NASA's Outsourced Computer People Are Even Worse Than You Might Expect (arstechnica.com) 252
Eric berger, writing for ArsTechnica: As part of a plan to help NASA "modernize" its desktop and laptop computers, the space agency signed a $2.5 billion services contract with HP Enterprise Services in 2011. According to HP (now HPE), part of the Agency Consolidated End-User Service (ACES) program the computing company would "modernize NASA's entire end-user infrastructure by delivering a full range of personal computing services and devices to more than 60,000 users." HPE also said the program would "allow (NASA) employees to more easily collaborate in a secure computing environment." The services contract, alas, hasn't gone quite as well as one might have hoped. This week Federal News Radio reported that HPE is doing such a poor job that NASA's chief information officer, Renee Wynn, could no longer accept the security risks associated with the contract. Wynn, therefore, did not sign off on the authority to operate (ATO) for systems and tools.A spokesperson for NASA said: "NASA continues to work with HPE to remediate vulnerabilities. As required by NASA policy, system owners must accomplish this remediation within a specified period of time. For those vulnerabilities that cannot be fully remediated within the established time frame, a Plan of Actions and Milestones (POAM) must be developed, approved, and tracked to closure."
Who would have guessed? (Score:5, Insightful)
EDS under a new name is the same old POS.
How do they get contracts? It's not like their incompetence isn't already legend.
The only thing they are competent at is marketing to government and fortune 500s.
Re:Who would have guessed? (Score:5, Informative)
Golf maybe?
>> It's not like their incompetence isn't already legend.
I took part in a state-wide effort to avoid hiring Accenture for some kind of state voting system about ten years, based on their demonstrated inability to complete that kind of project (they were getting sued by other governments during bidding) and their 3-4x run-up of costs at the same time. Guess what happened? The state hired Accenture anyway...got screwed with a system they couldn't use...and got charged about 3x what they were told. Unfortunately as I got older, I noticed that this happens all the time.
Re:Who would have guessed? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's called lobbying (aka bribery). You funnel lots of money into the campaigns, foundations, or libraries of powerful people (for example....Secretaries of State) and magically you get whatever you want. Big government contracts. Laws that hinder your competitors. Regulations that benefit you personally. Tax breaks. The list goes on and on and on...
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I wish someone could dig up some proof.
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I wish someone could dig up some proof.
I suspect there was some proof on an insecure mail server stashed somewhere away from FOIA requests, but since but the DOJ and the major news outlets have pledged fealty to the queen, we'll never know.
Did you know that over half the people who met with Clinton as Secretary of State (excluding government employees) had donated to her foundation? It could not be more blatant. Clearly we no longer have the level of civilization where that matters.
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Perhaps we can be satisfied with digging up the people who dared to dig up the proof?
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Hmmm... Then you won't remember it and will repeat it.
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They can get the contract because HP is both services and hardware all in one (minimal subcontractors) and they can claim "experience" from Navy-Marine Corps Internet (NMCI, see above AC post). The problem is the Navy and Marine Corps _hate_ NMCI for many reasons, and the network is still a playground for the Chinese and Russians while any"failures" result in EDS^H^H^H HP saying "you didn't pay us enough to do X". X is anything which is not something positive for HP, which means they can blame the Govt /
Re:Who would have guessed? (Score:5, Interesting)
The original NMCI contract expired and was replaced by NGEN.
Under NGEN, the government has full network infrastructure documentation and certain hardware assets.
While this particular problem has been addressed, HP got a sweetheart deal because they were basically a shoo-in. Precisely because Navy/USMC botched the original contract.
So while the government apparently learned from its mistakes, the Navy/USMC are stuck with HP for the next few years regardless.
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Keep in mind: small to medium companies are also terrible at maintaining security patch levels. This isn't just an issue with government contracts and fortune 500 companies. If you look at the headline breaches and vulnerability disclosures over the past few years, most of those were under internal IT departments even if the breach came in from another source. And how does a corporate IT department/contractor fix a vulnerability on a device where the manufacturer hasn't issued a patch and all comparable pr
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Found the shill.
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LOL. You forgot the / sarc dude.
Re:Who would have guessed? (Score:5, Interesting)
Accenture consistently drives high performance and has a history of satisfaction on projects for the worlds top organizations
No they have a history of bringing in piles of bodies that are only slightly more effective than a rotting corpse in the corner although the corpse may actually smell better.
What sets Accenture apart from the competition are its management.
Translation: We will blow more smoke up your ass than a stationary 2 stroke diesel Fairbanks engine with bad rings at load.
However Accenture Senior Management staff have shown consistently high levels of skill and communication.
See above a blowing smoke up your ass. Skills wise they suck harder than a black hole with daddy issues
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Hiring could be a revolving door with industry or whatever buzzword and acronym (see summary) generating criteria the industry uses - their management often isn't much better. Managers who poorly manage large projects still have that mystical experience. Same goes for the company.
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Because management doesn't listen to IT people, or even consult them about IT-related contracts. Instead, they imagine that they have all the knowledge and experience required to judge the merits of a proposal and end up selecting the one with the slickest marketing.
Re: Who would have guessed? (Score:4, Insightful)
IT people mostly suck, too. And there's this fallacy that people will actually deliver on contractual obligations; they won't. People that are good at spotting bullshit are usually marginalized as negative influences.
Re: Who would have guessed? (Score:5, Insightful)
People that are good at spotting bullshit are usually marginalized as negative influences.
I don't have that problem, so it's probably a question of how you identify BS or how you expose it up the chain.
The underlying issue is that you have to be right. If you call something out---even once---and it ends up doing what they wanted it for, then your credibility is shot.
There's an art to conveying uncertainty in regard to anything management wants.
I have never gotten a bad response from saying, "The suggested product does not have a perfect reputation, so here is an alternative if they can't deliver." And that alternative comes with a summary of the costs, functionality, and tradeoffs so he can justify the change if necessary.
The people I see marginalized as negative influences are the ones who talk shit about proposed solutions without offering one of their own. A business need can't go without a solution, so you're offering either a viable alternative or noise. And an alternative solution doesn't count if it can't check off all the major requirements, including the ones that might not be written down.
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Let me premise this by saying I'm in no way defending HPE, who I otherwise find to be competent in some areas, and total nitwits in others.
At each stage in the procurement process are opportunities to screw things up. They often start at the needs analysis and systems analysis point that provides motivation for change. People aren't visionary and don't think well for five years down the road. Add in people that are looking for retirement plans, or who are plainly scared to try something new, or go out on a
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They are highly competent at getting contracts (Score:5, Interesting)
>How do they get contracts? It's not like their incompetence isn't already legend.
They are very good at what they do - they get contracts. They handle thousands of pages of government forms, years of meetings, and of course donating to the right organizations.
I was a contractor for a company which did most of the on-site work for HP, called TCML. HP's competence was getting government contracts. TCML's competence was finding and contracting somewhat competent techs. My competence was with servers, switches, desktops, etc.
I'm not competent at preparing a XYX-7273-HDH-98(b) package for a federal RFP. HP isn't competent at upgrading a router.
Yes. Reading/writing 1,000 page proposal is work (Score:3)
> All the money is taken off the top and the real work is done for a skilled-labourer wage.
True, for government contracts a small percentage of the money goes to people with screwdrivers in hand. ALSO, the people reading and writing 1,000 page documents are doing work. It would certainly be good if we could eliminate some of that work, but it's real work that is required by the federal processes.
Most of these requirements were created to encourage fairness of one kind or another. I personally can go b
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Just wait until EDS+CSC , a black hole of IT despair.
Re:Who would have guessed? (Score:5, Interesting)
Government procurement contracts pretty much preclude the government obtaining goods and services on the open market. Instead it must rely to a large degree on contractors and vendors who have the capability of handling all the special paperwork and requirements.
So if you're on a procurement committee you don't have much choice. Once you discard the vendors who (a) can't absorb the amount of money to be spent on schedule and (b) jump through the statutory federal contractor hoops, what you're left with is a rogues gallery of usual suspects.
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EDS under a new name is the same old POS.
ZOMG that brings back horrible memories of NMCI. That was like the worst elements of outsourcing combined with the worst elements of in-house management. It would have been difficult to deliberately design a less functional system.
Not surprising (Score:5, Informative)
I worked for them. They have Linux HA failover setup on single network cable going to the same switch from both nodes. And then they debate why both nodes became master. When it was pointed out by me they stonewall and bounce between teams like engineering vs server ops. Nothing gets done. Engineering is a joke, they only know how to install linux from a CD. No tuning at all. SAN storage, where do I start. They recruit kids who got certifications, who use production as learning platform.
Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Informative)
Yup, I knew some of those kids while I worked in Albuquerque. HP would poach some of our greenest and youngest people.
Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
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So it has not changed from the time I worked there.
HPE is a joke, I would be willing to bet that these vulnerabilities are considered out of contract and remediation will be billed as T&M
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That's nothing. To save costs they collocated backup systems in the same physical facility with the main systems for many Navy east cost services.
Guess what happened?:
http://static.dvidshub.net/media/pubs/pdf_6736.pdf (link to an issue of "The Flagship", Vol 18, #19)
We (Navy) lost a lot of expensive data as a result..
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Engineering is a joke, they only know how to install linux from a CD.
So you are saying they are more competent than a standard MCSE cert holder then.
This is why (Score:5, Informative)
If you make widgets, be a widget engineer or a widget assembler or a widget repairman.
Support staff is easily outsourced or replaced and you wind up bouncing from job to job and being cut any time your pay nears a livable level. If you work at N
ASA, have something to do with rocket launches or exploration and you'll be fine. IT? Not so much.
Re:This is why (Score:5, Insightful)
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Within 2-3 years you'll pay will have advanced only joke 1-3% amounts while new hires will make as much or more than you.
I turned down a job when I ran into an old coworker during an interview. He was still making the same amount of money that I made when we worked together nine years earlier. If I had accepted the position, I would had made 80% more money than him for doing the same kind of work. Those 2% raises don't add up over the long run.
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At a minimum, getting an offer letter for a higher salary lets you negotiate more money than you'd otherwise get from simply going through a regular annual review.
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"To be fair, any number is a potential fraction."
How to show you wrong in one word: Pi.
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Re:This is why (Score:5, Insightful)
The nice thing about IT work is that all sectors need IT workers.
So you don't have to restrict yourself to one market sector.
Some sectors pay more than others.
For me, it is always a trade off between freedom and burdensome restrictions.
Usually, the bigger the company, the more you can get paid as an IT worker and the less you need to know. However, you also have much less freedom to drive company policy or to even do your job (or what you view to be your job).
OTOH, the smaller the company, the less money you make as salary but the perks may be bigger (retirement, medical insurance, free parking, etc) and you have more freedom to involve yourself in more things (wear more hats). However, the work is harder and you need to know more.
I personally like the smaller companies. I don't make as much as my peers, but I do get to do a lot more interesting things on a daily basis.
Re:This is why (Score:5, Informative)
Support staff is easily outsourced or replaced and you wind up bouncing from job to job and being cut any time your pay nears a livable level.
As an IT support contractor for 20+ years, I currently make $50,000+ per year and live in Silicon Valley.
Re:This is why (Score:5, Informative)
50K is crap in SV
Re:This is why (Score:4, Insightful)
50K is crap in SV
Not if you're living a modest lifestyle. The mistake that most people make is chasing the American Dream: big houses, big cars, big toys, big women, big kids. That gets expensive in Silicon Valley.
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Sorry dude, 50K is crap in Sacramento. It's a small piece of crap in SV.
Nobody should work hell desk for 20 years. If I couldn't find something better (pro mechanic?), I'd open my veins..
You are getting too old to live like an undergrad.
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Sorry dude, 50K is crap in Sacramento.
Are you kidding? I could get a three-bedroom house in Sacramento for what I pay for a studio apartment in Silicon Valley. If I moved out to Placerville, I could get a nice cabin with a deck above the snowline and watch the football-sized squirrel run around.
Nobody should work hell desk for 20 years.
I've done software testing, help desk, data center, PC refresh projects and, currently, computer security. I'm studying for my InfoSec certifications. Next job should be $100K per year.
If I couldn't find something better (pro mechanic?), I'd open my veins..
When God hands out lemons, do you make lemonade or suck your lemons?
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Rents are _crazy_ these days. You might find a 3 br place in DPH for that. Perhaps a 2br in the tweaked out parts of Orangevale, North Highlands or S Sac.
Placerville has truly gone insane, it's a bedroom community for Folsom. Anything commutable is _expensive_.
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But when people say they live "in silicon valley" it normally means you cannot pay the rent on a small place with $50,000 per year.
I live in San Jose and work in Palo Alto. Last time I checked, it was the heart of Silicon Valley.
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Some people like the position they have currently and don't want to change/climb higher in the pay rank.
I'm studying for my InfoSec certifications, as that is my current position in government IT. When the contract expires in three years, I'll make the jump to $100K with a new job.
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Except this is what is wrong with IT Security. People with papers without any actual experience doing the work.
I got 20+ years of IT experience and A+/Network+/MCP certifications from 15 years ago. My current job is computer security. I'm two years into a five year contract in government IT.
[...] a bunch of inexperienced, overpaid paper hangers [...]
Most people who get certifications don't know that they're supposed to get certified AFTER they get the experience.
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Ahh can't fault the guy. Some people like the position they have currently and don't want to change/climb higher in the pay rank. I work with a couple of people who've been on the IT help desk for 18, 19 years and that's what they'll stay at because they just feel like it. More power to them. I'd rather keep learning/trying to climb higher.
50k is fine, but Joe is right. In Si Valley, you'd have to live in a dump w/ that pay
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How's the cardboard box you're living in going? I figure that's about all you're going to afford in the Bay Area at that salary rate...
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How's the cardboard box you're living in going? I figure that's about all you're going to afford in the Bay Area at that salary rate...
I rent a 470-sft studio apartment for $1,466 per month. I've been here for 11 years.
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aka a cardboard box. Especially since most people with 20 years in a career have a kid or two (though likely not most who pay close to half their net salary to rent a studio apartment).
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Especially since most people with 20 years in a career have a kid or two [...]
Each kid costing $250K to raise from birth to college.
[...] (though likely not most who pay close to half their net salary to rent a studio apartment).
A studio apartment, no. A three-bedroom house that they can't afford, absolutely.
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Err, so about half your take-home is for rent?
Less than half. I put away 20% in savings.
That's some poverty-level shit right there.
Poverty-level shit is owning a house with an underwater mortgage, still paying off the down payment borrowed from the wife's 401k plan, leasing two or three cars, and buying $180 blue jeans. That's my brother and his family. He's rich, I'm poor. But only one of us can afford to retire — and it ain't him.
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Wow. That male prostitution business must be going very well.
I'm not in management. ;)
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Support staff is easily outsourced or replaced and you wind up bouncing from job to job and being cut any time your pay nears a livable level.
As an IT support contractor for 20+ years, I currently make $50,000+ per year and live in Silicon Valley.
Surely you jest.
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I believe you just made the point.
Making a living from IT support? Absolutely.
You can polish a turd... (Score:2)
Outsourcing vs Inhouse (Score:5, Insightful)
If you outsource, you get what you pay for .. maybe.
If you keep it in house, you get what you pay for .. maybe.
The problem isn't outsourcing, it is leadership that is incapable of articulating needs correctly. Or even make a decision without having to have 18 meetings with people who don't give a rip and don't know anything.
Re:Outsourcing vs Inhouse (Score:5, Interesting)
Or even make a decision without having to have 18 meetings with people who don't give a rip and don't know anything.
When I becane an IT manager, I instituted a "two meeting" rule. The first meeting to broach and issue and discuss it, and the second meeting to complete the discussion and make a decision.
This enraged people, who wanted multiple meetings spread out over weeks. Great way to avoid accountability but I wouldn't allow it. So people then started coming to me individually, post-decision, trying to get me to reconsider or have another meeting.
Sorry. I would rather have risked a sub-optimal decision than have no decision at all---- and the additional dozen meetings very likely would have resulted in something worse, not better.
I only lasted a few years in that job. Too counter-culture. (I also --- gasp --- got rid of subordinate managers who weren't getting the job done.)
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I've seen this myself. The "Leaders" who can't make a decision. The ones I've seen, are trying to avoid responsibility for decisions, and passing those off to an "unknown" committee, they can't be held responsible for the bad decisions because ... they didn't make that decision. OR worse, wait for the last possible moment to decide, and find out ... the decision was already made (incorrectly) or it was actually too late to make a difference (fix the dike after it is flooding).
I call it the "Accountability a
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The problem isn't outsourcing, it is leadership that is incapable of articulating needs correctly.
This, and the tendency for company leadership to feel outsourcing means they can offload all responsibility for project success. This is especially true when consultants are brought in for a project when in house staff has no expertise in one or more major aspects of the project. It's as if management believes an advisory role also includes ensuring overall project success.
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OR, in our case, spend $150K on "Consultants" to review and document our department's recommendation and put it in a TPS Report that nobody reads. Basically duplicating what our Department recommended, because we are too stupid to know what we are talking about.
You can read some interesting anecdotes of how people get around people who have to add their $.02 worth to every decision, just to seem important.
http://programmers.stackexchan... [stackexchange.com]
Re: Outsourcing vs Inhouse (Score:2)
"The customer('s management) couldn't provide requirements" is the excuse of incompetent contractors out to bleed the client dry. The customer almost never has very clear or necessarily realistic requirements -- if they knew enough to create those, they'd probably be able to do the work in-house. Good contractors need to be good at eliciting requirements, and be able to build a set of requirements that will support at least a minimum viable product.
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As someone who doesn't work as a contractor, this seems like an oversimplification to me. While its probably true for a small system, for large scale systems that approach is likely to result in a system that doesn't do what the customer needs it to.
The second half of this is of course that people make things too complicated, every business or agency isn't a special snowflake. Requirements get tacked on for arbitrary and political (in the case of NASA both internal and public politics) reasons that aren't r
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I once worked on a project, where the customer was quite clear about the requirements, and I created a system that fit the requirements perfectly, and probably better than intended. The problem was, they didn't like how it functioned, even though it did exactly what it was they asked for.
Basically I took a database TXT field that held a date, and converted it to a date field, so they could sort by date. But they didn't want a date field with MM/DD/YYYY (or variation of that format) they just wanted MM/YYYY
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And the constant repeating of completely bone-headed decisions that weren't right 10 years ago and aren't right now (T&M versus fixed price - I'm looking at you ;-)
The old adage: "you can't outsource a problem" springs to mind. For people to actually 'get it' though, they have to understand what their problem is. It's almost never the individual techies that do the grunt work.
This is a shame for Nasa though - they ought to be a major force in all things to do with space, and shouldn't be in the news for
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'nobody working for the govrnment has any talent'
I am a libertarian. I would not say "nobody" (an absolute) has talent. That being said, you make a strong strawman argument!
I am convinced, that that there are enough incompetent or evil people in government that it makes it impossible to dodge all the raindrops. The problem with Government Employees that suck, that are incompetent, that are evil is that it is virtually impossible to rid them from the system. They exist, they remain, and everyone knows a few that cannot be fired.
The reason you outsource in
Insider Info (Score:5, Informative)
I worked at one of the NASA research centers when this contract was awarded. During the Due Diligence phase, HPE didn't even send a representative to our facility, and at other sites the reps were there for one day. We were incredulous; at our site alone there are 3,000+ people and a complex IT infrastructure. How can you do proper due diligence for a multi-billion dollar contract without even visiting the IT environment your going to be taking over, or talking with existing staff and customers?
Lockheed also competed for this contract and lost. (Lockheed was the incumbent on the expiring ODIN contract, and some of us suspected bias against Lockheed because of this.) Lockheed contested the contract award, which is something that is rarely done because you don't want to burn bridges with the government, and the United States government is Lockheed's customer for about 99% of all corporate revenue. Lockheed's position was something like, "you can't be serious! HPE has no idea what they are doing!" But NASA was insistent that they wanted HPE. It's been pure IT hell at NASA ever since.
MORE: During implementation, we found out that HPE's plan was to have a single HPE employee at our location! Any other staff would be outsourced or done via remote desktop sessions.
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I worked at one of the NASA research centers when this contract was awarded. During the Due Diligence phase, HPE didn't even send a representative to our facility...
Because they knew it was a done deal. Palms greased, rounds of golf done, prostitutes paid.
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"Because they knew it was a done deal. Palms greased, rounds of golf done, prostitutes paid."
Don't think so. I've been on my dose of these procurements and usually, no, they are not taken for granted. It really depends on the contract but you don't do (percieved) due diligence for two reasons:
1) Since you are not sure about winning the contract, pre-sales costs are a problem since you don't know if you'll recoup them, so you save them on on-site techs in order to expend on "hooks and booze" -which usually
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EDS was just as crappy when I was working at JSC under CSOC back in 03...I remember us getting moved to a new room with a raised floor that hadn't been used in a while...come to find out there was nearly 100k in fiber spools just sitting there no one even knew about.
The problems begin with the letters H and P... (Score:4, Informative)
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NASA quote low bids (Score:4, Interesting)
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I don't know who stole from who, but during the telecast of the first space shuttle launch, a camera went live on Walter Cronkite when he wasn't expecting it, and he mused: "It must be a sobering thought to those brave astronauts, seated atop several million pounds of high-energy explosive, to realize that its contained in a vehicle built by a lowest bidder."
I noticed years later when I watched a documentary about the shuttle program, that line had been cut.
But outsourcing is wonderful! (Score:3)
Yeah, everyone who works for the government is incompetent, and business is *always* competent, and libertidiots are *sure* of this.
Btw, I work for a federal contractor, and I know as a matter of fact, not opinion, that my salary and benefits are comparable to the GS level I'd be at (well... except for, say, if the government shuts down, for Republicans, or snow, or whatever, I either have to make it up, burn vacation time, or take it without pay)... AND our tax dollars are not only being spent to pay me, but also my direct manager, and his manager, and so on up, and, oh, yes, however could I have forgotten, for my company to make a good profit.
See? So much saved money..... At least, I, and the folks I work with, actually know what we're doing.
mark
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Who is incompetent here?
The company that gets paid or the government that puts out contracts and never gets value?
If it was only one government contractor that was incompetent, you could blame them, but it's all of them. Government doesn't know what the fuck it's doing.
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everyone who works for the government is incompetent, and business is *always* competent, and libertidiots are *sure* of this
How about: Governmental bureaucracies generally reward tenure over competence, and competitive businesses generally reward competence over tenure (for businesses where competition is reduced or eliminated through cozying up to governmental bureaucracies, all bets are off). Only those desperate to continue sucking off the governmental tit or otherwise sticking their heads in the sand pretend to doubt this.
AND our tax dollars are not only being spent to pay me, but also my direct manager, and his manager, and so on up
You can't honestly believe that governmental bureaucracies aren't filled with endless layers of middle
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Found the problem: (Score:2)
Someone hired HP to do work?
Must be nice to have no budget accountability. (Score:2)
If I told my boss that I wanted to revamp our end user infrastructure for the low cost of $40K per user, I would probably be told to go home until I sobered up.
Thank you (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:3)
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True. They are not going to shut down their services or stop paying anyone because of this. They will simply not approve any of the tools for use until then. Which means they use the old stuff, or nothing at all, until the approvals are made. Since I doubt they plan on attempting to cancel the contract, this just means that NASA is fucked and HPE puts some project management monkeys on writing the paperwork. And the approvals will eventually come, whether or not the actual issues are fixed, just so tha
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And when the POAM is being tracked, and things aren't getting fixed .... oh, wait, *I* know, we'll put together a Selected Hurdles Integration and Testing Facility Engineering System Template to make sure the problems get resolved.
The deal is that once you've spent big money, you just can't back out and save face. They need a new leader, brought in from the outside, to shred the contract and tell HPE to go away.
The US gov tried their best (Score:3)
What went wrong in the 1980-90's with the post German generations of US gov staff testing?
Top US universities educated many of the worlds best graduates based academic merit over the decades.
Did all the great people go to the private sector, starving the US gov of needed skills? Did the NRO make a better offer to the very top % considering gov work?
Who or what is holding back the best US graduates from finding top jobs and working on gov projects that once had effortless internal institutional support?
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> Who or what is holding back the best US graduates from finding top jobs
Their money expectations combined with the stupidity of management that thinks everyone is interchangeable so why not just hire cheap H1Bs. The thing is, you get what you pay for.
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Have you ever worked a government job?
Top grads have their choice. Why would they want to work for a bureaucratic nightmare where promotions are handed out based on ethnic victimhood status combined with seniority?
Many managers in the private sector are almost as incompetent as government ones, but it's still a much better place to be.
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I think another factor is that in private industry, you can jump around pretty easily if you're any good at all. Tired of the horrible upper management at your company? No problem, just start interviewing and get a new job. Your company drives itself into the ground (or just your division)? No problem, just go find a new job. Your pay is stagnant, and/or you're tired of the incompetence or the IT infrastructure at your job? Start looking. Of course, getting a new job isn't *that* easy, but in a tech
Example of something working? (Score:2)
As much as the MCT will be what gets us to Mars, just as likely it will be because NASA will be hobbled by bureaucracy, bad tools and lack of vision.
Here's one example (Score:2)
Grumman was won the contract to make the F-14 Tomcat, but that was in 1970. I can't think of any recent examples.
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I can think of a few more: the A-10 Thunderbolt II ("Warthog"), and a couple of WWII bombers. Not to mention various other airplanes made during the 50s-60s which are now retired. Back then, it seems they were able to go from a vague idea to an excellent military aircraft design in full production in 4 years, back when design had to be done on paper/vellum rather than CAD. These days it takes 15 years and the final product has all kinds of problems.
Outsourcing never works (Score:2)
Outsourcing a national security risk? Shock! (Score:2)
NOT!
Anyone who's not a moron or a well bribed congresscritter or defense contractor has figured out that getting people in foreign countries involved in American technology with military operations is a huge vulnerability.
Think China or Russia buy mass quantities of military hardware and software from the USA? Surprise answer. Almost none.
Guess why?
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