The modern DoD is based around the Asst Sec Defs and business processes put in place by Robert McNamara, who came from Ford. It's all stats and businees. Engineers and scientists are generally considered a sideshow, a workforce to quantitate.
> “An interesting question is, ‘Where did the name, dynamic programming, come from?’ The 1950s were not good years for mathematical research. We had a very interesting gentleman in Washington named Wilson. He was Secretary of Defense, and he actually had a pathological fear and hatred of the word, research. I’m not using the term lightly; I’m using it precisely. His face would suffuse, he would turn red, and he would get violent if people used the term, research, in his presence. You can imagine how he felt, then, about the term, mathematical. The RAND Corporation was employed by the Air Force, and the Air Force had Wilson as its boss, essentially. Hence, I felt I had to do something to shield Wilson and the Air Force from the fact that I was really doing mathematics inside the RAND Corporation. What title, what name, could I choose? In the first place I was interested in planning, in decision making, in thinking. But planning, is not a good word for various reasons. I decided therefore to use the word, ‘programming.’ Iwanted to get across the idea that this was dynamic, this was multistage, this was time-varying—I thought, let’s kill two birds with one stone. Let’s take a word that has an absolutely precise meaning, namely dynamic, in the classical physical sense. It also has a very interesting property as an adjective, and that is it’s impossible to use the word, dynamic, in a pejorative sense. Try thinking of some combination that will possibly give it a pejorative meaning. It’s impossible. Thus, I thought dynamic programming was a good name. It was something not even a Congressman could object to. So I used it as an umbrella for my activities"
--Richard Bellman on the naming of dynamic programming [1]
A technology/security/defense product that the DoD is, should be more product focused rather than just metrics, metrics are important, but product, usability, security is more important. The wrong metrics can lead you astray[1].
The amount we pay for security, it is appalling some of the data in OP's report just to hit some arbitrary number over security and understanding of a defense product.
> The modern DoD is based around the Asst Sec Defs and business processes put in place by Robert McNamara
Robert McNamara, a Harvard Business School MBA, 'epitomizes the hyper-rational executive led astray by numbers' [1]
While we're on the topic of McNamara, I'd like to plug the documentary The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara [1]. It's great to watch, and you can see how McNamara's perspective has changed. I would recommend it to everyone, especially anyone who cares about defense/foreign policy.
This discussion doesn't make much sense. Economics is the science of making organisations work. It doesn't come with rigid objectives; Those are inputs to the process. Now I'd be glad if the DOD accidentally let a pack of MBAs with default settings do their thing, because they'd probably create a world-wide cartel within the first year, and reduce all the world's standing armies to just themselves in a very fancy conference room within four.
I think the problem of releasing MBA types on an organization is that they're specialists in business in general, not in whatever a particular organization wants to do. The actual goal is just a parameter - input to the process. And that input can be changed, or abstracted away, and as a result you get a typical soulless corporation - an organization that lost its soul, it's actual object-level goal, and remains a mindless automaton optimizing profits.
They're like those fungi that infect snails and cause them to become zombies, crawling to the tops of blades of grass, where the birds eat them, they infect the birds, the birds die, and then the next generation of snails come along and eat the dead bird, re-infecting themselves.
