If this is something that you are interested in to put an end to your financial worries, get yourself registered with the Central Contractor Registry which is a federal clearing house for vendors and small businesses too. Also identify a product or service that you can supply to the government and which the government needs in order to get a contract.

You can win such billion dollar contracts and secure your career or business better even during this phase of recession.

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The cost of failure in R&D is being given more time and money. The longer it takes in R&D the more lucrative the contract is.

The above is no secret and the reason why so few major programs ever make it into production.

If all else fails talk about how good your management programs are streamlining the process, all the savings you have generated, and you are employing best business practices using enterprise management principles, green belt, TQM and the kitchen sink.

As a junior engineer at a Defense Contractor, I was taught early that the game was to underbid the contract and make profit on the ECOs. The only way that worked is because 1) the Government really doesn't know what the hell they want to buy, the Staff Officers and Analysts are just following orders, and 2) the budget folks THINK they know what “X” costs, but really don't because their market surveys are crap and no one wants to tell the GO/FO they can't afford something. EVERYONE in the process is incentivized to make any MDAP a cluster-f**k. Just look at the VH-71. Who the hell is going to tell the White House Staff that they are not engineers, and have no clue what they are asking for in a new chopper? It is in Lock-Mart's interest just to say “yes”, and milk the program until either 1) more funding arrives, or 2) the program self-destructs. They still make profit either way, and taking money from stupid people is easy! The Navy makes out good, because NAVAIR's budget goes up, they get more people, and can justify more Flag Officer and SES billets!

I can state without any exaggeration that the program I currently work on pisses away $2B/year, yes, Billion with a “B” with little improvement in combat capability to show for it…

I was a Military Officer with experience in 2 wars. NONE of the programs I work on have made ANY effort to truly quantify the “benefits to the Warfighter”. If they did an intellectually honest appraisal, they wouldn't be able to justify them…

A retired buddy who worked at the Marine Corps Combat Development Center used to make his “cherries” spend their first day watching the Kelsey Grammer movie “The Pentagon Wars”, then quiz them on it. Virtually all the inefficiencies and incompetence depicted in that movie is still true to this day. I have seen OTreports re-written because the Program Executive Office was threatened that their budgets would be cut, and their new “pay for performance” metrics were based upon shipping a product, even if it meant it really didn't function as designed (just change the test!)

The system is so corrupt, it may be more efficient to scrap it all and start over. The original B-52 bomber concept was fleshed out in a hotel room overnight by one AF Officer and some Boeing engineers. No IPTs, no CJCSI 3170, no DoD 5000, no JROC. That airframe will outlast us all, and all our extensive Integrated Product Teams, JCIDS, etc…

Go back and read Eisenhower's comments on the Military-Industrial Complex. He was SPOT ON!