In my last post, I claimed that the government didn't do any work - they just contracted everything out. Well, that's not quite true - any work that gets done well is contracted out. But there are some things the government itself must do; some roles are designated as "inherently governmental", a term that like the Supreme Court's definition of pornography, doesn't have a precise definition but you'll know it when you see it.
For example, the government hires government employees. Consider the conflict of interest implications if a contractor did the hiring. Similarly, in developing new weapons and systems, the government's job is to define what they want, describe the capabilities and other operational parameters, and then manage the contracting process to get what it wants. And that's the problem.
Around about 1996 or 1997, Norm Augustine, the former Chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin, talked to a small group of us about why the government procurement process is so inefficient, and his answer stuck with me. As technology progresses faster and faster, the government can't effectively describe what it wants; the technology has progressed beyond the point that those not actively a part of that technology can't describe it. And if the government is able to put some type of Operational Requirements Document together, the capabilities called for are obsolete. Contractors have to re-tool their current processes and hire people that remember how things were done in the old days. And that's unnecessarily
more expensive and time consuming.
In my book, Finnegan, COL Harvey and their respective organizations confront and deal with this dilemma.
By the way, the other thing that Mr. Augustine told us that has stuck with me referenced the military's initial efforts to embrace Cybersecurity. He reiterated that the military didn't really know what it wanted or how to describe the capabilities it sought; Mr. Augustine remarked that if the military was really serious about understanding how Cybersecurity really works, it ought to intern some of it's brightest officers with industry's most capable practitioner - the on-line porn industry.
As I recall, there were absolutely no volunteers.
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