I am not sure how and what case you actually rest. What was your case again?

I rest my case.

The fascist economic model is an elitist model. It was born out of the European feudalist system. It is a compromise between capitalism and communism that takes the worst from both. Every day the few remaining capitalist free markets left in America demonstrate how well capitalism can work. Every day Chinese communism, especially their military, demonstrates how much better communism is than fascism.

Fascist socialism is welfare for the rich elite. It sucks away all incentive for productivity or creativity. It creates a fairly rigid class structure that severely limits the upward mobility of the working class and places the huge burden on them of supporting both the elite and the poor. We would be much better off to go strictly to design bureaus than we are with our current fascist procurement model. Better still to go to our former capitalist system of procurement, but even back when we primarily followed that model, we still had communistic design bureaus that designed and built large warships, the atomic bomb, the Apollo rockets. What we have settled on now as the “one size fits all” answer to everything is the worst of all approaches, that of the fascist model. It simply does not work.

How do you know? A private corporation is beholdent to its stock holders or owners, not to the US government. I would rather “know for sure” than “like to think”. This is not about being “effective”. There is NO reason why the government MUST be effective all the time. This is a notion derived from private business practices. The government is NOT a private enterprise.

In the particular case of maintenance of the nuclear stockpile, I’d like to think that the individuals within that organization prioritize national security needs over working hours, parking spaces, office prestige and maladaptive working practises. If so, then it falls under the tiny category of govt scientific/engineering endeavors that are responsive to changing realities and could not be more effective if moved outside of the civil service environment.

Not sure I understand your point. However about National Labs and your earlier point. Do you think it is okay to have our DOE labs be managed by the private sector? Is it morally okay to have labs designing and maintaining the US nuclear stockpile to be managed by the private sector? There are duties performed at those labs done in the National Interest that should not be left to any form of privatization or any specific elite to decide the agenda for us. National assets do not belong to any form of elite. They belong to the people of the US. It is supposed to be a democracy we live in, not a plutocracy. The fact that the public is unaware or worse does not care is a poor reflection on the status of our democracy. Sorry.

I do think there is a place for the govt labs – to house shared utilities that are too big for any given university to operate. Wind tunnels and other engineering facilities should operate like shared synchrotron facilities and shared physics facilities in general. But if you took the other scientists and engineers that work at NASA and transferred them into academia, they would be 2 or 3 times more effective. Ergo, research money is much better spent with academia.

Finally, it occured to me that when funding becomes tight in govt and industry, you tend to lose the best people first. When the same happens in academia, the departments tend to shrink back to a core of the key profs and the more talented students.

NASA actually implemented COTS where the companies are being paid when they achieve certain milestones. If it were to be expended to the entire NASA+DOD business that would finally promote competition and most certainly re-size the large defense contractors which in the end MUST happen. Those contractors are bloated and require unnecessary futile programs to keep their workforce alive. Cost is beyond belief and since there are only but a few competition is nil. COTS like programs are the future if we want a vibrant competitive industry. Otherwise we’ll soon buy their products outside the US, e.g. AF tanker program.

As for there being hope for pay-for-results procurement system, I recently read this:

The Pentagon also plans to tie more contract fee structures to performance – Reuters

There seems to be a quiet under current of support for a performance based acquisition system. So far industry has been able to trivialize that approach, but seriously, we have to do something. We can’t keep taking a quarter century to design every new vehicle. It’s not sustainable. We have a work force that spends their entire career on one and a half programs. At some point that ends, either of our own doing or our getting our ass kicked. Either way, it will end.

Nobody needs to care for academia to work except the academics and the functional elite who fund them Did the British public on the whole care about the work of Oxford and Cambridge from the middle ages to today? Probably not.

Govt labs and design bureaus are a relatively new invention; let’s see how long they last.