Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!know!sdd.hp.com!wuarchive!psuvax1!husc6!purdue!mentor.cc.purdue.edu!mace.cc.purdue.edu!dil From: dil@mace.cc.purdue.edu (Perry G Ramsey) Newsgroups: sci.space.shuttle Subject: Re: Not solving any problems (was Re: Solving The Shuttles Problems?) Summary: The contractor only brings people and organizations that have been developed with government money. Message-ID: <5737@mace.cc.purdue.edu> Date: 10 Oct 90 17:30:47 GMT References: <1990Oct1.160100.389@vaxa.strath.ac.uk> <5689@mace.cc.purdue.edu> <1990Oct8.031849.27121@loft386.uucp> Organization: Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Lines: 132 In article <1990Oct8.031849.27121@loft386.uucp>, wes@loft386.uucp (Wes Peters) writes: > Anything that you only > build on or two a year of is going to be essentially hand-crafted every > time. This applies to expensive car toys (Ferrari F-40), expensive yacht > toys (J-44), and expensive space toys (Shuttle). > > > Thinking that having the > government do something in-house would be more efficient than having it > contracted out is ludicrous. > Thinking that one bureaucratic organication contracting production out to another bureaucratic organization would be more efficient than producing it by the first bureaucratic organizaion is ludicrous. > > In most cases, the contractors in the > > US don't even own their own plant or furniture. It's all paid for > > by the government anyway. The contractor is essentially bringing > > nothing to the deal, except that they know how to deal with > > government paperwork. There is, in fact, an entire class of > > company, disparagingly known as the "Beltway Bandit" (in reference > > to the fact that many are located on the highway which surrounds > > Washington, DC, the "Capitol Beltway") which essentially does nothing > > but hire people who work under the direction of the Government. > > Actually, they bring two things into the deal: 1) knowing how to deal > with the government paperwork, which quite often even the contracting > government agency doesn't really know, and 2) people with the expertise > to actually CREATE something; you just don't find those kind of people > in the civil service. Why don't you find them in the Civil Service? (the pay issue, principally) The people who work for contractors essentially work for government agencies their entire careers anyway. Arch Hughes in a followup to your article makes a point about hiring painters to paint his house. By my original rules (hire someone from the outside if he brings outside experience to the job) contracting painters to paint your house makes sense. They already know how to paint houses, and own most of their own equipment. When they finish the job, they go on to work for a different customer. If, however, you had a whole lot of houses to paint over many years it would make more sense to hire the painters as your own employees. Which is what the government should do with the people who are now operating as contractors. > > I think you're entirely wrong. What we really need to do is reduce the > granularity on government contracting jobs, in the space program, the > defense industry, and elsewhere, and make it MORE competitive. The main > problem with the current state of government acquisitions is that there > is too much of a "whole ball of wax" concept. The government should run > procurement in many steps, starting with a concept definition, to a > requirements definition, to a preliminary design, then a pre-production > model, and then multiple-source production contracts. I can buy some of this. It's just that the contractors are not really in a position to do the concept definition, requirements definition, preliminary design, or pre-production. The government is the customer and if they don't have the expertise to do all of this, they are in no position to decide whether the contractor is doing it right. The old way of having the government lab bringing the idea up to the production stage and then multi-sourcing the production makes sense to me. That is competitive, which is what you are insisting on. The reason competition doesn't work in the first stages is that it is impossible to evaluate whether what is being done is right. The government has to know what it wants before it can issue a firm contract to have it done. > Each step should be seperately competed, and not until the prior step is > completed and results published. The "defintion" contracts and > preliminary design should be level-of-effort or time-and-materials > contracts until completion, with quarterly progress reviews. A level of effort contract is essentially just renting employees at a very high cost. It should only be used to rent people who have otherwise developed some unique skill. It doesn't make sense to rent forever. > Every effort should be made along the way to use commercial-quality > documentation and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) or non-developed > item (NDI) production. When you start putting unsuitable hardware in space because it was readily available, things get really expensive (heavy, unreliable, doesn't stand the environment, etc.) > The main expenditure in modern federal > acqusitions is not the design or production of the systems, but the cost > of documenting the system in the level of detail and REPETITIVENESS > required by the Federal Acquisition Regulations. All of that FAR stuff is to make sure that the government isn't getting ripped off. The trouble is that they have built a system where the expertise is at the contractor's facility, so it's difficult to decide technically if they are or they aren't. > If the rich people are getting richer for doing nothing, why did I spend > a lot of last year working 60 - 70 hour weeks for no pay raise? I think > you have been watching 60 Minutes or other TV news programs too much, > and need a drastic reality check. You're getting a little personal here, but I'll overlook it. My experience comes from six years working for aerospace contractors, not from listening to 'Inside Edition' distort the facts. By rich people getting richer, I refer to the stockholders (myself included) who essentially provide nothing to the taxpayer except the sign on the door and then geting a profit from it. Note that as a stockholder, I think this is a swell deal, but as a taxpayer and one interested in the exploration of space, I'm not so happy about it. > For all the heat government contractors in general, and defense > contractors in particular, have taken in the media over the past five > years, keep in mind what these contractors have accomplished over the > years - ... (listing of government funded projects) And I still insist that the contracting company provided nothing to the government. Everything from the pencils on up was paid for by the government, and the contractor just wrote the paychecks and made the recruiting trips. The people on the floor (apparently yourself included) did what they did out of some sort of devotion to the program, and the fact that they were working for GD, or MCDAD, or Rockwell, or whoever didn't really make any difference. There is a pretty common phrase among employees in the business: "changing badges". This means that you have changed contracting compainies, but you are still essentially working on the same stuff. That's probably the best example I can think of illustrating the (lack of) value that the contracting companies bring to the equation. Somewhere in this thread I did support the notion that the contractors were essentially honest, just operating in a rotten environment. Some of the comments we are making here might help that. -- Perry G. Ramsey Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences perryr@vm.cc.purdue.edu Purdue University, W. Lafayette, IN USA dil@mace.cc.purdue.edu We've looked at clouds from ten sides now, And we REALLY don't know clouds, at all.