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from the with-great-power-comes-great-responsibility dept.
The main reason why the U.S. military can promote global peace is because of the aura of invincibility it gained in World War II, because of the end of the Cold War, and because of its overwhelming military spending and technological advantage. But an aura of invincibility is a dangerous thing. And unfortunately, there are signs of rot.
Today, the U.S. military has fallen under the Bureaucracy Rule. The U.S. has no great power rivals, and thank God for that. Iraq and Afghanistan have not caused an identity crisis for the U.S. military because many senior commanders view these as "freakshow" wars — counterinsurgency wars, not the kind of "real" wars that militaries fight.
What are the signs that an organization has become a bureaucracy?
The first is excessive PowerPoint. Every organization should ban PowerPoint ( http://theweek.com/audio/442552/ban-powerpoint ). But it has become particularly endemic in the military ( http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html?_r=0 ).
The fact that the new Defense secretary has banned PowerPoint from some senior briefings is a step in the right direction ( http://www.forbes.com/sites/pascalemmanuelgobry/2015/02/23/the-war-on-powerpoint-in-the-military-continues/ ).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 01 2015, @03:28AM
I work as a civilian employee of the DoD and I can tell you that your take on this is bullshit. While deficits are not good, the real problem is lack of a budget. Every year the President and Congress are supposed to come up with a budget for the federal government. I came into the DoD full-time in 2009. I have yet to see our working group have a budget that we could count on to make long-term decisions. We have been constantly bombarded with politically motivated fiscal crises (sequestration, continuing resolution authority budget extensions, threats of government shut down, etc.) which hamper our ability to work effectively. We do not get whatever money we want. There are constraints aplenty on our spending. All too often the reality is that a political crisis creates uncertainty in our funding which makes long-term decisions difficult or impossible. When the money is finally released after months of delay, we are required to spend it all in a few weeks time or risk losing it. While I have sat through my share of awful PP presentations, the real crisis is political gridlock in Washington. But solving that would mean politicians having to make hard decisions on which programs in the Pentagon's portfolio need to be killed. Just my view from the trenches.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 01 2015, @03:47AM
I work as a civilian employee of the DoD and I can tell you that your take on this is bullshit. While deficits are not good, the real problem is lack of a budget.
Ah but it does prove my point. You have enough budget to hire a bunch of contractors. That cant do anything because they can not finish what they started. You get plenty of budget for people. But no real proper budget to finish. There is NO finish.
Your job is not to finish a product. But to make sure money is moved into your contracts firm. That is done by billable hours and process change. Notice how they do not outright hire anyone? Yet you work with other contractors?
But solving that would mean politicians having to make hard decisions on which programs in the Pentagon's portfolio need to be killed.
Neither party would dare do that to their own projects. Yet are quite willing to put up someone elses project to be killed. So you end up with thousands of zombie projects like what you work on. Because the 'budget is not big enough... see we can not finish'...
You do not end up with trillions of debt in one day. You end up there with poor decision after poor decision. Those decisions are designed to help political buddies.
My point is the deficit is the biggest threat to national security. Exactly for reasons you pointed out as well. Nothing is getting done yet trillions are spent.
the real crisis is political gridlock in Washington
Yet another symptom not the problem. The problem is straight up corruption and graft. You are not probably directly involved. But you are a pawn to help pull it off. Your job is to make it look like there is not enough people to finish...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 01 2015, @09:07AM
Again, you speak out of your ass.
Actually, no. One of our big problems right now is hiring new people. The last two civilian employees of the government working for our group each took well over a year to work through the hiring process. In each case, we nearly lost them because the process moves on geological time scales. And we could really use several more new people. Forget about hiring contractors through creation of a new contract. That takes even longer and is a paperwork nightmare. No one in our group has anything good to say about our local contracting department.
Actually, this is one of the things that does work. We do know how to keep contractors accountable to complete their contracts. Hint: when the government program manager has the power to cut the funding to a contract on a moment's notice, this makes contractors super attentive to their wishes.
Stop pretending that you know the status of the projects I work on. You don't. This just makes you look presumptuous.
In many cases, it is not because the budget isn't big enough. We do know how to come up with realistic budgets. More often than not, it is a matter of execution of the budget in a timely manner because of manufactured fiscal crises. For the last several years we actually have not had a budget. Instead we have been operating under CRA almost from the time I was first hired, which makes long-term planning all but impossible.
Look, I realize that this is a favourite talking point on Fox News, but it misses the point. The deficit issue is a solvable problem, but it requires that politicians grow a backbone. The real issue is corruption and cowardice among our political leaders. The result is that no one wants to make the hard choices which will actually balance the budget. The money is there; it just needs to be spent wisely.
Well, I'm not sure I would say nothing is getting done. The process is horribly inefficient right now and too often this is due to politically manufactured crises. Too often decisions are being made, not because of national security interests, but because of what votes and campaign dollars will be generated by a decision. The problems can be solved but it will take political courage from our leaders in Washington. They need to start acting like statesmen looking out for the good of the nation rather than politicians looking out to win their next election.