Why does the U.S government buy weapons from private corporations?

Factual Questions
41

An example of what usually happens after a system is put into service:

Government: We’re having problems with the new fighter jet you delivered us. The engine runs on sunflower oil. It is supposed to run on jet fuel, you idiots!!!

Contractor: Firstly, there were no requirements in the RFP on the type of fuel that must be used. Secondly, your government engineers in the program office reviewed the design during the design review last year. They signed off on it, the design was frozen at that point, and then we built-to-print.

So who’s at fault?

42

It’s not just military weapons that fall under strict government regulation. Components of military vehicles or aircraft, technical data, training manuals, anything like that cannot be exported out of the country without a license from the State Department. The penalties for violating these rules can be severe; people can & do get fines or even jail time for breaking these laws. If I send an e-mail containing technical data on a military vehicle component to someone in (let’s say) Germany, I have almost certainly broken US arms control laws, unless the State Department has pre-approved the transfer of that data.

43

Being as the government doesn’t build firearms or aircraft, there’s no good reason why an expert in designing firearms or aircraft would be working for the government.

But look at the engineers working for NASA. I’d say they’re proof that there are highly skilled government workers. So if the government wanted to establish its own aircraft manufacturing facilities, there’s no reason it couldn’t attract qualified engineers.

44

Do you think engineers working at Lockheed give a damn if the CEO gets a million dollar bonus? Why are they going to bust their ass for his reward? The government and private businesses use the same techniques to get their employees to work.

And do you think employees are stupid? If it’s harder to fire a government employee, then guess what? The best employees are going to be looking for government jobs.

To return your question, you ever see a private business penalize itself? At least with the government, the guys at the top can lose their jobs. And aren’t you the guy that just said that having the threat of losing your job is a good motivational tool?

45

You saying this usually happens?

Can you show that this has ever happened?

46

This opinion is only valid if you have never actually worked with NASA. This is not to say that there aren’t some smart people there, but they are the exception rather than the rule. NASA is an organization plumb full of mediocre managers directing a largely contractor-populated workforce. The singular exception to this is JPL, which is really a NASA center in name only as it is wholly managed by Caltech.

Clearly you haven’t worked with military and aerospace contractors. Not only does this happen on a regular basis, it is actually the modus operandi of many contractors to the point of being a running joke in Augustine’s Laws and at discussions at AIAA conferences. Lockheed Martin–the company responsible for bringing you the world’s most expensive second rate fighter aircraft, the F-35 "Lightning II–is known in particular for lowballing on proposals but then arguing out of scope on every damn thing (I shit you not, I actually worked a program in which this contractor successfully argued that a functioning guidance system on a rocket vehicle was “out of scope”), and ending up costing many times what their competitors bid for mediocre or non-existent results (X-33, Ares I and Ares II, Orion CSM).

And while I pick on Lockheed as the most egregious offender, it happens all the time by many contractors to the point that this kind of waste is routine. This is what we get when government procurement goes toward “management by requirements”; you end up with government people who don’t understand the engineering writng requirements that don’t make sense or aren’t consistent and complete, and contractors are well-versed in exploiting every loophole. The opposite–a govenment agency actually building an engineered system internally–happens so rarely outside of civil works projects run by the Army Corps of Engineers that it is hard to make a valid comparison. The best managed projects I’ve seen are those where private contractors do the work with oversight by independent technical assistance (SETA) to government project and program managers who ensure that not only are requirements being met but the result is functional.

Stranger

47

Snowden was a System Administrator which is a role you can justify contracting out. Actual signal intelligence work is done by government employees.

48

There is plenty of “intelligence work”, e.g. translation, interrogation, photo and signal interpretation, et cetera, performed by private contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton, TASC, BAE Systems, the MITRE corporation, et cetera. Just do a search for “intelligence analyst jobs” and see all the private companies hiring to support contracts with government agencies and the military.

Stranger

49

Yeah, it happens all the damn time. The F100 engine for the F-15 and F-16 is a perfect example: built to every spec, and once it started flying, the Air Force wanted different characteristics. GE developed the F101 engine to those new specs, basically, and Pratt and GE ended up competing on price and performance for decades. Because of competition, Pratt evolved the F100 into a much better engine than it initially was.

This was known as the Great Engine War. You can google it.

50

My point is that anyone with the skills would find better paying employment in a civilian industry. NASA is a pretty unique example, because until very recently there was no civilian equivalent.

51

Again, this notion that NASA is full of engineers and scientists tinkering in laboratories and building rocketships is almost completely bogus. Almost every spacecraft and every launch system and aircraft that NASA has ever flown has been largely designed, built, and integrated by private companies working as government contractors. The two relatively unique things that NASA does provide are launch facilities (until 2001 and the operating of the Kodiak Launch Complex, all orbital launches from North America were performed from either NASA or Air Force launch facilties and flying into Air Force controlled ranges) and some unique test facilities like the Space Power Facility at Plum Brook or the Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel at Ames. Much of the operations side–including managing the operations and maintanence for the Shuttle program–has long been performed by private contractors like United Launch Alliance or QinetiQ NA. JPL aside, the vast majority of actual NASA employees are managers of some description and are not doing any kind of detail engineering work.

Stranger

52

Back tot he topic at hand a bit.

One thing I’ve read a bit about is that the US has not traditionally had a very good military procurement system in any case - it’s frequently lagged well behind comparable militaries in key areas and has a tendency to spend money for no results (partly - more below). There seems to be a weird cultural thing in this. While training of soldiers has often been very good - and American soldiers have a history of being both adaptable and inventive, both on and off the battlefield, with or without a strong officer corps - the equipment was usually not the best and we rarely kept up with developments until after WW2. Even then, despite ample funding, the Russians were able to steal a march on our equipment multiple times, outdoing us in areas such as the first automatic battle rifle, keeping pace with jets of equal over capabilities that were better-tuned to actual combat condition, & etc.

Now, on the upside, one weird backward advantage of American military procurement is that we end up keeping a stable of firms able to supply high-tech arms, with advanced R7D departments, and the ability to quickly develop and deploy solutions as they arise. So in the case we do need something right fraggin’ now, we can almost certainly get it. But we are definitely left in situations where we’re overpaying for a cool and effective new toy, only to cancel the order later. We could do some incredible things with mobile artillery now, but I’m not sure if they’ve deployed a new version in decades.

53

In the past, defence departments would issue a specification to the usual aircraft firms and invite them to submit prototypes for test. Since the costs of developing an aircraft accelerated out of sight, few firms can now afford to invest in such a program and not get the contract - the costs will break them. So you get more amalgamations and fewer defence contractors to choose from, until you end up with one national defence contractor. And if you give the contract to a foreign bidder, next time you have no domestic defence contractor left.
In the past governments felt it desirable, even during a long period of peace, to maintain manufacturing facilities for things like smallarms and cannons which had no domestic commercial equivalent (and most commercial firearm manufacture involved a significant amount of handfitting - mass production of interchangeable smallarms components for the government was a key stage in the emergence of ‘The American System of Manufactures’). Now they are no longer prepared to do so, and have relied on private industry being able to supply their wants, or being able to convert to supplying their wants.

54

I don’t know how good it is, but it’s a systematic process that has been hammered out for decades. They’ve come up with a laughable map for the entire process. This may be as simple as it gets, but as you can see by the chart it is a extremely complicated process. It’s probably a good thing the actual design, manufacturing and production is not left to gov’t employees.

55

Anyone interested in learning more about the government procurement process might find this documentary about the Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle interesting.

56

This one is a good read too: Poor Management Oversight and Ineffective Incentives Leave NPOESS Program Well Over Budget and Behind Schedule, report of the Department of Commerce Office of the Inspector General.

(The title is a bit of a spoiler though…)

57

While that is a very entertaining movie (“General, it says here that you taped electric hotplates to the surface of the vehicle to help your heat-seeking missile find its target, and that the surface temperature of the vehicle was so high it could have fried an egg at twenty feet!”) and the development of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle is certainly an avatar of mismanagement and failures in procurement, the film took some substantial liberties with the actual story despite being directly based upon James Burton’s memoirs.

The problem isn’t the procurement process per se, not even that complex-seeming chart that nate referenced above. That is to say, there are some aspects of how the process is applied or interpreted which can overcomplicate the actual work of getting a properly skilled integrator on contract or manage the procurement lifecycle, but the ultimate problems is incompetent people doing stupid things, being led by managers who don’t know how to build a team and delegate work, overseen by an army of civil servants who often don’t have the first idea about how to actually build a working system, all reporting to career-minded officers which have an agenda that is more attuned to not getting stuck with a hot potato rather than stepping up and making tough decisions.

A lot of the real problem starts with contracting, with technical requirements and statements of work that are so poorly scoped or defined that doing the job correctly is actually out of scope, which is as previously mentioned an issue that savvy contractors use to increase the “value” (i.e. money they can charge) beyond the original proposal. There is also the issue that for multi-year projects, officers will rotate in an out, and while the civil servants provide some kind of continuity they’re often not very motivated to care about doing a good job. I’ve met some very smart civil servants, but they are the exception rather than the rule, and in general the stereotype of government workers as lazy and inept has more than a little basis in fact. And of course contractors do everything they can to keep the engineering details “in-house” to guarantee future sustainment or development work, even though the government has paid for all of the development and engineering lock, stock, and barrel, and should be able to take a system to another manufacturer to “build-to-print”. (In reality, build-to-print for complex systems always requires some degree of reverse engineering, but in too many cases the government is stuck paying whatever a contractor wants to charge for any sustainment or maintenance parts beyond the original contract scope, hence why the A-10 is being retired despite its effectiveness in actual combat.)

It doesn’t help that many procurements are driven by political “needs” rather than actual warfighting or strategic purposes, and the DoD ends up maintaining expensive systems that they don’t need and didn’t ask for, or NASA ends up with an orbital transportation system that lacks a destination and has capabilities that they don’t need which detract from payload mass or operational reliability. We can see this now with the Space Launch System (a.k.a. the Senate Launch System) which is designed to spread work around to all critical distracts rather than develop a true next-generation launch system that could reduce costs and increase availability, and the focus on a pointless crewed Mars mission rather than the technology development and asteroid recovery missions that the technical planners at NASA have pushed.

So I would contend that it isn’t so much the process that is broken than the people who run it (although it could be streamlined by demanding direct accountability for performance rather than management by requirements), and the contractors who exploit that ineptitude to make money. And let’s face it: the Boeing and Lockheed aren’t in the business of building rockets or aircraft; they’re in the business of making money, and the more money they can get for building fewer articles, the higher their profits, hence why the United Launch Alliance EELV vehicles are so slow to go together and so expensive.

Stranger

58

Of course this is the answer. Of all the options for how to do things, the current system is the least bad. Most proposals for how to do things better begin with “First, get a group of people who don’t act like our typical experience of the ways people actually act, then…”

Government red tape has generally been added to the process to account for past abuses and problems. Yes, in a perfect world, you shouldn’t need to do things that way, but in the real world, it keeps things working.

59

It might be worth noting that the Manhattan Project didn’t involve the government using “their highly skilled government workers to make their own weapons”. Rather, the approach was to find private citizens with the right skills and organize them into a massive, government-run project.

60

Wait, what? Asteroid recovery? Like, dragging one nearer to Earth? That seems like a really, really bad idea.