Where to start.
I am a program manger for the Navy...I procure all Unmanned Air Systems for the Navy and Marine Corps. My budget baseline for all my classified and unclass systems exceeds 3 billion dollars.
I have also been a flight test guy (both operational and developmental), the Chief Pilot for the government at the Sikosky factory in CT., and have managed other large and small scale programs.
So, I have a sense of what is good and bad. With that said, every post in this thread is right.
For manned air vehicles the specifications are amazing and very difficult to meet, hence the $400 dollar toilet seat. Every piece of equipment in a navy aircraft has to be qualed to 20/20/10...meaning 20g loads in two axis, 10g in the lateral axis before a flight clearance will be granted.
Believe it or not, for transport aircraft the entire toilet assembly must be rated to those specs. I don't agree with it, but there it is.
Billing. Shaun is right on the money (pun intended). I am dealing with a case against one of my civilian companies because their fanance guy embezzeled over $1M on an old contract. I order yearly audits by government accountants every year and also requested baseline audits when I took command of my program office 3 1/2 years ago.
Government acquisition regs are horrendous, especially in the contracting realm.
Lastly, outside of the national lab structure, gone are the days when the government paced technology innovation...and the large defense contractors don't either. The hardesst part of my job is maintaining software engineers writing code on my major programs: federal law only allows me to pay a certain wage for certain work...software engineers are so in demand that the gaming industry swoops up all my talent just when they get really good!
I am trying to fix that, we'll see.
I could go on and on.
