Disney and the DOD

I heard a thing recently about when the Walt Disney corporation hired the McKinsey group to advise them on cost cutting. It’s important to note that among amusement parks Disney had a stellar reputation for safety. The McKinsey people visited the parks, talked with employees, and did the math. They advised Disney to cut back on maintenance and safety inspections. It was overkill, they said. There was plenty of room to make adjustments without endangering anyone. 

There was an exchange between a Disney safety inspector and a McKinsey employee that is telling. The McKinsey boffin said, “Why do you check the lap bars every day? You haven’t had a malfunction in 20 years.” (The lap bars are those padded bars that fold down over ride passengers to keep them from catapulting into space.) The safety employee replied, “We haven’t had an accident in 20 years *because* we inspect them every day.” 

The result was entirely predictable. Disney visitors started to be injured, disabled, and even killed on the rides. Pieces flew off and hit people. Lives were ruined. The Disney reputation for safety was gone. 

Just yesterday, I read about the latest DOGE cut in the federal government. The Department of Defense just ordered a 50% cut to what is called The Office of the Director, Operational Testing and Evaluation (DOT&E). The office acts as a kind of Consumer Reports for things that go boom. Also things that fly, float, drive, communicate, encrypt, clothe, heal, and feed. They hire private companies to test various types of hardware and software and report back on how it performs. Engineers of all kinds test to make sure that the flying things stay in the air, the driving things stay on the ground, the booming things go boom when, how, and where they are supposed to, and the software resists the attacks of Russian and Chinese hackers. 

A relevant news report. 

We can have a discussion about how much we spend on the military and how we use the military, but I think we all can agree that whatever it is that we are spending money on should actually work and be safe for the personnel using it. Of course, to the barely post-pubescent hackers of DOGE, budgets were made for arbitrarily cutting in half. Quality assurance isn’t a requirement for consumer software, so why should it be for an aircraft navigation system? An image comes to mind of a cartoon character sawing off the branch that it is sitting on. 

Alcoholic sex offender, failed nonprofit director, and Fox news host turned Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, intends to save $300 million a year by halving the DOT&E staff and cutting contracts. He has not presented any estimate of how much money the Pentagon will lose per year due to nonfunctional hardware, or more importantly, how many military personnel will be injured or die due to equipment failure. Or, for that matter, whether we will lose a military conflict because the enemy hacked our control systems. 

Perhaps the cost cutters could focus on the 145 golf courses owned and operated at a loss by the DOD?

The DOD hasn’t done a Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) round since 2005, even though the DOD estimates that it has upwards of 20% excess base capacity. Closing and combining bases could save $2.7 billion annually.

There is a crowd of journalists and think tanks pointing out ways that the Pentagon is wasting money. Much of that waste has to do with private contractors overcharging the DOD, often for underperforming products. There is also a bad habit among members of Congress; horse trading for billion dollar contracts for ships and planes the DOD doesn’t even want, but that inject money into the congressmember’s home state.

The Pentagon could save a lot of money by buying and having fewer things and paying less for them. It’s the worst false economy to cut the program that ensures that they work.