Haft of the Spear

1. Bureaucrats suck. They make the trains run on time but they can’t actually build a railroad: that takes leadership.
2. The system doesn’t move fast so no sense in busting your @$$.
3. The lazy are “too busy working,” to get anything meaningful done. :30 a day collaborating or investing in a new way of work could avoid 12:00 of wheel-spinning … but since they get paid regardless . . .
4. Information is Power. It doesn’t matter how small a fish I am in the ocean, I’m going to make sure I’m the biggest fish in this reef.

Find-and-replace with any DOD or IC institution or endeavor and it all still holds up. This is why no major progress in technology, work, or effectiveness a’la the leaps and bounds seen between the start of WWII and (more or less) the end of the Cold War. AQ recruits engineers, not Lit or policy studies grads, for a reason. It is not that such capabilities do not exist in-house, but there is at least a generation that has to pass before they’re allowed to flex and by that time they’ll be the geezers who don’t like that (insert development-after-next here) stuff. I don’t call for a purge because I don’t like oldsters; I call for a purge because as much as I do like them, they’re going to get me killed.