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Comment by SomeStupidPoint | Hacker News Reader

This is what happens when you force the military to outsource core functions to fleece taxpayer money for your buddies.

For a long time, there's been a push to not let the military develop capabilities in-house, despite repeated contractor fuckups and huge overspends.

Can we just admit privatization is a failure?

It's literally destroying national security.

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The military cannot pay the salaries that are required to keep qualified people of certain professions/specialties. Surgeons and hackers, but also some other things too. so they must outsource to the private sector. But they certainly can require the contractor to use military provided/mandated security oversight. Mandate and verify good security practices, not tick checkboxes.

Why can they not pay the going rate at least in the NSA ?

Government job, government rules.

So change the rules

They're working on it. But those rules are there specifically to prevent overspending, are they not? If someone then ends up, or appears to end up, overpaid, you're going to have a different angry mob at the door. You have to be careful tearing that kind of thing out, to say the least.

As opposed to paying 3x the rate for some contractor from "Booz ma kindney" or the other usual suspects

Yes, as opposed to that. What I'm saying is that it's a hard problem. It's not one that's unique to government either; corporations have to decide when to outsource, too, with similar (but less dramatic) tradeoffs.

But unless your insane out source your core competencies and for TLA's you don't out source your cleaners as the risk is to high.

How -- conceptually -- does the military being unable to afford the salary of person A get fixed by subcontracting to hire person A through corporation B?

That literally just makes person A cost more money.

When you pay the contractor, you pay all your buddies that run and administrate the company too. It is all a staggering money grab, what better job is there than federal contractor that works on stuff so secret that congress doesn’t even really have oversight? That stuff is free money for ever. Plus I think they do it to evade rules, there are different penalties for the government breaking rules and laws than for these secretive companies. Foobar secret LLC could totally just target Muslims if they actually did work and it wouldn’t have to be a constitutional issue if they were ever caught.

Privatization was mostly done under Clinton in response to the fact that federal workers were even less effective, often more expensive, and impossible to fire. contractors aren't all wine and roses but before you knock them you need to carefully understand the alternative and why things are as they are.

.....eh, not exactly. While privatization was done under Clinton, he wasn't the first (at all, Carter ran on exactly that) and more importantly it wasn't done because of any percieved "effectiveness", it was an ideological pitch to Regan democrats and that all but invisible voter "moderate republican but I'll vote for a Dem if they woo me". And the idea that somehow federal workers are more expensive then contractors is .... bizarre. It is very much the opposite.

> Can we just admit privatization is a failure?

The United States has the most advanced military in the world. Boeing and Lockheed are private.

I'm not an expert, maybe it's just a coincidence.

> core functions

We're not talking about outsourcing tangential features, we're talking about the outsourcing of waging war and core abilities of the military, eg the hired hackers at the NSA or outfits like Blackwater.

Privatization isn't about purchasing supplies through corporations outside of the government, but having corporations perform key features of the government.

Your example isn't really about that, so you're right -- you're not an expert, you're talking about the wrong thing.

> The United States has the most advanced military in the world.

It's not just that Silicon Valley and other tech is in the USA. It's the result of a massive spending program.

https://www.pgpf.org/chart-archive/0053_defense-comparison

The United States spends more on national defense than the next eight countries combined.

the United States has historically devoted a larger share of its economy to defense than many of its key allies.

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