Another Nail in the Lead System Integrator Concept Coffin

As I have said before, with the LSI model, you have the contractor supervising their own performance, which is almost literally a fox in the henhouse:

Defense contractors developing the Army’s largest modernization program — the Future Combat System — also were paid $91 million in 2007 to report back to the Pentagon on how well the program was performing, according to a new inspector general report, adding fuel to demands for tougher conflict-of-interest rules.

The Nov. 24 Defense Department inspector general report, reviewed by POLITICO, was sparked by an anonymous tip. The probe found that the $100 billion FCS program contained numerous conflicts that went unreported and that, between 1987 and 2007, the Pentagon increased its reliance on contractors for quality assurance and other tests by 375 percent.

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For instance, SAIC, a prime contractor doing systems engineering along with Boeing, received $2.2 billion for development of the FCS program, but in 2007 it also received $25.8 million for testing the program. Computer Sciences Corp., General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman also received money to create elements of the FCS at the same time they were helping to test it, according to the report.

(emphasis mine)

I worked with folks from the SAIC when I was at FCS, and got very little "L" from the LSIs: they simply did not provide direction to the contractors.

It's no surprise that the inspector's report was marked "For Official Use Only", because the powers that be in the Pentagon want this buried, but someone, probably someone who actually thinks about the soldiers who use the product, leaked it.

Note that this is an artifact of a number of administrations:

In addition to pursuing specific allegations of conflicts of interest, the inspector’s report looked more broadly at the trend toward using services contracts for testing. The review found that before the 1990s — when the Pentagon embraced the trend of cutting government employees and instead contracting for services — the Pentagon spent about $8.9 million a year on contractors for testing. In 2007, it spent $42.6 million.

The Pentagon started doing this under Bush I SecDef Richard Bruce Cheney, though it is fair to say that it was expanded under Clinton, and went, as did defense procurement generally, completely haywire under Bush II.

The problem is that when you have contractors testing for you, they lie, they self-deal, and they cheat.

That's capitalism, baby: Cheating is a profit opportunity.

Unfortunately, the capabilities that the government has shed over the past few years will take much longer, but if the development of new systems is curtailed until the internal governmental testing capabilities, it will result in a exodus of people in private testing, because their jobs will be gone, and return to government.