It's true. It used to be the engineers were the ones acknowledged, interviewed and the techies managed the engineering projects, rightly so, because they knew what's going on.

Now techies have been marginalized, where you get the "CEO" as "speaker" as if just anyone can design this stuff.

It's no wonder the United States technology edge is declining and somehow I don't think "social networking" is up there with the invention of the transistor or getting a rocket to the moon.

At first when I drew this connection I said to myself, "no, surely there wasn't that much advanced thought put into this." Then I realized that they gave Von Braun the bum's rush to get him out of the way in NASA's contracting, which was remarkably easy probably due to his background in Germany during WW2. What has always amazed me about the shuttle program is how such a huge failure could be spun into a success. The shuttle met none of its performance goals and kept us from going beyond low Earth orbit for 30+ years. The one proposed version of the shuttle that would have fixed that, shuttle-c, was never accepted by NASA who had fully invested themselves into the story that we've been to the Moon and there's nothing of value there (how convenient). On the down side, the Chinese no longer believe that crap, but we still have no lauch system that will get us back to the Moon.

In the DoD world contractors had been getting reimbursed for their development costs since the C-5 program in the late '60s and it became common place throughout the '70s and '80s. It was not until late 1993 or early 1994 that DoD contracts paid profit on development, which coincided with Ben Rich's retirement from the Skunk Works in December of 1990.

Very interesting take on this. I have not heard of this before.

It is unfortunate that so many organizations dedicated to stopping waste, fraud, and abuse remain convinced what is wrong with the defense industry involves illegal activity. While they waste their time looking for the illegal fraud that does exist to some limited extent, they miss the vast majority of the waste by not looking at how the legal procurement system works and has been manipulated through legal means by lobbyists and campaign donations. This is a case where there is no smoking gun held by a nefarious character who has done this to us. Instead it has been a group of people working to further their own self interests that have caused such damage to how our weapons are developed and procured. Generally I think these people have done this while convinced they were also doing what was best for their country, though their morals have been very short sighted.

"Every generation has its own milestone," Zhang Yanzhong, the aircraft's chief engineer, told state media last year. "We've already accomplished [nuclear weapons and satellites], the Three Gorges Dam and manned space exploration. Now the big-jet project is the next milestone."

The aircraft's builders are so confident, the first "9" in the jetliner's name was picked because it sounds like "forever" in Chinese.

China is already a major assembler and parts supplier for some of the world's best-known aircraft. Airbus' A320s reach their final assembly in the northern port city of Tianjin. Half of Boeing's fleet of 12,000 airplanes includes components made in China. About 600,000 Chinese workers are employed in aerospace, about as many as in the United States. -- LA Times

Our government spends twice as much on defense as the rest of the world combined, has hiked the amout the DoD spends on contractors by a factor of 2 in the last decade, meanwhile hiring of Americans in the defense sector is at an all time low. Clearly many of our defense sector dollars and jobs are finding their way to China. If Americans are so stupid they think we can remain a free nation while outsourcing our most stratigically critical jobs to Communist China, then perhaps they are too stupid to be saved from themselves.

This letter released as a blog post from CounterPunch.org makes an excellect case for the need for defense reform:

[O]ver the last decade, the Navy budget received $293 billion more than the baseline of spending in 2000 anticipated (adjusted for inflation). Seen another way, the 2011 Navy's "base" budget, which does not include spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is 44 percent higher than it was in 2000. Yet the size of the Navy's combat fleet went down in this period, from 318 ships and submarines to 287 - a decline of 10 percent. This is not a smaller, newer fleet; it is a smaller, older fleet - about four years older, on average, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). It is also less ready to fight: for the past year the press has repeatedly reported on severe maintenance problems throughout the fleet, and Navy combat pilot training in the air has remained at historic lows.

The situation in the Air Force is worse. It received $320 billion more than the base budget levels anticipated in 2000 and increased by 2011 by 43 percent. During the same 2000-2011 period, the number of active and reserve fighter and bomber squadrons went from 146 to 72, a decline of 51 percent. According to CBO, our combat air fleet is now about nine years older than in 2000 - an historic high average age of about 23 years. Fighter pilot in-air training hours today are one-half to one-third of what they were in the 1970s, an era not noted for high readiness.

The Army received a $297 billion budget plus-up, a 53 percent increase. In this case, the combat forces did increase; the number of brigade combat teams grew from 44 to 46, an increase of 5 percent. A 53 percent budget increase bought a 5 percent increase in combat forces. But CBO tells us that major Army equipment inventories are mostly older, and in 2006, the House Armed Services Committee held hearings and leaked a memo documenting historic lows in the readiness of active Army units. The analysis has not been publicly updated, but we should worry that it has gotten worse.

There is no mystery why the increased spending has led to shrinking, aging hardware inventories. New weapons systems cost three to ten times more to buy and operate than the weapons they are replacing. Even if their budgets could grow steadily at five percent per year (over and above inflation), the cost explosion in new weapons dooms the military services to being unable to buy as many weapons as they had - hence the shrinking hardware inventories. Because they can buy so few new planes, tanks or ships, they extend the life of the old ones - hence the aging.

At $707 billion, the defense budget is today higher in than it has ever been since the end of World War II, even when the effects of 65 years of inflation are removed. This spending level is unrelated to the military threat. During the Cold War, from 1948 to 1990, when we faced the sizeable forces of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, annual Pentagon spending averaged $440 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars, (and that includes the effects of the Korean and Vietnam wars). Today, big spending advocates point to China, with a defense budget variously estimated at from $80 to $180 billion per year, as the future threat we must prepare against. But, if we add the highest available defense budget estimates for China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Cuba and then double that sum, the Pentagon still spends more. As to the threat of terrorism, we almost certainly spend more in one day than al Qaeda, the Taliban and all their affiliates spend in an entire year.

Despite Secretary of Defense Robert Gates' efforts to cancel or redo several weapon programs that were over cost and under-performing, the number of major defense acquisition programs has changed from 91 programs costing $1.6 trillion to 87 programs costing $1.6 trillion. As you know, Secretary Gates has also imposed a plan on the DOD bureaucracy to transfer internally $102 billion dollars over 5 years, but there is no net savings to help the deficit.

Instead, Secretary Gates wants the DOD budget to grow one percent per year plus inflation for the next 10 years. That would increase the base DOD budget from $554 in 2010 to $735 billion in 2020 - a 33 percent increase, not including any spending for the wars against terrorism. While the Co-Chairs' Proposal seeks a number of terminations, reductions, and efficiencies beyond the Gates' plan (many of them welcome and overdue, but some that we believe require major modification), both the Co-Chairs Proposal and the Gates' plan project into the future a defense program that is essentially the same as that we have today, simply at different spending levels. Under either plan, the size and modernity of our forces will continue to shrink and age, even if all remaining programs are implemented without any cost increases or schedule delays.

We believe there is a path that meets the goals of deficit reduction and strengthens real national defense. That path needs to start with the acknowledgement of a need for fundamental reform. -- Counter Punch

Unfortunately their recommendations regarding what to do to reform defense fall flat. The authors of this letter seem to believe that an application of tighter accounting standards would pencil whip our problems away. While I have no doubt that better accounting standards would be helpful, they won't fix the root of our current problems, which is the payment of profit on the design and development of weapons. That is both the cause of why programs drag on and typically go up in cost to the tune of single or double digit multiples of their quoted development costs. Many times the increase in development costs are masked by a huge reduction in weapons bought. Which do you think will keep you safer, a paper design or an actual weapon?

On the up side, though, this letter also supports some of what I was saying regarding the power wielded even by some of our retired weapons designers. You'll notice this name in the signature block:

Pierre M. Sprey
a key designer of the F-16 & A-10
defense career started: 1956
pierre[at]mapleshaderecords[dot]com

Imagine if Kelly Johnson or Werner Von Braun were to weigh in on the fiasco we call our defense procurement system today? Congress would have no choice but to do something. The problem has been, every time they've done "something" in the past, they've only made things worse, not better. It is clearly time to undo some of what they've done, before it is too late.