Road to 350: What Does the US Navy Do Anyway?

[Flash]

Go to any finance or ID card office and tell me that 20% of that workforce couldn’t be culled and achieve the same level of output.

My main experience with civilians before I got to DC was those same folks, and I often wondered the same thing...until I was the Admin O of my second squadron and had to deal with admin BS all the time and finally understood why many of those folks were so surly.

After getting to a staff job and subsequently transitioning to the civil service myself I saw that there was more to our civilian workforce than PSD and ID folks, and cutting 20% of the folks that I work with would do nothing but seriously degrade our country's defense capabilities. Can some trimming of the workforce take place across the government? Sure, but it should be done as part of a deliberative and careful process to ensure we keep the capabilities and resources we need and not in a haphazard and abrupt fashion that originates from tweets by randos and morons.

Our acquisitions process is yet another example of the same systemic issue we have, people and corps are not asked to perform to any real metric and failure doesn’t hurt.

There is a lot more to our acquisitions process than civil servants being a pain in the ass with a raft of laws, rules, regulations that govern the process along with Congress involved that make everything the way it is.

 

[BigRed389]

Which is why I’m a fan of people like Alex Miller in have been some of the largest change agents. That GD project we’ve been hemorrhaging money on? He’s the one that took the PMs money after we embarrassed them to the SecArmy. This was after watching their engineers ignore our feedback for three years so it was gratifying to say the least. ACM-RA is the same problem. They have a green suit LtCol who is effectively just a mouthpiece for an entrenched GS15, and that guy retiring will move us forward a decade, because he refuses to go into the scif and see the problems we’re asking to solve through the needs statements they’ve been receiving.

The problem isn’t that we have a civilian workforce, it’s that we have a lot of our civilian work force being guys who got tired of shaving or pt tests, found a job that pays 3 times as much to work 6 hours, and now they’re being asked what have you done to a pikachu face. Or its people that stopped reading the mail they were getting from those people telling them the problems they face. Those people need to produce or go.

I don’t disagree.

Problem there is that while we have DRP, there has been zero results in either DOGE providing modernized IT/digital efficiency (that’s been a nonexistent fucking joke) to allow people to do more with less, and nothing on restructuring the workforce.

Contracts are where the government gets fucked repeatedly in dealing with the big prime contractors. Losing contracting talent, especially if they don’t want to stick around long enough within civil service to be accountable for their contracts, will make this problem waaaay worse.

Same for any essential function across the board. Tired of dealing with shitty civil service engineers? Not doing anything to be competitive with the private sector to recruit/retain talent won’t help things either.

I’d also gladly shitcan the “compliance” weenies that do things like radio airworthiness checks…but the incentive structure there is fucked because those guys only take risk if they let things go without having every box ticked, while they take none to make the programs waste time and taxpayer money to do more work.

And as Flash pointed out, there is a maze of bureau and regulations that get thrown on top of everything else. I’d gladly shit can entire functions of DCMA billets that are checklist checkers, who I think actively do more harm than good…but they’re required by DOD.

 

[Brett327]

It is bizarre going to meetings with our gov team members and seeing their decreasing numbers as they randomly take the DRP or get laid off. Critical people too, on one-person-deep teams. The killer is in contracts personnel. So many of them worked remotely and bailed rather than RTO.

You kill money movement, you kill the organization.

This…

@Lawman
Here’s a data point for you. Take a relatively small civilian footprint with 150 GS employees across all grades in an organization of 1000, then take an indiscriminate 20% reduction in that workforce. What you get is a significant degradation in capacity. That means less training for deploying units, less force generation, fewer test events for priority DoD weapons systems. Now multiply that effect across DoD. Our entire force structure is now at greater risk.

You sure as fuck aren’t going to get “about the same level of output.”

Only someone with the most superficial understanding of our DoD civilian workforce could make such an absurd statement. That you would assert, without irony, that because you’ve worked with some shitty civilians, you’re now qualified to weigh in on civilian workforce management is further evidence that you’re looking at this through a purely partisan lens.

So, while you’re asking to not be treated like a JO, you might start by demonstrating some thinking that’s a bit more sophisticated than you’ve shown us here. Even if your goal was to reduce the DoD civilian workforce, an end that could be credibly argued for, the result of this administration’s execution has been a complete disaster. That you’re cheerleading what has happened by referencing the fucking ID card office tells us everything we need to know about how much actual thought you’ve put into this.

So, I’ll reiterate… you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about, and nobody should listen to your hare-brained takes.