USAF's lessons from Procurement Blunders

Cover story on this week's issue of Aviation Week. They are talking about the great tanker disaster which has been running for 10 years. It started with a plan to lease new tankers from Boeing, continued with a high Pentagon procurement official pleading guilty to steering plum jobs to Boeing, an award of the tanker job overturned by appeal, a second bidding for new tankers awarded to Boeing. Talk about incompetent and crooked, it doesn't get much worse than that.
So what did the Air Force learn from this decade long disaster? Well, some high level civilians were fired. The new Air Force secretary Mike Donley tells Aviation Week that the Pentagon has hired nearly 10,000 new procurement civilians, who can now do "should cost" estimates. This is only important on sole source jobs. If there are competing bids, you just take the lowest bid, that's what the job should cost. Sounds like Donley is getting ready to do more sole source procurement.
Then there were some surprising statements by Donley. Such as "We had some conversations with Boeing AFTER then contract award, obviously as the were starting to put together their initial estimates." Wow! Donley apparently isn't aware that he is supposed to settle on price BEFORE awarding a contract.
Or "Working on the requirements process was one of the outcomes there on which we took some action. Limiting out appetite in that requirements process was an important step." No kidding.
The Air Force is notorious for putting fancy gadgets on planes that don't work, cannot be made to work, and are not needed to fly the mission.
Does not sound like Air Force procurement has learned much over the years.
I still remember my first job with defense contractor Raytheon. We had a big two story building. First floor was engineering, labs, shops, storerooms, the stuff to build product with. Second floor was all "contracts", paper pushers to make the government procurement people happy. Raytheon had as many people pushing paper as they did doing the work. That's gotta be expensive.