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Army of Davids Beats Pentagon Procurement
chris-chittleborough writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that 'a Marine officer in Iraq, a small network-design company in California, a nonprofit troop-support group, a blogger and other undeterrable folk designed a handheld insurgent-identification device, built it, shipped it and deployed it in [Iraq] in 30 days.' Compare this to the Automated Biometric Identification System, a multi-megabuck Pentagon project now 2 years old. With bureaucracy increasingly strangling innovation, will agile smaller businesses be able to accomplish what once required a sprawling government project?"
Something tells me that if we drafted the appropriate industries to build a *REAL* military industrial complex, and punished profiteering adequately in the first place, our troops could have had this technology (instead of a stupid deck of playing cards) in 2002, instead of waiting until 2007 for it to be delivered. But since Bush doesn't want to impact the profitability of this war, we have to wait for a significantly patriotic David to identify who the enemy is. It's exactly this lack of vision that has turned Afghanistan back into a Taliban-controlled country and destroyed our success in Iraq.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The moment you try to limit funding to a wasteful Pentagon program you're accused of hating the troops.
And so it goes.
The standard rip against wasteful education spending is, "You can't just throw money at a problem and expect it to be fixed!"
Yet that's done 10x with the military and no one bats an eye.
In any case, having something like this that has not had extensive field trials is better then what they had before, which was nothing. The problem with the military procurement system, is that everything has to go thrugh the same process, regardless of whether its a 200 handheld unit, or a 1 million dollar vehicle. This does not allow the agility that the private sector can afford.
But the PRC-77 was far more robust.
And naturally, after the PRC-77 run was over, every engineer that made it robust was taken out back and shot, and the plans shredded, pulped and incinerated, and the contractor began working on the PRC-78, spending 5 years trying to figure out just how to make it robust.
In the real world, robustness is solved. Engineers don't need half a decade to build some contraption that can take a licking and keep on ticking, they just have to look at the previous designs and apply the same techniques to a modern device. But hey, when its the government's money, spending 2 months researching 400 different types of rubber grommets to determine which one works best for shock absorbing because, you know, physics might have changed in the last year or so, is a perfectly reasonable idea.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
The missing palettes of cash were known about through independent news and radio long before the news hit mainstream media, including an interview with a woman soldier who had refused to take the money who said that she was told to keep quiet about it, not send any home, and not to make it obvious when she returned home. But it's only a small part of a bigger picture. The DoD has over $2.3 trillion unaccounted for[CBS], 25% of its budget of taxpayers' money. The palettes of cash are business as usual. The worrisome part is not the American and Iraqi soldiers receiving what one might call "bonuses", but where the rest of that $2.3 trillion+ went. If the Executive and military authority are that brazen about giving out unaccounted for money and then telling them to keep quiet about it, imagine what other undocumented transactions of our tax money they might be willing to do. It's obvious at this point that the people of this country (and their representatives) will not hold them accountable, and I'm sure they realize that.
It's also hard to believe that Abu Graib was the result of giving too much "autonomy" while Alberto Gonzales is arguing for the use of torture. Do you think you'll ever really know how high up the chain of command the knowledge of what was going on in Abu Graib reached? Or whether the same thing didn't happen at other locations? Do you think you'll ever know all the horrors and atrocities that have resulted from an urban war that has gone on far too long, with many of its battered participants now having served several tours of duty?
No, it is my belief that only the uninformed will believe that these cases are isolated incidents resulting from giving the perpetrators too much autonomy. They are the exact opposite: the inevitable corruption resulting from giving a military bureaucracy too much power with far too little oversight.