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6 IT Projects, $8 Billion Over Budget At Dept. of Defense
McGruber writes "The Federal Times has the stunning (but not surprising) news that a new audit found six Defense Department modernization projects to be a combined $8 billion — or 110 percent — over budget. The projects are also suffering from years-long schedule delays. In 1998, work began on the Army's Logistics Modernization Program (LMP). In April 2010, the General Accounting Office issued a report titled 'Actions Needed to Improve Implementation of the Army Logistics Modernization Program' about the status of LMP. LMP is now scheduled to be fully deployed in September 2016, 12 years later than originally scheduled, and 18 years after development first began! (Development of the oft-maligned Duke Nukem Forever only took 15 years.)"
Man someone should have told me that a long time ago, 8 billion is nothing to sneeze at.
It's nice to see someone in our government giving 110%.
First rule in government spending: Why build one when you can have none for twice the price?
if you specify the actual cost during the planning phase, then they wouldn't be started in the first place. So people make best case estimates and then reality strikes, the actual cost exceed the allocated budget.
...it looks like they originally expected to take 6 years to roll out their plan. Even if they'd been on schedule, by the time everything was in place, it would have been obsolete.
Pretty much everything the Pentagon does is over budget, behind schedule, and budget-wise, generally a spawn of wishful thinking. The "cheap" Littoral Combat Ships were sold to Congress as sub-$250 million craft. They're currently just under $700 million apiece. The "cheap" F-35 was promised to be no more than $60 million a copy or so. They're now just under $200 million a copy, flyaway (more expensive than the F-22 they were supposed to compliment). The new Ford class carriers... an evolutionary development of the current Nimitz class.... will now cost 2 1/2 times as much as the last Nimitz that was launched just a few years back.
Why should DOD software be any different than DOD hardware when it comes to wishful thinking from the brass?
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I expect that the contractors were staffed with lots of "project planners" and "requirements specialists" who went straight from the service to work on these projects. And you can be sure that the ex-military are extremely unlikely to buck the system and stand up to uniformed types. And those in uniform know that they can climb on the retirement gravy train as long as they don't make life too hard for the contractors who they expect to work for when they get out.
It's a recipe for disaster. Nobody is going to make waves, because they are all too busy looking out for their common interest. It's another example of the endemic corruption that is steadily eroding the fundamentals of US society.
Of course this is small change compared to what goes on in the financial sector...
Why is Snark Required?
Apparently the logistics of killing dirty little foreigners is quite complicated.
Government subsidizing private corporations, overruns,
non-transparency, corruption. And look at the straight
faces meanwhile. What a joke.
When government work used to be done by government, it could have gone over budget: you have to buy more raw materials or pay more people to work more hours.
But the whole point in outsourcing is that you pay a fixed amount to third parties to complete a specific job, and they take over the responsibility for making a profit (or, at worst, breaking even).
OK, I lie. The whole point in outsourcing is to give treasury money to your friends, and erode the state in favour of scrounging corporations.
So wait a minute...if you're always forced to go with the lowest bidder this can happen? I would have thought the lowest bidder would have also been the most reliable and skilled. Who would have known?
Come on people. Say it with me.
Federal. Prison.
FEDERAL. PRISON.
Are we so inured to this that we can't even speak the words, let alone call our congresspeople? Will we not even push people to ask whether the next president will be calling for the prosecution and imprisonment of the people responsible for creating a billion dollar, 18 year "army logistics" software development project?
Don't give me that "mistaking malice for incompetence" bullshit. That's exactly what's wrong with this country. Just because it's computers, don't tell me you can't tell a $100 toilet seat when you see one. A couple years late may be incompetence, but you should have the FBI given all necessary clearances and set them crawling all over it. At 8 years into a 4 year project, you fire the buy-side project managers and cancel the project, whether you uncovered fraud or not. Fail to maintain even these basic standards, and no estimate in time or money is ever real, and every contract becomes open season for treasury looters. Oh wait, like it is today.
There is no way on earth or heaven that a logistics system can cost this much or take this long to build. And I would say those so corrupt or negligent as the ones running implementation at the vendor or running procurement within the military should be behind bars. This is not a joke, people - this is keeping American troops in a decaying and ancient logistics system so that some weasel can steal your tax money.
We could all start the backlash right here, today.
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It is the sacred duty of governments to waste money by giving it to the private sector. That's why these disasters are bi-partisan screw ups.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
The Navy's ERP system has already been "deployed" at certain commands such as NAVAIR and SPAWAR, so it isn't like they have spent this money and not produced a product. The system has issues, some of which are outright bugs (e.g. losing employee time sheets), some are poor design choices (e.g. the purchase request part of the system had issues with $0 line items on orders, previously we had to put in $0.01 to make it work), and some are dumb policy choices by the DoN or the local command (e.g. we are not allowed to use the built in leave request system, we still pass around e-mails or signed PDF documents).
Overall it is an improvement over the systems it replaced - for me that was a series of in house systems that essentially emulated the original WANG environment and re-used COBOL code. It does make it more difficult to fix things and I still believe the system has a hard time working with the DoD's "accounting" system i.e. different colors of money, lines of accounting, money that expires, etc.
/* ICBM Coordinates 32.78N, 79.93W */
There's engineering solutions and military solutions.
Engineering solutions have known goals (don't laugh, I'm writing about an ideal situation here).
Military solutions cover contingencies which may shift over time. They are also highly vunerable to political whim, up to and including outright bribery.
From TFA: "The department is racing to meet a statutory September 2017 deadline for passing a full financial audit."
Ya gotta love it. Any publically traded company has its accounts audited annually. The government is so out of control that it looks unlikely to meet a deadline of a successful audit five years in the future.
The government ought to be required to follow the same standards required of companies. No one has any idea what the financial status of the US government really is, least of all the government itself...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
When you spend 10 digits on software you should come out with a univeral simulator or a Matrix-like sex game. Anything else is unacceptable.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Amakudari. And it is a recipe for disaster in every industry that it occurs in. . .
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!