powdermonkey

So Sad

I wish DoD would do a better job of checking payments, wasn't an office started to do this???

Pentagon Paid $998,798 to Ship Two 19-Cent Washers

By Tony Capaccio

Aug. 16 (Bloomberg) -- A small South Carolina parts supplier
collected about $20.5 million over six years from the Pentagon
for fraudulent shipping costs, including $998,798 for sending two
19-cent washers to an Army base in Texas, U.S. officials said.

The company also billed and was paid $455,009 to ship three
machine screws costing $1.31 each to Marines in Habbaniyah, Iraq,
and $293,451 to ship an 89-cent split washer to Patrick Air Force
Base in Cape Canaveral, Florida, Pentagon records show.

iran nuclear power?

They first mastered the hype cycle then the nuclear cycle, now can they master  'the help you people out of poverty cycle'?

Ahmadineajd: Iran now nuclear power

Iranian president: Our scienists have reached zenith, accessed nuclear fuel cycle

IED's and Innovation

Recently there has been a lot of talk about how the insurgency in Iraq is 'different' - this reminds me of the new economy talk in the late 1990's. The thing that is different with the insurgency is that communicaitons has increased the speed of innovation. In effect bad ideas go away faster (along with the people trying them out) and newer/better ideas are adopted, improved upon and shared with others. In previous insurgencies the lines of communicaitons were tenuous and usually involved people having to travel for training. With the ease of xerox and the internet, ideas are cycled through much more rapidly, leading to a deadlier force.

Col John Boyd coined the phrase "get inside the enemies OODA Loop" (OODA = Observation, Orientation, Decision, Action, see http://www.mindsim.com/MindSim/Corporate/OODA.html) meaning if you can make decisions faster than your enemy you will win. In effect it allows you to make more bad decisions and find interesting combinations of attack.

[Technorati tags: IED, JohnBoyd, innovation]