Having learned or read far more about the intelligence community program dysfunctions than a person should be subjected to, it is understandable why many prefer the hand wave, surface level dismissal of “they messed up,” rather than grinding through and/or being forced to hear the gory details.
At the risk of going on what may in the end be a huge diversion from the story of the travails of the Future Imagery Architecture (FIA) and Gap Mitigation (GAP) story, I want to provide some detail to answer the question that has gone begging about how some of these government programs-spending our-your-tax dollars-could be run so poorly: it is the people-the talent-or lack thereof.
Alfred E. Newman (What, me worry?) has something to say about what happens when leftist, academic philosophy and woke social dogma intersect with manpower policies in the United States Government to shape and create the workforce leader’s desires. The deleterious effect is the reflection in the workforce of the often socialist, liberal, academia touted beliefs- translated into policy-that results in workers who are key word and code word selected and fit into position to spread the proverbial gospel throughout the work force like some woke virus.
Many laugh when they see the tragi-comic visage of Dick Levine in Naval uniform or freaky Sam Brinton taking the oath of government service. Levine oversaw a devastating death mill COVID policy for seniors in Pennsylvania-he signed out the directive-with tragic results across the state-but intervened in the case of his mother-who he moved to a private facility, away from COVID patients allowed into the nursing homes where the death toll was unprecedented: and avoidable. And who could have predicted that the hot mess of a human Brinton would turn out to be-well-a hot mess-kleptomaniac, suitcase stealing, cross dressing embarrassment, lying potential administration star who faded fast. How did he get a clearance? Did he need a suitcase for classified documents (just wondering?)
A new administration gets to appoint some 4000 or more executives in government, of which some ~1200 require congressional confirmation. Make no mistake about it, these people-sometimes freaks of nature (above) have a trove of senior executives working for them to help create-out of whole cloth-their leadership visions for their business units.
Not to belabor the nightmare, worst case scenario, but just think through what a Dick Levine or Klepto Brinton approach to policy would consist of for the Departments they lead (while I find Brinton just skin crawly creepy and aberrant, he has done some good work messaging the protection of kids from life altering medical treatments that are irreversible at ages where they lack the maturity to make such decisions: but he has a lot of aww schticks offsetting that positive.)
Every minute of every hour of every day of the work week spent on things that government has no business being involved in-is that much less time available for what they should be doing. What priorities would leaders such as these bring to the job?
This may come as a shock to many-because it seems counter-intuitive-but there is no department of “woke” in the US government. Congress takes somewhat of a dim view when departments act like “that” is a core mission as evidenced by messaging when there is serious work to be done for the people (well, they used to.)
Think back a dozen years or so to the Office of Personnel Management breach that spilled an admitted 27 million Americans personal identification information (via Security Form-SF/DD398.) With at least five references in each 398 it was actually over 100 million people compromised, enough to move the needle bigly on credit and cyber-crime. OPM wasn’t keeping up with security protocols and virus checks-meh: but received very high grades on woke policy…
For huge organizations like the Department of Justice (DOJ) some fourteen thousand lawyers may turnover and reflect the new administration’s objectives, including the makeup of the influential Civil Rights Division. You would think with that lady justice thing, the scale, evidence, facts, law, etc., Alfred E. would be right at home: what could go wrong? Have you been following some of the ridiculous woke statements and actions emanating out of our nation’s leading institutions producing these lawyers? Have you heard the Michigan Attorney General demonstrate potty-mouthed enemy bashing and aberrant gender signaling? Are you familiar with George Soros’ funding of many of these candidates in this century and the correlation with out of control crime and ridiculous policy-think LA, Philly, Chicago, SF for starters: justice for whom?
Soro’s also funded a strategy to poison and undermine Secretary of State (SoS) positions in the wake of the Bush V Gore election effort, when it became apparent the formerly vanilla or milquetoast SoS had the strong potential to influence election processes and should be the province of a “wokee” (not of the Star Wars variety.)
Joe Girardi-the worlds greatest salesman-and his rule of 250-tells you all you need to know about how you can end up with people like Levine and Brinton in supervisory positions, but more importantly how quickly these appointments can affect and undermine public supported policy (e.g., 4000×250=one million people.) You may think the oath of office, negative survey results, bad press would mean something to these-our-aberrant government civil servants: nope.
I made this point in my series about the Nifty 50 (51) senior intelligence community hacks who were willing to flush their reputations down the toilet to reaffirm their “Orange Man Bad” bona fides and hate lust by lying through their teeth and showing their furry arses for all to see in the heat of an October election surprise season. The average time served for these 51 is on the order of 40 years-just to be reasonable, let’s say they had ~ten-15 years in their prime (think of James R. Clapper as the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, NIMA/NGA, USDI and DNI between 1990 and 2017,) where they were shaping and infecting the work force in their likeness and each of those likeness(es) was going about the workplace doing Joe Girardi influencing (and so on, and on, rinse and repeat…)
I believe this is somewhat of the linking problem in many-most-of the examples I’ve given. People are busy, bumper stickers are cheap and ubiquitous, water (money) has already gone under the bridge and is gone, move on, rinse and repeat. How many seniors who bring in an acolyte are willing to turn on and “smote” them when they mess up? I’ve worked with a number of these “appointees” or love children or folks who gave the boss a good boot “licking” and were hired into high level positions.
My Wing Commander-the “Wing King-” Col Gaillard R. Peck was fond of saying that if you “relearned a lesson, then you never learned anything in the first place:” very true when it comes to programs like the ones I’ve been describing because you see the same bumbling failures happen over and over again and we don’t hold people accountable for the wasted time, lost opportunity and frittered away money.
For those who have reviewed government appraisals over the years, have you ever seen one that gave a frank assessment of the performance of one of these program managers captaining these proverbial “Titantics?” How can we have so many tales of bad and poorly executed programs (well-I have so many,) and yet I have only documented one “tar and feathering” (Darlene Druyun-maybe 2 if you count LTG Mary Leguire) in two dozen or more stories about programs that were led by people who should be pooping through feathers? I’m not really talking about the cases of illegal actions, as those almost police themselves.
Remember earlier when I detailed how the NRO FIA procurement selection team and the program manager were led out of Westfields in shackles and taken to the hoosegow (you don’t see that word every day?) Of course, you don’t-because it didn’t happen. The only FIA program manager who received any real acknowledgement or publicity-was the last one-Colonel (USAF) Doug Loverro, appointed in November 2002-just by coincidence (but there aren’t any-) the month after the GAP recommendations were presented.
Loverro subsequently produced lessons learned from FIA that I always referred to as “FIA-Blinding Flashes of the Obvious: How it Went Wrong and Stayed that Way.” He was on track to sainthood for being the truth teller in this sorry affair and went on to a great government career until he stepped on his hoo hah (with golf shoes on-the worst) and recently resigned from NASA.
Missing in the BFO pile is the NGA companion about GEOSCOUT/GEOSKUNK. From that standpoint this series is somewhat of a “two-fer,” as I’ve covered many aspects of both topics. Somebody interested in connecting the dots on acquisition problems would find a ripe field indeed reviewing the last projects/programs attempted by the Defense Mapping Agency (DMA) before integration into NIMA, such as automatic feature extraction nirvana pipedreams. Or reading through Dr. Annette Kriegel and Ms. Rita Lewis’ “Getting Started” acquisition primer issued as a companion to the Peter Marino led NIMA Commission Report: it was an excellent prescription but could not help a terminal patient.
What can’t be overemphasized in these instances-in fact, in all the problem programs I’ve touched upon in this series-is how and why we-the government-came to be so bad at program management. One of the modern approaches to this specific issue-the question of holding people accountable in these instances-is not to: I mean, were they trying their best, harrumphing at the right times, team players, did they grit their teeth and hold interminable meetings, were they sincere in their efforts, good to their people, tried hard? Well then-they should get a pass because maybe they just weren’t suited for the job.
Think of the performance of your favorite sports teams and what we do if they don’t meet expectations…do we ever fault the coach in these instances? Pretty much each and every time-but not for these ill-advised, poorly executed, wasteful programs: they all worked for somebody (who worked for somebody…)
Worse is the faux legitimacy many agencies embraced in the 21st century with new policies organized around a total “paper job” of the promotion process-the documentation-by adding additional narrative mandates as Senior Executive Core Qualifications and Competencies, requiring flowery personal attributes for aspirants to write to, and faux scenarios to answer in the spirit of “what would you do about this situation?” Provide an example where you faced and solved a similar problem.
Compare this to the Army-or any of the other performance systems you have been a part of-is there a worse practice than not using the performance appraisal as the major contributor to promotion considerations (notwithstanding the inevitable number inflation?) Many argue that performance appraisals don’t reflect potential or the “whole person:” but that would certainly be reflected in the personnel file. Performance appraisals address-wait for it-performance and the corollary-potential! Many woke nutjobs opine that test score results don’t reflect the “whole person,” either, because “racist.”
If standard tests, performance appraisals, training mandates/gates, mandatory statements to address potential don’t answer the mail, then I guess we are reduced to aspirational descriptions of handling “stuff:” think vapidity on the scale of Ms. Universe responses.
What this approach does facilitate is an impossible to decrypt selection process-opaque smoke and mirrors-that-somehow-always meets the pre-selection objectives-some call them quotas-that seem more “demographics” than ability based: future potential, smential, rinse and repeat.
Under such an approach all of our FIA or GEOSKUNK incompetents come across as heroic figures wrestling with interminable challenges that they did their best to get the measure of, absolute tragic and sympathetic figures trying their “doggone best” under impossible conditions. Those damned contractors…
Jethro is not going to pick the Titanic story to brag about expertise in his promotion packet-maybe the responsibilities and the effort, but definitely not the results. Nor my example where the Aqua Logic solution pooped the bed and cost the government several million dollars to fix each instance where it was used due to lack of critical stress testing, nor the Common Imagery Processor debacle (same-same,) nor the Interim Transition Center that was unnecessary, underutilized, way costlier than advertised (what level you may wonder-order of magnitude 225M or so,) and a fraud, waste and abuse candidate from day 1-that was not even coordinated or deconflicted with the movement planning element-the New Campus East Program Office-responsible to move us to Springfield. Nor the “I improved the availability of the National Exploitation System from 62% to 80%.” Hmm, so you started out at better than ~90% availability, delivered a solution where analysts were unable to do their jobs 38% of the time-against a target benchmark of ~99%-when you started to “improve things.” Good job Jethro-here is your annual bonus…
When you take the plunge and take on City Hall in the government over accountability and wrongheaded policies like these-specifically referring to poor program management and delivery that adversely affects your business unit, incompetent people coming up with just ridiculous ideas, woke training that is an insult to government service and oath of office, or leadership burying sexual harassment charges for two years and then getting all energized with full-on crocodile tears to do something in Town Halls when the story is about to break in the Washington Post, etc., the problem has shifted and it is full quarter, no relief, outed as not a “harrumpher:” just not a team player-a “Borg” target. The problem is now you!
19 January 2023
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1 thought on “National Intelligence Folly: How a Tragic Unsolved Murder Led to Billions of Dollars of Program Fraud, Waste and Abuse Part 28: Why is the Government so Terrible at What Should be a Core Skillset: Program Management?”