The Military Industrial Complex - Part 1 - Picatinny Arsenal

I worked in the military industrial complex (MIC) for 15 years. I left there over 30 years ago so I can only report on what my experience was then although from all indications not much has changed. Basically, the MIC is a gigantic welfare scheme for middle class functionaries and salary men who sit on their asses all day, say nary a discouraging word and collect their adequate paychecks every two weeks. It's shrouded in secrecy not mainly to protect secrets from foreign enemies but so that the rest of America doesn't know what goes on there: practically nothing. In my view this fact alone makes it corrupt.

In my 15 year career I worked for Picatinny Arsenal in Dover, NJ, Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Livermore, CA, General Dynamics Convair and Electronic Divisions in San Diego, General Dynamics Fort Worth (Texas), and Naval Electronics Laboratory in San Diego. Naval Electronics Laboratory changes its name periodically to protect the guilty so it has become at various times Naval Electronics Laboratory Center (NELC), Naval Ocean Systems Command (NOSC) and Naval Research and Development (NRAD). Can you believe guys get paid with taxpayer dollars just to sit around and come up with another name?

I was a senior in high school in 1959 when on "career day" someone from Picatinny Arsenal came around and told us abourt the "co-op" plan. It sounded pretty good to me. You worked for Picatinny Arsenal a quarter; then you went to college a quarter and so on. You had your choice of five colleges you could attend, one of them being Georgia Tech where I ended up going. The thing I liked about the co-op plan was that I got to live at home every other quarter and commute to work, and I earned enough to pay my college expenses so my college education didn't cost my parents anything. Also I never borrowed any money unlike the college kids today who are stuck with a mortgage sized debt by the time they get out of college. It took five years instead of four to get through college on the co-op plan, and the last year you went to school five straight quarters.

The summer after I graduated from high school was the first quarter I worked at Picatinny. I was in for a shock. They didn't  give me anything to do! Sure I collected a paycheck but I was bored out of my mind. This was my first introduction to the "world of work" or actually the world of middle class social welfare. I "worked" in a different group each quarter hoping to find something that would enable me to pass the time away doing something productive. One quarter I worked in a group that did drawings for machine tools and I ended up copying a lot of drawings. At least it was something to do. Finally, I ended up in this enormous office building with four desk clusters as far as the eye could see. There were no partitions, no cubicles. Guys used to test their eye sight by how many clocks they could see which hung from the ceiling every so many yards. The desks were all pushed together so that your desk was right up against two others and touching the corner of a third. The guy next to me smoked cigarettes all day, and there was a constant waft of smoke coming from his desk which seemed to aim itself right for my nose. This was in the pre-anti-smoking days when there were no restrictions on smoking. The guy had a lit cigarette going in his ash tray all day on which he puffed occasionally.

After coffee in the morning the guys would head on over to the "shop," a boondoggle for which somebody had been able to get money appropriated. It was outfitted with everything a home hobbyist could desire including drill presses, lathes etc. Here is where they did "home projects" ^i.e. they made stuff and carted it home. At Christmas time the shop was especially busy turning out Christmas presents. There was no supervision there. There was a story about one guy who had built a boat maybe not in this particular shop but in one like it. When the boat was finished, it was too big to get out the door so they tore down a wall to get it out, and then he took it home. When they weren't doing home projects, they were sitting around telling war stories. This went on till a little before lunch time when they gravitated back to the office building, looked busy for a bit and then ate  lunch. In the afternoon this process was repeated until a little before it was time to go home when they returned to the office and kibitzed until "quitting time". I heard one guy say, "I haven't done a lick of work in ten years, and, what's more, if I don't get that raise I'm after, I never will do any work here ever again." They had complete job security because in the civil service they couldn't fire you.

On the alternate quarters when I went to school, I had to perform. I had to work in order to get the grades I was accustomed to. There was no fooling around. At Georgia Tech all they cared about is that you had the right number in the right box on the tests. You got no points for almost getting it right or for having basically the right idea or having done some of the steps correctly.

I didn't enjoy at all having nothing to do at Picatinnny where there was such a lax work ethic. This was my introduction to the military-industrial complex where you had to have a security clearance to get in the gate mainly for the reason that they didn't want the outside world to know what really went on there: nothing. People were  literally paid to sit around and do nothing at taxpayers' expense. Only now since the "Republican Revolution" it's all money borrowed from the Chinese so it's not really taxpayers' expense any more. I thought that Picatinny must be exceptional, that surely this same thing, which I considered to be a form of corruption, could not be going on elsewhere, but in my journey through the MIC I found that this was quite typical. My only good work experience was at General Dynamics Convair for three years where the dynamic was somewhat but not completely different. But I'll get to that later.

Basically, how the MIC works is this. They work off of "cost plus" contracts they get from the Pentagon or sometimes they tap into pots of money directly controlled by congressmen. The essence of a cost plus contract is that the government (via Defense Department appropriations) awards (either competitively or non-competitively) contracts to various private industries (or civil service entities under direct government control) a contract to do something. In most cases these contracts are the result of direct lobbying by the industries or entities themselves for money to do some project they have dreamed up which may or may not have any relevance to actually defending the US. In most cases the cost is not defined. In other words the government pays whatever the project costs and then tacks on a certain percentage of the cost as profit, the "plus" in "cost plus." Therefore, the industry or government controlled entity such as civil service has the incentive to make the project as costly as possible. And when the contract ends, in many cases, there is nothing to show for it but a report that never gets read. There is no follow-on; nothing comes of it that becomes a part of the actual defense of the US or is ongoing even as an intellectual asset. There is no rhyme or reason.

The result is that, the more costly the project, the more profit will be realized. A good way of increasing the cost of a project is hiring more personnel. After all, money always ends up in human hands. So department heads, having obtained a "cost plus" project, immediately start hiring people even if there is no well defined role for them to play. That drives up the cost. A department head's status and salary is directly related to the number of personnel working (or not working) under him. In many cases the project or contract itself is a big boondoggle, something a congressman "delivers" to his home district so that his constituents will continue to reelect him for "bringing home the bacon." It sure helps the local economy, but it has turned the US into a national security state, a country that is primarily concerned with militarism as a means of keeping the economy going and as a platform for politicians to run on.

Now if the government has a project where it is vital that some serious work get done, they sub-contract it out to Jet Propulsion Lab which has a lot of PhDs from Cal Tech or Lincoln Labs which has PhDs from MIT. In fact most of these government entites like Picatinny simply sub-contract the hell out of a contract sometimes several times and then all they really are is contract monitors. In other words there are several levels of guys whose only job is to check on the work of the sub-contractor at the next level below them until you get down to the level where the only real work happens ^i.e. at the level of the PhDs from JPL or Lincoln Labs. The proliferation of personnel as contract monitors and the many layers of sub-contracting adds to the cost and hence to the profits as well as providing a home for the college educated middle class.

As someone said, in the old Soviet Union the employees pretended to work and the government pretended to pay them. In the good old US of A the employees in the MIC pretend to work and the government ACTUALLY does pay them! That was the difference between the USSR and the USA.

After two  years of "working" alternate quarters at Picatinny, where they had made artillery shells for World War II, I got so fed up and bored I decided to drop out of the co-op plan and go straight to school. There, at least, I felt like I was accomplishing something. I went eight straight quarters including summers and managed to graduate the summer quarter after I would have graduated if I had not been on the co-op plan in the first place. Then, having been accepted to graduate school at Stanford on a research assistantship, I went three more quarters there for a total of eleven consecutive quarters without a break. At least I wasn't bored!