a lot about humans that functional governments* tend be stuffed to the ceiling with means to restrict that ability. Those famous and super-effective “checks and balances” we get to hear about whenever someone fawns over the US democracy, for instance.
*Functional in the sense of not making everyone – or some – in their care suffer and die horribly. I felt compelled to add that at the last minute… but why?
I want to point out that the F35 is a spectacular success. It is doing exactly what it is supposed to do and that is to guarantee cost plus contracts for the next century.