SpaceNews reports that Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced that Jeff Bezos and Neil deGrasse Tyson will join the Defense Innovation Advisory Board.
Carter has asked the board to identify private-sector practices that the Pentagon could adopt. A first round of recommendations is expected in October.
The full list of current board members is:
· Eric Schmidt, executive chairman, Alphabet Inc.
· Jeff Bezos, president, chairman and CEO, Amazon Inc.
· Adam Grant, professor, Wharton School of Business
· Danny Hillis, computer theorist & co-founder, Applied Inventions
· Reid Hoffman, co-founder, LinkedIn, and partner, Greylock Partners
· Walter Isaacson, president & CEO, Aspen Institute, former TIME magazine editor and Steve Jobs biographer
· Eric Lander, president and founding director, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
· Marne Levine, chief operating officer, Instagram
· J. Michael McQuade, senior vice president for science and technology, United Technologies
· William McRaven, chancellor, University of Texas System
· Milo Medin, vice president, Access Services, Google Capital
· Richard Murray, professor, California Institute of Technology
· Jennifer Pahlka, founder, Code for America
· Cass Sunstein, professor, Harvard Law School
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Thursday July 28 2016, @05:33AM
Having worked in defense acquisition, I can only say: weed whack the bureaucracy. Specifically:
- Write simple contracts with black-and-white requirements.
- Get rid of most procurement regulations, especially idiotic things like awarding contracts based on race and gender
- Remove Congressional approval of individual programs (which leads to subcontracts chosen by Congressional district, so that Congress can collect its pork)
- Eliminate 90% of the personnel managing defense contracts (you don't need them if you have simple contracts, simple regulations and fewer politics).
- Oh and finally: eliminate the revolving door.
None of this will happen, of course. Congress won't voluntarily give up its pork. And the defense bureaucracy won't do anything to streamline itself - Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy is far too entrenched.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.