[bumby]

Part of Murphy's Laws of Combat: No combat ready unit ever passed inspection. No inspection ready unit ever passed combat.

Managers need to be careful of Goodhart's law. (in this case "passing inspection" may not be the best target)

[bastawhiz]

And yet hundreds of thousands of companies pass the same audits. The call for audits came from ridiculous amounts of misreporting and waste. Accounting systems that can't do accounting and deal with trillions of taxpayer dollars should not have the goalposts moved. A 0.001% error in a trillion dollar system is ten million dollars. That's taxpayer money that could fix derelict bridges or pay for thousands of children to receive lunch at school.

[bumby]

I agree with you, but I’d venture to guess most of those companies would use “combat” in that sense as an analogy.

The DoD does not.

[herewulf]

Yet the DoD's bureaucracy is neither combat nor inspection ready.

[bumby]

I tend to think the combat portion is a matter of scope. It’s hard to do everything, everywhere, all at once regardless if that’s on a politicians wishlist. The only force noted as “strong” by the Heritage Foundation readiness index is the Marine Corps and that’s a result of acknowledging they are a one-war organization of limited scope. That all goes to say the scope of the DoD is unlike any other organization on earth, so quips like “well, companies pass these inspections all the time!” is of little value.