It’s only a matter of time before the mil gets shafted again…. & believe me it will, for it just doesn’t get it…
The military, with military mindsets, want it & want it now (but can’t quite get its head round the ‘what, when & how’ bit).
Civilian companies (BWoS, Boing, EADS, Airbus et al..) do what they are legally required to do & that is think with a different mindset, a commercial mindset – Profit. They are not charities.
If the ‘customer’ knew what he wanted & stuck to it, he’d get what he ordered & probably on time & to price (& yes there ARE examples of this being so) or penalties would be paid.
Yet here we have a ‘customer’ who has been in the procurement game for getting on for 100 years (in the case of the RAF), yet it still can’t get its act together. It gets ‘shafted’ almost every time… Hellloooo.
With some of the more recent procurement fiasco’s bordering on the ‘Gross Incompetence’/’Criminal Negligence’ is it no wonder that the ‘Arfur Daly’s’ of the commercial world see the military coming…? You can’t blame xxx (insert company name) for getting a gold plated contract which makes money for it’s shareholders (& let’s not forget that BOTH sides have legal departments who scour these contracts and advise senior management before they are signed).
If the contract has to be re-negotiated/changed at the behest of the ‘customer’ is the supplier expected to pick up the bill? If you were having a house built to your agreed specification & halfway through the (contracted) build you decided to swap out ‘x’ for ‘y’ & change the wiring spec, who would you expect to pay for the additional work?
My advice would be to buy shares in companies like BWoS & share in the vast profits resulting from ‘Customer’ incompetence. At least you’ll get some of yer hard earned tax back…. LOT’s of profits = Very happy shareholders. Simples.
The Mil are not alone in their wandering in the lost world of procurement… The NHS, Foreign Office & any number of gov depts. seem to be equally inept.
‘fools’? spannermonkey... I think not. You may not like it but they are certainly not fools.