{"id":5374,"date":"2010-09-14T07:42:25","date_gmt":"2010-09-14T11:42:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=5374"},"modified":"2010-09-14T07:43:53","modified_gmt":"2010-09-14T11:43:53","slug":"when-the-bureaucracy-strangles-its-young","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2010\/09\/14\/when-the-bureaucracy-strangles-its-young\/","title":{"rendered":"When the bureaucracy strangles its young"},"content":{"rendered":"

Noah Schactman<\/a> uncovers the reason it takes a decade for the Pentagon to buy new weapons:<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

And you thought winning the Afghanistan war was tough. Try building the Army\u2019s new armored vehicle. Or piecing together the Navy\u2019s new network.<\/p>\n

All of the complexity of the Afghan conflict — and all of the bureaucracy NATO used to manage the counterinsurgency effort — was summed up by a single spaghetti monster of a PowerPoint slide. \u201cWhen we understand [it],\u201d war commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal joked when he saw the slide, \u201cwe\u2019ll have won the war.\u201d<\/p>\n

But that slide was child\u2019s play compared to the three-foot wall chart the military uses to explain its gajillion-step process for developing, buying, and maintaining gear. The \u201cIntegrated Acquisitions Technology and Logistics Life Cycle Management\u201d diagram is kind of a precis to the whole interminable progression, from \u201cdecompose concept functional definition into component concepts & assessment objective\u201d to \u201cexecute support program that meets materiel readiness and operational support performance requirements and sustains system in most cost-effective manner.\u201d Stare long enough, and you\u2019ll start to see why it takes a decade for the Defense Department to buy a tanker plane, or why marines are still reading web pages with Internet Explorer 6.<\/p>\n

The chart is put out by the Pentagon\u2019s Defense Acquisitions University, where the Pentagon educates 180,000 people a year on its, um, unique<\/em> process for purchasing equipment.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Full-sized horror of the slide at the link. If you think you can survive the insanity of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Noah Schactman uncovers the reason it takes a decade for the Pentagon to buy new weapons: And you thought winning the Afghanistan war was tough. Try building the Army\u2019s new armored vehicle. Or piecing together the Navy\u2019s new network. All of the complexity of the Afghan conflict — and all of the bureaucracy NATO used […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,5,13],"tags":[145,31,30,514],"class_list":["post-5374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-military","category-usa","tag-airforce","tag-army","tag-navy","tag-usmc"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-1oG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5374"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5374\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5377,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5374\/revisions\/5377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}