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Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

breakingdefense.com

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Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#151

Post by vore »

mschuster91 wrote: post #145
wolverine876 wrote: post #104

The US Department of Defense was not audited until six years ago, when it began a project to make their organization auditable. From the start, it was expected to take longer than six years: You are looking at a potential new job. A large company wants you to lead a project on their audits. Here is the situation: They are large and complex - on a different order of magnitude, possibly the largest, most complex organi…

Give me the complete and utter authority, Congress off of my neck for four years and I will. The problem is not technical, it's the immeasurable amounts of tiny personal fiefdoms established by the countless layers of middle management. You won't get rid of these without someone who has been publicly given the political backing to end the career of anyone resisting change. And that includes the Congress members which…

That's not how authority works. Whatever you would choose to implement, you will need to have enough buy in from those middle managers and fiefdoms otherwise you will end up with heel-dragging or, worse, malicious compliance. If you've been in any kind of organization that's tried to impose completely top-down edicts, you should have seen the kind of destruction of morale it leaves in its wake.

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#152

Post by Kon-Peki »

mike_hock wrote: post #57
kgwxd wrote: post #21

Duh. You can't just put "classified alien technology R&D" as a clear-text line item. Just trust them, it's all going towards national, even global, security.

"What, do you think we spent 10 grand on a fire extinguisher?"

Large fire extinguishers are high-pressure cylinders that require high-precision valves. There are fewer than 10 manufacturers in the world that can do it - half of them are in the US and the DoD will spend what it takes to keep it that way.

You wouldn't want to end up like the EU and not have a single manufacturer that can do it, or (since Brexit) not have any that are legally allowed to import them. It's a good thing they can be refurbished when used, and that the authorities look the other way when a shipment arrives from a 3rd party...

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#154

Post by wolverine876 »

Loughla wrote: post #56
wolverine876 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you say there are no reprocussions? It's a signicant issue in Congress, which writes all of the Department of Defense's checks, oversees them, investigates them, confirms their leaders, and makes laws controlling everything they do.

And what has failing audits led to in the past?

To improving the auditability of the Pentagon, a new and ongoing project.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38307749

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#155

Post by DougBTX »

nradov wrote: post #74
encoderer wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can imagine a future where new software is, mainly, written by humans while legacy software is maintained by ai. It can take months for a new developer to understand a legacy code base but an LLM with a big enough context window would be instantly productive.

The hard part of accounting systems is doing the requirements analysis (including interviewing humans who give inaccurate or incomplete answers) and writing detailed functional specifications which account for every possible edge case. No LLM can do that. Once you have the detailed specifications the coding is relatively easy. Some of that can be partially automated using AI CASE tools, but that only gives a marginal…

> The hard part of accounting systems is doing the requirements analysis (including interviewing humans who give inaccurate or incomplete answers) and writing detailed functional specifications which account for every possible edge case.

So lots of tedious repetitive manipulation of language to extract facts and transform them into a systematic format? My prediction: LLMs are going to eat that for breakfast.

(Honestly it is a great business idea for someone with the right contacts. Lots of big customers with deep pockets and large private datasets to train against that might now have a solution to a problem which was previously intractable in scale.)

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#156

Post by bumby »

bastawhiz wrote: post #139
uticus wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, devil's advocate would point out COBOL in 60s was written with a lot more focus on lasting in general. They didn't largely have the same general attitude of 'we iterate quickly with our script kiddies' as is prevalent today. Not that all software from then was wonderful. Or that COBOL magically guarantees great code. But, on the flip side, you can't say the code base isn't battle-hardened (to various liter…

> you can't say the code base isn't battle-hardened Your statement is undermined by the fact that the system has failed its sixth consecutive audit. If it's not hardened against failing an audit, I'm not really sure what it could possibly be hardened against.

Part of Murphy's Laws of Combat: No combat ready unit ever passed inspection. No inspection ready unit ever passed combat.

Managers need to be careful of Goodhart's law. (in this case "passing inspection" may not be the best target)

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#157

Post by wolverine876 »

warner25 wrote: post #81
wolverine876 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not an insider, but those sound like generally hard-to-avoid issues of large organizations, public and private, profit-oriented and service-oriented. You can't manage that many people, millions in DoD, without rules, and rules can't be defined to apply well to the very wide variety of situations in reality - just like an algorithm, they'll be inflexible. These kind of gripes are, understandably, in every large or…

Yeah, it just seems like we've spent an inordinate amount of time on things that would either (1) save what amounts to peanuts in the context of the Army and DoD budgets or (2) not save any money at all. I guess the primary purpose of the audit is to make all the numbers add up, and maybe that can inform cost-saving decisions down the road, like you said about warehouse storage space(?). I'd rather see a number of "e…

> like you said about warehouse storage space(?).

I think that's about much more than space, and more the operational drag of managing all that stuff.

Here's the Army Undersecretary and also the Chief of Staff talking about it and plans to reduce inventory:

https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2023/10/army-doesnt-know-w...

From the article:

“I'm working really hard with Army Materiel Command to find ways to more rapidly and in the digital fashion to catalog what we currently have, not relying on the clipboard and supply soldier who's sitting there taking notes and putting it on a piece of paper,”

Yikes.

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#158

Post by quickthrower2 »

ebiester wrote: post #116
uticus wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, devil's advocate would point out COBOL in 60s was written with a lot more focus on lasting in general. They didn't largely have the same general attitude of 'we iterate quickly with our script kiddies' as is prevalent today. Not that all software from then was wonderful. Or that COBOL magically guarantees great code. But, on the flip side, you can't say the code base isn't battle-hardened (to various liter…

I can build you a team using today's (quality: average B2B startup) programmers and today's methodologies that will write software for 40 years. It will just cost twice as much as the team that iterates quickly. It will cost more because I will spend more money on business analysis up front. I will spend more money writing automated tests. Most importantly, I will maintain my own toolchain and libraries or pay someon…

The trick is to use JS. (Not anything that compiles to it)

It will be guaranteed to run in 100 years time.

Any other language can die or have incompatibility issues. Over that timespan.

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#159

Post by VoodooJuJu »

thelastgallon wrote: post #96
bogota wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Start paying 250k a year for cobol developers and the problem fixes itself really fast. That or start migrating the system. Or more likely they keep using it until it completely breaks and then run to the government for a big handout to fix it. Easy to be irresponsible with other peoples money.

Incentives only work on low-skilled labor that is quantifiable. Eg. more money for flipping more burgers. It is not a settled science paying people a lot more will automagically solve problems. People crave Autonomy, Mastery & Purpose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbR2V1UeB_A What is definitely going to happen is you will attract the cowboys who have convinced themselves and can convince you to pay top dollar. The…

>People crave Autonomy, Mastery & Purpose

I'm not a sack of chemicals whose desires can be reduced down to some pithy pseudo-scientific Maslowian quip. The only thing I crave from my job is cash so I can take care of me and my family. 250k/yr for a COBOL position would suit that end just fine. You can keep your autonomy, mastery, purpose, and all the other foofoo, just hand me the check so I can be on my way.

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#160

Post by wolverine876 »

brvsft wrote: post #72
wolverine876 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you say there are no reprocussions? It's a signicant issue in Congress, which writes all of the Department of Defense's checks, oversees them, investigates them, confirms their leaders, and makes laws controlling everything they do.

The failed audits have no impact on their budget the following year.

The Pentagon is on track, for the most part, on their auditing project. But what makes you say it doesn't impact their budget?
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