A MEMOIR

By Arthur Murray

Copyright © 2008 by Arthur C. Murray  

Dedicated to Bill Murray, the brother who encouraged me to shoot for the moon!

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CONTENTS

Chapter                                                                                                              Page

Forward                                                                                                                    5

Acknowledgements                                                                                                   7

One                            Why Not Write About It?                                                        8

Two                           Opportunity of a Lifetime                                                    14

Three                         Dealing with Disappointment                                                   19

Four                           Ups and Downs                                                                      24

Five                            A Better Place                                                                        29

Six                             The Will to Succeed                                                               33

Seven                         Those Formative Years                                                           47

Eight                           What Might Have Been                                              62

Nine                           Forging Ahead                                                                        72

Ten                            Nuptials                                                                      82

Eleven                        Canal Zone (1963–1967)                                                       91

Twelve                       Washington, D.C. (1967–1973)                                116

Thirteen                      Germany (1973–1976)                                                          142

Fourteen                     White Sands Missile Range, NM (1976–1980)          153

Fifteen                        Korea (1980–1983)                                                              164

Sixteen                       White Sands Missile Range, NM (1983–1987)          175

Seventeen                   Fort Lewis, WA (1987–1998)                                               184

Epilogue                                                                                                                  196                                         

Appendices:  

A.  Commissary Conglomerate – An Exploratory Study of                                 

      Alternatives to Present DOD Commissary Management                                     197

B.  Article:  Wanted: A Few Good Men                                                                   211                                                                 

CHAPTER 1

   Why Not Write About It?

Destiny…is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.

William Jennings Bryan US lawyer, orator, & politician (1860 – 1925)

As a newly minted civilian Federal bureaucrat in 1962, I had looked forward to a promising career as an auditor with the U.S. Army Audit Agency.  However, after spending 85% of my time travelling, I missed my family so I left to accept a desk job.  Opportunity knocked again in 1967 and this time it was a promotion to Headquarters, Department of Army in Washington D.C. 

For me, it was the right decision, at the right time, for the right reason.  Panama had been an idyllic paradise but now at age 37, it was a dead end.  Yet, there were many others who thought differently and stayed where they were.  Mobility was not in vogue at the time because employers perceived it as a sign of employee instability.  

You may have seen them trudging silently out of their dreary offices to hit the streets.   With pasty faces, bloodshot eyes and graying hair, they clutched their briefcases as they headed home from work.  For them the daily grind was a bargain they readily accepted.  They seemed resigned to it even though the careers they had dreamed of would remain mostly dreams.  I had vowed not to let that happen to me. 

Also, I had a different bent.  I was a striver not content with the status quo.  Still young, ambitious, mobile and motivated, I wouldn’t follow the crowd and wait for destiny to find me.  Instead, I sought advice from senior careerists and began setting higher goals.  I worked hard, went back to school and looked around for challenging assignments.  I soon found myself in demand and rapidly advanced into better paying jobs.

Still, there was an unexpected downside.  While I achieved almost jaw-dropping success, I also had alienated many who saw me as an intruder, spoiler and a persona non grata.  Wherever I went, I encountered these groups.  However, despite their hostility, I completed what had been a tumultuous 37 ½ year old sentence before unbuckling the harness.  How did that happen?  

Like Alice in Wonderland, I felt like I had fallen down a rabbit-hole into a fantastic realm populated by peculiar and anthropomorphic creatures.  I had journeyed from nowhere to everywhere crossing the globe from east to west and north to south, living here and there.  In my travels, I had seen first hand how an audacious assortment of Federal bureaucrats misused their powers to entrench and enrich themselves at taxpayer expense.  Their capricious and cavalier attitude had resulted in billions of dollars lost through fraud, waste and abuse.  That’s right.  Not millions but billions!  I wondered if you the bill-payer and all other taxpayers fully realized just how bad it was.  Driven by pride, apathy and greed, they pandered, plotted, and plundered, lining their pockets with their ill-gotten gains.  It was epidemic.

But, you ask:  How was it possible for them to get away with it?  Were not controls in place to prevent that from happening?  The answer was yes.  Lots of controls existed to detect and punish offenders.  However, as you will discover by reading this book, they were not effective, generally.  Like a fly on the wall, within the deep confines of officialdom I had watched in amazement as they maneuvered, deceived and misused their offices for personal gain. 

I had been an Army financial manager familiar with the laws and regulations that governed management of money and manpower resources. As principal advisor to military commanders, I was responsible for giving them sound financial advice. To my dismay, however, it sometimes fell on deaf ears. When that happened it left me with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.  A vignette:

Once I was called into the Office of the Deputy Commander of the 19^th Support Command (Korea) and told to arrange a contract to billet a higher headquarters team of visiting military observers along with their wives at a plush local hotel.  The purpose was to provide them with luxury living quarters and accommodations while they attended an FTX nearby.  The higher headquarters was a four-star command while my headquarters was a one-star command.  No one had raised the red flag of warning that regulations governing FTXs (Field Training Exercises) required all participants be billeted under field conditions.  Field conditions were self-explanatory, meaning that personnel would live in tents, use field mess for feeding (outside stoves and mess kits) and field latrines.  Regulations prohibited comfortable living during such field training and made no provision for wives or other non-participants to tag along at government expense.  Angered by my reluctance to comply, he barked, “Are you going to tell a four-star general he can't do it!” I told him, “Sure, why not?” His answer: “No you won't!”  Needless to say, it cost the taxpayers a bundle.  It was a boondoggle if there ever was one.

When public servants behaved badly, it’s the taxpayers who footed the bill.  For example: (1) a general who flew commercial to attend a relative’s wedding at government expense, misrepresenting it as official travel (fraud); (2) a retiring general who packed government property (new, twin, hand-carved German grandfather clocks) into his household goods shipment (theft); (3) a colonel who improperly authorized dependent travel (TDY) for higher headquarters’ participants, billeting them and their wives in a plush hotel during a field training exercise (fraud); (4) a civilian GS-13 office chief who authorized TDY for his secretary to accompany him on a trip (fraud); (5) a major who approved funds to renovate an orphanage without official approval (misuse of public funds); (6) a colonel facing retirement who accepted a high-paying civilian job after understating charges in a tenant organization's base support agreement (bribery); (7) office chiefs who approved cash and performance awards based on contrived criteria (fraud); (8) high-ranking officials awarded a $50-million contract to the highest bidder when the work could have been done in-house or by a low bidder (fraud); (9) a civilian GS-14 who misclassified budgeted funds to establish a personal “slush” fund (fraud); (10) a colonel who hired an immediate relative to work for him (nepotism); and (11) a colonel who diverted government funds for his own personal use (theft).   

Disturbing as it may sound, the same officials also used their positions to manipulate the system to reward their friends and punish enemies.  Employees that fell into disfavor were subject to harassment, downgrading, denial of promotions, being given unjustified low performance ratings, denial of raises, having their positions abolished, and being bad-mouthed, ignored, kept out of the information loop, or even fired.  Such conditions were widespread and systemic in nature.  Wherever I went, I saw this familiar dysfunctional pattern.  

Here are some actual employee comments from just one location:  (1) …to get advancement you had to know someone; (2) most positions are pre-selected and that preference is given to officers’ wives over enlisted wives or civilians; (3) I feel in most cases that a person is selected even before an announcement comes out (4) My perception is that promotions are handed to the “in crowd” without regard for qualified “outsiders”. (5) A person that is temporarily put in the position gets the job; (5) It appears that awards and promotions are based on who you know rather than performance; (6) There are a lot of job pre-selection going on; (7) …there have been very few job openings here on post and those that do open up are preselected…; (8) When employees apply for jobs outside CPO, low ratings are given to prevent other branches from selecting.  Favoritism surfaces occasionally in higher grades.

The high esteem once enjoyed by our U.S. Civil Service work force had gradually eroded because of institutional neglect, apathy and moral decay.  Not surprisingly, fraud, waste, and abuse continued to cost taxpayers billions.  To quote from a statement by the Taxpayers for Government Accounting Reform (TGAR), “Government examples of waste, fraud, abuse, and non-accountability of our tax dollars make Enron's glaring accounting deficiencies look like no big deal.”

TGAR examples included: $100 billion in improperly recorded transactions; $900 million in rent subsidies to recipients who did not qualify; $500 million in mishandled Indian Trust Fund monies; $7 trillion in adjustments by the military money managers; and, $119.3 billion in undocumented military assets.  They urged the government to make reforms to improve the accounting and budgeting process to ensure the integrity of financial statements

As a young college graduate in 1955, I had begun slowly but later shot up to finish a career that exceeded my greatest expectations. It all began one cool May afternoon in 2000. We had met for lunch at a local bistro in Ruston, overlooking Tacoma’s Commencement Bay. Retired since 1998, I had been content walking my big yellow lab COSMO around and chauffeuring my three youngsters here and there. For me, at long last, the rat race had ended.

Pilar was my youngest daughter from a previous marriage, a solo practicing attorney with a keen interest in civil rights and employment law.  She had wanted to know more about my career from beginning to end.  Finally, she stunned me with the unexpected:  “Dad”, she exclaimed, “Your life was amazing.  Why don’t you write about it?” 

Did the public really care what happened behind the closed doors of big government?  I hoped so.  Burrowed deep inside, I had experienced the unfriendly workplace where trusted Federal officials put their interests ahead of taxpayers.  Instead of protecting the public interest they had exploited it for their own purposes.

Officials of all stripes found it convenient to engage in unethical behavior if they thought they could get away with it. They looked for ways to tiptoe through the legal minefields that stood in their way, using subtle threats against those who disagreed with them. A boss once chided me, saying, "I don't want to hear a description of the minefield, just tell me how to get through it!" They and their minions were not above bending or breaking the rules if it suited them. Were they seeking power, position or personal gain? Or, was it because they felt they were above reproach and could get away with it? Whatever it was it permeated the entire system. A quick wink here, a nod there, a pretense of ignorance and a shameless failure to call a spade a spade showed a lack of moral scruples.

Now I would tell the story; how I maneuvered successfully inside one of the nation’s largest bureaucracies to prevail in spite of them.

Recalling the past was like rolling through old movie reruns. I could still see and hear them even though they were gone. Their images brought back distant memories and gave me a strong nostalgic feeling. I had missed them, especially my close friends and those who had boosted my career. Many had helped me conquer my fears as well as my foes.  Although I had moved around a lot, it had been by design and not necessity. A mentor, LaRoy R. Bove, had once confided: “You’ve heard that a rolling stone gathers no moss? Well, I believe a rolling stone gathers greater luster.” I had followed his advice and chose mobility over stability; however, it had come at a high cost. I had become an outsider to the insiders who considered me a cancer that they needed to remove. This is the story of how I survived in the netherworld of internecine warfare.

Of Irish-Dutch-German heritage, I was born in 1930 during the Great Depression and baptized in the Catholic faith at Immaculate Conception church in Seattle. The youngest of three brothers, I was raised by my mother and can remember watching the old steam locomotives entering and leaving King Street and Union stations. Their loud clanging engines, spewing towers of white steam, gave me hours of entertainment as I watched from my grandmother's window located on a hilltop in old South Seattle.

We Murrays lived on Capitol Hill where I attended Horace Mann Elementary, Edmond Meany Junior High, Garfield High School and Seattle University (SU).

On August 6, 1955, I conducted the Seattle Scottish Highland Games Association track and field meet at West Seattle Stadium. Arthur Forrest, former Seattle City Finance Director and the Association's President, had asked me to take it over. It was the centerpiece of the annual Scottish festival which attracted spectators from all over, including British Columbia. It was like watching a three ring circus with Scottish bagpipers parading about, bare-chested men throwing the caber, and costumed girls dancing the Highland fling while over 50 athletes performed before a thrilled audience.

That sunny Saturday, the stadium was filled to capacity. It had been a hectic morning because, as the meet director, I was responsible for all of the details. For example, did someone forget to bring the string for the Finish Line? Were all the judges in place? I was upset because the lane offsets for the start of the 220 yard and quarter-mile events hadn't been limed. Nervously racking my brain and running out of time I asked Hec Edmundson who was seated nearby, "What should I do?” He looked at me, smiled, and said, "Forget it, you don't need offsets. Tell them to break for the pole at the sound of the starter's gun!"

After it was over I felt relieved. I had received numerous accolades but none more important than a personal letter from that legendary University of Washington track coach, Hec Edmundson. That experience had paved the way for me to overcome my deficits and go on to achievements that dwarfed everything else I had done so far.

The end of World War II had brought a wave of optimism that swept the country. That promise of a better future had convinced me and many others to go to college. I recalled back then that only about 15% of Garfield High School graduates went to college. With my oldest brother Bill’s support I entered SU in the fall of 1949 on probation subject to making up high school deficiencies afterward. Called to active duty with the U.S. Air Force in 1951, I returned to finish college and join the rat race. Young and idealistic, I hoped I could make a difference in a world, I knew little about. What I discovered was a weird world of work that was intimidating, and where ones survival depended on using your wits. Rather than an inviting atmosphere where one felt welcomed I found instead a velvet-gloved fist. Fitting in was valued above ability and that’s where the rewards were. I remembered the uncomfortable feeling in the pit of my stomach after being threatened by a new boss with firing if I were ever to disclose confidential salary information. That company had a reputation for firing employees for the slightest reason and on short notice.

My first job was as an office manager trainee with Pacific Fruit & Produce Klamath Falls, Oregon, maybe the biggest wholesaler of produce and groceries on the West Coast. Although my starting salary was below average I took it anyway because I had been unemployed for several months. While driving down old U.S. highway 99 en route to my new job in an old pea-green 1941 Chevrolet Coupe, I turned up the volume to hear Elvis singing his first big hit, "You Ain’t Nothing but a Hound Dog.".

Higher wages soon lured me away and I turned to Shell Oil and then SAFECO where I worked as an accountant. After a short duration they fired me with little fanfare. Shuffling sadly out of the SAFECO building that day, I was crestfallen. My career seemed ended. I felt my throat muscles tighten and my eyes well up as I headed home to break the bad news.

Those were dark days. Newly married with two young daughters, I had struggled to provide a decent living for my family but had little to show for it. Disillusioned by my feeble beginning in the corporate world, I accepted a job with the U.S. Army Audit Agency (USAAA) as a civilian GS-9 auditor in 1962. That move changed everything for the better and I found myself on a path that took me farther and faster in a career that had been going nowhere until then.

Assigned to their Canal Zone Area Office, I performed audits all over Latin America including Montevideo, Uruguay, Lima, Peru, San Jose, Costa Rica and Managua, Nicaragua. The primary mission was to perform management-style reviews of the Military Assistance Program (MAP) for compliance with U.S. law. But I was also assigned to perform audits of foreign contractors that held U.S. contracts. The auditing of such programs worth millions of dollars required a high degree of independence, analytical skill and curiosity. High officials roiled when their claims were disallowed; in one instance I was offered the services of a sexy female escort to be enjoyed at a weekend spent at a posh Peruvian guest ranch. Another time, I was invited to a popular bar, “The Golden Bull,” a well-known Costa Rican brothel. I declined both.

But after spending nearly 85% of my time traveling it began to get tiresome because I was away too long from home and missed my family. A year later I transferred to the U.S. Army Headquarters Southern Command (USARSO) as Chief Accountant, GS-11. It was a staff position located in a building a stone’s throw from the Panama Canal on Fort Amador. The Canal Zone had been one of the Army’s best kept secrets. U.S. civilians received a generous 25% tropical differential and were smothered with goodies.

It was a paradise complete with a warm tropical climate, great scenery, white sandy beaches, private clubs, good schools, cheap gas, well-stocked stores, manicured lawns, virtually free government housing, low cost health care, cheap maids, a boat marina and 10 days a year paid home leave. Who in their right mind would ever want to leave?

I had wanted to leave for some time. In fact, I had prepared for it by passing an exam to become an investment consultant for Investors Oversea Services (IOS), an international mutual fund firm. But as luck would have it, just before going full-time with them I received multiple job offers for reassignment to Washington D.C. with the Army.

Despite Panama being a tropical paradise, it was a professional dead-end, and no place to be if you were truly ambitious which I was. So I accepted promotion to the job of systems accountant in the Office of the Chief of Finance, Comptroller of the Army. That move marked a sea change in my future.

CHAPTER 2

Opportunity of a Lifetime

Leaving the Canal Zone in 1967 not only brought me to Army Headquarters in Washington, D.C., but it saved my career.  It was only a few years later, in 1969, that I was tapped to head a major worldwide study of Army commissaries ordered by the Secretary of Defense, Melvin Laird.  For me, it was the opportunity of a lifetime.

I must have caught the roving eye of those in higher positions when our report “Special Worldwide Review of Army Commissaries” (1970) was published and became a “must-read” for many Washington, D.C. insiders and observers.  The details read like a best-seller, including such sensational items as death threats, injury, incompetence, thievery, mismanagement, horrendous losses, intimidation and slipshod accounting.

It was unclassified and had been distributed on a “need-to-know” basis when Les Whitten, ace investigative reporter for Jack Anderson, syndicated columnist for the Washington Post, called me and asked for a copy.  After I refused on the basis of “need to know,” he threatened to use the Freedom of Information Act to get it, but didn’t.  Instead, he obtained one from a close source and began reporting excerpts from it, citing widespread fraud, waste, and abuse of public funds.  Almost immediately, a wave of public outcry made it a bestseller and a cause célèbre.  Not only had it made the front page of The Washington Post, it also drew the attention of Congress and probably even President Nixon who was known to read Anderson’s daily column.

The media, alarmed by the magnitude of taxpayer waste, clamored for an explanation.  This elicited a firm “no comment” from the Army’s Public Affairs Officer, who hurriedly convened a closed-door meeting, which I attended.  Unquestionably, the study had a far-reaching effect on the commissary system.  It triggered numerous management improvements to correct deficiencies found by the study team.  My team members and I were commended by then Lieutenant General Frank J. Sackton, Comptroller of the Army.  On August 30, 1970, he wrote: "The result of your work on this comprehensive project provides an excellent appraisal of the Army's commissary operations and represents a significant contribution toward improving the effectiveness of commissary service.  Your leadership qualifications, personal efforts and knowledge of the pertinent areas under review were instrumental to the successful completion of the project."

Unfortunately, my luck changed when I became beleaguered by suspicious and mistrusting insiders as I moved from one assignment to another.  In one instance, I faced a panel during an interview for the position of deputy comptroller where they all voted not to hire me.  I got the job anyway because the selecting official ignored their advice.  I was seen as an outsider who didn’t share their values or sympathize with their agenda.  Later, they retaliated by covertly blocking my initiatives and actions.  I couldn’t prove it so I just accepted their antics as the price of admission and decided I would live with it.  I considered them to be whiny, incestuous parasites whose main interests were in preserving the status quo.  They cleverly masked their true nature by quietly ingratiating themselves to their bosses.

But that paled in comparison to what happened when a Brigadier General (BG) and Harvard business PhD, de-emphasized the accounting improvements, which were approved by the Army’s Vice Chief of Staff.  The BG disbanded our team, leaving only myself assigned.  That effectively ended any real progress.  Charged with upgrading and standardizing all of the Army’s major financial systems, the scaled-down effort doomed my project, leaving it to wither and die.

That happened in 1972, when the BG allowed the Army to invest millions into an older generation machine, dubbed System 0488, produced by the Singer Corporation.  The equipment used in System 0488 was already obsolete.  It consisted of an Electric Billing/Accounting Machine Model 5023 (FRIDEN), a Flexowriter Model 2309, a Card Reader Model 2313-1 and a paper-tape/edge-card punch and reader.  A hand-wired program control board facilitated document preparation for 9 applications like commissary price changes, a Voucher Register and General Control for inventory accountability, and consumption data for replenishing stocks.  It was an accounting device, not an accounting system.  Rumors had it that commissary officers had refused to use it soon after it was deployed, reverting instead to manual methods.  It had been touted as the automated solution to former manual methods that would produce significant savings in time and money.

Our report "New Concept for Commissary Accounting" (1971), the system (NCS) approved by the Army's Vice Chief of Staff (VCSA), Bruce Palmer, Jr., General, U.S. Army, was ignored in the process.  In commending our team, he had said: "The preparation of this report reflects favorably on the analytical ability, management expertise, and dedicated effort of each member of your group.  Your endeavors have made a significant contribution to the development of a modern, effective accounting system for Army commissary operations."  Yet, it took no more than pure and simple politics to scuttle it.  Lieutenant General "Joe" Heiser, who sponsored System 0488, had no trouble convincing the Decision Board of lesser-ranked officers to vote ‘yea’.  I sat there dumbfounded, not being allowed to voice my opinion.

We had worked hard to design the new accounting system because it would have replaced a broken, archaic single-entry method, which was unsuitable for the dynamics of modern-day business.  But it was shelved by the BG when he cast the deciding vote in favor of the obsolete System 0488 with one proviso; he had urged that the machines be leased instead of purchased.  At best, it was a token effort which never came close to correcting the reported accounting deficiencies - a horrendous mistake.  Consequently, commissary assets remained vulnerable to waste, fraud and abuse despite the decision of the VCSA to strengthen and improve commissary accounting.  Had System 0488 been disapproved that day, the Army would have benefited from the leading-edge computer technology incorporated in the New Commissary System (NCS). 

Not surprisingly, twenty-two years later, those conditions still existed.  During an inspection, the Office of the Inspector General, Department of Defense, in their Report No. 98-158, dated June 17, 1998 “Internal Controls and Compliance With Laws and Regulations for the Defense Commissary Agency Financial Statements for FY 1997” issued a disclaimer which stated in part, “For the work we performed on the FY1997 Defense Commissary Agency Resale Stock Fund Financial Statements, we identified significant deficiencies in the accounting systems and the lack of sound internal controls (that) prevented the preparation of accurate financial statements.  Our disclaimer of opinion was included in the financial statement transmitted by the Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller) to the Office of Management and Budget.”  Their report went on to criticize the lack of effective internal controls and concluded that financial management systems and internal controls did not completely or accurately disclose the financial condition of the agency, as required by title 31, U.S. Code.

Frankly, I was devastated when the NCS was scuttled.  How could it happen that lower-ranked generals could so easily countermand a VCSA decision?  This occurred after extensive coordination to get his approval; hundreds of thousands of dollars in development costs; and many months of hard work by accountants, programmers and supply specialists.  One had to wonder who was actually in charge.  Even more perplexing had been an earlier Army official announcement.  It heralded that generals with business PhDs would ensure that taxpayer funds would be more efficiently and effectively utilized.  After all, shouldn't a general with a PhD be smarter than the rest of us?

Maybe, but for many who apparently were motivated by self-aggrandizement, it was a no-brainer.  Wasn't it smarter to put one’s own self-interest ahead of others?  The stakes were high, be they in promotion, retirement, prestige, power or money.  And of course, all this was done discreetly – away from the public’s prying eyes.  Also, it had been rumored that the Singer Corporation had paid kickbacks to sway the System 0488 decision in their favor.  Later, this reminded me of the notorious Halliburton case where officials were found guilty of defrauding taxpayers and lining their own pockets.  Loyalty, it appeared, was a scarce commodity when it came to serving the taxpayers.

Halliburton was a corporation that had once been headed by Vice President Dick Cheney (from 1995–2000).  Since the start of the Iraq War, the company collected $20 billion from U.S. taxpayers for services that often came under suspicion by the Defense Department.  Their bribery and overcharging had resulted in billions being unaccounted for.  Cheney had arranged for many exclusive contract awards to Halliburton.

Another more recent example of taxpayer fraud involved an Air Force general.  In a lengthy report by the Defense Department’s Inspector General, the Air Force awarded a controversial $50 million contract to Strategic Message Solutions (SMS).  It was a relatively unknown company but one favored by a retired four-star general.  He worked inside of the Air Force contracting system and had lobbied his former Air Force buddies to grant the award to SMS. 

In criticizing the Air Force for improprieties, the report described the conflicts of interest that had occurred in making the selection - officers stacking the deck in favor of friends, and others influencing a system designed to eliminate such favoritism in spending taxpayer dollars:

“The investigation found that the December 2005 award to SMS was tainted with improper influence, irregular procurement practices, and preferential treatment.”  “Lower priced offers from qualified vendors and capabilities in-house were bypassed in an apparent effort to obtain services from (redacted), president of SMS, who had a longstanding relationship with senior Air Force officers and members of the Thunderbirds.”

These examples serve to show just how taxpayer’s funds were looted by greedy officials who claimed to be patriotic but who were not above feathering their own nests when given the opportunity.  Interestingly, in his book, “Arming America: How the U.S. Buys Weapons”, J. Ronald Fox (1974), a former Assistant Army Secretary, described in detail the mismanagement that he observed, citing a lack of congressional capability in dealing with multibillion dollar defense programs; problems of civilian vs. military control of defense activities; and problems of lack of qualified personnel within the Defense Department.  (I have paraphrased his comments below). 

Important briefings where procurement would be decided were designated Decision Briefs, where attendees were assembled to hear and vote on a contracting proposal.  There were several “games” that could be played to ensure the “right” decision was reached.  One was to portray only the favorable facts and downplay or ignore others.  Another was to limit or suppress discussion; and, another was to de-emphasize competition.  Attendees who were less informed usually remained silent and concurred because they did not want to display their ignorance in front of others. 

Army officers served about one to three years in their assignments; and, long term accomplishments that were not initiated on their watch wouldn’t get them promoted.  If not promoted within a 3- to 4-year cycle, an officer might not become a general.  It was also well understood that long-term assignments outside of a combat arms unit hindered opportunities for promotion.  (A combat arms assignment might be in an infantry, artillery, cavalry or air defense unit).

Alternatively, highly placed civilian political appointees (e.g. Assistant Secretaries) faced similar short-term assignments since any new administration could elect to fill their position(s) with someone else.  This was obviously costly for taxpayers because a break in continuity adversely impacted program management, increasing delays and costs.  It also hampered recruitment of the best qualified professionals who not only had to accept salary cuts but divesture of their holdings as well, to avoid a potential conflict of interest.

Those who were recruited often became disillusioned trying to succeed in an arena that didn’t have a bottom line like the private sector where they had come from.  Consequently, many of these civilian managers would belatedly discover that they were devoid of the critical skills needed to solve the complex problems peculiar to working for the Defense Department.  Foremost among these was dealing with military personnel who might be reluctant to reveal vital information to their civilian overseers.  For example, if an Army general was opposed to a particular program, he might instruct his military representative to withhold vital information from his civilian overseer.  That could render the civilian boss impotent or frustrate him in achieving his objectives.

Consequently, many government officials never excelled because they were either not around long enough to master the fundamentals, too inept in their job, or too overwhelmed by the complexities they faced.  Thus, their efforts resulted in wasteful practices costing taxpayers billions.  When costly mistakes were uncovered, military officials tended to gloss over them or pass the blame to their senior civilian counterparts.  After all, the military bosses avoided career damage like the plague; professing to be only the executor of policy not the policy maker.  If a civilian whistleblower went public with a costly mistake made by his superiors, retribution would come swiftly from above, resulting in his dismissal or demotion to an insignificant job (see Chapter 4; on Ernie Fitzgerald).

Now I understood how the decision process worked.  To the naked eye, it seemed orderly and efficient but behind the scenes, it was a different story.  The BG that killed my project was no different than the others.  Because he couldn’t gain credit for my project since it had not occurred on his watch, he supported the one favored by the three-star.  Shortly thereafter, he received his second star.  Connecting all the dots, it was not hard to see that his vote for that project must have got him his second star while taxpayers got nothing but a big headache.  It had been a case of you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours.  Curiously, his promotion board had been run by Lieutenant General Heiser, the same three-star who had chaired the System 0488 Decision Board.

Those were the dynamics that influenced Pentagon decision-making.  That’s what I faced trying to succeed in a mammoth bureaucracy where favors, promotions and retirement were the principal drivers that more often than not determined how officials acted in performing their duties.  Needless to say, news accounts of government fraud, waste and abuse never ceased to end because of misdeeds by these wily bureaucrats.  Morality may have its own rewards but apparently not enough for many who saw their jobs as a way to promote their own self-interest.