[Cross-posted from the Accountable Strategies blog]
Death of a Spy Satellite Program describes a “troubled partnership” between the government and Boeing, which led to the derailment of an ambitious program for a new generation of American spy satellites. Billions of dollars have been wasted on this program that continued to founder on after it had been deemed unbuildable by company engineers.
The second story, which led the paper, describes the lax controls and government oversight of military contractors distributing Pentagon-supplied weapons to police and national guard troops in Iraq. Billions of dollars in arms have been “handed over to shoestring commands,” which have failed to account for the whereabouts of a significant portion of them.
The spy satellite story notes that “the entire acquisition sytem for space-based imagery technologies is in danger of breaking down,” leaving the U.S. more vulnerable to foreign threats such as terrorist training camps and nuclear weapons sites. And our inability to keep track of the weapons we ship to Iraq may well be playing a role in our inability to bring stability to that country.
Sadly, these types of stories are becoming increasingly typical of the way our downsized government now operates. And yet, the mantra continues—government bureaucracy is at fault because it hamstrings the private sector with too much oversight and too many rules. In fact, as The Times pieces point out, the problem is the opposite. Not only doesn't government adequately oversee contracts with the private sector these days, but it has ceded much of that oversight to the private sector. The result has been chaos.
Take the spy satellite situation. The National Reconaissance Office, which was in charge of the satellite project, gave Boeing, which had no previous experience in satellite technology, responsibility for monitoring its own work under the contract, according to The Times. The article described the situation as a:
…new policy, cousin to the Clinton administration’s effort to downsize government, of transferring control of big military projects to contractors, on the theory that they could best manage engineering work and control costs.
This was the same philosophy that undermined the Big Dig project in Boston, in which Bechtel Parsons/Brinckerhoff, the lead contractor, was also effectively given the responsibility of monitoring its own design work. We’ve seen how well both of those arrangements worked to control costs and bring the projects to completion on time.
The Times article doesn’t shed much light on the bidding process for the satellite program, other than to note that the other “invited” bidder was Lockheed, the government’s longtime satellite builder. It appears from the article that the government left it up to the invited bidders to design their own systems and then chose the one that claimed to be the cheapest and appeared to be the more “technologically innovative.”
The problem with this kind of open-ended bidding process is that the government appears to have had little idea of the type of satellite system it wanted and did not provide the bidders with a common design or specifications on which to bid. It’s another example of government ceding its authority and paying the price later in awarding a contract for an unbuildable system.
In the story on the arms shipments, The Times notes that rules requiring such things as signoffs and recording serial numbers before weapons could be shipped out of armories were not followed. One reason for this was a sense of urgency felt by some military officials to supply the Iraqi security forces quickly with weapons and to “cut through what they saw as a cumbersome military bureaucracy.”
It may be time for our political leaders to consider the huge price they have paid for bashing government even as they have emasculated it through continuous downsizing. It would be nice to hear the presidential candidates address this issue as well.
my apologies, I can’t even remember what it was—-was packed with pork. Aircraft that they USAF neither needed or wanted and small boats that the USN neither needed or wanted. Almost as good as the bridge to nowhere. Everyone in Congress is guilty, especially the current leadership.
Everyone wants to stick their snout into the public trough. Hey—-we get what we deserve.
Death of a Spy Satellite Program
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I’ll admit that I haven’t read the whole article, but it seems that they were trying to re-invent the wheel. There has, for a number of years, been a spy satellite in orbit that can reportedly take images to a resolution of about a square meter. Images of somewhat lower resolution have been put on the Internet. The site was originally called spaceimaging.com now it’s geoeye.com I first ran across their site shortly after 9/11/01, when they posted before and after images. Throw up a few more such satellites and they’d have fine imaging coverage; the latest toy isn’t necessary.
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BTW, the reason that the US landed on the moon in 1969 (besides the fact that the government threw a moderate but not excessive amount of money at the project) is that the NASA officials who were running the project were as good engineers as those at the outside contractors. Government contracting, to the extent that government uses outside contractors, should be viewed as a cooperative effort: to get the job done. Unfortunately, it has devolved into an adversarial operation.
between government and outside contractors. But I’m not sure the relationship has become as much adversarial as that the government has simply stepped back and said you guys take over, we don’t want the responsibility. The problem is that the contractors have no incentives to look out for the taxpayers. I’m not saying we shouldn’t spend money on these projects, but I’m concerned that there’s less and less government oversight of government contracting.