Hard & Soft America

[godwulf]

I retired from the Navy in '93, after 21 years on active duty. I remember the early '70s laxity very well - smoking dope, especially, was very widespread and in the open. Random drug testing and zero tolerance discharges for all put an eventual end to that - but other, even more serious problems have not been as easy to eliminate...perhaps because there exists, within the military, very little desire or incentive to do so.

There exist, in the military, a number of near-universal and (sadly) perhaps inevitable roadblocks to efficiency and competence...and these were in evidence, to me and those with whom I worked, every bit as much in '93 as they were in '72. One of my sons recently served a tour as a tank mechanic in the Army, and advises me that very little if anything has changed in these areas.

To put it simply, the military is not a business - it is therefore under no pressure to 'make a profit' or operate in the most time- or cost-effective manner. Waste is not only a way of life - it's sometimes a priority.

I can remember my P3-C Orion crew being about to land back at Moffett Field after a training flight, and being advised by the Ops office to do 'bounces' (landing practice) for two or three hours, in order to burn fuel. It was the last day of the fiscal quarter or something, and we had to burn the fuel or risk being alotted less in the future. Once I was handed a supply catalog by my Department Head and told to "order anything you can think of" - he didn't care what - for much the same reason.

Since job performance ratings are never based on making (and seldom based on saving) money, they are often based, instead, on very arbitrary, and often bizarre and nonsensical, criteria that would only make sense within the context of the military, and at times, not even there. Add to this that it is nearly impossible - once a certain level of seniority, in either the enlisted or the officer grades, has been achieved - to lose your job without creating a very serious and public spectacle of a screw-up, and the stage is pretty well set for institutionalized incompetence to rule the day.

In the late '80s-early '90s, the TQM (Total Quality Management) craze struck the military at the highest levels; the military leadership renamed it 'Total Quality Leadership', and soon commands were shelling out taxpayer money for $500 videotapes of the system's founder dropping ball bearings onto a table and droning on about probability. The bottom line was to establish working groups within a company (or command) to address and examine every tiny aspect of the institution's workings and make recommendations to those in charge as to how to proceed. It was (and is) the most complex and convoluted method humanly imaginable for doing anything, and it fit the military like a big square peg in a round hole. I'm sure they've probably dropped it by now, but not before a whole lot of brass-hats had their retirement homes paid for by kickbacks from the TQM people.