DOD Just Beginning to Grapple with Scale of Weapon Systems Vulnerabilities

The inclusion of this graphic makes me realize the report is not intended to explain the situation to engineers. It's to explain the problem to well-decorated higher ups that probably don't understand modern technology all that well, yet are calling all the budget shots.

Here's a few concepts that came out of B-Schools/MBA land. at a grossly brief, thus over-simplified level:

* "Shareholder value" as the prime goal of management, justifying the exclusion of all other stakeholders (employees, customers, community supporting the business, country supporting the business, etc.). Few concepts have done more to damage this country and capitalism itself (note the main problem of shrinking middle class able to purchase the goods produced).

* "Manufacturing is fungible & expendable, just outsource it to the lowest-cost country". Massive damage to developed nations' economies, and national security, all to goose short-term profits. Actively destroys massive corporate value of know-how, simultaneously providing both the existing know-how and ability to generate new know-how to new competitors.

While all the MBAs thought we were exploiting the cheap Chinese labor, the Chinese were looking long terms and exploiting our myopic need for short-term profits to gain massive economic & military advantage (note the recent controversies about planted chips, among many other similar security nightmares). This will go down in history as one of the all-time great geostrategic blunders, brought to us by MBAs.

* "Invest in the stars, milk the cash cows, dump the dogs" -- breaking down your business units in this way, guarantees that the business will become a shell of its former self -- the dogs will be sold off with no regard for their potential if invested in (they may be developing key breakthrus, but not yet showing good financials), the cash cows will be starved of all potential and soon become dogs to be sold off, and maybe the stars work out or maybe they don't. Great way to kill a business. GE was financially managed -- where is it now?

* The general concept that I've seen multiple times of focusing on managing to the financials instead of managing to CREATE great value. The financials will ALWAYS look better when investment in building true value and a competitive moat is overlooked to cutting costs and goosing current sales. These numbers will look good and increase for a while, possibly years. Until they don't. At that point, the business has no hope, and is a walking zombie, unrecoverable.

So, yes if MBAs are kept in their suitable container of 1) installing good accounting practices for tracking and security of financial assets, 2) managing the profits that are made to ensure good returns, 3) optimizing operations & taxes (lease vs. buy capital assets?, etc.), then things will work out great.

But putting them in charge without also having serious domain knowledge, both on the customer/market side and on the engineering/manufacturing side -- very bad idea.

well, I recall asking about the security of the systems (I was the IT lead and was to help design the global port tracking system which they hoped to track all shipping containers) -- there was no encryption/authentication on any of the tags.

If you had a reader, you could read/write the tags.

They had not even thought about securing these systems - and they were trying to tout them as a security system for weapons shipments. They even had tags that had G-sensors that were to be able to tell you if a munition was dropped, if it had armed (some weapons will only arm themselves once a certain g-force is reached which indicates to the weapon they have been launched.)

I seem to remember a story about "how good is the SAS" because they were asked, after years of development, to try and destroy an armoured train that carried nuclear material from power plant to disposal (it ran through populated areas so was proof against head on collisions at a gazillion miles per hour and so on)

The guy took a calor gas canister, filled the train half full of gas and lit it. The armoured million dollar train of course ruptured with the internal explosion.

kudos to the well trained SAS demolitions expert, but i suspect a lot of the army could have done that, at various earlier stages.

not sure where that is going, except, yeah blow things up, early on.