IT IS TO LAUGH

I was reading prattle and laughed out loud in an empty room.

There are still people out there so ill informed that they think the Military gets the very best of technology. They are not at all familiar with the Defense Acquisition Manual, the DoD 5000 and it's related bits of idiocy layered on the process year after year by Congress and bureaucrats.

ARPA and DARPA and even the Navy's version were an attempt to get around the dead weight but they didn't last more than a few months. As an analogy it was like the dead hand of Rickover stopping all research into nuclear power for decade after decade because he was the go-to man who had a role in building the Nautilus. It is what you get with bureaucracies. Left to itself the Army would still be buying Spads. Let's see...., the Air Force is still flying B-52s.

Went to pick up breakfast this morning and found a girl, a young lady, wearing an SAIC shirt. I have not seen SAIC anywhere since I left Cali 10 years ago so I had to ask her if she worked there and she replied, yep.

SAIC, science applications international was a fascinating place to work for under its founder who had a unique philosophy for managing an enormous and utterly diverse workforce. He put people in charge and each of them was probably brilliant but the significant thing was that he put them in charge. They used to deal with each other like feuding lords in the middle ages. Going outside your swim lane, the one controlled by your feudal overlord, was death. It reached the point, shortly before the Greek Olympic debacle that the company found itself bidding against some of its own divisions for work. It was kind of amusing to watch on the inside.

The engineers and scientists were the very best. The management teams? Not so much. As far as I know, up to the death of the founder, management was sourced primarily from within. After he left the board elected to bring in Wall Street types to be in charge and it didn't take them very long to take an employee owned company and sell it on Wall Street, rake in huge amounts of money for themselves and then walk away after breaking it up.