Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he’ll withhold $614 million of Lockheed Martin Corp.’s fees on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program and change the project’s leader at the Pentagon after performance targets were missed. ... Gates said Marine Corps Major General David Heinz, the program manager on the Joint Strike Fighter, will be replaced with a senior officer holding the rank of a Lieutenant General or an equivalent position.Last year, Gates sacked the commanding general of the Afghan theater, Gen. McKiernan. The year before, he fired both the Air Force Secretary and Chief of Staff over nuclear weapons safety issues.
The F-35 program is in trouble, and this is after Gates slashed the F-22 program. Add to that the fiasco surrounding the aerial tanker contract, the LPD-17 and even down to trying to buy a replacement rifle for the M-4 and you have to wonder if the folks in DoD procurement could even buy a few cases of legal pads without somehow fucking up the order.
6 comments:
Hi Comrade,
Not on the subject of Gates, but how did you get that cool Google Translate Gadget onto your page? I found the gadget you used, but I can't figure out how to put it on my blog.
Dave
Gates isn't the sharpest tack in the tool shed but he ain't the dumbest either. He inherited a clusterfuck. The fact that he hasn't managed to clean up the clusterfuck in three years just shows how deep the clusterfuck really went. Rumsfeld really ripped the guts out of the DoD in oh so many ways. We have neither the force structure nor the administrative structure to fight two wars at once, in a real shooting war the first thing that would have been done would have been to institute a selective draft to draft the folks needed to ramp up procurement and fill knowledge-base holes, the next thing to be done would have been to add six more divisions of plain old grunts to the regular Army to handle keeping the wogs in line after the pointy tip of the spear got'em pacified, but Rummy tore up those plans, Bush wouldn't have gone for it and was a lame duck just trying to run out the clock by the time Gates came in, and Obama can't do it because he promised to get us *out* of Iraq and Afghanistan, not keep us there forever in a war of occupation.
Clusterfuck. From day one. Can't blame Gates for that. Wish we could, but the real culprit is a bit higher in the food chain.
- Badtux the Un-delusional Penguin
UC, if you go to the blogger "dashboard" and then to "layout", you should see something called "add a gadget" in the side column. click on that, then in the upper left of the dialogue box, click on "more gadgets". You can then search for google translate and add it.
I think.
Gates has made his mistakes; chiefly his wild overestimation of the durability of the USSR in the 1980s. But he's been pretty decent as SecDef, though cleaning up the whole procurement mess is an Augean task.
Thanks for that, Comrade. I'm on it. I've got a friend that doesn't read English too well and I'd like to see if the gadget will provide serviceable Spanish.
Dave
Sisyphian task might be another word for it. Without some clear commitment from his boss, all he'll ever be able to do is tidy things up a little. I agree Gates has the right attitude, and he may even make some programs run better, but you'll notice that nearly every major DoD weapons program (including FCS) is in some sort of trouble.
I think until they start to hire more civil servants to do development, evaluation, and test there is only so much Gates can do. There's just too much potential profit, and corruption, built into the system.
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