[Loopyjr]

http://lewrockwell.com/wile/wile52.1.html

Great article

[Kokomoxcvcv]

"Daily Bell: Give us some background on yourself and the US military-industrial complex.

Colonel Douglas Macgregor: Let's be clear. I think we are spending far more on defense than we need to and that's been true for a very long time. It's become a self-perpetuating industry, sometimes referred to as a self-licking ice cream cone. I think it's a good way to depict the American defense establishment at this point, though. I am by no means anti-defense or anti-defense industry but I think we can extract more for our money and we can do business much better than we are or what we have been doing for a very long time. One of the reasons that I wrote the books on military reform and reorganization is because until you go after the defense system and reorganize it and change it, the defense industry is not going to be changed. The defense industry has organized itself to support the client and it mirrors a very Byzantine, bloated defense establishment that we maintain in the United States.

Unlike many people, I walked away in 1991 from Desert Storm with the view that we had failed strategically to achieve our objective. The generals were, as usual, very timid and reluctant to fight. We assembled this monumental military force designed to take on and defeat the Soviet Armed Forces in Europe and we didn't use it effectively. We didn't use it effectively for a whole range of reasons – because we were organized to refight WWII, which was a mistake, but also because the people at the top were very much bureaucrats who had risen through the ranks in peace time and they failed.

The political leadership chose to ignore that failure because they could, and I'm talking about George Bush Sr. and others, who thought they could capitalize on this great strategic achievement, which was not a great strategic achievement politically in the next election. As we know, that did not work. The American people, as usual, were not terribly engaged. They were happy to lead cheers, happy to receive the usual glowing reports regardless of whether or not they were accurate.

And so I walked away from the desert and that experience and we should have taken it more seriously than we did and made fundamental changes in reforms. Again we did not because there was no interest in the senior ranks to do so and no one in Congress was either sufficiently well informed or interested to make any changes. So the result is you have this trillion-dollar defense establishment that is still designed for the most part to maintain large numbers of generals and admirals and headquarters and to feed politicians' re-election campaign coffers and sustain this bloated defense industry. Again, it's all linked together but it all begins fundamentally with the nature of this military establishment."


he's not kidding.

one of the problems i was asked to solve while working for a large defense contractor was that of condensing humidity getting into the connectors.

i went to the local auto parts store ("Pep Boys") and bought some dielectric grease - for $7.

dielectric grease has been used by the car industry to keep water out of high voltage connections for at least 30 years. therefore it has a LONG & successful usage history.


PROBLEM WAS - "they" (upper management) wanted me to propose a re-design. a $5 million re-design, using gasketed connectors that i had used while working for another company. $5 million = 20 man-years.

so they assigned me to another "Tiger Team" to work on fixing other design fvck-ups.

you should have seen how pissed they got when i suggested fixing their problem with a $7 tube of dielectric grease.