An Important Challenge to Employees of the Commonwealth
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6 responses to “An Important Challenge to Employees of the Commonwealth”
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How many complaints did you file in the Navy, there Cap’n? Fraud, waste and abuse was invented at the Pentagon.
The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal, is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be. –Douglas Adams, author (11 Mar 1952-2001)
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The Navy has relief valves to prevent having to file such complaints in the operating Navy.
Both officers and enlisted people are encouraged to bring new and different ideas forward, and to challenge bad policy through the system. And it works.
There are of course people in the system who will always resist change, some of them very senior, but operational readiness is necessary, and it is necessary to listen to younger people to maintain it. I never once saw a good operational idea that wasn’t eventually implemented.
You seem to be talking about acquisition, in which I never worked but with which I am familiar.
Certainly acquisition decisions are regularly challenged both inside and outside the Navy in DoD review panels and in courts.
DoD acquisition is complicated by the fact that there are so few suppliers of major hardware systems. The Navy has only one builder of aircraft carriers and two builders of submarines, for example. The Department has not only to keep them in business but to preserve capacity to expand production.
But in more competitive parts of the industry, such as IT and pretty much everything else, the competition is cutthroat.
Directly to your point, the rewards for filing fraud, waste or abuse complaints that prove out are very, very lucrative and the punishments for offenders include prison terms. DoD keeps them that way on purpose.
So stick with something you know about, whatever that may be.
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Yeah, Fat Leonard.
Bennie Suggs and FWA are two different things.
As opposed to he who knows all? Some people stay relevant. Others never were.-
Fat Leonard sure pulled one over on the Navy. Among the nineteen people who have pleaded guilty to federal crimes, one was Francis (Fat Leonard) himself, two others were his top deputies; and sixteen others were Navy personnel.[
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It may be true that once something hits the internet it never goes away.
I just used Internet Archive’s “Wayback Machine” to download a pdf file of the 2012 Commonwealth of Virginia, Emergency Operations Plan (2015 update).
I used a “snapshot” of the VDEM website from December 2018 to find it. Just in case anyone would like to get a copy for themselves:
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Excellent work.
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