What a huge opportunity! "The contracting workforce is stretched thin." Yet, Congress, for R&D, prototyping, and delivering new capability, MANDATED, as in it's the law, that DoD develop a "preference" for using Other Transactions (OTs). OTs do not require contracting officers to be involved. What a huge opportunity to do something radically different, timely, to CREATE something new, actually be innovative... "necessity is the mother of invention" we are seeing this elsewhere.
Also, if the DoD chooses to hire and then indoctrinate masses of new bureaucrats to do administrative work, what assurance do we have that AI won't substantially augment those tasks in very short time, making these new hires somewhat pointless? They will likely become burdens on the system already close to imploding from bad ideas and mismanagement. They will justify their position with greater bureaucracy (likely with no care of consequences for others).
It may be wise for DoD to stop conflating (confusing?) acquisition with contracting with doing business. If one is nuanced, these are understood to be quite different. What the Nation needs is the DoD to do common-sense business focused on achieving goals and delivering results! That's what the warfighter, taxpayer, Nation and posterity need, the bureaucratic rules should not take precedence, as they do. Technically, this is not hard to do, generally speaking, but leadership needs activate a "charge" a real push to innovate, not these half-hearted attempts, worried that they might upset someone or not get the lucrative post-gov job.
The hyper-focus on compliance to made up rules and the resultant culture of conformity is underpinned by non-value-added contrived (void of practical experience and know how) theory and special interest molestation. The FAR system is not for the warfighter, it's not for the taxpayer, it most certainly not for the industrial base or posterity. For goodness sake, using a highly regulated purchasing system to conduct R&D, (please) take a step back and think about how absurd that is. Kafka, Rand, and Camus would have to do a long "golf clap" for this level absurd bureaucracy and corporatism, it looks like a comedy of errs.
Publicly funded R&D represents our Nations' collective aspirations, it is very important work. Moralistically, anyone using this investment for their own self gain is negative and a burden on our collective enterprise.
DoD has been provided solutions galore. Yet they stick with what they have always done, it's an inter-generational doom loop of preserving the status quo and "innovating" at the fringes... never capitalizing on past successes nor learning from failure... around and around, over and over.
"The DoD violates every rule in modern product development... We have terrific people stuck in a VERY BAD system." - Eric Schmidt
#absurdism #nihilism #Kafkaesque #bureaucracy #theborg #Randian
