Defense Procurement Scandal

The lead news story the last few weeks has been that Defense Department officials and industry executives have been allegedly trading classified and trade-secret data for gifts, kickbacks and after-retirement consultant’s positions.

I’ve been in the defense aerospace industry for nearly 30 years and while I have never been naive about the ways and means of landing the contracts we worked on, I was surprised at the scope of the allegations and the high level of the targets. Industrial snooping and government-industry back-channel contact was assumed, but not out of the secretary’s office.

The irony of it all is that there will now be a fresh round of “getting tough” on the military and its suppliers, the major burden of which will fall on those who have endured years of increasingly intrusive and stultifying regulation in the course of trying to do a competent job for the government and the taxpayers. From the early 1970s onward, the trend has been away from an atmosphere of problem-solving to one of suspicion and fear in the workplace. Anonymous denunciations for “fraud,” which might consist of a long lunch, career destruction over time-card errors, and the near paralysis of procurements because company buyers were required to maintain minute tracking data on the most trivial purchases--these have convinced many like me to take early retirement, seek jobs out of the DOD market or just simply leave the profession.

And the perpetrators will be back, in new guises, with new methods of circumventing the new regulations that only the innocent will be guileless enough to find insurmountable.

DAVID KASE

Palos Verdes Estates