So this post reminded me:
www.indianagunowners.com
This is a long one. If you are at all interested, refresh the coffee pot.
When I first arrived as a captain at the GPS program office I was assigned as a software engineer/program manager. My first program to manage was this acquisition of a GPS simulator that was to be installed at Warner Robins Air Logistics Center, which was the designated logistics agency for military GPS receivers.
In terms of the GPS program, this was a relatively small acquisition, about $6 million originally if I recall. The guy managing it was a first lieutenant, Tony, who was getting ready to PCS or separate in a few months, I forget which. In between acquisition courses, I was supposed to stick close to him and learn everything he knew so I could take over the project when he left. I spent most of the next few months in some kind of acquisition course, but I did spend every loose minute with Tony.
Tony was honest and told me upfront that the acquisition was a mess. I could see from previous records that it had had several program managers changing fairly frequently, and Tony himself was on his first assignment in the Air Force, so he was learning the Air Force, acquisition, leadership and management, all at the same time. He didn’t get a lot of support from above on this because it was just too small for leadership to worry much about it when they were dealing with programs that were hundreds of millions of dollars. They would just give some more money and tell him to work on it. He also had a couple other significant additional duties as a manager for manpower contracts that provided program management and engineering support for the big hunnertmillion dollar programs. He was run pretty ragged by it all..
The program was a Small-Business set-aside, which by itself is a red flag for Risk in a complex effort like this. The program manager on the contractor side was also on his first management gig, he had been lead engineer on the project when the program manager left the company, so he got handed the management responsibilities as well, and was also over his head in terms of managing things. Unsurprisingly, the project was late and over budget. It was a hot mess, but basically had been used as training wheels for newbies like Tony and I. The WR-ALC guys were not pleased, and our office should have transferred management of the thing to them, but for some reason our leadership didn’t want to.
About the time I finished my acquisition courses and was officially smart, Tony PCSed out and I got a new boss, a bird colonel who had been an F-4 pilot. He was on his first acquisition assignment, but he was not a rookie at managing things. He turned out to be a great guy. Anyway, when he arrived, I briefed him on the status of this project, and he recognized it was a disaster. He told me I had some short period of time - a month? don’t remember exactly - to get it back on track or it would be cancelled altogether. I think he had to backtrack a little bit because he hadn’t consulted with Warner Robins yet, and they were horrified to find out that he might kill their baby, but after some coordination of phone calls, and such, we set a date by which either of the remaining work and requirements would match the schedule on the budget or we would just kill it.
And I did it. I was actually pretty proud of that little piece of work. I held a brutal all-day meeting with the Warner Robins people who set the requirements, our contracting guy, and the contractor, and we rescoped (“cut”) the remaining work so that work and schedule and budget all matched (“rebaselined”) and everybody knew that if it went off the rails again, we would simply cancel it. The prime contractor brought in a real program manager and the previous guy went back to being only lead engineer. (He was very happy). I monitored it pretty closely and in fact, we did get a usable product at the end on time and delivered to Warner Robins. They were relatively happy about it. Yay.
There was an interesting piece of fallout from this re-baselining effort. The primary contractor focused on the hardware for the effort, computers, hard drives, electrical, gizmos to simulate the satellite signals, hardware, interfaces, and so forth. They subcontracted the software part, ($2M in those days) which was where the real magic would happen, to another company. Not long after the re-baselining the primary contractor’s program manager (PM) called me and said some thing odd had happened. The software subcontractor quit. Called, said they were terminating the relationship, they would send the software code as it existed, and that was it. When PM got to work the next morning there were several programmers from the subcontractor standing outside on the sidewalk telling him they had just been laid off from the sub contractor. Since he was obviously going to have to bring the software in the house, he basically hired them on the spot.
So that is all background to something I ran across once I got the program back on track.
Remember that I said this thing was a GPS simulator. Its purpose was to simulate the GPS satellite constellation for any military receiver. You could hook the receiver up to the simulator and it would believe that it was receiving signals from space. This would be used to test the functioning of various military hours. There’s probably a million of these things out there now but in those days this was pretty new stuff and nothing like it existed at the time.
I’m sitting at my desk looking through some of the GPS industry magazines to see what the civilian world is doing, and I run across this ad from that software contractor that quit. Interestingly, he is advertising a commercial GPS constellation simulator that has numerous functions that track pretty much with one we have been trying to buy for the last four years or so and was just now back on track. Hmmm.
I called the prime contractor PM and told him about the ad. He was pretty surprised. He goes and talks to the programmers that I’ve been laid off about their time at the subcontractor and calls me back. These guys had to charge their time against the project they’re working on, so they were given codes to put on their timesheets. This is normal. They said they were not really told what the codes went to, and that the subcontractor PM would tell them every morning which codes to use that day. This was not so normal. The same contractor also had commercial work that he did, and the codes for that should be different than the ones for the contract for the government. Most places tell you when you’re working on a specific project, and then you know which codes to use, but in this case, they weren’t given the project name, just “use this code to charge your time.”
I get with the Air Force contracting officer for this project, another captain, and go through this with him. We both agree that it sure sounds like the subcontractor might have built his own GPS constellation simulator for commercial sale, using the government money, and worse, not even giving us a finished product.
So he calls the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. They have an office on base or the investigators specialize in contract fraud. A couple of them come by and listen to us, but when they find out that the amount of money involved was $2 million, they lost interest. Chicken feed for what they are usually looking for. I briefed all this up my chain of command, of course and pretty much the same answer. Yes, it’s wrong and probably criminal, but in the big scheme not worth the effort.
And I went on to bigger and better things
I feel weird asking, buuut… anybody here work for the FBI?
So I have a scammer on the hook pretty hard and I’m curious if it’s worth turning them over to the authorities or not. I posted a WTB ad on another forum for a Leupold 1.5-5x20 (I’ll put an ad up here soon too lol), and this guy responded with an illuminated version. He sent me photos in my...This is a long one. If you are at all interested, refresh the coffee pot.
When I first arrived as a captain at the GPS program office I was assigned as a software engineer/program manager. My first program to manage was this acquisition of a GPS simulator that was to be installed at Warner Robins Air Logistics Center, which was the designated logistics agency for military GPS receivers.
In terms of the GPS program, this was a relatively small acquisition, about $6 million originally if I recall. The guy managing it was a first lieutenant, Tony, who was getting ready to PCS or separate in a few months, I forget which. In between acquisition courses, I was supposed to stick close to him and learn everything he knew so I could take over the project when he left. I spent most of the next few months in some kind of acquisition course, but I did spend every loose minute with Tony.
Tony was honest and told me upfront that the acquisition was a mess. I could see from previous records that it had had several program managers changing fairly frequently, and Tony himself was on his first assignment in the Air Force, so he was learning the Air Force, acquisition, leadership and management, all at the same time. He didn’t get a lot of support from above on this because it was just too small for leadership to worry much about it when they were dealing with programs that were hundreds of millions of dollars. They would just give some more money and tell him to work on it. He also had a couple other significant additional duties as a manager for manpower contracts that provided program management and engineering support for the big hunnertmillion dollar programs. He was run pretty ragged by it all..
The program was a Small-Business set-aside, which by itself is a red flag for Risk in a complex effort like this. The program manager on the contractor side was also on his first management gig, he had been lead engineer on the project when the program manager left the company, so he got handed the management responsibilities as well, and was also over his head in terms of managing things. Unsurprisingly, the project was late and over budget. It was a hot mess, but basically had been used as training wheels for newbies like Tony and I. The WR-ALC guys were not pleased, and our office should have transferred management of the thing to them, but for some reason our leadership didn’t want to.
About the time I finished my acquisition courses and was officially smart, Tony PCSed out and I got a new boss, a bird colonel who had been an F-4 pilot. He was on his first acquisition assignment, but he was not a rookie at managing things. He turned out to be a great guy. Anyway, when he arrived, I briefed him on the status of this project, and he recognized it was a disaster. He told me I had some short period of time - a month? don’t remember exactly - to get it back on track or it would be cancelled altogether. I think he had to backtrack a little bit because he hadn’t consulted with Warner Robins yet, and they were horrified to find out that he might kill their baby, but after some coordination of phone calls, and such, we set a date by which either of the remaining work and requirements would match the schedule on the budget or we would just kill it.
And I did it. I was actually pretty proud of that little piece of work. I held a brutal all-day meeting with the Warner Robins people who set the requirements, our contracting guy, and the contractor, and we rescoped (“cut”) the remaining work so that work and schedule and budget all matched (“rebaselined”) and everybody knew that if it went off the rails again, we would simply cancel it. The prime contractor brought in a real program manager and the previous guy went back to being only lead engineer. (He was very happy). I monitored it pretty closely and in fact, we did get a usable product at the end on time and delivered to Warner Robins. They were relatively happy about it. Yay.
There was an interesting piece of fallout from this re-baselining effort. The primary contractor focused on the hardware for the effort, computers, hard drives, electrical, gizmos to simulate the satellite signals, hardware, interfaces, and so forth. They subcontracted the software part, ($2M in those days) which was where the real magic would happen, to another company. Not long after the re-baselining the primary contractor’s program manager (PM) called me and said some thing odd had happened. The software subcontractor quit. Called, said they were terminating the relationship, they would send the software code as it existed, and that was it. When PM got to work the next morning there were several programmers from the subcontractor standing outside on the sidewalk telling him they had just been laid off from the sub contractor. Since he was obviously going to have to bring the software in the house, he basically hired them on the spot.
So that is all background to something I ran across once I got the program back on track.
Remember that I said this thing was a GPS simulator. Its purpose was to simulate the GPS satellite constellation for any military receiver. You could hook the receiver up to the simulator and it would believe that it was receiving signals from space. This would be used to test the functioning of various military hours. There’s probably a million of these things out there now but in those days this was pretty new stuff and nothing like it existed at the time.
I’m sitting at my desk looking through some of the GPS industry magazines to see what the civilian world is doing, and I run across this ad from that software contractor that quit. Interestingly, he is advertising a commercial GPS constellation simulator that has numerous functions that track pretty much with one we have been trying to buy for the last four years or so and was just now back on track. Hmmm.
I called the prime contractor PM and told him about the ad. He was pretty surprised. He goes and talks to the programmers that I’ve been laid off about their time at the subcontractor and calls me back. These guys had to charge their time against the project they’re working on, so they were given codes to put on their timesheets. This is normal. They said they were not really told what the codes went to, and that the subcontractor PM would tell them every morning which codes to use that day. This was not so normal. The same contractor also had commercial work that he did, and the codes for that should be different than the ones for the contract for the government. Most places tell you when you’re working on a specific project, and then you know which codes to use, but in this case, they weren’t given the project name, just “use this code to charge your time.”
I get with the Air Force contracting officer for this project, another captain, and go through this with him. We both agree that it sure sounds like the subcontractor might have built his own GPS constellation simulator for commercial sale, using the government money, and worse, not even giving us a finished product.
So he calls the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. They have an office on base or the investigators specialize in contract fraud. A couple of them come by and listen to us, but when they find out that the amount of money involved was $2 million, they lost interest. Chicken feed for what they are usually looking for. I briefed all this up my chain of command, of course and pretty much the same answer. Yes, it’s wrong and probably criminal, but in the big scheme not worth the effort.
And I went on to bigger and better things
