Happy New Year to all. I thought I would dash off a quick note to let you all know that I haven’t stopped writing articles, but it was a busy end of year and I just couldn’t find the time. Given all the food for thought out there now, I promise to do better. There’s several things that have flashed into my mind as potential topics to write about:
What’s up with the Navy’s new number, 355? I wish them luck in selling that one…mostly because it’s in direct violation of Crenshaw Rule of Primes, which states that any number sent to Congress must be a prime number in order to give the “illusion of analysis”. Numbers ending with even numbers or zero?…..not satisfying or credible. Now 353????? That’s a number!!! See…. you, too, think a 353 ship Navy is far more achievable that a 355????? Too many fives….
The Navy’s newest and costliest and most technologically advanced ship had to be towed while in the Panama Canal? Nahhhhh. Can’t be. This must be an example of the “Fake News” craze. Come to think of it, I think I read about that in The Onion, my go-to source for factual information. Seriously, I can’t
help but think about my days in the Pentagon when we decided to save some money by piggybacking our EP-3 aircraft replacement program on an Army aircraft program (I can’t remember the name) to save some money. Turns out the Army put so much stuff on the airplane it was too heavy to fly and they had to move to another airframe…..zeroing out any savings we might have achieved. We used to laugh about it and say the Army forgot to put in one KPP (Key Performance Parameter), the ability to fly!! So I guess in the case of the DDG-1000, we forgot to include a KPP which required it to steam around unaided. Oh well……..
Or how about this one? President Elect Trump bypassed the entire acquisition bureaucracy to personally negotiate for new POTUS jet and convened what must have been a JROC of ONE and decided Super Hornets might be a better way to go…..not JSF. So much for DoD 5000. I wonder if the new Super Hornets will have gold leaf relief tubes? maybe marble cockpit deck? We all know that the Congress was not happy with the procurement hierarchy in OSD, but I’m not sure this is what they had in mind. To be sure, the process is complicated but in the interest of learning, here’s the process in a nutshell.
Hmmmm…seems simple enough….
Anyway,
No daily intelligence briefing? What about the hundreds, if not thousands of analysts, spies, prognosticators, and intel pogues that labor so hard on “the Book”? And despite their numbers, the product isn’t always as accurate as we might hope…WMD in Iraq? Where did ISIS come from? 
I think there are just too many folks in the intel world these days, so this might be an opportunity for a intel force structure review….oppps, I forgot that it’s impossible to “follow the money” in the intel world and so we will never know how big that Empire really is. As my granddaughter used to say when she was three, “I can’t know that.” I’m thinking that if enough people are writing enough stuff, they will probably write just about anything. I believe that in the Pentagon every possible combination of numbers and letters have been put on enough Power Point slides that there are no new ones to be made. (See my Powerpoint thoughts) So I think one could infer that if we had
enough analysists typing on enough keyboards, we could prove the Russians, or the Chinese, or extraterrestrials are hacking into our political process. We just have too many people in intel IMHO.
Finally, here’s a link to a good article by Sandra Erwin at NDIA on what’s in store for 2017. You might even find a quote or two from me.
I will get hot on writing on these these topics and if any of you have some ideas, feel free to shoot them to me. It’s going to be an interesting ride in 2017 and I am looking forward to it.