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?