Far East Cynic

It is a blessing

To be holed up inside the house because of this:

I needed the time to get caught up on this project. I spent most of the weekend holed up in my “man cave” writing draft after draft of a proposal and taking the occasional break to bang my head against the wall.

It is not that the work is that hard-but it is quite serious. In a lot of ways, the defense contracting business is similar to the world’s oldest profession. How to figure out how to get as much ass in your service-for the lowest possible price the market will bear.

Except, these are real people we are talking about here-and no matter how this turns out, real people are going to get screwed. People I know personally ( and possibly myself), and don’t deserve this kind of disrespect.

So this project weighs on me a lot. I know we have to get it right-and in a normal world we would have well over 60 days to so. With that kind of time this would be a relatively straightforward task and the weekends would be free.

But not our erstwhile task master. Who thinks its a good idea to staff a multi million dollar project in less than two weeks? I don’t-and I don’t know anyone else in the trenches who thinks it is either.

But such is the world we live in.

Snow keeps the phone from ringing-and that’s a good thing. Back to the salt mine……………

  1. Skippy…..
    I ASSUME that since you were in the Navy you are working on Navy related projects?
    Anyway…I read Defense Tech everyday and one of their pet peeves is the F35 clusterf*ck….
    Can you explain why a program like this can get so out of control? or the IFV or????
    Aren’t the contractors responsible and not the taxpayer, for such HUGE cost over runs, after the contractor has given the DOD a contract price? (in order to “win” the project)
    Do they INTENTIONALLY lie?
    Are there no consequences?

    by the way..Go Ducks!!!!

  2. Richard,

    I would suggest you go and read a couple of interesting books that talk about the acquistion programs in the Navy. Both of them were written by the same guy, James P. Stevenson. The books are “Pentagon Paradox” and “The $5 Billion Misunderstanding: The Collapse of the Navy’s A-12 Stealth Bomber Program”. Both of them talk about how contractors over promise. How the DoD constantly changes the contract on a whim to add in some other whiz-bang feature. Then you have the debate about fixed price contracts or cost-plus contracts. There are pros and cons tween both of them.

  5. Re: your effort on the project – Heed the (slightly revised) advice of Queen Victoria to one of her daughters – “Lie back and think of (Japan).”