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Notes -
Such things can be adjusted on the basis of what the project actually is. If the project is highway construction, then if the road is not functional, or the road doesn’t get built within a reasonable timeframe, then obviously that’s something to be accountable for. There might be more long term projects— I imagine getting drugs approved is more of a safety problem, and I think you could expand the scope of accountability to include long term health effects ten years on.
The trouble with procedure based accountability is that it basically incentivizes foot-dragging by punishing people for not following thousands of procedures, but effectively not caring at all if the results ever happen. I’ll admit that random bad luck can happen, but over a long enough timeframe, say you do ten projects a year, at least half would be successful by chance, and perhaps another quarter could be made to work by careful work. That would give a person on that position a 7/10 success rate, which is pretty good.
Can you provide some sense of what you have in mind for a project like I was talking about, say, a new fighter jet?
I mean im not a military expert so that’s mostly why I’m not thinking specifically about the military process. However, there are things you can do in the case of planes, mostly stress testing them in ways that simulate combat and picking those that perform well. You don’t want a jet fighter that shakes apart at combat speeds or on quick turns, and so you simulate those things. And you can have those tests, im not completely opposed to procedures and tests, but they must be in service to the end goal which in this case is a fighter jet that can handle combat conditions, and has guns/missiles that fire accurately and explode as needed on impact.
As far as generals predicting the future of combat, this is a stickier problem, simply because it involves building when you don’t know exactly what you need. If we go to war with Iran, we need something different than if we go to war with China. There’s no real work around for not knowing what to plan for, though I think the generals have better ideas about how to approach the problem Than I do. Gun to head, I might go with an internal version of a warfare prediction market and listen more to the guys capable of predicting shorter term scenarios correctly. This would be a rough proxy for the ability to predict long term trends.
My point is to get the general systems aligned with accomplishing the things they’re tasked with doing. I want my highway department to build roads, not file endless paperwork on environmental impact, on obscure safety issues, or on the precise details of the demographics of the companies hired to build the road. At the end of the day what I and most of the public want are roads built and maintained that are reasonably safe to drive on.
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