Meatball, Lineup & Angle of Attack
The House Intelligence Committee is looking into the apparently surprising Russian response to the crisis in the Ukraine. I’m only a junior assistant policy wonk (one tour on Joint Staff as a policy guy) but as I heard this news on the radio this morning, a few random thoughts popped into my head which I thought I would share. The first thought that came to mind is the similarly between intelligence analysts and meteorologists. In the end their forecasts are just a guess…albeit an educated one. It seems as though regardless of the...
read moreSECNAV and Mowing the Grass
As I was reading the morning news, I saw a piece in The Hill about SECNAV Mabus’ comments regarding the savings associated with “scrubbing” the $ 40 Billion or so the Navy spends on service contracts. Service contracts can be just about anything from feeding Sailors in the chow hall to fixing the leaky toilets at the 4 Star’s headquarters building. SECNAV says “We know we can save significant amounts of money just by setting up things like contract courts, which require … contracting officers to come in every...
read moreStealth Works in the Budget Too!
First thing: Yesterday’s blog on Shared Services fell flat on the website with only a handful of hits. I take it the world of Shared Services is not so hot on the list of “interesting” topics. But there’s still a lot of money to be saved there. In fact, I would contend that there’s a lot of money floating around in areas that most people don’t find so interesting. It’s the uninteresting that ironically is the most interesting in terms of budget cutting. They escape scrutiny during the...
read moreSharing
Ever watch toddlers playing together? It doesn’t take long for one of them to decide that something belongs to them and they jealously guard it. Sometimes even hitting other children trying to take the toy. That’s a lot like what sometimes happens in the world of Shared Services. Agencies are sometimes not all that anxious to share their IT systems. On the flip side, other agencies are not usually begging to migrate their systems to someone else’s system. There are bright spots in the Federal Government…just check out...
read moreRewarding the Guilty and Blaming the Innocent
When I was a young, steely-eyed Naval Flight Officer attending the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School with no apparent fear of death, one of the classes I took was in project management. I have always remembered the day we talked about the phases of any project: Elation—“This is gonna be fun!” Concern—“This is turning out to be harder than I thought” Confusion–“I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing” Terror–” If I don’t get this done, my career is over!”...
read moreThe Bolympics Begin!
The Defense world is all atwitter at the upcoming peek at the DoD 2015 budget that Secretary Hagel will be giving today and thus kicking off a new round of olympic games, the Budget Olympithon (let’s just call it the Bolympics), which will most likely last until at least Christmas. After two weeks of the NBC olympi-blitz I was growing just a bit weary of yet another human interest story. Unfortunately never-ceasing “breaking news” about the olympics will be replaced with never-ceasing “breaking news” about the...
read moreCyber: Too Big Not To Fail
I admit that I am not much of a cyber-techie. I do know a little about computers though. When Microsoft announced they were not supporting Windows XT a while back, I had a bit of a cyber-rebellion because I refuse to spend anymore money on Mircrosoft Operating Systems, which I assume, much like the NSA, report your every keystroke and video back to some central repository for “troubleshooting.” Right….But I instead elected to move to linux. I’ve not noticed a degradation in what I can do, don’t have to worry about...
read moreDavid and Goliath
Over the past few weeks there has been a lot in the press about the larger defense contractors worries about “shrinking” (see DoD Budget Cuts: Less of More) defense budgets and the effects on their profitability. Bloomberg News had a piece today about deals dropping for Pentagon contractors. While it doesn’t appear any of the big guys will be going out of business any time soon, they are indeed under pressure to deliver the goods to their shareholders. I would guess that most everyone who has a 401(k) has some amount of...
read moreToo Big To Fail
If you saw the Sixty Minutes piece on the JSF last night, you probably not a happy camper. The opening salvo was pretty staggering: The program is costing $400B for 2400 airplanes, or about twice as much as the US spent to put men on the moon! So how did we get here? When I was a squadron Commanding Officer in the 1991 timeframe I witnessed a rare occurrence at the Pentagon, The cancellation of the A-12 Avenger program by then Secretary of Defense Cheney. The A-12,intended to be the next generation aircraft for the US military, was...
read moreQ•D•arrrrgh!
I saw a nice article in Politico’s Morning Defense this morning about the upcoming DoD Quadrennial Defense Review, commonly referred to as the QDR. I fondly remember my days in the Pentagon wrestling with the QDR gurus, the best and brightest thinkers of all the Services, getting together to figure out how their Service was going to get more money. The knives were out as the behind-the-scenes point papers on the vulnerability of aircraft carriers, the shear madness of fleets of supersonic, stealth airplanes, and the end of the need...
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