Blaming Ascent for this fiasco is like blaming the shark who attacked the swimmer with an arm full of bloody fish. Ascent is doing what shareholders expect of their management, maximizing profits.
This is 100% on MOD. Their failure to adequately define the requirement, set realistic project deliverables, mandate the project milestone scheduling, and impose suitable contract compliance obligations; guaranteed project failure.
This is the poster child for the government truism. “ There will never be enough time or money available to do the job right, but there will always be enough time and money available to do the job over”
The ultimate irony is that if this project was properly contracted in the first place the resulting bids would have been extremely high to reflect the actual costs of providing a safe, effective and efficient training scheme plus the expected Industry profit; it would likely have been abandoned at the outset.
I wish I could articulate a solution, rather than just moan about the problem, but I see no realistically achievable alternative. Government procurement is profoundly broken and there is not enough political upside to fix it.
One of the most interesting contracting stories, IMO, is the USAF Boeing KC 46 Tanker saga. For the first time in living memory the US government imposed a fixed price contract with real deliverables. Boeing undoubtedly figured that they could wiggle out of the consequences of their low bid, but found out to their chagrin that they actually had to take responsibility for their failures. They are now 5.4 billion and counting in the red on this contract.
In a perfect world this would be a wake up call to industry that the government was getting serious about contracting reform and their bids better reflect reality. In the real world Boeing and the other aerospace contractors put on full court press to prevent these kind of contracts in the future and the USAF is now on record that they will not continue with this “failed” contracting model......