No one interested

Previous posts showed F-35 obsolete

   One of the most astounding and sickening facts about the U.S. congress is that in over 200 years they have never audited a defense contract.  They spend tens of billions of dollars every year financing purchases without ever wanting to know how well the money is being spent.
   In order to learn such information they would have to take a vertical section through a project, they would have to question people at each level of work and management about the operations on the project.  Instead of doing this the members of congress all seem to be afflicted with Big Man Syndrome.  The symptoms of this syndrome are: a belief in one's own self importance; a refusal to do any work which could be measured as right or wrong, thereby avoiding any chance of blame; an insistence that subordinates have everything set up without cooperating with them on the set up; a wish to be asble to appear in control by staff work, meaning only simple questions will be asked; and a  belief in only talking to peopel who have an important job title to pretend it is the big men who are talking and to pretend they actually know what they are doing.   Owing to this, only senior project management are ever called for questioning and they always insist everything is being done as expected and any delays are inevitable, none of which provokes competent questioning to attempt to ascertain if any of it is actually true.
   They are abetted in this by equally incompetent journalists, most of whom have never actually done anything in their lives and who, consequently, have no idea what questions to ask either.
   Competent questioning of the people at the bottom of a large project would generally follow the following pattern:
How many hours a day do you actually work?
When you say two or three hours, do you actually mean all the work you do?
Well, why don't you work more hours?
What do you mean by disorganized?
Certainly some of the managers must know what they are doing.
But if they are managers they must have shown some competence?
Are you sure the answer is "no".
   Engineers meet each other.  Engineers talk about working on disorganized projects where they feel they are accomplishing nothing.  Engineers talk of getting only one or two hours of work done in a day.  None of this is ever covered in a news story or brought out in questioning in congress. Maybe it really is not happening.
   If the members of congress are going to insist on spending the amount of money that they do it would well behoove them to engage in the actual exercise of working form bottom to top through several contracts so that they have an understanding of how work gets done or fails to get done.  They also need to practice asking questions so they know what questions to ask to determine if project money is being efficiently spent.
    The news media focuses on trivia, a glaring inanity in budget costs, like $300 hammers, while ignoring the constant day-to-day mismanagement which is both a drain on money and the source of failed and incomplete designs; no one knows and no one wants to know.
   Any system, if it is not audited, will, to a statistical certainty, degenerate into inefficiency and corruption because it is the easiest thing to do and requires the least work, with the accompanying reality tha eventually there will be at least one jack ass working as a project manager.
    This actually applies both to military and public works projects.  The military assigns contract officers, uniformed military personal of officer ranks, to projects.  I have no idea what they actually do, they certainly do not seem to be aggressively digging for faults in the projects.
   It also comes from the same mentality that each project is treated as a unique, single event, instead of as a progression of work which needs to be evaluated and improved continuously.