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My day job is with a major defense contractor. My particular plant manufactures spare parts for much of the Army’s vehicle fleets. As you can imagine, the Army’s operational pace has kept us busy. Except sometime last year TACOM (Tank and Automotive Command) cancelled their standing orders and we will lay off roughly 70% of the company by August. The reason they were able to do this is they’ve scrapped half of the fleets for spare parts.

If you think about this for two seconds you’ll ask; what happens when we run out of spares? While I’m certain my company will survive it will be a long, expensive and failure-prone exercise to reconstitute the company to its present world-class capability. Off the cuff, our Logistics guy guesses there will be sufficient parts to run the fielded vehicles to 2012. Restarting the plant could take two years and bulk deliveries will take months longer to fill the pipeline.

But, hang on, there’s more insanity. The procurement office has decided that it’s not “ethical” for the company that designs something for the military to produce it. Therefore, the recently completed designs must be contracted out to competitors.

In the bad-old-days Engineering used to operate independently from Production. Therefore designs were elegant, un-producible art. Today, the folks who will produce the hardware watch the design coming together like mother cats. Imagine what the hardware will devolve into if the engineer never knows or sees the ultimate manufacturer. Even assuming the designs are perfect, the money is in production, not design. This artificial “ethics” issue will turn the hardware into mediocrity made solid.

I’m sure the Defense Department would wave around glossy Power Point slides explaining how as yet undersigned super weapons will magically swoop in at precisely the right time to save us. I’ve been in engineering a long time and I can spot a process designed to fail. This is it.