[HN Gopher] Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row
___________________________________________________________________
Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row
Author : TurkishPoptart
Score : 208 points
Date : 2023-11-17 16:52 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (breakingdefense.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (breakingdefense.com)
| moose44 wrote:
| > While there are still three outstanding audits not yet wrapped
| up, the DoD reported that the remaining 18 failed, including the
| Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and National Security
| Agency.
|
| Here's my surprised face: - _ -
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Can anyone explain to me why it is awful for a person to live in
| debt but it is okay for the federal government to do so? I've
| never understood this in the least, other than the "kick the can
| down the road, America superpower backed by military blah, blah,
| blah" very weak argument. History is full of the carnage of
| failed empires that had this same idea.
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN
|
| 32 trillion in debt seems insurmountable, has anything like this
| ever reversed course historically?
| kaesar14 wrote:
| I don't think it's 'awful' for a person to live in debt. The
| richest Americans have loads of debt. A significant part of the
| American Dream is to own a house which is essentially debt.
| Perhaps the argument is more about whether the US government is
| drowning in debt more akin to CC debt (bad debt) or mortgage
| debt (good debt) but in the abstract, leverage is a perfectly
| fine thing for a government to use in order to fund its
| development.
| nxm wrote:
| Debt is also how economies and a lot of companies grow
| HideousKojima wrote:
| They could also grow by saving and reinvesting
| surpluses/profits
| intotheabyss wrote:
| The entire point of debt is to bring future revenue to
| the present so that you don't have to wait for savings to
| trickle in every year.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| At the cost of some portion of your future revenue
| airstrike wrote:
| and if that future revenue is N times greater than you
| would otherwise get without debt, then it's still better
| to take on debt.
|
| Would you rather have 90% of $1M or 100% of $800k?
| HideousKojima wrote:
| >if
|
| That single word is doing all of the heavy lifting for
| you. "If" the housing market will never crash, then it's
| a surefire safe investment! Better buy tons of houses to
| flip on credit. There's no guarantee that your
| debt/investment will succeed, which is why banks try (and
| often enough, fail) to price in risk with things like
| varying interest rates, collateral, etc.
| grotorea wrote:
| AFAIK the standard economic opinion is that this is
| suboptimal and leads to underinvestment.
| scatters wrote:
| No, they couldn't. One person's savings is another
| person's debt. If everyone tries to save then no one can;
| this is the paradox of thrift.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_thrift#Critici
| sms
|
| Just because someone gives it a formal name doesn't mean
| it's true.
|
| >One person's savings is another person's debt.
|
| Only if you treat fiat currency (or bank deposits in
| general, the paradox you mention was formulated long
| before we got off the gold standard) as the only possible
| form of savings.
| logicchains wrote:
| The American dream is to "own" a house, not to own a
| mortgage.
| anon291 wrote:
| You do not own a mortgage. You have sold a mortgage.
| digitalengineer wrote:
| Small correction: it's awful for a _poor_ person to live in
| debt. If you are quite wealthy there are lots of ways to borrow
| money and it's all good!
| logicchains wrote:
| >If you are quite wealthy there are lots of ways to borrow
| money and it's all good!
|
| If you have a negative net worth (more debt than assets)
| you're generally not considered a wealthy person.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| Perception is everything. For quite a while, Sam Bankman-
| Fried was billions in the hole, but could still secure more
| funds on demand.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > If you have a negative net worth (more debt than assets)
| you're generally not considered a wealthy person.
|
| That's only true if your debt and assets are both small. If
| you have $200 million in assets and $500 million in debt,
| you will be considered a wealthy person. You would only
| stop being wealthy if your stuff got taken away.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| There's no meaningful sense in which the Federal Government
| could be considered to have a negative net worth.. they
| have a 'stake' in the collective value of the largest and
| most vibrant economy on earth. People's conception of the
| Federal 'balance sheet' as limited to the dollars in bank
| accounts explains why they are continually surprised that
| $30+ trillion in debt is shrugged off by the market and
| every knowledgeable economist.
| grotorea wrote:
| How would you even calculate the asset value for a
| government? Normally you'd compare it to GDP which is
| something else.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| So I don't know if what the government is doing is the best
| long term decision. But the US's national debt could be
| compared to a mortgage. And the government's income is massive
| so they can be in trillions of debt without it exceeding what
| they can reasonably pay off (never paying it all off, but
| paying off individual loans).
|
| So by your analogy, is it actually bad for a normal person to
| be in debt? Normal people have mortgages.
| askonomm wrote:
| Has the number ever decreased? As in, have they actually paid
| things off? Without actual numbers, U.S feels increasingly
| like a high-school bully who borrows money and then threatens
| with violence when that money is wanted back.
| l33t7332273 wrote:
| I don't think US really threatens violence when people
| collect on the public debt. This is quite rare historically
| because it makes people weary to lend you money.
|
| Payments, including interest, are regularly made and of
| course individual debts are paid all the time.
| buerkle wrote:
| The only time the US was debt free was a few years during
| Andrew Jackson's presidency.
| macintux wrote:
| We were paying it off at the end of the 90s, some
| projections had the debt paid off in 10 years, but then
| Bush 2.0's tax cuts and 9/11 wrecked everything.
|
| (I could be off in some details, but I remember my despair
| when Greenspan gave Congress cover for supporting the tax
| cuts by testifying that it wasn't necessarily a good thing
| to be debt-free.)
| metabagel wrote:
| A better question is whether the percentage of debt to GDP
| has ever decreased, and it has.
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S
| uticus wrote:
| asking about state-level debt gets into philosophical (and I
| would argue even religious) territory very quickly, but to
| answer your questions:
|
| 'why...it is okay for the federal government...' federal govt
| in US is following general patterns at business and individual
| scale, because democratic processes lead to a reflection of
| decisions at smaller elements of society at bigger ones.
|
| '...ever reversed course historically?' no reversals, but
| plenty of upheavals, such as war, conquering, etc.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Most explanations I've seen boil down to to "The US (or any
| other sovereign nation with control over their own currency)
| can print their way out of debt, it's literally impossible for
| the US to default." This ignores the devastating economic
| effects that printing such a huge amount of currency would
| cause (likely comparable to the effects of simply defaulting)
| and ignores the fact that sovereign nations with control over
| their own currency have chosen to default anyway (see Russia
| ~20 years ago for an example).
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Most explanations I've seen boil down to to "The US (or any
| other sovereign nation with control over their own currency)
| can print their way out of debt, it's literally impossible
| for the US to default."
|
| Its impossible for the US to be forced to default.
|
| Its quite possible for the US to make a political choice to
| default, and it has come very close to doing so.
| evancox100 wrote:
| Also, not only is it possible, but many countries have in
| fact chosen to default on debt denominated in their own
| currency, rather than subject their citizens to wild
| inflation and/or break norms around reserve bank
| independence. So, it could happen even if US is not forced
| to, I agree.
|
| For a starting point, see https://www.bankofcanada.ca/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/06/BoC-B...
| scatters wrote:
| The Russian rouble was not free floating prior to the crisis.
| They tried to defy the iron triangle and paid for it. This is
| not a problem for the USA, since other currencies are
| denominated in terms of the dollar.
|
| The reason it would be impossible for the US to default is
| that the US is not significantly in debt. Most of the federal
| debt is held domestically, meaning by the US. You can't be in
| debt to yourself.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| >Most of the federal debt is held domestically, meaning by
| the US. You can't be in debt to yourself.
|
| Sure, we can just inflate away the Social Security fund,
| but do you think the effects of this would be better or
| worse than simply defaulting? And nevermind the political
| optics of "We still paid what we owed to China but magic
| wanded away the debt to Grandma!"
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| That's the Fallacy of Composition - the economics of a
| government are not the economics of a grocery store or a
| household:
|
| https://amp.theguardian.com/business/2013/nov/21/post-crash-...
| ahallock wrote:
| But imagine if they were. Wars and other destructive
| behaviors would be a lot more difficult
| uticus wrote:
| Sorry, but 'Fallacy of Composition' is just a theory.
| (Disclaimer: I happen to disagree with it.)
|
| Ultimately the way these ideas about economic theory are
| approached is a lot more philosophical/religious-based (for
| the Atheists, please read that 'strong belief-based') and a
| lot less math based than some would be willing to admit.
| Honestly the math itself is usually statistical, which in
| turn is a lot more difficult to comprehend and analyze
| properly.
| HFguy wrote:
| I would put aside statistics and whether we completely
| understand how the economy works (we don't).
|
| Just ask...are there are very fundamental differences
| between the finances of an individual and the government?
| There are. For starters, the government can simply print
| money and pay off debts. They can also choose, by their
| actions, to inflate away nominal liabilities.
|
| So then it is reasonable to consider that "being in debt"
| may have different ramifications for the government than
| for an individual.
| uticus wrote:
| > may have different ramifications for the government
| than for an individual
|
| I can only agree ramifications look different when an
| inappropriately narrow timespan is in focus. Thinking
| through history, what nations have been able to
| ultimately avoid ramifications from significant debt -
| the same sort of scenario that would in proportion cause
| 'ramifications' for individuals or businesses?
|
| I can think of several historical instances where a
| nation having significant debt _appeared_ to have no
| 'ramifications' early on but were unable to avoid the
| inevitable (and inenviable) outcomes.
|
| I mean, even an individual may get deeply - horribly - in
| debt yet avoid ramifications for a time. But the bills
| will come due. No doubt a government is not the same
| thing as a business or an individual. But to dismiss
| government debt as playing by different rules than debt
| elsewhere is foolish.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| "Just a Theory"?
|
| It's actually central economic thought. If you disagree,
| it's on you to prove otherwise.
|
| Governments can print currency, create taxes - actually
| inter generational (government bonds). Households cannot.
|
| Economist Mark Blyth explains it quite clear:
|
| http://gesd.free.fr/blythsenate.pdf
| ahallock wrote:
| You can leverage debt as an individual as well. We often shame
| people for bankruptcies when we shouldn't. Businesses fail all
| the time and go bankrupt -- running a household is similar and
| can fail.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Barring difficult to foresee circumstances like an expensive
| medical procedure, a debilitating injury/illness, or a
| devastating lawsuit, most of the circumstances that lead to a
| household going bankrupt are directly attributable to
| mismanagement.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Can anyone explain to me why it is awful for a person to live
| in debt but it is okay for the federal government to do so?
|
| Not sure its awful for a person, depending on the kind of debt,
| but people and the government are differently situated. For
| one, people (natural or corporate) who have a debt in something
| that isn't a token that they can issue at will have an
| externally enforced obligation to do whatever is necess5 to
| acquire those tokens and sacrifice whatever is necessary to
| deliver them to the creditor.
|
| Currency-issuing governments with debt in their own currency
| have an obligation to... ultimately, if nothing else works or
| is desirable, just poof up some currency.
|
| Also, for certain governments, there isn't a vastly more
| powerful external enforcer of whatever obligation they have,
| whereas with most people, there is, in the form of the local
| government.
| DougWebb wrote:
| I'm hardly an expert, but I think "government debt" and
| "government investment" are accounted for the same way, but
| only the former is a problem. If the government sells
| bonds/T-bills (eg acquires debt) and uses that to improve the
| country in a way that benefits the citizens and encourages
| population and economic growth, then its worth doing. If the
| government uses the money only to pay interest on existing
| debt, or to give it away to make wealthy citizens more wealthy,
| or other unproductive uses, then it's not so good.
|
| The attacks directly on the national debt are a political
| strawman, meant to distract from the real issues about where
| revenue comes from and how it is spent. It's like the constant
| debt ceiling wailing; Congress sets a budget and legislation
| that requires spending more than the revenue available, then
| sets a debt ceiling that prevents the treasure from borrowing
| to cover the _required by law_ spending, then bitches and moans
| and grandstands over how the debt ceiling creates a crisis. It
| 's all for show.
| TimedToasts wrote:
| > The attacks directly on the national debt are a political
| strawman, meant to distract from the real issues about where
| revenue comes from and how it is spent.
|
| No, I assure you that those of us concerned about the
| national debt are actually concerned about it.
| nradov wrote:
| It's not awful for a person to live in debt. Debt is a useful
| financial tool.
|
| Unlike a person, a government has an unlimited lifespan and
| debt can persist forever. This only becomes a concern when
| total debt exceeds some multiple of GDP. The exact limit will
| vary based on many factors including interest rates, economic
| growth rate, demographics, and tax compliance. Once that limit
| is breached it tends to cause a fiscal and political crisis
| within a few years. Either default or hyperinflation in the
| short term, followed by a long period of austerity.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > This only becomes a concern when total debt exceeds some
| multiple of GDP. The exact limit will vary based on many
| factors including interest rates, economic growth rate,
| demographics, and tax compliance. Once that limit is breached
| it tends to cause a fiscal and political crisis within a few
| years.
|
| This is the kind of theory that, without a concrete model of
| how the limit varies (or even with one, if it involves much
| statsitical variability) is nonfalsifiable, either because
| the probability of a crisis in actual concrete conditions is
| unknown or the range of variability is too wide to make
| strong conclusions given the small-n problem with real-world
| conditions, but at the same time becomes very easy to
| rationalize almost any real-world conditions as fitting.
| intalentive wrote:
| Depends on the productivity of the country and whether the debt
| can be exported (as reserve currency) or monetized (as
| inflation). The USA checks all these boxes for now. Highly
| productive and the costs can be passed on to others.
|
| Otherwise you are correct. Zimbabwe certainly has to live
| within its means.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > 32 trillion in debt seems insurmountable, has anything like
| this ever reversed course historically?
|
| Never and it is insane that there are apologists for such a sad
| state of affairs.
|
| https://www.usdebtclock.org/
|
| This is not going to end well. That's what happen when totally
| clueless, incompetent and senile people are pulling the levers,
| following the advices of visionaries like Paul _" it will
| become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been
| no greater than the fax machine's"_ Krugman.
|
| > https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN
|
| What is insane on that graph is that it doubled in ten years
| and quadrupled in 15 years.
|
| Anyone who thinks this is reasonable is simply out of his mind.
| uticus wrote:
| The numbers are just outside comprehension. We can comprehend
| a dollar, or a hundred dollars, in the hand. We may be able
| to imagine (or have seen) a room full of a couple tens of
| thousands of dollars. But to extrapolate one, to 32 trillion
| of the same...
|
| If a 4 GHz processor core executes an instruction every clock
| cycle, it would still take two _hours_ to iterate that
| instruction 32 trillion times.
|
| If you lined up 32 trillion inches, it would be over 505
| _million_ miles.
|
| If a dollar bill is 0.1 millimeters thick, and you stacked 32
| trillion of the bills on top of each other, the stack would
| be almost 2 _million_ miles high.
|
| Etc
|
| By the way, we went past $33 trillion in September, and
| reached $33.5 20 days later. Only a half trillion added in 20
| days.
| jmyeet wrote:
| People like to use the household analogy when it comes to
| government spending and debt. Some cynically do it to justify
| cutting social programs. Some (and I include you here) are
| genuinely confused.
|
| First, literally nobody in government cares about the debt. Of
| the $32T debt in our entire history, $8T comes from the 4 years
| of the Trump presidency. Remember that when the next fiscal
| hawk starts chirping about the need to cut spending.
|
| Second, debt doesn't matter when you can print money in the
| currency the debt is denominated in. We borrow US dollars. We
| print US dollars. So if we'rea household who has to pay out
| build you can't ignore it fact that we have a money printer in
| the next room.
|
| There have been sovereign currency devaluations in the past
| too, famously by FDR who changed the gold standard.
|
| I would suggest looking up videos on Modern Monetary Theory.
| _jal wrote:
| To start with, individuals do not print their own currencies.
| People always jump in immediately to say you can't inflate your
| way out of debt/look at Argentina/etc., but that's missing the
| point, I'm not saying that.
|
| The point is a sovereign currency issuer has a fundamentally
| different relationship to money than mere people. They can
| certainly still get themselves in trouble through
| mismanagement, no doubt, but there are a lot of levers they
| have that are unavailable to normal folks.
|
| Like some other major differences: not too many people have
| massive standing armies or hundreds of millions of tax payers,
| or control over a substantial fraction of global financial
| flows.
|
| Again, not saying eleventy-trillion in debt is not a problem,
| or that all's well, or anything else like that. I am saying
| that comparing private finance to sovereign finance is a
| category error, and things will make much more sense to you if
| you understand why.
| smileysteve wrote:
| > it is awful for a person to live in debt
|
| Is an interesting premise when data is
|
| > American households carry a total of $17.29 trillion in debt
| as of the third quarter of 2023, and the average household debt
| is $103,358 as of the second quarter of 2023.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 32 trillion in debt seems insurmountable, has anything like
| this ever reversed course historically?
|
| If you look at output or income relative, instead of
| meaningless absolute nominal terms, yes, in fact, the _current_
| US debt to to GDP ratio and debt to revenue ratios are a _drop_
| from the recent peak--a result of exactly the kind of reversal
| of course you are asking about.
| nradov wrote:
| It's important to understand the history here. Failing the audit
| isn't necessarily due to some sort of fraud or abuse (although
| there likely are isolated instances). The problem is that for
| decades Congress never allocated funds to put proper financial
| controls in place so naturally the accounting systems are a
| disconnected jumbled mess. When they started annual audits
| everyone knew they would fail so that was no surprise. The point
| is to make gradual improvements every year until they can
| eventually pass.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Yeah but with that in mind it's a good thing that new outlets
| roll with this "failed audit" as it puts pressure to constantly
| be trying to do better and this slowly helps to rule out
| corruption or incompetence
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Sure, let me use that excuse with the IRS and this how it
| works.
| l33t7332273 wrote:
| IRS exists to give those organizations money, so they're more
| of a client and you're more of a product.
| malux85 wrote:
| Product is a very diplomatic way of saying Lunch
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Not quite. The money is the product of the IRS, you and I
| are the raw materials from which the money is produced.
| vkou wrote:
| You're going to make the excuse that your company's
| accounting mess is because you founded it before the IRS
| existed?
|
| Good... Luck with that.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| > The point is to make gradual improvements every year until
| they can eventually pass.
|
| The Pentagon has been on the GAO's "high risk audit failures"
| list since 1995 [0]. Exactly how much longer do we need to
| wait? And at what point can we start to assume they don't
| intend to ever actually fix the problem?
|
| [0]: https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-23-105784
| nradov wrote:
| What are you proposing exactly? Hire more accountants? Shut
| down the military until they pass an audit?
| uticus wrote:
| appreciate this viewpoint.
|
| not trying to defend the large 'disconnected jumbled mess' that
| is military spending, but headlines (and large percentage of
| armchair commentators) make it sound like 'see, told ya so!'
| when in fact this audit is the weakest basis for an argument
| that military spending has no oversight, gets too much, etc.
|
| note that i'm _agreeing_ there needs to be more oversight, less
| spending, etc. but this audit is not going to serve persuading
| that.
| mbfg wrote:
| incompetence is fraud, when displayed over time.
| marricks wrote:
| Eisenhower warned this would be a thing and here we are, it's a
| thing. The best we will ever get is the illusion of spending
| being under control.
|
| It's wild, but whenever a big change occurs there's always
| smart folks who knew what was going to happen and exactly
| called it out. Usually as a "ok guys be careful cause X could
| happen" and X inevitably does.
| pstuart wrote:
| Equally wild is when "fiscal conservatives" complain about
| spending, it's _only_ on social programs they disagree with.
|
| Fraud and/or waste should be a subject of concern
| _regardless_ of the program that experiences it.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I wouldn't pin this on any particular party or ideology.
| Both major parties in the USA support dumping infinite
| unaccountable money into the military. It's one of the few
| things they agree on.
| metabagel wrote:
| There are a fair number of dissenters on this within the
| Democratic Party.
| marricks wrote:
| The government isn't a household and its finances don't
| need to be treated as one. I think everyone in government
| knows this they just don't want constituent's to realize it
| so they hem and haw about any spending they don't like.
| Neither side super cares about social programs, dems just
| aren't the ones to cut them typically.
|
| If you notice, whenever dems have launched a plan in the
| past 30-40 years they always say how it's almost always
| going to be "deficit neutral" or help because they actually
| don't want to increase spending (or help people all that
| much, is my take).
|
| Both sides have and will continue to green light defense
| spending and other "important issues" so deficit goes up
| anyways.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| When did Eisenhower warn about failed audits, or something
| like them?
| intalentive wrote:
| His farewell address warned of unaccountable military
| bureaucracy.
| metabagel wrote:
| He warned about the military industrial complex swallowing
| up funds which could be better used for schools or to
| fulfill other public services.
| nradov wrote:
| Eisenhower might have warned about it but he apparently never
| asked Congress to appropriate funds for modernizing the
| Department of Defense accounting systems. Had he done so they
| wouldn't be such a mess today.
| Arrath wrote:
| I mean, the COBOL accounting systems being discussed were
| developed and put in place after his term, no? So they are,
| in fact, more modern than they would have been during
| Eisenhower's time.
| sp332 wrote:
| Last year the DoD's CFO Mike McCord said "I am disappointed
| that we didn't show more progress this year"
| https://news.yahoo.com/pentagon-disappointed-failed-audit-ag...
| And this year he said "Things are showing progress, but it's
| not enough". https://www.reuters.com/world/us/pentagon-fails-
| audit-sixth-... The improvements are too gradual.
| Iwan-Zotow wrote:
| Ha ha
| kgwxd wrote:
| Duh. You can't just put "classified alien technology R&D" as a
| clear-text line item. Just trust them, it's all going towards
| national, even global, security.
| mike_hock wrote:
| "What, do you think we spent 10 grand on a fire extinguisher?"
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| Large fire extinguishers are high-pressure cylinders that
| require high-precision valves. There are fewer than 10
| manufacturers in the world that can do it - half of them are
| in the US and the DoD will spend what it takes to keep it
| that way.
|
| You wouldn't want to end up like the EU and not have a single
| manufacturer that can do it, or (since Brexit) not have any
| that are legally allowed to import them. It's a good thing
| they can be refurbished when used, and that the authorities
| look the other way when a shipment arrives from a 3rd
| party...
| walterbell wrote:
| Since 2018, there's a separate, non-public accounting ledger
| for national security items at 150 agencies. In theory, this
| should improve public ledgers.
|
| http://files.fasab.gov/pdffiles/handbook_sffas_56.pdf
| The objective of this Statement is to balance the need for
| financial reports to be publicly available with the need to
| prevent the disclosure of classified national security
| information or activities in publicly issued General Purpose
| Federal Financial Reports (GPFFRs). This Statement allows
| financial presentation and disclosure to accommodate user needs
| in a manner that does not impede national security.
| warner25 wrote:
| Just to provide a ground-level insider perspective: We've been
| doing things in the name of "audit readiness" for a decade, and I
| just... don't get it. It has translated to a lot of asinine
| things like
|
| 1. Making sure that everyone's marriage certificates and kids'
| birth certificates are on-file, to root out maybe the one person
| in 10,000 who is erroneously getting paid an extra $200 per month
| for certain entitlements.
|
| 2. Making sure that when we sign leave forms (i.e. requests for
| vacation time) we do so with a digital signature (even though
| they got printed out for processing and archival) using a certain
| image instead of a manual signature with a pen.
|
| 3. Going through an absurdly painful process to put on the books
| every physical piece of property we see (e.g. hand tools, step
| ladders, obsolete radio and telephone equipment) and then account
| for them on a monthly basis even if they've been useless and in
| storage since the 1970s.
|
| Meanwhile, I can see tens or hundreds of billions of dollars of
| seemingly wasted man-hours on various initiatives (including
| those listed above), unnecessary personnel moves / rotations, and
| questionable purchases of new uniforms, equipment, vehicles,
| software, etc.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I'm not an insider, but those sound like generally hard-to-
| avoid issues of large organizations, public and private,
| profit-oriented and service-oriented. You can't manage that
| many people, millions in DoD, without rules, and rules can't be
| defined to apply well to the very wide variety of situations in
| reality - just like an algorithm, they'll be inflexible. These
| kind of gripes are, understandably, in every large
| organization.
|
| > 3. Going through an absurdly painful process to put on the
| books every physical piece of property we see (e.g. hand tools,
| step ladders, obsolete radio and telephone equipment) and then
| account for them on a monthly basis even if they've been
| useless and in storage since the 1970s.
|
| On the upside, that provides one of the benefits of an audit:
| Identifying wasted assets. I know the Army is focusing on
| reducing the amount of useless equipment it warehouses.
| justrealist wrote:
| Stuff is cheap... there's been immense value in having tons
| of old cheap assets to throw into Ukraine. And even if it
| isn't dirt-cheap, there's value in maintaining industrial
| military production capacity.
|
| Corporations got incredibly fragile supply chains by
| optimizing for JIT asset delivery, let's not repeat the
| mistake with national defense. I don't want the US to run out
| of vehicles, artillery shells, and spare uniforms 2 weeks
| into a real war.
| warner25 wrote:
| Yeah, it just seems like we've spent an inordinate amount of
| time on things that would either (1) save what amounts to
| peanuts in the context of the Army and DoD budgets or (2) not
| save any money at all.
|
| I guess the primary purpose of the audit is to make all the
| numbers add up, and maybe that can inform cost-saving
| decisions down the road, like you said about warehouse
| storage space(?).
|
| I'd rather see a number of "elephant in the room" programs
| ruthlessly cut, or processes changed, to start saving many
| billions of dollars now.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| > _I guess the primary purpose of the audit is to make all
| the numbers add up, and maybe that can inform cost-saving
| decisions down the road_
|
| That's right - the, not unreasonable basis, is that you
| can't make informed decisions about whether you're getting
| good value for money, or how to change allocations, unless
| you've transparency into what that money actually does.
|
| It's approximately the same reason why financial statements
| and their audits are relevant in the private sector - just
| substitute "investors" for the "the public, with Congress
| as proxy".
| importantbrian wrote:
| Also, audits are not 100% about saving money. They're
| also there to enforce conformity to standard accounting
| practices and try to make sure the books aren't getting
| cooked. Even if the books aren't getting cooked the only
| way you can be sure of that is to go through the audit
| process.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > like you said about warehouse storage space(?).
|
| I think that's about much more than space, and more the
| operational drag of managing all that stuff.
|
| Here's the Army Undersecretary and also the Chief of Staff
| talking about it and plans to reduce inventory:
|
| https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2023/10/army-doesnt-
| know-w...
|
| From the article:
|
| _"I 'm working really hard with Army Materiel Command to
| find ways to more rapidly and in the digital fashion to
| catalog what we currently have, not relying on the
| clipboard and supply soldier who's sitting there taking
| notes and putting it on a piece of paper,"_
|
| Yikes.
| warner25 wrote:
| Oh yeah, when I was a platoon leader and company
| commander, we spent 20-30% of our time - like a day per
| week, or a week per month - just looking for stuff,
| counting stuff, and annotating on paper the locations of
| the stuff (e.g. which building, office, shipping
| container) to help us find it again next time.
|
| But you also weren't _allowed_ to get rid of any of it,
| even if it was obsolete and just hanging around since the
| 1970s like I said earlier.
| importantbrian wrote:
| All of that sounds like bog standard kinds of stuff that we and
| every other private company have to go through during our
| annual audits. I don't totally understand why these things are
| so burdensome to DoD personnel that they can't pass an audit. I
| would have been fired a long time ago if our company regularly
| failed audits over this kind of stuff.
| mtrees_io wrote:
| da fence is a broad term
| blindriver wrote:
| Why would anyone care about an audit if there are no
| repercussions?
| eviks wrote:
| Those boxes don't check themselves
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Why do you say there are no reprocussions? It's a signicant
| issue in Congress, which writes all of the Department of
| Defense's checks, oversees them, investigates them, confirms
| their leaders, and makes laws controlling everything they do.
| Loughla wrote:
| And what has failing audits led to in the past?
| jsbisviewtiful wrote:
| So far more money :P
| wolverine876 wrote:
| To improving the auditability of the Pentagon, a new and
| ongoing project.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38307749
| edgyquant wrote:
| They haven't been doing them for very long at all and have
| had better results pretty much every year since they
| started.
| mrchucklepants wrote:
| It should be. But its not and, likely, never will be.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| The DoD is Congress' baby. They will move heaven and earth to
| make sure the defense industry gets paid.
| vuln wrote:
| To make sure congress critters get paid by Defense
| Contractors and secure lucrative board seats.
| brvsft wrote:
| The failed audits have no impact on their budget the
| following year.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| The Pentagon is on track, for the most part, on their
| auditing project. But what makes you say it doesn't impact
| their budget?
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| Six (out of six) years of failed audits, and no
| repercussions in sight?
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Again, they are on track.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38307749
|
| It's like an airplane under development. It's not
| expected to fly yet.
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| > It's a signicant issue in Congress
|
| What are you basing that on?
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Lots of discussion and pressure on it, going back 10-15 or
| more years.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Believe it or not, the Pentagon isn't really the problem;
| Congress is.
|
| https://rollcall.com/2023/05/23/hill-favored-projects-called...
|
| Congressional representatives push all sorts of weapons
| "programs" that military leadership doesn't want or need,
| because it's an easy way to be able to go home and tell your
| voters how many jobs you "saved" "protecting America."
|
| Well over a decade ago Pentagon leadership declared that their
| budget was not sustainable for the country...just like they
| declared a long time ago that climate change was a serious
| threat and started working on decarbonization (the US military
| is still the single largest generator of carbon dioxide on the
| planet.)
| beambot wrote:
| More to the point: Perhaps it's a feature, not a bug.
| MrMetlHed wrote:
| Worked with a guy ten years ago that would obsessively read these
| reports from the Pentagon. Here's a couple of his stories about
| the matter: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/pentagon/ and
| https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-mari...
| (very old and I apologize for my horrific javascript at the
| time.)
|
| It sounds like nothing has changed. Relevant to this crowd,
| maybe: "Most of the Cobol code the Pentagon uses for payroll and
| accounting was written in the 1960s, according to 2006
| congressional testimony by Zack Gaddy, director of DFAS from May
| 2004 to September 2008."
|
| "Wallace, the Army assistant deputy chief of staff, says the
| system has "seven million lines of Cobol code that hasn't been
| updated" in more than a dozen years, and significant parts of the
| code have been "corrupted." The older it gets, the harder it is
| to maintain. As DFAS itself said: "As time passes, the pool of
| Cobol expertise dwindles.""
| wslh wrote:
| I would love to perform static security code analysis to that
| code.
| tandr wrote:
| Are there any SA tools, that would understand COBOL?
| Jtsummers wrote:
| https://www.sonarsource.com/knowledge/languages/cobol/
|
| Never used it (and hopefully never will), but yes.
| xeromal wrote:
| Not all the RAM on earth would be enough to process that shit
| bogota wrote:
| Start paying 250k a year for cobol developers and the problem
| fixes itself really fast. That or start migrating the system.
| Or more likely they keep using it until it completely breaks
| and then run to the government for a big handout to fix it.
|
| Easy to be irresponsible with other peoples money.
| lancepioch wrote:
| Don't they have caps and levels for federal employee
| salaries? I agree that raising the salary would decrease the
| issues. I think that they'd need exceptions to account for
| these increases though.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Yes, but not for contractors. Most software sustainment
| ultimately ends up in the hands of contractors with
| government supervision in the form of program offices. Not
| all, though, many programs are also "organic", primarily or
| fully staffed by government employees and managed by
| government employees.
| randmeerkat wrote:
| > Yes, but not for contractors.
|
| Sure, but it's not like the consulting firms are paying
| their "contractors" more, they just siphon up the
| difference for their shareholders.
| ska wrote:
| That's not really how it works. They are more than happy
| to have "market forces" drive up the hourly rates, so
| long as they get to keep their overhead % fixed, and
| that's probably how the contract is structured. Win-win
| (and perhaps -lose for taxpayers).
| randmeerkat wrote:
| > That's not really how it works. They are more than
| happy to have "market forces" drive up the hourly rates
|
| That's exactly how it works, look at contract government
| salaries compared to anything in the private sector. They
| charge the government more as rates "go up", but that
| certainly isn't passed along. If large contracting
| companies really offered value to the government _and_
| kept up with market rates for their employees, the state
| of federal software wouldn't be what it is today.
| ska wrote:
| I didn't say that your rate at a govt focussed
| consultancy would be identical to your rate elsewhere. I
| probably should have been more explicit.
|
| I rejected the idea that the consultancy would get a rate
| increase based on "market rates being higher" and then
| just capture it all - in my (admittedly somewhat limited
| and path dependent) experience that just isn't how it
| works. It's more like we pay randmeerkat $X, we bill them
| out at $X * factor + overhead. "Market forces" mean we
| have to go Y > X in renewal or we will lose randmeerkat &
| friends, so now they get $Y and we bill $Y * factor +
| overhead. It's of course usually more complicated in
| general, and overhead especially likely isn't that
| simple.
|
| Nowhere in there is the assertion that X _or_ Y is what
| randmeerkat would get on the open market. Importantly,
| their market isn 't really "programmers", but
| "programmers that work in govt + contracting halo". Which
| is part of why the idea: I could get $N more in SF tech
| may be compelling for you, but isn't compelling for them
| (unless too many people actually make that change,
| instead of just talk about it).
|
| Also there are many other ways they can raise there
| rates, but if the claim is that it is due to market on
| the developer salaries that are going to be a line item,
| there is going to be at least first pass look at a) is
| that true (find some market data and wave hands) b) did
| it actually get spent that way (may come up in an audit).
|
| So the real answer seems to be not "They get more and I
| get nothing" but "I get a bit more, and they get more
| scaled by what I get", i.e. "win-win".
|
| There is lots wrong with the system of contracting, but I
| don't think criticizing a cartoony straw-man of it gets
| anywhere useful.
| nickpeterson wrote:
| Part of the problem is, you tend to need cobol experts to
| actually have any hope of successfully transitioning to
| another technology, and if we had enough cobol experts would
| look at the cost of migrating and say, "who needs to, we have
| a bunch of cobol developers?"
| adamc wrote:
| Hire experts and have it be reported as "waste" and hear
| complaints in Congress about government waste.
|
| We want government to be cheap. You get what you pay for.
| toasted-subs wrote:
| Starting pay for cobol in finance was around 350k last time I
| glanced. Nobody wants to rewrite a working system which will
| likely be much more expensive than finding one person to
| maintain the project.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| With rewrite comes uncertainty and risk too, how many new
| bugs compared to code that works for decades?
| MrMetlHed wrote:
| In the last part of the series from 2013 we have a chart that
| shows the Pentagon had spent over $10b modernizing their
| accounting systems (that was through 2013, no idea how much
| that number has grown.) I can't imagine anyone would miss a
| few million of that going to COBOL developers. The money
| scale for Pentagon projects is mind-boggling to me.
| thelastgallon wrote:
| Incentives only work on low-skilled labor that is
| quantifiable. Eg. more money for flipping more burgers. It is
| not a settled science paying people a lot more will
| automagically solve problems. People crave Autonomy, Mastery
| & Purpose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbR2V1UeB_A
|
| What is definitely going to happen is you will attract the
| cowboys who have convinced themselves and can convince you to
| pay top dollar. They will come up with lets do kubernetes +
| service-mesh + multi-cloud hybrid + blockchain + crypto +
| AI/MI on this COBOL ... They will take top dollar, make a
| bigger pile of mess, sell it as a success story and move on
| make bigger messes.
| whatshisface wrote:
| 250k is not top dollar, it is average for experienced
| engineers.
| Kranar wrote:
| 250k is not top dollar for programmers, but it is top
| dollar in absolute terms. The point is that you don't
| incentivize better work by paying top dollar. Taking a
| mediocre developer and paying them more doesn't make them
| a better developer or even motivate them to become
| better.
|
| It can attract people who are already good software
| developers absolutely, but the second point being made is
| that you also attract a lot of charlatans as well and so
| just throwing more money at the problem isn't exactly a
| great solution.
|
| You need a solid culture to go with the money.
| ramilefu wrote:
| Depends on where you live. An "experienced engineer" is
| going to make a lot less if they live in Mississippi than
| if they were in California. 250k for the former is likely
| "top dollar".
| 1323portloo wrote:
| If you are a small shop, sure. If you are a major
| employer you will either meet market rate and get top
| candidates (willing to live in your area) or you will get
| whatever candidates decided to live in Mississippi.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| People on HN are convinced if you don't live in
| California maximizing your salary, you're not capable of
| doing so.
|
| Highlighted in the sibling comment: "you will get
| whatever candidates decided to live in Mississippi"
|
| As if top talent never decides to live in Mississippi and
| accept 250k/year as their salary ceiling...
| 1323portloo wrote:
| I didn't say that top talent doesn't live in Mississippi,
| I just said you will get what candidates DO decide to
| live in Mississippi. If you want top talent, you have to
| advertise nationally, and be willing to pay the national
| rate. I live in a city that is quite poor for an employer
| that is quite large. They pay slightly better than
| average for the area except for their engineers and upper
| management, that goes to market rate because they are
| willing to hire the best available.
| rumdz wrote:
| Outside of CA?
| metabagel wrote:
| Even in Southern California, $250K is a very high salary
| for developers, at least in embedded systems, which is
| the space I'm familiar with.
| Miner49er wrote:
| No, that is not average, maybe in high COL areas, but
| that obviously would then not be average.
| metabagel wrote:
| Outside the Bay Area, $250K is top dollar.
| rybosworld wrote:
| This is a lie that is commonly spread here and on reddit.
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| >People crave Autonomy, Mastery & Purpose
|
| I'm not a sack of chemicals whose desires can be reduced
| down to some pithy pseudo-scientific Maslowian quip. The
| only thing I crave from my job is cash so I can take care
| of me and my family. 250k/yr for a COBOL position would
| suit that end just fine. You can keep your autonomy,
| mastery, purpose, and all the other foofoo, just hand me
| the check so I can be on my way.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > I'm not a sack of chemicals whose desires can be
| reduced down to some pithy pseudo-scientific Maslowian
| quip. The only thing I crave from my job is cash
|
| I thought you were against reductionism?
| curiousllama wrote:
| Cobol cowboys are a thing. They make substantially more than
| 250k. They're competing with Wall St though, so hard to just
| pay more.
|
| Fed govt migrations are ALWAYS shitshows. The army alone has
| like 20 individual email services. The pentagon is to org
| complexity what big tech is to technical complexity. It's
| turtles all the way down.
|
| This is literally one of the largest bureaucratic challenges
| on earth. There's no simple fixes
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The solution is simple: you need someone with absolute
| authority over _everyone_ including the generals to lead
| the effort.
|
| There's a time and place for democracy - but large IT
| projects are not. Do a _thorough_ need analysis, compare
| with what 's reasonably possible using COTS software, and
| adapt or discard what is not possible.
| count wrote:
| I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, or earnest.
|
| This is the funniest possible response. The 'thorough
| need analysis' is the reason we are where we are now!
|
| The thoroughness is so thorough that the needs change
| faster than the analysis can be completed, obviating the
| analysis in the first place.
| ska wrote:
| > Start paying 250k a year for cobol developers and the
| problem fixes itself really fast.
|
| Do you think they aren't? I don't know any now, but the last
| one I did was making more than that 15 years ago.
|
| Old crufty legacy systems in a big bureaucracy are many
| peoples idea of hell. Empirically speaking, good pay and job
| security aren't enough to have people knocking down your door
| for that kind of work if they have other decent options.
| wubrr wrote:
| That could work if the existing code is actually up-to-date,
| correct, and if you have knowledgeable users of the systems
| backed by this code. The part about 'code corruption' makes
| me thing this is not the case.
|
| Worked at a big bank migrating some old code to new stack one
| time: - Original developers are gone. -
| Existing users don't understand the systems outside of their
| own narrow use-cases. - Code which was committed to
| repositories didn't match the actual running code, because
| people would go into production servers, manually edit the
| code there, in place, not document or commit the changes to
| repo. There were like 20 years of adhoc changes made in this
| way.
|
| We had some business analysts which were supposed to talk to
| the users and gather requirements - they very quickly simply
| gave up and asked the developers to 'reverse engineer'
| everything.
|
| Anyway, it was a hilarious shit-show, but kinda fun at the
| same time (if you're able to ignore incompetent leadership
| pressure - a skill I mastered during this time).
| uticus wrote:
| Of course, devil's advocate would point out COBOL in 60s was
| written with a lot more focus on lasting in general. They
| didn't largely have the same general attitude of 'we iterate
| quickly with our script kiddies' as is prevalent today.
|
| Not that all software from then was wonderful. Or that COBOL
| magically guarantees great code.
|
| But, on the flip side, you can't say the code base isn't
| battle-hardened (to various literal degrees).
|
| * edit: corrected sp
| SteveNuts wrote:
| It'd be battle hardened to 1960s standards, payroll has
| changed a _lot_ since then. And if they can't accurately
| describe exactly how certain calculations are made (or have
| to do some of those manually outside of the program after it
| runs), that would be a huge problem in an audit.
|
| This is why big companies use Oracle or SAP for their ERP,
| auditors are very familiar with it and the way it functions
| is well-known and understood.
| monocasa wrote:
| Also throwing out there that COBOL was a language designed by
| the DOD specifically for managing it's bureaucracy.
|
| It was a naval research project headed by Admiral Grace
| Hopper to program with words rather than formulas like
| earlier "high-level" "autocoders", enabling secretaries to
| transfer their business logic into computers. It actually
| intentionally has a lot of the same structure as a recipe,
| hoping that this would allow easier uptake by secretaries.
| ebiester wrote:
| I can build you a team using today's (quality: average B2B
| startup) programmers and today's methodologies that will
| write software for 40 years.
|
| It will just cost twice as much as the team that iterates
| quickly. It will cost more because I will spend more money on
| business analysis up front. I will spend more money writing
| automated tests. Most importantly, I will maintain my own
| toolchain and libraries or pay someone to do so. Every piece
| of software deployed will have someone accountable to my
| business to maintain it.
|
| It turns out that this is expensive. It's no more expensive
| than maintaining the COBOL code, mind you, and would likely
| give you better results than the equivalent COBOL code. Most
| companies will take their chances with less expensive
| software because that's what their competitors do.
|
| About a decade ago, I saw one of the major systems you talk
| about up close. While they spent that amount of money for
| mission-critical systems, they didn't do nearly as good of a
| job on the average software in the system. I'm not convinced
| that any business is ready to go back to the battle hardened
| days.
| docandrew wrote:
| I wonder though whether the up-front costs incurred by your
| team would eventually be outweighed by the long-term costs
| of the quick team.
| ebiester wrote:
| I am not convinced that it would. The quick team will get
| to learn three times as much and adapt to the actual
| customer need. The cost of change in a system built with
| stability as a quality attribute will be higher. (As you
| can see from a system like the old mainframes!)
| dustingetz wrote:
| ha! you wouldn't even be permitted to bid the project!
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| The trick is to use JS. (Not anything that compiles to it)
|
| It will be guaranteed to run in 100 years time.
|
| Any other language can die or have incompatibility issues.
| Over that timespan.
| ebiester wrote:
| You could use Java or Python and have the same guarantee.
|
| I am not convinced Node will be here in 100 years.
| klyrs wrote:
| Brainfuck is the only language we need. It's feature
| complete and practically guaranteed to go unchanged in
| the next millenium.
| kube-system wrote:
| I can't tell if I'm being Poe's Law'd. JS engines are a
| moving target and have been ever since it was called
| LiveScript.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| > you can't say the code base isn't battle-hardened
|
| Your statement is undermined by the fact that the system has
| failed its sixth consecutive audit. If it's not hardened
| against failing an audit, I'm not really sure what it could
| possibly be hardened against.
| bumby wrote:
| Part of Murphy's Laws of Combat: No combat ready unit ever
| passed inspection. No inspection ready unit ever passed
| combat.
|
| Managers need to be careful of Goodhart's law. (in this
| case "passing inspection" may not be the best target)
| bastawhiz wrote:
| And yet hundreds of thousands of companies pass the same
| audits. The call for audits came from ridiculous amounts
| of misreporting and waste. Accounting systems that can't
| do accounting and deal with _trillions of taxpayer
| dollars_ should not have the goalposts moved. A 0.001%
| error in a trillion dollar system is ten million dollars.
| That 's taxpayer money that could fix derelict bridges or
| pay for thousands of children to receive lunch at school.
| bumby wrote:
| Can you made a single company that has the same mission
| and scope? They article states there are 29 entities
| audited. A fair number of those probably dwarf the
| companies you're using as a comparison all by themselves.
|
| I'm all for holding the DoD accountable. But I'm not for
| trivializing the problem they are working on and
| pretending it's equivalent to a company selling copier
| paper.
| encoderer wrote:
| I can imagine a future where new software is, mainly, written
| by humans while legacy software is maintained by ai.
|
| It can take months for a new developer to understand a legacy
| code base but an LLM with a big enough context window would be
| instantly productive.
| Yahivin wrote:
| I can imagine the opposite.
| encoderer wrote:
| Cool tell me more.
| SteveNuts wrote:
| Not OP but I could see some shops pushing AI generated
| code to production, then when changes need to be made,
| they can't get the AI to modify the existing code in just
| the way they need, so a human has to intervene.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| I can't get Copilot to generate Python that adds numbers
| together correctly sometimes. Getting an LLM to generate
| correct, working code for a language that hardly anybody
| writes anymore is almost assuredly going to lead to
| failure.
| encoderer wrote:
| yeah I agree but when you look at the slope not the
| y-intercept it's getting obviously better.
|
| one advantage the government would have is training/fine-
| tuning on a hundred million lines of domain specific
| cobol.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| The slope doesn't really matter, because the target is
| "better than a human, and able to identify and fix its
| own errors". The slope will decrease as you approach this
| threshold.
|
| It's also wildly bad to plan to train and fine tune on
| code that you know has bugs. Already we have Copilot
| generating code with trivial vulnerabilities because
| that's what it's trained on.
| nradov wrote:
| The hard part of accounting systems is doing the requirements
| analysis (including interviewing humans who give inaccurate
| or incomplete answers) and writing detailed functional
| specifications which account for every possible edge case. No
| LLM can do that.
|
| Once you have the detailed specifications the coding is
| relatively easy. Some of that can be partially automated
| using AI CASE tools, but that only gives a marginal
| improvement to overall project productivity.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The hard part of accounting systems is doing the
| requirements analysis (including interviewing humans who
| give inaccurate or incomplete answers) and writing detailed
| functional specifications which account for every possible
| edge case. No LLM can do that.
|
| One of my first one afternoon (for prompt refinement and
| trying it out) toy GPT-3.5 "applications"--really just a
| prompt--was having it interview for reauirements and draft
| and progressively refine a requirements doc in a specified
| (by reference to an author in popular Agile literature, not
| by specific templates, so just relying on the model's
| general training) format. Its pretty much what convinced me
| of the broad utility of the technology.
|
| I absolutely think that with a bit of effort, GPL-4-128K, a
| custom RAG framework and/or the Assistants API, you could
| build something that handles a lot of this. I'm not really
| bullish near term on LLMs as full replacements, but I can
| see it as a big force multiplier.
| charlie0 wrote:
| Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner. This. I see issues at
| my small startup with not having clarity with certain
| billing items. This issue is not technical, it's the
| unknown requirements of why things were written in the way
| they current exist. I can't imagine what kind of bizatine
| rules they have in the Pentagon that were placed there
| decades ago, and no one can answer why. Codebase must be
| littered with Chesterton fences.
| DougBTX wrote:
| > The hard part of accounting systems is doing the
| requirements analysis (including interviewing humans who
| give inaccurate or incomplete answers) and writing detailed
| functional specifications which account for every possible
| edge case.
|
| So lots of tedious repetitive manipulation of language to
| extract facts and transform them into a systematic format?
| My prediction: LLMs are going to eat that for breakfast.
|
| (Honestly it is a great business idea for someone with the
| right contacts. Lots of big customers with deep pockets and
| large private datasets to train against that might now have
| a solution to a problem which was previously intractable in
| scale.)
| nradov wrote:
| None of those customers have actual data sets to train
| against when it comes to ERP and accounting software
| requirements analysis. The data that exists at all is
| scattered across random Word documents, wiki pages, paper
| notebooks, and legacy requirements management systems.
| Most of it is summarized. It's not recordings of past
| interviews with SMEs that business analysts and product
| owners conducted to extract functional requirements. In
| order to train an LLM to conduct such interviews you
| would have to obtain actual transcripts of such
| interviews. Not impossible, but unlikely to happen
| anytime soon.
| TurkishPoptart wrote:
| Is the problem really related to COBOL, or is the fact that
| this institution is basically unaccountable to taxpayers?
| b8 wrote:
| Which 18 departments failed besides the two mentioned in the
| article?
| solardev wrote:
| Sorry, that'll have to be a separate audit of this audit.
| jmyeet wrote:
| At least the missile knows where it is.
| rattlesnakedave wrote:
| au contraire, it knows where it isn't
| jfoutz wrote:
| I know I'm incredibly naive, and there's no political will to
| actually make the system work.
|
| It seems like various sections and departments are passing
| audits. If you're within, say, 1% just allocate the funds.
|
| If you didn't pass the audit, fill out this form and then get the
| money. The form can be classified.
|
| I have no idea, but I'd imagine like payroll and taxes are pretty
| much perfect.
|
| Once you get a handle on who doesn't know where their money is
| going, you can help them figure it out, throughout the year, and
| be on track next year.
|
| It's huge, it's massive it's trillions of dollars, it's a
| completely incomprehensible system. But, like, some parts are
| comprehensible. Those parts are easy. The incomprehensible parts
| can be broken down and figured out. Is divide and conquer not a
| thing?
| TinyRick wrote:
| There's no political will to actually make the system work
| because the system is working perfectly fine for those in
| charge.
| curiousllama wrote:
| This is what they're doing ("incremental progress" as they
| say). The issue is the scale of the system.
|
| With a big enough org, the ongoing deterioration occurs faster
| than you can actually root cause and fix the problems.
|
| You divide the orgs, they divide the pillars, they divide the
| groups, they divide the pods, they divide the teams... all the
| sudden, a 4 week root cause exercise takes a year and a half.
| By the time you implement the solution, you're 3 years out of
| date. Whoops - administration flipped. They don't care anymore.
| "What do you mean accounting - why are we behind China in AI?!"
| importantbrian wrote:
| Divide and conquer actually does seem to be the strategy. Each
| department within the DoD does its own audit, and a few of
| those departments actually have passed. But most of them have
| failed with a few still ongoing.
|
| The bigger issue is the no political will part. If congress
| mandated that senior pentagon officials lose their jobs when
| they fail an audit they would get the process figured out
| really quickly. As is there's no urgency because there are no
| consequences for failure.
| kulahan wrote:
| >I have no idea, but I'd imagine like payroll and taxes are
| pretty much perfect.
|
| It is _well_ -known in the military that WHEN you inevitably
| get a screwed-up paycheck, if you get too much, it's your
| problem, because they're 100% sucking that money back out of
| your account or simply not paying you the next month. If you
| get too little... well that's also your problem. Good luck - go
| find someone to spare the time to fix it. It's a pain in the
| ass.
|
| The system is ancient, unfortunately.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| The US Department of Defense was not audited until six years ago,
| when it began a project to make their organization auditable.
| From the start, it was expected to take longer than six years:
|
| You are looking at a potential new job. A large company wants you
| to lead a project on their audits. Here is the situation:
|
| They are large and complex - on a different order of magnitude,
| possibly the largest, most complex organization in the world -
| with ~$4 _trillion_ in assets (not market cap, but hard assets),
| and ~$900 _billion_ annual budget, seven figures of employees,
| and operations spanning almost every activity, all over the
| world.
|
| Such an organization is naturally divided into an incredibly
| large and complex org chart that maybe nobody really comprehends.
| Among all the entities on that chart are an incredible array of
| financial and asset tracking systems, computerized and manual,
| from new back to possibly WWII.
|
| Your boss says that procurement is the most important thing to
| audit: An unusually large part of that $900 billion budget is the
| world's largest procurement budget and operation, with an endless
| list of vendors of every size and shape, from the world's largest
| companies - some whose core function is milking your organization
| without crossing legal redlines - to the tailor for West Point
| uniforms. And we were hoping you wouldn't ask, but we're afraid
| the budget and operation is decentralized across all/most of
| those entities in that org chart [edit: per commenter with actual
| knowledge, "the budget is somewhat centralized; it's just the
| execution that's decentralized".]
|
| We'll need you to stitch all that together so we can audit it.
|
| Who is providing executive support for this project? Well, very
| few in our organization, from the leadership down, really want it
| - they all see it as a distraction and source of trouble,
| possibly risk to their missions and careers. It was imposed on
| us. Also, the project will be the target of politics (including
| from a certain highly aggressive party in Congress), talking
| heads, and general public Internet attacks no matter what you do.
| Everyone sees you as a useful whipping post.
|
| Do you take the job?
| psunavy03 wrote:
| As someone with 20 years active and reserve time, the only
| thing I'd really tweak here is that the budget is somewhat
| centralized; it's just the execution that's decentralized. DOD
| is an Executive Branch department that operates on money
| programmed by Congress. Agencies choose, within limits of Title
| 10 US Code, how to spend that money, but the "pots" or
| "flavors" of money they have to spend are allocated in the
| Congressional budget.
| count wrote:
| Heh, most of the DoD is. But DoD also has non Title10/PPBE-
| programmed funding (foreign military sales, contingency and
| humanitarian operations funds, MWR funds and incomes,
| support-to-other-agency (e.g. the US Navy NAVWAR organization
| provides SUBSTANTIAL IT and cyber expertise to non-DoD
| entities and other federal agencies such as the FBI and DHS).
|
| The DoD is like the End Game Boss on legal and financial edge
| cases.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| As someone who seems to know a bit about it, do you take
| the job? :)
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Give me the complete and utter authority, Congress off of my
| neck for four years and I will.
|
| The problem is not technical, it's the immeasurable amounts of
| tiny personal fiefdoms established by the countless layers of
| middle management. You won't get rid of these without someone
| who has been publicly given the political backing to end the
| career of anyone resisting change. And that _includes_ the
| Congress members which are on speed dial in some people 's
| phones.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Your analysis of the problems is interesting. Do you work in
| DoD?
|
| IME such internal politics is unavoidable in large
| organizations. Nobody likes it but it's the ocean in which
| everyone must swim. You can alter it to some degree, but
| there's no way for a structure that large to work without it.
| How do you manage million(s?) of people without middle
| management?
|
| Also, it's not Meta. It's an organization that is responsible
| for life and death of hundreds of millions or billions, and
| national and global security, so control is essential. As a
| simple example, you can't lose track of the grenade launchers
| or nuclear weapons and have them end up in the wrong hands.
| vore wrote:
| That's not how authority works. Whatever you would choose to
| implement, you will need to have enough buy in from those
| middle managers and fiefdoms otherwise you will end up with
| heel-dragging or, worse, malicious compliance. If you've been
| in _any_ kind of organization that 's tried to impose
| completely top-down edicts, you should have seen the kind of
| destruction of morale it leaves in its wake.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > Whatever you would choose to implement, you will need to
| have enough buy in from those middle managers and fiefdoms
| otherwise you will end up with heel-dragging or, worse,
| malicious compliance. If you've been in any kind of
| organization that's tried to impose completely top-down
| edicts, you should have seen the kind of destruction of
| morale it leaves in its wake.
|
| Even for military officers giving orders in the field,
| edicts don't work. You need buy-in, including earning trust
| in you.
| bumby wrote:
| Hell, it would probably take more than four years just to
| understand the problems the various organizations are trying
| to solve. If you rush that, you "solution" is bound to miss
| important nuances that make things worse rather than better.
|
| Sure, you could assemble a team with that experience to
| short-cut some of that. But you'll likely need a long time to
| just build the trust necessary to get the right information.
| You're an outsider and will likely be treated as such.
| thelastgallon wrote:
| Sounds like an ideal job for AI.
|
| AI, please read this COBOL code and rewrite it all in Rust.
| Understanding 85 COBOL Standard reserved words is orders of
| magnitude easier than understanding English. AI should bludgeon
| this task in no time.
|
| And Rust can be 180,000x faster[1], all the code will be
| efficient and run on a mac mini or raspberry pi.
|
| It sounds like the easiest way for AI startups to make a pitch
| and collect a big bounty from Pentagon.
|
| [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37964161
| psunavy03 wrote:
| Do you even code?
| btbuildem wrote:
| Pardon me if this is too simplistic, but wouldn't cutting back
| the budget begin to instil some fiscal responsibility into an
| organization?
|
| Conducting an audit seems like just another expenditure in a
| climate of obscene overabundance of resources that encourages
| spending more and more.
| px43 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure they would blame the cuts for their continued
| lack of action.
| wedn3sday wrote:
| Any loss in revenue would immediately be blasted through the
| media as the destruction of jobs. Dont think of the pentagon as
| a fighting force, think of it as a make work (and thus make
| votes) organization.
| dostick wrote:
| 60% of 35 trillion is unaccounted for. With this kind of money
| they can build whole separate world under earth surface. Nothing
| they can't buy with that money.
| queuebert wrote:
| That's 420 years of the NIH budget. They lost FOUR CENTURIES
| worth of groundbreaking medical research. We have really eff-ed
| up priorities.
|
| In other units that I'm known for, that's 550 Enrons.
| juujian wrote:
| Looks like they can just get away with it, so what's the
| incentive to change that?
| karaterobot wrote:
| > Auditing the Department's $3.8 trillion in assets and $4.0
| trillion in liabilities is a massive undertaking
|
| But... that's irrelevant. The _audits_ didn 't fail, the things
| being audited failed the audit.
| rglover wrote:
| Is everybody ready to warmly embrace anarchism yet (or as a
| start, secession) or are we going to take a few more trips around
| the sun?
|
| /s
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