The Wall Street Journal's op-ed section had this little snippet in today's paper.

The U.S. military is the toughest and most professional in the world, but one force it usually can’t beat is the bureaucracy back in Washington. The Defense Department has 200,000 acquisition personnel, whose insistence on doing everything “by the numbers” slows to a crawl efforts to get vital equipment such as armor into the field.

But the bureaucracy can be defeated, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld demonstrated last week when he invoked his new “Rapid Acquisition Authority,” allowing him to cut through the red tape to meet urgent battlefield needs. By invoking this power, Mr. Rumsfeld has given the Secretary of the Army 15 days to find a way to mass produce a new device that can jam the electronic signals insurgents use to detonate improvised explosive devices in Iraq.

The portable jammer, developed by the Navy, saves lives by stopping bombs from going off. It costs less than $1,000 each. But when estimates came in that it would take 13 months to field under the normal acquisition procedures, it became clear it was time to take Rapid Acquisition Authority out for a test drive. Now the jammers could be on their way to Iraq in a matte of weeks.

The Pentagon’s sorry procurement system is a creation of Congress, which barely could bring itself to pass Rapid Acquisition Authority last year. It is currently limited to just $100 million in spending, a fraction of the $75 billion defense procurement budget. The small victory on jammers is a good reason to expand this kind of efficient procurement to more military spending.

I’ve deleted some of the commentary on various politicians’ contributions and obstructions in getting the measure passed. Congress is by definition a bureaucratic morass and the slow procurement procedures have always plagued our military. And so my posting this is not to induce any kind of political argument, but to simply illustrate the inadequacies of our system.

200,000 people to buy stuff? That's insane.

The irony of their twisted logic is that all of those people, and the layers of bureaucracy that they make up, are required to ensure the necessary checks and balances in the procurement system.

Otherwise, we would have unaudited contracts between the military and the contractors where we'd be getting $300 hammers and such, . . . oh, wait, that happens anyway.

That happens anyway plus the payroll and overhead of employing a small army to make sure it happens. (Indeed, 200K is larger than the Marine Corps.)

The military created many of these problems by over budget and useless toys that they had to have. The concept of the infantry as the primary group to support was lost after WW2 and they keep trying to lessen their importance and always end up using simple boots on the ground to solve the words problems.

Cutting the bureaucratic BS needs to be done on a regular basis. Why keep a cow that no longer produces milk?

great example of an old joke my grandfather told me

" a Genral give an order to a Major he gives to the same order to a LT. and so on until it gets to a Privat whom read and say wait a second Genral Washington is dead all ready this must be a mistake" to real funny but true in many ways

Takes four people to order a box of paperclips. System is so bogged down and idiotic I gave up. I buy most of my own supplies just to avoid the system.

its called JOB SECURITY