Based on the scuttlebutt I've been hearing from Navy insiders, this is just the tip of the iceberg, and the entire organization is a mess right now.
The Navy is left with uniformed personnel and manager bureaucrat types, neither of which have the engineering expertise the organization needs.
The results should not surprise us.
Same with any other part of the US government. It doesn't pay people what they're worth, so they can't attract enough good talent.
In my neck of the woods, there are departments that have to make do with whole teams of low-skill employees because, while a more skilled person could do the work of at least four lower-skill workers, they would also require two lower-skill workers' worth of salary, and you just can't be paying any one person that much money because that would be Government Waste.
We know that Unions don't oppose salary caps, but they oppose differentials in compensation based on job performance. Seems like that amounts to the same thing? Unless you're suggesting we just pay government workers more and see if we get any marginal productivity out of them.
I think it's an interesting question how a government workers' union would be likely to feel about a hypothetical restructuring that lost 75% of existing jobs while doubling or tripling wages. I tend to suspect that if the union already existed and represented those low-skilled jobs, it would be adamantly against the restructuring.
Doubling wages while not cutting jobs would obviously be fine with the union, but what would the point of that be?
Whenever that first part isn't true for a union, then the market pressure is for the top performers to leave the union for free-market wages, until it is.
They also have more bargaining power when they represent skilled workers compared to unskilled ones.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/most-americans-agree-th...
Also, I think that a honest reading of that chart would be that there is the Vietnam War (with very low justification), WW2 (with high justification) and then two subgroups: WW1 & Civil War with moderate justification, and Korea, Gulf War 1 and Afghanistan with lower levels, but still significant levels of justification.
For instance, I joined and served in the military during the second Iraq war despite disapproving of the invasion.
This holds especially for career civil servants, as political winds shift and one may not always agree with the policies of the current government.
One does not serve because the nation is perfect, one serves to strengthen the nation and to have the opportunity to make it better for future generations.
And after your experiences would you recommend the same path to your children if they were thinking of doing the same?
...and they have no real way to evaluate the talent they DO attract, so they're doubly-screwed.
We've been at "war" for decades burning military dollars on a "cause" that very few Americans believe in, care about, or even understand. You can only wave the flags and shout about patriotism for so long before people stop giving a shit. It obviously becomes very hard for an organization to attract talent when said talent doesn't care about or believe in what the organization is doing.
The military got the best and brightest during WWII because the US was fighting Nazis (oh, sorry, "alt-right European Nationalists") and a foreign enemy who had attacked us on our own soil. For Vietnam, they had to draft because few believed in the cause and what they got where those too powerless to escape the draft (cough, cough, bone spurs). And for... whatever the fuck it is we've been doing in the Middle East since 9/11, the military doesn't even have a draft to potentially snare some better people.
When you have an all-volunteer military in an endless war for no clear purpose, the end result is many people who have nothing better going for them. Should we really be surprised the military is a clusterfuck? If you were competent, why would you want to squander your talents helping the US kill random brown people for no good reason?
WWII also had a draft, as did WWI and the Civil War. More people (as a percentage) volunteered for Vietnam than did WWII. That surprised me when I heard it. Americans were pretty gung-ho about enlisting in Vietnam and didn't really sour on it until later in the war. It was during the communism scare, so people fully bought into the Domino Theory at the time. Russia went nuclear, North Korea invaded South, the Iron Curtain went up, Cuban Missle Crisis, McCarthy, Sputnik, and a lot of chest thumping made it a pretty scary time.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2x491p/volun...
I think your general point is valid. It's better to enlist when the country isn't at war, and that hasn't been for what, going on 18 years now? Enlistees nor draftees typically don't decide what features a warship has though.
consider: here on HN commenters will often deride decisions made "anyone in the field with half a brain should know...".
But if you don't have that requisite someone in the field with half a brain, and when someone who literally makes money from convincing you they are experts tries to sell you...anything, how can you possibly evaluate the truth of their claims?
I saw this in state govt when they would try to hire someone - without programmers on staff, how can you evaluate if someone is a decent programmer? This goes beyond the normal problems of interviewee evaluations - you can get people that can't do fizzbuzz and you'd not be able to tell. Being able to tell the difference between "experienced expert" and "halfway competent but way over their head" isn't even an option.
It's a hard thing for an organization to overcome - as far as I can tell, absent some trusted 3rd party evaluation system (which runs into incentive problems), it requires iterations of staffing and trial by fire to build even this ability to evaluate in house.
I work in .gov and have heard many variations of that problem. A really common non-solution is to hire a second contractor to oversee the first. In theory that’s not a completely horrible idea but there are relatively few contractors who are certified to do business with the federal government and they usually aren’t trying to make waves, not to mention how job hopping makes for a lot of personal incentives which aren’t aligned with the clients’. Since getting and breaking contracts is so hard — and the big guys will definitely play hardball if you do – it has to be a pretty epic disaster to have real consequences, and that’ll arrive after years of billing very well.
The answer should be having more staff positions at competitive rates so agencies have qualified staff for oversight or simply doing the work but that has been politically untenable for decades.
One can argue about the appearance of impropriety, but when people talk about stopping the revolving door, you’re talking about hurting both the gov’t and private companies because there are a limited number of experts.
In my experience NAVSEA (the actual Navy side) were all former senior engineers at the subcontractor. They were good engineers and could smell bullshit easily. But that kind of work is very different than the creative side. Some people like being the reviewer better, and the government benefits are generally better, but otherwise I never saw the appeal.
"Let's save time and money by not building a prototype and do our testing of the system on the actual ship itself!"
Whenever someone thinks: let's cut corners on "x" to save money and time, it has always come around to bite me. And now they are far behind schedule, and they ended up having to build a carrier replica at the drydock to do testing anyway.
No, it won't.
From my conversation with navy folks, unless a scandal sinks an admiral, the organization does not take it seriously, and will not make any institutional changes.
But if the only scapegoats are lower down in the chain then the result will be devastating to morale.
The SecNavy has to fire one or more admirals here, and soon.
There might not be a prototype, because the delivered item is the prototype.
Sure, it should be tested before being shipped, but it doesn't help when it ultimately doesn't perform as expected and there is no alternative at hands.
Old saying, "Fastest way to build a six inch reflector telescope is to build a four inch telescope first."
That is, learn in the simplest possible context.
Like companies that won't build an MVP or even a non-sellable proof of concept. Finding out a key software library doesn't work three weeks before launch day, for example.
Taken from:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/future-...
So "this engineering mistake" indeed has to be made ad nauseum, it would seem. As Einstein said, only space and human stupidity are infinite.