Reporting on the predicament of the American hostages of the FARC, now freed in an audacious rescue by Colombian authorities, was a real eye-opener about the failings of government contracting, and government in general. The three were contractors for a small surveillance program – two single-engine planes and a handful of pilots and technical people, most of them ex-military. The lines of bureaucratic authority around this program were hopelessly complex: it operated under the authority of the U.S. Southern Command, but also did work for the CIA, DEA, and State Department. There were something like a dozen corporations that had a hand in outfitting the spyplanes, maintaining them, and running the program.
You might think of this as a “too many cooks” problem. Quite the opposite. There were hardly any cooks. The surveillance program was embedded in a net of institutions, but operated on its own, without much oversight, just a handful of guys and a lot of cash. As a result, it wasn’t equipped to deal with problems that inevitably arose – mysterious engine failures, increasingly dangerous missions – when the institutions demanded too much. Then those problems resulted in disaster – one plane crash due to engine failure, a second likely due to a combination of preventable factors, including an inexperienced pilot taking off in unfamiliar terrain, and extreme fatigue.
Then the institutional net broke altogether. Since no one organization was responsible for the program, all fled the scene, metaphorically speaking, when disaster struck. Northrop Grumman transferred the program to a hastily-created shell corporation (the ridiculously-named CIAO, thus publicly linking the hostages to the CIA), and Southcom swept all the bureaucratic errors and oversights under the rug.
Essentially, you had a system in which accountability had been engineered out. And this is the big flaw in military and all government contracting today – the blurring and breaking of traditional, commonsensical lines of responsibility. No one ever is brought to account when things fall apart, and so … things keep falling apart.
Update: I write more on this here.
