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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

#161

Post by KennyBlanken »

blindriver wrote: post #34

Why would anyone care about an audit if there are no repercussions?

Believe it or not, the Pentagon isn't really the problem; Congress is.

https://rollcall.com/2023/05/23/hill-favored-projects-called...

Congressional representatives push all sorts of weapons "programs" that military leadership doesn't want or need, because it's an easy way to be able to go home and tell your voters how many jobs you "saved" "protecting America."

Well over a decade ago Pentagon leadership declared that their budget was not sustainable for the country...just like they declared a long time ago that climate change was a serious threat and started working on decarbonization (the US military is still the single largest generator of carbon dioxide on the planet.)

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#162

Post by wolverine876 »

vore wrote: post #151
mschuster91 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Even for military officers giving orders in the field, edicts don't work. You need buy-in, including earning trust in you.

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#163

Post by 1323portloo »

ramilefu wrote: post #112
whatshisface wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

250k is not top dollar, it is average for experienced engineers.

Depends on where you live. An “experienced engineer” is going to make a lot less if they live in Mississippi than if they were in California. 250k for the former is likely “top dollar”.

If you are a small shop, sure. If you are a major employer you will either meet market rate and get top candidates (willing to live in your area) or you will get whatever candidates decided to live in Mississippi.

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#164

Post by rybosworld »

whatshisface wrote: post #97
thelastgallon wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

250k is not top dollar, it is average for experienced engineers.

This is a lie that is commonly spread here and on reddit.

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#165

Post by uticus »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #86
Mistletoe wrote: post #3

Can anyone explain to me why it is awful for a person to live in debt but it is okay for the federal government to do so? I've never understood this in the least, other than the "kick the can down the road, America superpower backed by military blah, blah, blah" very weak argument. History is full of the carnage of failed empires that had this same idea. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN 32 trillion in debt…

> 32 trillion in debt seems insurmountable, has anything like this ever reversed course historically? Never and it is insane that there are apologists for such a sad state of affairs. https://www.usdebtclock.org/ This is not going to end well. That's what happen when totally clueless, incompetent and senile people are pulling the levers, following the advices of visionaries like Paul "it will become clear that the In…

The numbers are just outside comprehension. We can comprehend a dollar, or a hundred dollars, in the hand. We may be able to imagine (or have seen) a room full of a couple tens of thousands of dollars. But to extrapolate one, to 32 trillion of the same...

If a 4 GHz processor core executes an instruction every clock cycle, it would still take two hours to iterate that instruction 32 trillion times.

If you lined up 32 trillion inches, it would be over 505 million miles.

If a dollar bill is 0.1 millimeters thick, and you stacked 32 trillion of the bills on top of each other, the stack would be almost 2 million miles high.

Etc

By the way, we went past $33 trillion in September, and reached $33.5 20 days later. Only a half trillion added in 20 days.

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#166

Post by bumby »

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…

Hell, it would probably take more than four years just to understand the problems the various organizations are trying to solve. If you rush that, you "solution" is bound to miss important nuances that make things worse rather than better.

Sure, you could assemble a team with that experience to short-cut some of that. But you'll likely need a long time to just build the trust necessary to get the right information. You're an outsider and will likely be treated as such.

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#167

Post by bastawhiz »

bumby wrote: post #156
bastawhiz wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

And yet hundreds of thousands of companies pass the same audits. The call for audits came from ridiculous amounts of misreporting and waste. Accounting systems that can't do accounting and deal with trillions of taxpayer dollars should not have the goalposts moved. A 0.001% error in a trillion dollar system is ten million dollars. That's taxpayer money that could fix derelict bridges or pay for thousands of children to receive lunch at school.

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#168

Post by bluefirebrand »

ramilefu wrote: post #112
whatshisface wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

250k is not top dollar, it is average for experienced engineers.

Depends on where you live. An “experienced engineer” is going to make a lot less if they live in Mississippi than if they were in California. 250k for the former is likely “top dollar”.

People on HN are convinced if you don't live in California maximizing your salary, you're not capable of doing so.

Highlighted in the sibling comment: "you will get whatever candidates decided to live in Mississippi"

As if top talent never decides to live in Mississippi and accept 250k/year as their salary ceiling...

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#169

Post by count »

mschuster91 wrote: post #142
curiousllama wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cobol cowboys are a thing. They make substantially more than 250k. They’re competing with Wall St though, so hard to just pay more. Fed govt migrations are ALWAYS shitshows. The army alone has like 20 individual email services. The pentagon is to org complexity what big tech is to technical complexity. It’s turtles all the way down. This is literally one of the largest bureaucratic challenges on earth. There’s no sim…

The solution is simple: you need someone with absolute authority over everyone including the generals to lead the effort. There's a time and place for democracy - but large IT projects are not. Do a thorough need analysis, compare with what's reasonably possible using COTS software, and adapt or discard what is not possible.

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, or earnest.

This is the funniest possible response. The 'thorough need analysis' is the reason we are where we are now!

The thoroughness is so thorough that the needs change faster than the analysis can be completed, obviating the analysis in the first place.

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#170

Post by count »

psunavy03 wrote: post #131
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…

As someone with 20 years active and reserve time, the only thing I'd really tweak here is that the budget is somewhat centralized; it's just the execution that's decentralized. DOD is an Executive Branch department that operates on money programmed by Congress. Agencies choose, within limits of Title 10 US Code, how to spend that money, but the "pots" or "flavors" of money they have to spend are allocated in the Cong…

Heh, most of the DoD is. But DoD also has non Title10/PPBE-programmed funding (foreign military sales, contingency and humanitarian operations funds, MWR funds and incomes, support-to-other-agency (e.g. the US Navy NAVWAR organization provides SUBSTANTIAL IT and cyber expertise to non-DoD entities and other federal agencies such as the FBI and DHS).

The DoD is like the End Game Boss on legal and financial edge cases.

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