Military Waste. Joshua O. Reno
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DoD. As a result, current employees feel additional scheduling and cost pressures. In some cases, these pressures manifest in the social relationships of client and seller. However, market relations are never purely reducible to economic competition, which is premised on an idealized conception of marketplaces and market behavior.14 From the point of view of those involved in military contracting, wastes result from trying to please and maintain a good relationship with the customer, not simply as part of the abstract logic of the marketplace. The ultimate meaning of this relationship may still come down to reducing cost (for the client) and growing shareholder value (for Lockheed), but in practice it involves real people communicating with one another to solve problems and come to agreements.
I talked about this with Louis, a retired analyst for the DoD (specifically the Defense Contract Management Agency, or DCMA). I met Louis through the local Kopernik Astronomical Society, where he has volunteered in retirement alongside other current and former DoD and Lockheed workers. Louis explained to me how trying to satisfy the customer could lead to waste in the form of “mission creep”:
It’s a fancy term for, you start out and you say “I want this vehicle to do mission one, mission two, mission three. . .” And then, two years later into the development cycle, a new secretary of defense comes along and says, “Oh, guess what: I want you to do X, Y, and Z in addition to one, two, and three.” And all the military planners go, “Okay. . .” You know, and then they go back and look at all the other contracts and say, “Well, we’re developing this vehicle that can do these things, but we really need to add more capability.” Never mind the fact that it doubles the price, and/or increases the delivery schedule by more years.
Louis explained mission creep to me while we sat in the children’s section of a Borders bookstore, where he liked to go with his grandchildren sometimes, and the occasional child or toddler wandered in and out of our peripheral vision. He refused to discuss specifics, unsure of what would constitute treason, but he could tell me that mission creep could waste time, money, and effort. Manufacturers might even be aware of this, but be unable to resist the requests of their primary client. Both the manufacturer and the client might invest more than necessary in the development of a product that would never see the light of day, or would be purchased but end up with unnecessary multifunctionality simply because of the caprice of “military planners.”
The military spending cuts of the 1990s meant fewer companies but also fewer big-budget projects to go around. Sometimes budgets were cut on ongoing projects. But there are strategies for dealing with this as well. As Louis explained:
Usually the response to having your budget cut is you tell the contractor, “Well, instead of delivering twenty-five vehicles this year, and fifty the next year, I want you to deliver ten vehicles this year and fifteen vehicles the next year.” And then the contractor goes crazy! Or you say “Well, we changed their mind [i.e., the DoD], instead of having capability to do X, Y, Z, let’s just do X and Y, forget about Z, and reduce the quantities.” Or come back and say “Well, instead of having them ready by 2017, we’ll stretch it out to 2019, can you live with that?”
From Louis’s perspective as a former agent of the DCMA dedicated to overseeing and monitoring military contracts on behalf of the DoD, Lockheed Martin was not necessarily to blame for any wasted time, money, or resources in the process, “My personal experience with Lockheed Martin was they’re fairly responsible. There are other military contractors that don’t necessarily have the best track record.” He then paused and added, “Reasonably responsible,” perhaps thinking of instances where Lockheed crossed the line into wasteful irresponsibility.15
Routine aspects of contract negotiation, like mission creep, are not entirely reducible to ordinary market logic, which pits buyers and sellers with their competing interests against each other. Rather, they are also a product of social relations between people who know each other well. For employees at the DCMA, military industry is not a collection of faceless corporations, but people with whom they share a community. In this community, I have known DCMA and Lockheed employees who continue to socialize and volunteer together after retirement—including at the Kopernik Observatory. They tinker with machines together, teach young people about the value of science and technology together, go camping together, run charity events together, get to know one another’s families, health concerns, and passions. Perhaps because of this social intimacy, no one described the relationship between Lockheed and the DCMA as oppositional or combative.
Even so, as representatives of buyer and seller, respectively, there can be disagreements and misunderstandings. As Hugh Gusterson observed of nuclear weapons scientists at Livermore National Laboratory, many work-related stories by weapons designers “involve a sequence of events in which scientists fear that machines will not behave as predicted but, after a period of painful anxiety, learn that humans can predict and control the behavior of technology” (1996, 159). In the stories I heard, people were as much a source of anxiety, and people also needed to be predicted and controlled to have successful outcomes. One current Lockheed engineer described how this could happen in the bidding process for a new contract:
When we’re in the bidding process to get a job. . .we’ll go in and. . .we’ll do our first estimate of what we think it’s gonna take to do this job. And then in our reviews we’ll say, “Aww, that’s gonna cost too much money, our inside information says the customer only has this amount of money and they won’t go over that, so, get it down!” So you get it down. And then when you win the job and you’re actually performing the job, you realize that the first number you put out was the real number. That happens an awful lot.
He went on to tell me a story:
One project I was involved in, we had a supplier who was providing the software, and they went bankrupt in the middle of what we were doing. So there was a lot of internal hand-wringing: ‘What are we gonna do about it? Are we gonna do the work ourselves? Are we gonna farm it out to yet another company?” And I was the one that had to do the analysis of what we were going to do and say, could we do it, and said “Yeah, we could do it,” and decision was we would do it, which was the decision I hoped we weren’t going to do, because it was a lot of pressure, both schedule and cost. It was unanticipated cost because we had given money to this company and expected fully that they would deliver us a product and now they weren’t there, so we were gonna have to do it. And it’s something that we had no expertise in at all, so we had to learn fast. And we had to have it done in six months.
When producers bid for projects, they present an initial price for meeting customer demands. When the cost of a project goes up, they risk being blamed by the client or the general public for wasting government dollars or jeopardizing defense needs. Yet, this example shows a simple contingency that can set production back (a supplier who unexpectedly goes bankrupt). If wasted money and time are avoided in this instance, it will come from manufacturers with “no expertise” working hard to deliver on their company’s promises. And, if they do not, they may be blamed by others but will not blame themselves. It is a failure to predict the actions of other people that is held responsible, as if they too should behave as reliably as machines.
Simon explained other specific examples where projects could live or die as a result of social relations maintained with the clients, who might disappoint or frustrate producers:
I was also on a couple top-secret projects. . . We were making brand-new aircraft for DARPA. It was called UCAR [unmanned combat armed rotorcraft protocol]. DARPA has their own internal engineers, the customer was the Army, and the Army would have their own staff of engineers. . . We’d show up for a meeting and there’d be DARPA engineers and there’d be generals. . . We were in a four-company contest to make this UCAR.
The UCAR was considered a small project for Lockheed at the time, but still an important contract to get.
We were down-selected from four to three and three to two. So we were at one of these presentations where the generals and colonels and DARPA. . . We were making our presentations, and typically it’s death by PowerPoint slide. Over two days, over six hundred PowerPoint slides. So these poor generals and DARPA people, they know what’s coming. So during the first presentation, the lead engineer from weapons and fire control in Orlando, Florida, was making his presentation