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Comments: 412 +- Hardware: Army of Davids Beats Pentagon Procurement on Friday February 09 2007, @02:42PM
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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?"
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There must be a typo. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:There must be a typo. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
It's not just government (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll put that down to people's fear of not being able to support themselves, and thus being unable to let go of a job even if that job is no longer relevant. Perhaps if rights to food, clothing and shelter were garaunteed, government departments that had outlived their usefulness would be less resistant to being dissolved.
Whew! Almost let a pro-capitalist thought slip through unchallenged.
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Re:It's not just government (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:It's not just government (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [youtube.com][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.
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Re:It's not just government (Score:4, Insightful)
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American Spirit at it's best (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:American Spirit at it's best (Score:5, Insightful)
Link, please.
First of all, Americans where in Vietnam for more than two decades. They had their chance. It's not like the American forces didn't some small window of oppurtunity to end the conflict.
Second, can you give an accurate estimate of how much more NVA soldiers Americans would have needed to kill to end the war? Do you know how much more people would have been killed after the war if the outcome was in our favor? I sure as hell can't. That's why bringing numbers into to this is more bull shit than anything else.
One of the main reasons why we went there in the first place was because McCarthy scared the shit out of the American public (sound familiar?), and basically made people believe that if communism doesn't end in Vietnam, then the whole world would become a slave to communism. Of course, this never happened after the war.
[quote]Guns don't kill people, peacenik bullshit does![/quote]
People who refuse to fight to defend their family, friends, and country are pussies. I have no qualms saying that. But Vietnam wasn't a war about defending ourselves. After we "lost" Vietnam, they didn't come over and bomb the shit out of us, like we did to them. So pulling out of there wasn't as a horrible decision as you make it out be.
Parent
Re:American Spirit at it's best (Score:5, Informative)
It was the Vietnamese who went in to Cambodia and took out Pol Pot.
Peace comes from courage. Not shooting people without understanding what is going on.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
100 people a day is, seriously, something to sneeze at.
Apples & Oranges? (Score:5, Insightful)
operation and storage? High humidity? Is it impervious to dust?
How does it handle shock and vibration?
20+ years ago, I worked for a company that designed & manufactured
power supplies for the military. It's one thing to design a quick
& dirty one-off, proof-of-concept. It's quite another to build a
production device that will withstand continued use in a multitude
of military environments.
Infantry proof (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Infantry proof (Score:5, Insightful)
Another way of thinking of the situation is like this: Is it better to have a piece of equipment that might break rather than having no equipment at all?
If the answer is "yes", then a stopgap solution like the one in the article needs to be deployed immediately. If the answer is "no, it would be worse than having nothing" then the troops should make due without.
Parent
Re:Infantry proof (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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It Is My Experience (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Apples & Oranges? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This goes to show that the Not Invented Here attitude of most government contractors is due to wanting to stretch out a contract rather than trying to make a more reliable design.
Re:Apples & Oranges? What if oranges are bette (Score:3, Informative)
Which is better: a theoretical device that has not been delivered, or a real device that may be unreliable?
There are many reasons why some military equipment should withstand such environmental stresses, but applying the same rules to all equipment makes little sense if the end result is that the US army does not readily have the e
Re:Apples & Oranges? (Score:5, Insightful)
I hear your line of commentary a lot. The experience of people who are there and who have been there is important, but everyone's individual experience is still just that - it doesn't give an overview, you may miss very important features of the situation that didn't occur where you are (and, of course, it leaves out the experiences of Iraqis). Asking your experiences to be taken seriously is important. Trying to quell discussion based on those experiences is wrong.
Parent
even for hard things, less seems more (Score:3, Interesting)
I once learned (or was taught) at a consortium if you (as a corporation) couldn't build a new major application/suite of applications in six months, you shouldn't do it. I think the message wasn't that if the task was more than six months it was too hard... the message (in my interpretation) was you should find a better way to get to your endpoint, i.e., in a business setting you had to be more "agile" (sorry).
I think this is even more true for this example. Bigger organizations (and they don't seem to get more bigger than the government, eh?) beget less ability to:
When lives are at stake it is even more/most glaring. It would be nice to see the government (whoever that is) take a lesson from this. However, different pieces of the government maintain a stranglehold grip on their turf and are generally loathe to loosen that grip.
Less is more, but it's hard to convince the more to let the less get 'er done.
I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-The-Legal-System! (Score:3, Interesting)
This is the entire problem with "cheap combat" (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This is the entire problem with "cheap combat" (Score:5, Insightful)
though this is yet another example of how damn effective gururla warfare is. the only time you tend to see terms like "dishonourable conduct" and "unfair tactics" is from the side that is not doing well.
if you don't buy that it is effective, consider that the enemy, armed with AK-47s, RPGs, high explosives, and dedication to their cause, are holding their own against what is likely the most expensive and advanced miltary in the world.
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Keep clapping. We'll see if you can save tinkerbell after all.
Re:This is the entire problem with "cheap combat" (Score:4, Insightful)
I suspect the same type of individuals will be responsible for our failure in the Middle East.
The fact is that the US military are totally incompetent to win the kind of war we are in.
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Re:This is the entire problem with "cheap combat" (Score:5, Insightful)
Traditional armies have been saying that about insurgents since at least the US war for independance. They didn't line up into neat rows and square off against British soldiers like they were expected to.
Of course it's effective. They are using the tactics that the Americans trained and equipped them to use against the Soviets. And, they were good at it -- you'll notice the Societs eventually gave up and went home.
It's a higly effective set of tactics.
Cheers
Parent
Re:This is the entire problem with "cheap combat" (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
gov't never as efficient as business (Score:5, Insightful)
the wrong question (Score:3, Interesting)
I think a better question is: "Are sprawling government projects and bureaucracy really necessary?
I wish we could. (Score:3, Insightful)
I've had so many negative experiences when dealing with governmental customers. While there is a lot of blame to be laid on the large companies, I can't fathom (or rather I don't want to) how much money has been wasted by people who really don't understand what they want, or how much it will cost to actually get what they want.
I've spent months doing work only to have it erased by the customer, worked another month, only to have them revert back to the origin. Only then do they discover that you can't just 'go back' once production has started without huge costs.
Or maybe they do understand it, but just don't care.
Gold Platting (Score:4, Insightful)
Just try cutting off the gravy train... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
CIA world factbook shows that Defense is 4.06% of GDP.
This page shows that Education is 5.7% of GDP.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/edu_edu_spe-educ ation-spending-of-gdp [nationmaster.com]
What that page doesn't show you us that the US GDP is 12tr$, so 5.7% is 648 BILLION dollars, or over $2k per year for every man, woman, and child in this country. When you consider the fraction of the 300m assumed population that actually receive public school instruction, and the m
Nope (Score:3, Informative)
No, because they don't have the political power to actually get large contracts. Their larger competitors will use their influence on legislators to get "written in" to large budget bills. Can you say, "No bid contract"? Their less scrupulous competitors will bribe legislators or military procurement. We've already seen this in Iraq with everything from oil and water, to flack jackets.
The most insidious tool that's used are the absurd design requirements documents. They set out an often completely unnecessary set of requirements that often only one company, or perhaps two very large companies can provide. This keeps any bidding process "under control". What will be delivered may not even meet those requirements, but only after years of delays, "best effort", and disappointment. The only good thing that seems to come out of the larger projects are the much derided "slush funds" that let individuals actually innovate without being put under this absurd process.
Why is it set up this way? Is there a better way with the Bureaucracy we have? Is tearing it down the way to go? Good questions. DARPA and some small programs try to fix this around the edges, but something with this much money in it will always draw the crooks.
NASA is subject to the same pitfalls. It just costs less money, and fewer people die.
Two problems: org size and gov't creativity (Score:3, Insightful)
The only time the government really beats out private industry (and to a greater extent, larger orgs beat out smaller ones) on new technology innovation is when it's a money issue (the materials really do cost billions of dollars). As technology has gotten cheaper and become more accessible, that advantage has slowly disappeared.
A larger issue than size, though, is that governments (most of them, this one in particular) tend to recruit homogenous workforces and encourage groupthink. Workers are encouraged (directly or through lack of promotions, harassment, etc.) to "fit in" at an institutional level. So, it's not surprising that the government is not as innovative as other places.
People lately are often heard saying that the US government doesn't "pay enough" to get good people. I dont know about you all, but I'd give up a little pay to work on interesting projects and with good people. The government's problem is that it doesn't -like- people who are creative, innovative, and different and actively selects them out - not the pay.
Think of the children (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a difference (Score:5, Funny)
It is not a "major war" (Score:5, Insightful)
article is an oversimplification (Score:5, Insightful)
I also can say that the big contractors are indispensable for some things. Lockheed Martin maintains and updates the monster that is Aegis, for example. David has no ability to do this. Maybe an army of Davids overseen by LockMart acting as lead integrator, but otherwise no.
The acquisition process has serious problems, don't get me wrong. But anecdotes don't make a good argument.
News of the Obvious (Score:3, Insightful)
It's news that a small group of committed individuals moves faster than Department of Defense procurement? Continental drift moves faster than Department of Defense procurement.
It can take decades for a new weapons system to go from concept to prototype to deployment. Look how long systems like the F-22 fighter [globalsecurity.org] were in the procurement pipe. The DoD procurement process is so lengthy that by the time the system is deployed, the threat it was designed to counter has often disappeared.
Rumsfeld's military (Score:3, Interesting)
An alternative explanation (Score:3, Interesting)
We, through our elected representatives, have not faced up to the fact that we're in the occupation and counter-insurgency business for the long term.
We've created a military with unprecedented tactical agility -- which doesn't help in this situation, as they trudge out on patrols and get picked off on the way back. We've equipped them so they are more lethal per person than any military in history -- which is downright harmful. What we can infer about this is that we want our guys to fly in, kick the shit out of anybody they have to, then get the hell out.
Rushing new technology into the hands of troop is les than ideal for many reasons. Nor should you need to do it if you anticipated how you'd be using the troops correctly. The first weeks of the Iraq war showed how well the troops were equipped, trained and structured for the ass kicking duties we thought we'd be using them for. The remainder showed how poorly we'd planned the aftermath; the intention was to be well out of there by now. We were assured that while nobody could predict how long it would take, that people who said it would take years were crazy or something.
The bottom line is the reason we are bogged down in Iraq isn't bureaucratic incompetence, it is strategic incompetence.
Blame the contractors and the politicians (Score:3, Insightful)
Face it ... the large military contractors (the Raytheons, the Halliburtons, the whomevers) are not rewarded for their innovations. They're rewarded, in units of large contracts for weapons systems with questionable necessity and dubious quality, for their contributions to the campaigns of the political leaders who control those contracts. Can you said "quid pro quo"? Sure you can. And the more impressive-sounding and more expensive the proposed weapons systems are, the more likely the funders get hard-ons for them.
Oh, yeah, and let's add in the concept of cost-plus contracts, where the contractors make more money the more they spend. There's no incentive to build anything for a reasonable cost, and no incentive not to keep piling on the extensions and overruns.
So simple things, like better body armor and better defense for humvees and the cheap electronic ID-things mentioned in the article, which aren't sexy (but save lives), don't get the attention of the Big Contractors nor their political funders.
I'm kinda surprised that Raytheon hasn't tried to stamp out the little guys ...
Re:A little hyperbole (Score:5, Insightful)
Those lousy Democrats sure are crafty...
Parent
Re:device not about saving lives (Score:4, Insightful)
1: a person who revolts against civil authority or an established government; especially : a rebel not recognized as a belligerent
2: one who acts contrary to the policies and decisions of one's own political party
Setting aside the legality of the occupation for a moment, the typical insurgent isn't defending his homeland, but more so fighting for his particular faction to gain control or power, doing whatever harm against others in relatiation for "being wronged" whether by United States or another competing faction.
The troops at this point aren't so much fighting a convential war, but rather working as an "industrial strength" version of a police force to stop one group from attacking the other and vice-versa, getting caught in the middle from "meddling" with each groups objectives. As a police force, they need the tools of a police force in order to locate and identify troublemakers and perform their investigations more efficiently. This is one example (of many) tools to function in this manner. Remember that the military is better equipped for fighting wars and not function as a domestic police force. Equipment like this would allow them to function better with their current mission as such.
Think of it this way for a moment: Would a city's police force be very effective if you took away all of their offender databases, mobile data terminals and other tech tools? Yes, you could equip them all with body armor and machine guns, but their effectiveness is then limited to "shoot first and ask questions later". If the police were only allowed to operate in this mode, it's no wonder that all sorts of uprisings and attacks would result.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What do you mean "were"?
I hate to have to clue the
Granted, there is no insurgency, there is no Iron Curtain nor any cold war any longer but the fact is that had the US and associated allies abandoned their posts in these nations after the ink on the peace treaties were signed there would have been another war the next day. While this occupat