Mike Ellis said:
Back in the 80's.....
I have no doubt that we made it to the moon. I have significant doubt that we could hope to do it again, given our current approach to systems engineering.....
Wow Mike! I have to say that this may be the single most enlightening post I've ever read on TDR, of the many thousands I have read (I'm a TDR addict).
Talk about thinking outside the box!
It's funny how the military (and gov't in general) caught so much flak for having all this proprietary BS vis a vis computers and tech systems. Turns out that it was actually more effective in many ways.
In some ways, the COTS stuff has been great. But they are minor, very insignificant ways. For example, the USAF for a long time used a program called JetForm Forflow for all of its many forms and documents. When I'd write enlisted performance reports and such, I had to use this program. It was a TERRIBLE product. It was not WYSIWYG, so it made setting margins and text spacing unnecessarily difficult. Knowing this was a problem, the USAF started offering many of the more oft-used forms as Adobe PDFs that were fillable. A DREAM COME TRUE. I could just click to check boxes, get drop-downs for many fields (rank, date, etc), and then just type in my report in the text boxes.
I guess that the AF decided this was too convenient and went to yet another proprietary piece of crap called IMT (info mgmt tool). Talk about a step backwards! It's much better than the olf FormFlow, but nothing like the PDFs.
That said, I think this is one of the very FEW cases where COTS has been a good thing. Y'know, it used to be that the military had different, HIGHER standards. For example, in electronic componentry.
Back in the day, basic electronics components like resistors, capacitors, and inductors had to be made to a much higher standards of precision and durability to be considered "mil-spec". They were the best available.
When the military went to plumbing aircraft and such, they designed their own proprietary technology, the Army-Navy fitting. The AN fitting soon became a standard of performance for durability and ease of maintenance.
It was easy to learn, too, as each size was simply given in 16ths of an inch. So a -8AN is a 1/2" -12AN is 3/4" and so on. Years later, it's still the high-end way to plumb something.
Mike, I think you touched on something that's near and dear to me. It used to be that the military was setting the standard, innovating and engineering to the highest levels possible. Management at the time reflected this.
Then, at some point, the table turned. The military went from LEADING to FOLLOWING.
My first experience with this was when the AF first tried to implement Total Quality Management. TQM was the latest and greatest, the most innovative, out-of-the box thinking the military had ever seen-- and it came from large corporations. I sat through hour after hour of TQM training (even as a very junior enisted guy), and we learned how this was the future.
Then, it just disappeared! No more training, no nothing. It's like it was a fad that someone swore off very quickly, like Parachute Pants.
But since then, there's still this seed in the minds of senior military leadership that they are to look at civilian corporations for management training.
In the 11 years I've been in the air force, I have become convinced the most senior DOD leaders are incredibly out of touch with reality. The run in circles of rarified air and become creatures of politics and/or corporate finance.
Recently the USAF Chief of Staff sent out a memo in which he referred to our existing deployment construct as a "proven tool". Proven? YES-- PROVEN TO NOT WORK!!! The construct a few years ago was that all AF people would deploy for 3 months of every 18 in a regular cycle. Not bad-- home for 15mo, then gone for 3. Then they changed it (last year) to deploy for 4mo, home for 20mo. Sounds fine, right?
But WHO DOES THIS APPLY TO?? At the nuclear missile base I am assigned to, the vast majority of the people here never leave the US. They "deploy" to WY, CO, and NE to sit in a missile silo. The rest of us (like me) are deploying to sandy locales in the Middle East. But none of MY guys get to go for only 4mo and then be home for 20. No, they are gone for 8mo at a time, and then they have to leave again within a couple months.
This month, I am deploying 1/3 of my manpower for 8 months! They are "supposed" to be gone from Jan 06 to Apr 06. But the AF just waved a magic wand and now the rules go out the window. The worst part is that some of them were gone LAST year for 8 months. So gone for 8, home for 6, gone for 8 more. Does THIS sound like the 4 and 20 that the AF claims is working so well?
So, senior AF leadership just changes the rules when bad decisions and poor managment put them in a bind. There's little loyalty or looking out for people. Why are my guys getting hosed? Because some E-9 (not even an officer) at the Pentagon told the Army that he would offer up the troops in his purview (air force specialty code, like Army MOS) to augment the Army. That's right, instead of looking out for his folks, he VOLUNTEERED them to go play Army and get shot at.
Oddly enough, he wasn't very eager to go to Iraq HIMSELF. When he went over, he ended up at a cushy desert resort miles from any shots fired in anger. And this was only after he had remained in his cushy Pentagon office for over a YEAR after he volunteered his troops.
The AF is so incredibly screwed up that it's hard to know where to begin. The Senior Enlisted members that were brought up to serve as "advisor" to higher ranking officers are now a de facto part of the chain of command. That's right, as an AF Captain I have to answer to someone I significantly outrank. This is because their POSITION gives them more rank than me, in effect.
Senior leadership also surrounds itself with yes-men guaranteed to prevent the truth from being known. Heck, they don't WANT to know how bad it's getting. They don't have time. They're too busy flying all over the world pretending to care about the people they lead, rubbing elblows with corporate execs (and hoping to land a lucrative consulting position after retirement), going to parades, cutting ribbons, and sitting through one PowerPoint show after another.
Not too long ago the AF placed a Brig Gen in charge of bringing to service a new airplane called JSTARS. It was basically a flying computer/ground radar that would be VERY helpful to troops on ground. The platforms selected for the plane were some of the oldest Boeing 707s made. They found them in South America. They did NOT even have certificates of airworthiness. Nonetheless, the flew them to the US and modded the crap out of them.
The result is the E-8C JOINT STARS airplane. It's prone to random cockpit fires and studies are showing high rates of testicular cancer among crewmen due to insufficient radar protection.
So the General that oversaw this program shepherded an inferior airplane based on a JUNK frame into the AF fold.
Lo and behold, he retires AND GOES TO WORK FOR THE AEROSPACE CONTRACTOR HE WAS SUPPOSED TO SUPERVISE. He was rewarded for making the company millions of dollars by screwing over the AF (and the guys flying the plane).
So he's pulling in mega $$ as a retired one-star, then gets more mega $$ as a member of management for this company.
Was any punishment taken? No, he was instead rewarded!!
And THEN people have the nerve to wonder why the average troop doesn't have a whole lot of faith in those who are sending them off to war.
The lack of integrity present in the very highest reaches of power is most alarming to me.
Rant over.
Pondering my AF future,
Justin
Attention: TDR Forum Junkies 
to our limp national backbone, aggressive risk-taking programs like manned space flight end up facing a TOUGH row to hoe. We are not willing to spend the money or the effort to keep pushing our space program the way we did decades ago, look for example at the "International Space Station", where the politically correct spankers who run our agencies now have decided that we can't do anything major in space without letting other nations get involved. #@$%! 
