I think the bigger issue is why is the Pentagon using an off the shelf software package.
†
We have the largest defense budget in the world and that's where they decide to cut cost?
There is part of me that wants to be really sarcastic, here, so I think the best thing to do is explain why, because, in the end, that's usually how it works.
Why those kinds of software packages?
Republicans. Don't get me wrong, Democrats needed to vote for this stuff, too, but this is how the last ten presidentical cycles have gone.
The conservative appeal has been to business and wealth. We can unchain your potential as an individual by slashing taxes and deregulating because then the economy will fly, and history shows the only reason anyone ever is dishonest in the business community is because there are laws and regulations, and that forces good people to break rules. Yes, I know, it sounds ridiculous, but that's also what a lot of us have been saying for decades. As (
ahem!)
someone↑ pointed out, "Privatization of national security tools—what could go wrong?"
Because that's what happened. When Republicans pushed privatization, Democrats pushed back where they could and buckled where they thought they must. And it's really easy to buckle on these individual points, without any context toward the larger downstream, and cumulative effects. We talk a lot about legislative majorities, like recent arguments about whether Democrats should drop aspects of civil rights advocacy in hopes of peeling off a few midwest votes. Thirty years ago, the easy compromises to make were abortion and privatization.
Hey, do you remember the idea of kaypee? I'm sure KP exists somewhere in the service, but think of it this way: Once upon a time, soldiers fed themselves and each other. Congressional Republicans looked at the pile of appropriation money for feeding the services and decided it could do a lot more if they gave it to large-scale restaurateurs in order to create a retail marketplace so that the private sector could profit off servicemembers during wartime. I still think that's ridiculous, but ... what? That feels in memory like it was so ingrained that there wasn't really much discussion. I don't remember the transition, but I think it was between our Iraq Adventures.
Some of what Democrats did was the price of desperately forestalling what we have right now. And while we usually wallow in this aspect, these days, arguing about what Democrats should do next, there is also this: The privatization of government needs and resources is part of a political thesis in this country, and voters have supported it for decades.
Thus, "why is the Pentagon using an off the shelf software package?" Republicans. Congress. Voters. Priorities. We did this consciously and deliberately. It was not an accident. "Saving money" as a public proposition while routing public money to private interests is a long Republican plank, and voters have really liked it. Kind of like trimester abortion bans, or the D&X ban, crossover Democrats occasionally think they're doing the right thing voting in support, but mostly feel they're taking a dangerous compromise in order to fend off greater danger.
And that's one of the things that hasn't worked; if you've been following questions of the Democratic Party and Appeasement, it's one of the subtexts people on the left side of the dispute keep presenting. The idea that public schools are incomplete unless they are indoctrinating new consumers to brand loyalty is pretty awful, but when you lose enough elections that the other side is about to get away with starving people, you'll take what scraps you get.
This is how we've done it in these United States the whole time my political conscience has been awake. History tells me the only real change compared to what came before me is that these fake compromises, these intentional sieges against the American potential and proverbial American Dream, used to be a little more opaque and obscure. Right now, we're openly playing simpleton swindles.
And this is one of them.
There have in our American politics been some smoldering rumors and suspicions, over the course of decades, and what contained the heat was a simple proposition of general decency, that you don't go randomly accusing people of being so terrible.
And as many have pointed out in recent months, there really isn't anything surprising about the utter disrepair and mean spirit about the Republican Party in the Trump Era; this is not a deviation, but a culmination. This is their big throw. And thirty years ago? Yeah, we all knew there were pockets of white supremacism in the conservative movement, but they were never supposed to get their way. And that's an example of the concession to general decency. Yeah, we've kind of "known" the whole time that these were a bunch of white supremacists, but my entire life there has been enough sympathy for them that saying so was considered inflammatory.
We had an incident at Sciforums some years ago that almost perfectly encapsulates the attitude: A moderator wrote a political post denouncing Mexicans for being an army that was invading the United States and stealing jobs and economy from good, decent Americans. (You know, because we born Americans are just lining up for the privilege of that awesome job picking strawberries the rest of the world would prefer to not allow on their shelves for the dangerous manner in which they are grown.) Someone picked apart the racist tropes, explaining why they were racist. The moderator, elevated specifically for his political outlook—increasing conservative representation because, you know, we need to be "fair"—struck the post criticizing his own and instituted an unwritten rule that accusing racism is off limits for being ad-hom. As far as I know it was never enforced again.
And that's kind of the way supremacists are. There is actually a white nationalist in the Pacific Northwest who meets a particular criterion of mine, though I have no idea what that means since the point was generally rhetorical. At any rate, this guy acknowledges he's a racist, a supremacist, and so on. He just thinks the world should be that way, and wants the area where I live for a "white" homeland. (And as "white" people start dealing with words like
genotype and
phenotype—it would be funny if it wasn't so tragically stupid—after sending away for their DNA analysis because they want to be proud of their white purity, freak out upon learning they are sixteen percent black and eight percent Jewish, perhaps white-homeland advocacy is preparing to die with its current leading generation.) This particular white supremacist, though, seems something of an outlier. Most supremacists are really sensitive about the propriety or impropriety of supremacism, and what is different about now compared to some not so long ago then is that we're having some manner of societal discussion about supremacism in conservative quarters. And that contrast is the point of this digression.
Because the magnitude of various strange controversies ever since the economy blew up in '07, which, depending on one's preferred narrative is either significant or presumptive of oversignificance, as nothing ever begins, have really sort of erased, much like the years of war preceding the meltdown, what was once a weird but useful middling compromise of normalcy. And in that normalcy was a move to privatize everything, and compared to everything else that was going on, shrinking government was a pretense Democrats really, really needed to be in on because it could swing close districts.
The question of cutting costs is what it is; can we actually prove that hiring out is really less expensive and more secure than raising a Joint Service Technical Corps specifically for the purpose of programming the nation's defense? Remember that, even setting aside the Snowden issue, that firm would eventually be revealed to have pretty terrible vetting standards. Letting the private sector have a piece might seem like a good idea, but we should also remember that proper security protocol is expensive and therefore bad for business.
And as we learn more about the Kaspersky connection to an NSA loss, doesn't it seem like certain things really ought to be clear? That is, yeah, this guy took stuff home, and that's how it landed in the Kaspersky index, but then we have to put out memos telling departments to get rid of the software that makes an index of what is on a computer and relays it to a server to check against another index, that was developed in another country, in this case, Russia. I would have thought the part about software that makes an index of what is on a computer and transmits that list elsewhere would have made an obvious point about software developed under a foreign purview.
However, when we talk about what is good for the economy or bad for business, yes, this level of apparent
¿huh? is a fundamental part of how we've been doing it in these United States for a while. Many who lament that the parties are the same would be including Democratic buckling on business and commerce among the enumerated offenses.
More than cutting costs, what they mean is cutting expenses spent on federal action. In some conservative theses of government, the idea is that the government supports the society by providing for its defense and supporting its trade and commerce; the point is to take taxpayer money and give it to preferred rich people, and has nothing to do with cutting costs.
The fact that this is even possible," as
Iceaura↑ noted, "tells us all we need to know."
