Paying Others to do Your Job
...what exactly, are we doing here?
A few bullet points for you to consider as you start your week:
The fiscal year 2024 budget for the Department of the Navy was $255.8 billion.
Each Virginia Class SSN costs about $4.5 billion.
The Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA), as of October 2023 had 86,886 civilian and military employees who are tasked with building, buying, and maintaining the Navy’s ships, submarines, and their combat systems.
The US Navy has been operating submarines for 124 years.
We have built hundreds of conventional submarines, 90+ nuclear attack submarines, and 59 ballistic missile submarines in the last century.
The Navy’s FY 2024 shipbuilding budget was $32.8 billion that got us 9 battle forces ships.
Look that list over again. It’s OK, this is going to be a short post today.
Now, ponder this:
The US Department of Defense (DOD) shared Tuesday that the US Navy will be awarding a contract worth almost $1 billion to local nonprofit BlueForge Alliance.
According to the DOD, the $950,744,520 contract is to, ‘support planning, resourcing, coordinating and uplifting the U.S. Submarine Industrial Base and Foreign Military Sales requirements.’
…and this.
Deloitte Consulting has won a potential five-year, $2.4 billion contract to work with the Navy and Defense Department on their efforts to modernize and expand the submarine industrial base.
Workforce development is one of several aspects Deloitte will seek to help the Navy and DOD's Innovation Capability and Modernization Office address, as part of their larger effort to address regional and broader challenges in submarine manufacturing.
Awarded on Monday, the contract has an initial one-year base period and up to four option years. The General Services Administration managed the procurement for the Navy and DOD.
Solicitation documents describe the Navy's goal as being able to "rapidly reach and sustain a programmed production rate of 1+2 submarines per year with a predominant emphasis on closing associated industrial workforce gaps."
So, $3.4 billion is going to the consultancy class.
We don’t know who is on Deloitte’s team on this contract, and to their credit, Blue Forge is rather open who runs and advises them. I am sure that in the end, Deloitte’s team will be like Blue Forge - mostly people who have experience in the very system that is so dysfunctional that - despite largesse in money and bureaucracy per battle force unit unseen in history - it can’t do its job.
I’ll never begrudge a man for earning a living and these are all exceptional people being asked to do a hard and important job, but it all has a certain vibe to it.
So, if we have to spend 3/4 of the cost of one of the two SSN’s we can build a year because the full-time employees of DON and their organization are broken to the point of inadequacy … then where is the effort to fix the underlying problem? Blue Forge has produced some exceptional advertisements and goodness knows there is a lot of work that needs to be done to fix our industrial base, but it begs a deeper series of questions.
Why are we here, and who are the people and what are the processes that created the present conditions?
Who is being fired? Which positions are redundant being that we’ve outsourced a few billion dollars of work? What processes are no longer fit for purpose and are being replaced with something that will perform?
In the civilian sector, if you have to bring in outside consultants to do what you are already staffed for, and that your leadership was hired to do in the first place, then it is usually part of a cleaning house of leadership, processes, and structures.
Here?
Will anything be done, or are the American taxpayers and their elected representative content with accepting this level ineffectiveness and inefficiency?
I worked many years for Booz Allen Hamilton. One of their brags was their consultancy of developing the PERT Chart system to help the Navy with managing the development of the Polaris system - boat and the exploding rocket thingy. So, not new.
Look to personnel management of both the uniformed and civilian workforce. In my little cohort of retirees (Majors, Lieutenant Colonels, and Sergeants First Class) we got hired by contracting firms to do what we did as uniforms, and oft-times better paid (even before the ret'd pay) but were null sets military career-wise. The ones in our fields who went on to Colonelcies, etc, had game-playing chops, and thought the "big thoughts" but turned to us to actually get things done (including waiting out the more fanciful "big thoughts"). Those folk who were truly assets, went on to the corporate side, many of the lesser lights shifted laterally into GS13-15 positions, where they continued their mediocre system-gaming, and contracting folk like us to keep it wired. We were needed.
Why? Because their lateral shift to the GS13-15 world shut down advancement for talented GS folk, who either died on the vine, occupying space, or left to come work for us. The system selects for mediocrity. Hey. Two of my SFC buddies went on to retire as millionaires, once freed of the system. Doing great things for the warrior in terms of drone-warfare during the Endless War, and doing it in-theatre.
We have the same problem the rest of government has. A system that promotes and protects mediocrity, and values conformity over competence at the highest levels. We all know great and talented civil servants and military folk - who are rode hard, out up wet, and leave. Vice time-serving parasites like Fauci and Milley. 🤬
This isn't just limited to building submarines. Ever since the Obama Administration, hundreds of billions of contracts have been thrown at consultants to study or fix issues that federal employees used to do. As you well said, systems are broken throughout the federal government. We could almost balance the budget (well, not quite, but it would be start) by getting rid of all consultants.