Army RFP for

[Streck-Fu]

Why everything gets so damned expensive.... via Weaponsman. LINK (http://weaponsman.com/?p=25355)



The solicitation is 315 pages long, most of it bureaucratic boilerplate. The real statement of work begins on Page 188, and it looks like the one thing they don’t want to do is buy a handgun from a handgun manufacturer. Instead, they aim to throw the contract to a large, high-overhead defense/aerospace prime contractor who will assemble the package with components from many disparate vendors, each one marked up obscenely.

[therunningwolf]

I can say from experience, having worked in contracting while in, it is fairly easy to insure that the person you want getting a contract gets it, simply by writing the solicitation in a way that excludes everyone but that contractor. This has it's uses in some cases, but is overly abused and more often then not for the wrong reasons. The Army is an overly wasteful machine, they would rather spend millions designing and building a substandard POS then pay a little bit of cash to a company for a already purpose built and proven design.

I never did figure out why, but i'm pretty sure it's for either A) Ego, wanting the product to be "made by the Army for the Army" or B) Someone is getting a heck of a kickback, probably both. I know for a fact the later happens a lot for those in the contracting career field. There's a reason it's a chronic critical field, why take E-4 or E-5 pay when you can start out making 100k doing the same thing in the civilian world, and all I got to do is give the right employer the right contract. To many low quality greedy POS are being let into the military and we are literally paying for it.

Don't get me wrong, we have some good folks in the contracting career field, but it's a very easy AFSC (AF term for MOS) to be corrupted by, doesn't help that most of the career field has only been in (AF side) that AFSC for 3-5 years, that includes the 1SGTS and a lot of them only enlist/ reclass in it so they can get a good job on the civilian side.

Sorry for the rant, this subject damages my calm.

[Streck-Fu]

This one reads as though it was written for the Sig P320....