Working for the DoD right after the fall of the Berlin wall was a soul crushing experience. It was an interesting period to live through, but you remember the Chinese curse about may you live in interesting times....
How so?
Well, there was the do more with less mentality, so people weren't being replaced. Wings were being consolidated, so there were less "groups" on paper, but the amount of equipment to manage remained the same. When I started working there, we had 24 engineers in my group, typical cold war staffing level for 'in case something happens.' They were down to two engineers by the late nineties.
You can't really sustain a program effectively with that staffing, so they outsourced to contractors. Because their pay comes from a different pot of money and even thought they cost more per seat than civil service, the government can claim they
are reducing headcount.'
Now on to the acquisition side. When they gravy days for the services dried up in 1992 or so, the political pull on new programs became unreal. Decisions were based solely on what senator/congressman/contractor had the most pull, rather than being based on logic and facts. I worked directly on two major programs that went seriously sideways, numerous smaller programs that went seriously sideways, and worked peripherally on the F-22 program which was such a cluster-foo that absolutely no one outside the gov could comprehend the level of goat rope going on.
And the interservice/interplatform rivalries got really nasty. In the AF, the bomber/fighter battles were legendary. In the army, it was the tankers vs light infantry. Don't know what it was in the Navy.
It was a mess. And I couldn't be part of what I considered to be a very, very large problem, so I quit.
