Just for record, do you feel Bush was a good president?
I’m not playing your little reindeer games.
Congratulations! Welcome to my ignore list. 
Haha conservative coward ducks question of credibility because conservatives lack it.
If you haven’t ignored me yet, running away like a bitch isn’t exactly the strongest demonstration of the superiority of your ideas.
What games do reindeer play, anyway? Is the team captain the reindeer with the best rack of antlers, even if he’s stupid? If you screw up, does the Coach make you run Lapps?
Considering I’m the IT security officer for a defense contractor at the present time…
That would make you what, the ISSM, ISSO, FSO, what level we talking about here?
Or are you just the schmuck that keeps the inventories and pushes paper? COMSEC, maybe? How big an org we talking? MAJCOM level?
Let’s hear it big guy, I’m all ears.
Oh! If only that were so!
ISSM, ISSO and goddamn CTO actually. I do everything from keeping the paper to building the custom hardware. It ain’t a big place, but even at the $3-5mil/yr per contract level, we bust our damn asses to earn and keep every contract we get. You’ll obviously understand that I’m not getting into specifics. (Right now, they’re all “just” NOFORN, but we are Secret/SCI qualified and audited every other year) We’re not really big enough to work at the MAJCOM level per se, but we have worked with at least three or four R&D subcommands. I know what the hell I’m talking about–50-75% of my employers bottom line is defense or medical contract performance, and we live or die on repeat business.
And what the hell I’m talking about is this: everyone at the company I work for busts their asses to bring the value on every contract we get, because if we didn’t there are other major companies in our space ready to eat our lunch, all of whom are much bigger than we are. Every contract we take is evaluated at minimum yearly, and we can and will get shit-canned if we’re not delivering as promised and on budget.
shrug Where do you witness all this failure? Cause it ain’t happening in MY (admittedly small) corner of defense contracting.
Oh, that reminds me. A previous employer was contracting directly with USDA and DHS, which is goddamn high enough, and we didn’t have any room for fucking around there either.
I’m honestly curious as to who is getting all these low-bid contracts and returning shoddy work, because the people getting SBIRs and the like would get killed if we tried it.
I apologize for not getting into specifics, but both of those places are in niche enough fields that it’d be trivially easy to find out who I am if I started naming names.
This argument isn’t worth your privacy, Zeriel. I wouldn’t feel too bad about limiting your info. The quality of your argument and general knowledge about contracting either shores up your qualifications or casts doubt on it. In your case, you’re well supported.
Nadir, on the other hand, may be the common element in all those low-bid contract failures being claimed without citation. Based purely on the arguments posted, of course.
Very good advice xenophon, and also why you may not see alot of details and citation from me on subjects directly associated with my work. I am pleased to see however, that Zeriel felt comfortable enough to allow some clues to narrow down the perspective on this subject from his point of view, once he saw he was not talking to just any dumbass on this message board. What we may have to say now will be characterized as “talk around” in the classified world and will be necessarily obtuse to the casual observer, or better yet left unsaid, but at least we have some idea of where we stand.
I will begin by just saying that DoD contracting (with which I am intimately familiar from a previous association to Defense Contract Management Command (DCMC)) is but one facet of the overall government contracting subject. I can also speak of some things directly related to an acronym he used (SBIRS) as well as the international aspect of DoD contracting. I can relate experiences that contradict his position at the highest MAJCOM levels and also including that international perspective from the standpoint of hugely wasteful programs and downright incompetent management.
Unfortunately, that does little to characterize the WI state union and government contracting issues, because they are apples and oranges to DoD, comparatively speaking. I know about the cutthroat competition and believe I am presently employed by one of the 600lb gorillas in that space standing ready to eat Zeriel’s lunch, so to speak.
So anybody else wants to start educating me on government contracting, I’m still all ears - and ready field a rationally formulated question or two, if anyone’s up to it. 
No, you’re not. You’re just armed with the result of a google search on the terms that he used in his post to you.
It’s kind of obvious.
OK whatever you say, we’ll just leave it at that then.
Am I on your ignore list? I’d be personally offended if I was not.
Not unless you’re in a particular sub-branch of a particular engineering discipline.
My company does alot of extremely high tech stuff, but I wouldn’t presume to comprehend half of it. Aerospace is the biggie, and I presently fly a spacecraft. Previously, I did security work at that one acronym. But now I’ve said too much. If you are really one of “us” in this very small world so to speak, you could with a little time and effort figure out exactly who I am. 
In my current situation, the government is the biggest customer of my customer. The 3-year contract deal we are presently awarded at goes for around $600-odd million IIRC, and overall it is probably a pretty good deal for everyone involved. Well it is for me, anyway.
Are you familiar with the Nunn-McCurdy issues?
So - Capt obvious, you got any questions or you ready to just shut the fuck up?
We’re in different worlds, then.