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Posted on 02/10/2026 7:06:39 AM PST by Alas Babylon!
The Pentagon has warned defense contractors to brace for sweeping performance reviews that will identify companies it says aren’t fulfilling their contracts, according to a message sent to the industry late last week.
The reviews were the result of President Trump’s January executive order threatening to cancel the contracts of underperforming defense companies that buy back their shares or pay dividends.
“We have completed initial reviews to assess company performance as part of this executive order and will now undergo an extended period of review in which we will make noncompliance determinations,” Michael Duffey, the undersecretary of defense in charge of weapons buying, wrote in a Feb. 6 email to executives reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Expand article logo Continue reading
“Following the upcoming decision period, we will be in touch with identified companies to begin remediation plans,” he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
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Note, years ago, I was a military member of a Pentagon contracting board. The laws are Byzantian. So many layers and ways to hoodwink the panel....
Good, I guess. But this is going to be superficial. They will find some $400 toilet seats and call it a day. Because when you talk about the “swamp,” there is no swamp deeper than the relationship between the Pentagon and defense contractors. They might as well be the same organization. There is no way that some new contractor is going to break into that relationship other than for something minor. Your use of the word “Byzantine” is appropriate.
Don’t be so pessimistic! I think Hegseth is a new kind of leader.
Will he turn the whole thing upside down? Probably not, but every little bit helps.
The DOD/W contracting system has been a mess for decades. My experience was from 1990! It is going to take time.
When I belonged to the last all men’s Toastmaster Club, after a meeting didn’t go well, one of the older gentlemen stood up and said:
“Gentlemen, we can do better than this.”
Didn’t bitch, didn’t moan, didn’t point to details, simply said:
“Gentlemen, we can do better than this.”
Next meeting went a lot better.
Trump is telling us ALL, we can do better. Of course that statement will offend some...................
A $400 toilet seat may actually be a bargain if it means the difference between having the ability to load an Abrams tank into a cargo plane or it won't fit because they had to buy a Lowe's toilet seat.
I worked at the Pentagon in the mid 1990s as a contractor. I was assigned a basement office. We opened the door to this small space and everything was covered by a coating of dust. It was obvious nobody had been in this room for many years. There was a dust covered NYT newspaper on a desk there. The date of the newspaper was November 2, 1961. The date I was born. It blew my mind.
The Pentagon wants to buy Star Wars equipment at Calcutta prices with guarantees that it will always work forever without any maintenance, built by a company forced to hire trannies and other Didn't Earn It (DEI) hires.
For example, the Feds are currently trying to replace the Boeing 747 for use as Air Force 1 but Boeing doesn't make 747s any more. Maybe modify a twin engine aircraft such as a C-17 or another Boeing passenger aircraft?
Multiply that dilemma by hundreds of thousands, both in scope and level of detail. There are a lot of talented individuals who make it a point in their life to steer clear of such nightmares.
Contractors have been forced to adopt DEI garbage for decades. The Pentagon needs to look in the mirror too.
For this, "the Pentagon" should not blame the contractors. The contractors did not write those laws ... Congress wrote those laws. Congressthings have many perverse incentives to write laws in ways that benefit congressthings at the expense of these United States. the necessarily large amount of money overseen by the Department of War invites graft and corruption on Capitol Hill.
I was USAF. One of the BEST things that could be done is to make it illegal for retired senior officers of the Air Force from taking jobs with defense contractors after they retire.
No more going from 3 or 4 stars to CEO of Lockheed, Boeing, McConnel-Douglas, etc. I’d say for at least 10 years after official retirement.
I will argue that there is an intermediate position that simplifies and smoothes out the contracting process. Both the DOD and the contractors cause the costs to be inflated.
Regarding $400 toilet seats, a custom designed and produced toilet seat may not actually be expensive enough. The use may very well preclude using a $50 off the shelf seat. The design costs alone can easily run up the cost of an item that has only a few pieces manufactured.
Hey! Me and you both. I was with JDSSC in BE-104. Ours wasn't an office, but a huge room (s) full of mainframes and mini-computers. I ran the SIOP computer room. 3 years. Escaped in 1991!
I heard it all got flooded out during 9/11 and the cleanup.
I wonder if modern manufacturing like 3-D printers could lower those costs. I think the specifications of materials would have to be adjusted, but even so.
I was on a project where one of the government guys didn’t like the adhesive that the contractor was using. It was a small run of a very expensive piece of equipment. The adhesive was basically pocket change. But he wouldn’t approve it, and the Contractor didn’t want to change it. We argued about it for over a year. Literally spent millions waiting for the issue to be resolved. In the end, we just accepted the Contractor’s original choice. Lost a year. Lost millions. For no reason at all. Everyone came out a winner, except the taxpayer.
We had no way to connect to the local area network down there. It took a week to run a line to our office. We eventually figured out that what we could have done for essentially free was billed out at nearly $100,000. The waste was epic...
You’d likely be surprised the extent to which 3D printing has been accepted by and adopted within the DoW and its associated contractors. You’d probably also be surprised to know that DoD and contractors got in on the ground floor of 3D printing at least a couple decades ago.
Yes, either as employee, advisor, lobbyist or "consultant."
We'll never get rid of all the graft because it seems to be inherent in government, and defense is absolutely the government's turf, but it is important to do as much as possible.
Yes, I do remember those early years. The printers were very expensive as well as the materials.
I also remember when buying TEMPEST-rated computers for the USAF/ESC cost $15K for ONE 286, 4 MB RAM, 10MB removable hard drives, and Fiber Optic connections...
In 1994, USAFE pushed the non-Tempest requirements to the base perimeter fence, which meant we could buy regular computers off the shelve. It took a year fighting San Antonio-Security Hill to get this approved.
Industrial-grade 3D printers are still expensive relative to the tabletop stuff you can buy from Amazon etc. You get what you pay for; you pay for what you get.
If you want to play around at home and be a “maker” ... buy from Amazon.
If you’re serious (and have the bucks): https://www.stratasys.com/en/
The PRRs were mostly a top to bottom ORI type thing done jointly by DCAA (Defense Contract Administrators) and the service(s) SPO (Special Program Office).
It was a pretty thorough wring out of management, production practices and contract compliance and determined contract eligibility for continuing a program or bidding on other programs depending on the outcome.
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