Air Force Needs to Hug Industry Closer??

Once again we find ourselves in Bizarro World, the parallel universe where the opposites of reality rule.

General Norton Schwartz, newly-named head of the US Air Force, told Aerospace Daily & Defense Report (sorry, subscription required) that he wants to repair the "unfortunate deterioration" in the relationship between the service and its contractors.

Hello???

From our vantage point, all we can see are piles of examples of cozy warm & fuzzy relations between numerous federal agencies and their contracting chums.  Surely one of the most egregious examples of such relations would be with the military services, and the Air Force has been particularly notable in recent years for being in bed with contractors.  The fiasco with the tanker is just the latest and most unfortunate episode. 

We at POGO can certainly agree that the Air Force acquisition system seems to be broken, but we'd like to see a little more care taken to address the unfortunate deterioration in the relationship between Air Force acquisition and the taxpayers' pockets.

-- Beverley Lumpkin

Comments

[Dfens]

The procurement system isn't broken. You get exactly what you pay for. You pay defense contractors for process and they give you process. They give you lots and lots of process. The Air Force doesn't have a problem with this means of doing business because sitting behind a desk for 25 years watching the F-22 being developed beats the heck out of sitting at a station in some God forsaken desert somewhere getting shot at. You also don't hear those DCMA pukes complaining since most of them would be flipping burgers somewhere if they didn't have these contracts to leach off of. Congressmen steer money into their districts. Defense contractors get rich. Everyone is happy. I guess we need to have a witch hunt every now and then otherwise the taxpayer might get wise to what's really going on. Ok, go ahead, let's have another congressional committee waste some more money. Why not? Anything to keep the current system in place. After all, we can never hire to many bureaucrats. We can never drag a program out too long. Let's keep paying for process instead of results. It's worked so well up to now, why change?