You may recall (and yes I’m assuming a lot here-like you are still interested in this story) that I provided no small amount of detail in Part 25 on the back story that was further amplified in Part 29, where I gave somewhat of the bottom-line-down-the-bottom that many of the people involved in these poorly executed program stories are not just poor program managers, but many are bad human beings who do not have the same appreciation and respect-reverent view-of their oath of office as they could (put as mildly as an Army guy can phrase it.)
I have examples of scheming, conniving, lying and dishonesty on the part of many of the folks I have in mind when I state the above-which I will get to in time-but really not my story for today.
It is easy to be viewed as a “one-note or one-sided Johnny” presenting these stories, as they are my viewpoints and opinions based on my experiences and there are obviously two sides-or more-to every story.
What I’m convinced makes some of the events that occurred during this period of time-from ~1998 through about 2017-instructive as exemplars of typical government program management problems, and issues characterized by lousy execution by largely poorly trained-and also crappy people, is how much time and more importantly-opportunity-because of the cost of the “clean-ups-” was lost in the first part of the 21st century as these incompetents, charlatans, and misfits had their head.
Lost opportunity is the most important aspect of this period where we had military, civilian and contract personnel in harm’s way. We could have done better in supporting them if large segments of our government-particularly the intelligence community (IC)-were not distracted and sidetracked and tied into knots trying to work through some of these big program problems that consumed entire careers of some great Americans who opted to serve this country during this period.
I’ve provided numerous bad program exemplars and you could be forgiven for believing, “wow, the government-IC-never gets anything right!” That is certainly not the case, and most programs are actually very successful. I don’t have the statistics on it, but my intent was to give a rundown of very poor performance on IC programs that I played some part in to highlight recurring problems that strike me as eminently preventable.
I mentioned already the other tragedy of talented and willing people who opted to serve the government being thrust up to their necks in problem programs and mayhem that kept them totally distracted for much of their time in government.
Two that come to mind include Undersecretary of the US Air Force, Space and NRO Director Peter B. Teets, who was a decent and good human being and a very successful businessman in his own right, who spent the bulk of his time in government distracted by-well, distractions-that consumed the bulk of his working time-and that’s not to say he did not accomplish a lot in consideration of the major problems he worked during his time.
I also previously told the story of Gen (USAF, Ret) Bruce Carlson and his “white knight” effort reviving the glory and saving the NRO-only to be done dirty enough by the swamp that he resigned as DIR NRO rather than ignore or abide by the scummy actions of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI,) perpetrated largely by the Principal Deputy DNI (PDDNI) Stephanie O’Sullivan and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
All facts-whether viewed in hindsight-as most of you must do at this point in time-or those I’ve attempted to somewhat “reel” or spool out in an attempt to present them in the context of the time as things slowly became clear-and clearer still as more information emerged to some of us who were involved to some degree or another-bear on the judgement of whether what I’ve termed as the disaster at the heart of this story was preventable. Those who were not privy to the Lockmart (LMC) and Boeing proposals-which includes just about everybody not on the selection team or in one of the two companies-or part of the Bid and Proposal teams-could hardly be blamed for not seeing the disastrous outcome coming, as anybody familiar with the “mission space” was shocked when Boeing was selected as the winner of the “whole enchilada” representing the space segment: not surprised, not a “wow,” not a “that’s interesting”-shocked, amazed, dumbstruck.
The disastrous result of the award of the Future Imagery Architecture (FIA) optical component to Boeing, and the companion disaster funded by congress (throwing good money after bad) investing in NIMA/NGA’s Tasking, Processing, Exploitation and Dissemination (T) Analysis Program (TAP) Modernization Plan, were companion disastrous acts that one can’t fault congress, the community or the people-staff, the IC, contractors and oversight-that spent much of their careers trying to make right.
I’ve presented the “tells” throughout this series, but-as a reminder-these include the fact that (a) Boeing had never built a satellite for the US government before, while (b) LMC had built all of them to date. (c) Boeing had to scrap a large number of parts that a sub-contractor had manufactured with tin: an absolute, space 101 no-no. (d) Barely three months after contract award there were already nasty rumors circulating throughout Westfields (NRO Headquarters) that the optical component had slipped or was slipping at least four months.
It was during these early FIA program years that heroic action was possible-and necessary-to break off and cut losses on what was a looming and pending disaster.
Many of the focused examples I’ve provided point to the problems caused by hiring people into government who bring with them agendas and mandates and self-inspired motivations that have nothing to do with their employment. I closed Part 27 with somewhat of a tongue in cheek warning that if you are that “pebble in the shoe,” non-harrumphing, “but-but-but” person who points these problems out, you will eventually-but more likely sooner than later-draw the ire of those touting nonsensical, impossible or dream state solutions that defy logic, physics, common sense and the natural order and state of government ebb and flow (and there is such a thing.)
What would be the point of finessing the requirements for things like the hiring process, the promotion process, having known personnel (friendly faces) in key positions, undertaking big organization efforts that can be controlled to a focused-thumb on the scale-outcome (in case this is a puzzlement?)
In our organization these efforts were always about power and influence, but always at the heart of these schemes was money. The tragedy about my experiences and this description is not that I experienced it, called it out, fought it, or any aspect of my involvement other than as a witness to serious malfeasance of a borderline criminal variety-which is not a trivial matter.
The far greater injustice to me is that these battles were almost never about our people-unless the focus was on some aberrant, woke cause where there was a movement to uplift a demographic so small it barely moved the needle, nor-much more importantly-the mission.
When you hire people into government who come with their own motivations, plans and agendas that have nothing to do with the people’s business-like the previously mentioned Dick Levine and Klepto Brinton-you should not be surprised when they pursue their schemes and ideas above and as a priority over the actual business at hand-overseeing malfeasance in their business unit that results in something like the Office of Personnel Management breach that compromised the personal identification information of 100 million Americans.
The government paid-some two years after the compromise-for Experian credit protection for the core group of 27 million or so (like me) who were compromised: 27M times maybe $60 each (over a billion dollars.) The other 73M people? Not even a heads up or warning-unless-like I did-you shared that notice with the people on your SF/DD398. All because the clown show academia-based sycophant hired in as a virtue signal by an administration much more concerned with that aspect than the people’s business, did not heed myriad inspector general warnings about infrastructure vulnerabilities.
One of the basic core principles you learn in government is that money is never saved-cost might be avoided-but when that happens there is some schemer with a grand plan sitting there with a money fishing net looking to scoop it up for their latest venture-that insiders have likely already identified as the “opportunity” “they” have been looking for to fund their “new idea.”
That is how modern-day government in the big bureaucracy government agencies works-not just in the intelligence community, but a whole of government “feature.”
An example that encapsulates a lot of the features of the problems I experienced during my time and the weakness in government program and technical expertise was a risk reduction effort undertaken with what-at the time-2006 or so-was a little-known high-performance computing and gaming firm called NVIDIA. To keep it pithy, our Chief Information Office (CIO) had an annual, yearly goal to drastically cut down on our Oracle Enterprise Licensing fees. The problem with the desire is it was a pure wish arrived at fact-free, since our main exploitation workstation-of which we had some ~4200-worked on what we called a Triad construct (an exploitation workstation, a link to our imagery library, and to our target data base) that required a minimum of three operational sessions to be open simultaneously. Only one vendor-Oracle-had a solution that worked to specification within our enterprise.
NVIDIA proposed to solve the challenge through processing power-and to keep it pithy as promised, they were unable to demonstrate a working capability over ~six demonstrations from 2007-2009.
It was not simply a processing challenge that a faster, multi-threaded, gaming engine, high performance computer could handle. The challenge was more in the security regime that maintained access-without compromise-or creating or exposing vulnerabilities to hacking-while handshaking among the three systems.
I moved on to a different job after the last demonstration. Imagine my surprise when several months later our CIO presented a plan to significantly reduce our Oracle licensing fees in favor of a solution that would cost much less-that had been demonstrated and was being presented as a decision briefing to the CIO Steering Committee to approve the plan: it was the NVIDIA solution. The brief had no detail whatsoever on how it worked but was focused on the cost savings to the agency of being able to nearly eliminate Oracle.
I don’t want to waste a lot of time going over the details beyond saying that the CIO shop was not aware that NVIDIA was in our footprint, and they had zero expertise or domain knowledge of the project we had funded. They had little to no understanding of the trials that had been undertaken over the previous 3 years to test NVIDIA’s capability and solution: they were shown an amazingly fast gaming engine capable of handling myriad threads, they assumed it would work in our enterprise, and solicited a bid from the vendor.
I wish this were an isolated incident, but I believe it to be the case that we have too few government seniors-leaders-who understand the systems their subordinates use to do their work. We had hundreds of seniors and not one in ~80 or so could explain the enterprise architecture our mission personnel used to do our daily work.
During my last six or so years “we” conducted an increasingly burdensome Portfolio Management (PFM,) Canine Equestrian Event that purported to be the pathway to revolutionize our agency workflow. There were two problems with this grandiose plan, one minor element being that 99% of the people working the effort lacked knowledge on what-and how-the current mission segments of our architecture worked. While the second-much, much, much bigger problem-was that none of the “made up” solutions were contract ready: there were no specified requirements, there was no documentation to explain the bumper stickers (for instance, the who, what, where, when, why and how) and none of it was funded or deconflicted with our executing or planned program.
On my ranch I would like to have a “hay dispenser” like a Pez device that I could fill up once a week-or longer and just press a button to automatically feed our animals. I’d also like something like a Roomba that picks up the “gold” the animals produce with “regularity” to save me time and trouble. How would I do it? Hell, if I knew that it would be working as we speak!
This was the type of thinking going on in the PFM effort. I was flabbergasted at the amateur hour approach we were making in this effort, although at the time I was assigned to a mission partner as the PFM delusion gained momentum.
Plus-because the agency had programs ongoing-with funds allocated to them-approved by congress, we lacked available funds to suddenly do a right or left turn and take on some new tasks or programs-that were not contract ready-by just canceling or shutting down the systems currently supporting missions that we couldn’t do without.
Despite what many might believe about the government-budgets, programs and “stuff-” an agency with an approved budget (program) from congress can’t just suddenly decide to spend tens of millions of dollars on “new stuff” that has not been briefed, vetted, submitted and approved. We had actually already been burnt in trying to do just that, as DNI and congress were unimpressed with us standing up a new office and creating new reporting processes without retiring or replacing the old: they identified the funds as excess-and not needed by us.
Our agency PFM effort was grinding along as if the wonderful things being made up to “revolutionize our workflow” would be available in short order, with no thought to the traditional contract cycle that takes about 18 months for programs over a few million dollars-assuming the requirements cycle has been completed, reprogramming efforts are successful, and congress approves the changes.
The folks working this effort were based out of our Research Lab and I was an increasingly frequent and interested visitor. A visitor because the agency had decided that neither the acquisition nor the research and development directorates would be “at the table” or deeply involved in the planning of the “revolution” unless the folks leading it decided to invite them in or provide some work for them to do. The idea being that the mission elements would determine what needed to be done, allocate resources to accomplish it, and use the acquisition or research personnel as they deemed necessary.
Also, program reviews were conducted to determine if the mission elements-those draining the swamp daily-were happy with and approved of the programs currently being executed. So the research program approved and funded by our agency Director, the Director of National Intelligence and congress, could be voted down by junior PFM representatives if a research plan or initiative lacked a compelling link to mission-in their view: they were largely budget or financial wonks with minimal mission expertise.
We briefed a project where a Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) was doing sensor evaluations by looking at commercial imagery vendors to judge the contributions and determine the value in comparison to other solutions, including government satellites. When our data scientist briefed a chart that showed very low contributions to resolving objects at scientific and technology sites, the budget/financial representative from the Analysis Directorate expressed concern and asked the briefer why the effort was being done. Our scientist pointed to the project point of contact, noting it was an office chief from the analysis middle east office: gotta reach those pedals.
A similar reaction came when a different scientist briefed an artificial intelligence, machine learning effort that could count discrete objects within an image scene and identify those that could not be resolved for action by the analyst. The question from the budget folks was-Who is this for? Why would we ever need or use this? It was pointed out that the Iran team uses the tool to count exports in the shipping, loading and dock storage area, as well as any cars being staged for shipping. The effort answers a standing request for the counts from the CIA, automating the task well above the 95% threshold objective, saving our analyst hours by not having to manually count items.
The technique has pretty much gone mainstream since the above briefing (Orbital Insight.) To close with the BFO (blinding flash of the obvious) here, these budget folks representing the analysis directorate were the ones making the recommendations on whether these projects were worthwhile-or not-to continue as part of our future agency capability: that is the mission space we were working for them. Fascinating was seeing somebody brief the above capability as part of the overarching portfolio-agency priorities-yet have junior budget analysts’ question-and ultimately voting-whether these projects were worthwhile to continue.
It is not a stretch to imagine somebody like these budget folks believing that it was a great idea to save money-“a billion dollars-” selecting Boeing over LMC: if everything is equal-cause you, in effect-know nothing-why wouldn’t you opt for the cheapest option? Just like shopping for a coffee mug, wrench or any other typical item…
19 January 2023
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