A little more than 24 hours after an IT contractor gunned down a dozen workers at the Washington Navy Yard, the CEO of the company he worked for sent an email to Navy Secretary Ray Mabus saying he has the experience to help the military improve its security.
The email from The Experts chief Thomas Hoshko, which included descriptions of his background and expertise, stunned some Navy leaders still reeling from the shooting rampage Monday that left 13 people dead, including the gunman, former Navy reservist Aaron Alexis.
Sometimes in life you make your own opportunities.
WereBear
You know how conservatives think: their extensive experience with wrong-headed decisions, disregard of facts, and outright failure is valuable and they should get paid for it.
Soonergrunt
You shouldn’t be surprised at all. When I was a contractor, every single one of my managers, regardless of the company I worked for, insisted that my primary responsibility was delivering business opportunities to the company first. Meeting the terms of the contract was seen as a means to that end.
Lavocat
About as subtle as a fart in church.
Shame is for suckers, after all.
Keith P
Kinda like when Bush (successfully) ran on fighting terrorism after being asleep at the wheel on 9/11.
Baud
I’m going to try this at my next employee evaluation.
RSA
@Keith P:
And the way Donald Rumsfeld is now pitching a book, Rumsfeld’s Rules: Leadership Lessons in Business, Politics, War and Life. Given his recent comments about military policy, it seems clear that his understanding of leadership is divorced from actual outcomes.
c u n d gulag
Ok, for he first and only time in my life, I say, cue Michele Bachmann:
“CHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOTSPAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
MomSense
Colossal. Dick. Move.
donnah
Ya know, I read stuff like this and I laugh, but it’s that hysterical, maniacal laugh that I can’t control, and pretty soon it turns into sobs.
sigh
JPL
nbc.com has breaking news..Wayne Lapierre calls for more armed guards. This is breaking news because nbc news doesn’t cover world events.
WereBear
At least the Navy Yard had an appropriate human response.
Botsplainer
OT, but I was clipping the pups nails and nicked the quick. Damn, but a little trickle of blood tracks a hell of a long way.
Needed to mop the floors anyway and was already planning a PetSmart trip to get a large wire kennel (plus was going to clean the carpets while my wife is off at her flying lesson), but this is an unwelcome complication. Guess I should pick up some Quick Stop for the nail while I’m there.
MomSense
@RSA:
Because Rumsfeld never suffers the consequences of the actual outcomes.
WereBear
@Botsplainer: Flour helps, and doesn’t hurt the doggie.
PsiFighter37
@JPL: Wayne LaCrazyFuckhead can go pound sand. There should be a special place in FSM hell reserved for him. His ideal world is to turn America into a paintball course, except everyone is using machine guns instead.
Suffern ACE
@MomSense: because the goal is to get as many exemptions as possible. Performance based incentive comp package plus the golden parachute. It’s what we all want really.
MomSense
@Suffern ACE:
I wish I could want that because my life would be a lot easier. This whole caring about human beings thing is exhausting.
Fuzzy
@Botsplainer: Use sugar to stop the bleeding or the styptic pencil we all used to keep for shaving nicks but that has a little sting. I guess my age is showing huh.
WereBear
@Fuzzy: Only problem with sugar is that it encourages them to lick it off. Flour didn’t do that for my dogs.
shelly
Like we need more evidence that most CEO’s are sociopaths?
Exceptionalism, bitches!
Amir Khalid
@JPL:
I wonder: why is his surname LaPierre, and not the grammatically correct LePierre?
Mike in NC
Who could possibly criticize the guy running an outfit called “The Experts”? He’ a frickin’ expert!
RepubAnon
Perhaps “The Experts” can help the Navy with their expertise in evaluating employee stability and likelihood of an employee to go on a shooting rampage? It’s not as if they themselves supplied a person showing numerous signs of serious mental illness to the government, while failing to take any action to warn someone of the problems that they noticed… oh,wait.
WereBear
@Amir Khalid: Correct grammar is for wimps, that’s why!
gene108
Yes you do.
I’m just surprised he feels like he has the contacts to go that far up the food chain, with regards to who he’s contacting to try and get more business.
@Soonergrunt:
That’s life.
If someone’s not trying t get new contracts, then when the old one ends what’s going to happen to the business? And unfortunately we live in a society, where people tend to favor recommendations from people known to them versus hiring strangers.
It doesn’t matter if it is an RFP for a multi-million dollar project or getting a handyman to hang a storm door, we all tend to work from recommendations of people known to us.
EDIT: So if you are working on a contract you might be known to the PMO’s, contracting officers and others, who might be putting out RFI’s and RFP’s and can put a face to the company.
GregB
@Amir Khalid:
He Americanized his name, it used to be LePenis.
Amir Khalid
@Mike in NC:
Maybe Thomas Hoshko had a secret plan to copyright the word “expert”, and sue everyone else in the whole world who claimed to be one. Just think of the damages he could win. (Hey, Microsoft had a plan like this, only with the word “Windows”.)
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Soonergrunt:
That had a lot to do with Nortel’s implosion: getting the contract was more important that fulfilling it. Genuity, too.
It took a disastrous hire, based on a resume that emphasized the sizes of the contracts the guy had managed at his previous employer, to convince my employers to start checking references. Still couldn’t convince them to do background checks, though.
WereBear
Bad business practices are an outright infestation. They seem to think business consists of:
1. Create business.
2. (do absolutely nothing)
3. Profit!
Kind of like Republican approach to policy, come to think of it…
SiubhanDuinne
@WereBear:
No. No, I don’t.
gnomedad
Scrap the “kill your parents and plead for mercy as an orphan” story; we have a new standard for chutzpah.
JordanRules
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: Dealing with that at my company now. So frustrating. It’s not sustainable and we have great people that can do #2 well. Needless to say, I’m deciding when I should jump ship. We’re working on a huge IT POC right now and still haven’t decided who is going to present and explain the whole thing next Monday. Le sigh.
Elizabelle
Would Mr. Alexis have gotten more help had he worked directly for the US government or military, vs. for a contractor?
WereBear
@SiubhanDuinne: You are right, it’s just that we do not yet have a word for “mindless mental reaction on the level of a pithed frog.”
gbear
Fun Fact: The same company also vetted Edward Snowden. Double chooootspa. Warning: Link posts a bunch of Greenwald tweets.
JordanRules
Mobile no edit. Reply was to Sister RGWH and WereBear.
I get the feeling that our Principal gets high off the sale and possible win. I’m begging them to understand that not respecting the cost centers and the work is going to blow up in our faces. Deaf ears is where it falls.
maximiliano furtive, formerly known as dr. bloor
@WereBear:
We can only dream of the day when they do something so benign as “absolutely nothing.”
PsiFighter37
@maximiliano furtive, formerly known as dr. bloor: I think what Adam Smith failed to convey is that the Invisible Hand was a more abstract version of the Underpants Gnomes.
Citizen_X
Huh. Sociopaths gotta be pathological.
Captain Comrade
The contractor is clearly responsible for the behavior of the employee because the contractor could not be critical of the employee for fear of offending his Client. Therefore, the best answer is to End the Federal Reserve and restore sanity.
BruceFromOhio
Guy knocks on the door to a house in Podunk, IA, next to a big cattle ranch. Rancher opens the door, says who are you? Guy says, I bet you one head of your cattle I can tell you exactly how many cows are on this ranch. Rancher says, is that so? OK, I’ll take your bet.
Guy goes back to his van, works on his smartphone and his laptop for awhile, knocks on the door again. Rancher opens it up and says, well? Guy says, you have 1,257 cows. Rancher says, how about that, you’re correct. Guy says, I’ll go pick out my cow. Guy finds the animal he wants, wrestles with it until he’s got it in his van. Guy is about to drive away when the rancher knocks on his window. Guy says, what do you want?
Rancher says, I bet you I can guess your profession. If I’m right, you give me back my animal. Guy says, okay, I’ll take that bet. Rancher says, you’re a consultant. Guy says, how’d you know?
Rancher says, well, you show up out of nowhere, uninvited, you tell me something I already know, and the rest of the time you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. Now the guy gets a little pissy, and starts trying to defend himself.
Rancher waves him away, and says, look, I won the bet. Now give me back my dog.
Patrick
@WereBear:
I’m sorry but these people are not conservatives. Just like today’s Christan leaders, they have hijacked what conservatism and the bible truly stand for and replaced it with hate and other garbage.
gelfling545
@WereBear: Especially French grammar!
LittlePig
@gbear: Greenwald tweets would be the last thing I’d be worried about at that joint. I’ll take your word for it.
LittlePig
@gelfling545: LaPierre uses FREEDOM grammar instead.
RSA
@Amir Khalid:
His ancestors should have gone with a solid American name, like ThePeter.
MomSense
@Elizabelle:
Alexis would not have qualified for the military if the Bush administration hadn’t “relaxed” the standards for enlistment because they needed more people to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I suspect we haven’t experienced all of the ramifications of that decision yet.
Elmo
@gene108:
I work for a Fed contractor too. I’m lucky – the whole business model is geared toward doing the best job we can on the contracts we have, keeping the client as happy as reasonably possible, and using that past performance to leverage new work.
We’re already a large business, and we’ve nearly doubled in size in less than five years with that approach. Why other contractors can’t figure it out is beyond my comprehension.
PurpleGirl
@BruceFromOhio: Thank you for a morning laugh. And the ending is so true.
ETA: Experienced dealing with educational and organizational consultants. Was skeptical of all of them.
YellowJournalism
@PurpleGirl: You mean the educational consultants who have never spent a moment of their life working in the field of education?
cermet
I once won an SBIR, phase one for a military program to make new armor. I successfully created an armor to defeat man portable RBG’s based on my original thesis research. Also, this low cost armor could defeated many types of light but dreaded IED’s (those that produced a high velocity metal jet) and all regular/armor piercing ammo up to 50 cal.
This armor did it at 1/5 the weight for what the army currently had. This application was for light vehicles (and maybe people if I could convince them.)
They didn’t like the weight (per area; how armor is rated), so even though it was vastly better than what they had, I did more work and came back saying I could possibly halve the weight.
They wanted me to halve it again.
For millisecond I considered lying but because people’s lives depended on this, refused.
Looks like I was a chump; the last five yearsI have refused to ever get into that business anymore – maybe that is wrong but between health (failing) and anger about the incredible stupidity of both the military (and me for refusing) I just couldn’t handle the stress of proposals (with most rejections over the previous ten years – yeah, goes back a ways.)
What pains me is that because my 50% further reduction might have worked, I could have saved thousands from injury and many hundreds from death in our wars of choice.
This is a bitter pill that I only partly learned to endured over the years.
Sorry for this long (but related) post but I needed to finally get that off my chest.
SRW1
@RSA:
God damnit! Leadership is about style as a deciderer, not outcome! If it were about outcome, you’d have to know stuff! What the fnck are underlings for?
cermet
UH, never would have even won a phase one (nor should I have) if I couldn’t spell RPG … damn, a little too fast on typing!
PurpleGirl
@YellowJournalism: Well, some of them had spent some time in the classroom but years ago; main problem was they had no idea what my organization did and that our volunteers were not teachers but parents, community members, and corporate employees. They weren’t good at listening to our explanations.
SRW1
@Amir Khalid:
Well, it used to be SchwarzerPeter, but that kind of had a smell. So he frenchified it. Unfortunately, there was a page in the grammer book missing.
maya
Pffft. No big deal here. Now, if Hoshko really had balls he’d email all the relatives of the victims and pitch his firm’s expertise in home security while they are attending the funerals.
WereBear
But that, too, is speculation. You don’t know.
The one thing you do know is that you refused out of principle… and that’s always the right thing to do.
We do it not knowing the outcome. That’s the point.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Amir Khalid: It’s a place name. Presumably, it was grammatical when the village was named.
Bob In Portland
The Experts sounds creepily like a CIA cutout.
Shakezula
To prevent another mass murder, please insert $10,000,000…
Chris
@Amir Khalid:
No, he’s got it right. (Or his ancestors did). The French word for rock is une pierre, feminine.
This does not in any way alter the fact that he is an asshole, of course.
Chris
@SiubhanDuinne:
I don’t think they do, either.
The Moar You Know
@cermet: I’ve done this dance before. They didn’t want your armor, they wanted to stick with their current supplier, who was giving the procurement people fat cushy jobs on retirement. So they handed you an impossible set of technical requirements knowing that you couldn’t do it. Had you accepted, they’d have asked for something even more insane, like for you to halve the weight again and make the armor invisible in the process.
Time to stop beating yourself up about it. I’m hoping I can wrangle another ten years out of my job (defense contractor) and then go weave baskets for a living or some shit like that, because the whole industry isn’t about making better products for the warfighter, it’s about landing cushy white-welfare jobs for procurement officers. Feels dirty, that does.
Yatsuno
@Chris: My French surname is no longer grammatically correct in modern French, but in the 12th Century it was just fine. LaPierre is still a bloodmonger though.
Jebediah
@Botsplainer:
Chucky managed to badly scratch one of her nipples. Our floor looks like a fucking crime scene.
ruemara
@LittlePig: Nothing wrong with little green footballs.
@cermet: Can I say I’m amazed at what you came up with? And don’t beat yourself up. This is the evil of bureaucracy writ large in blood.
sharl
@cermet: I always wondered if your nym had a materials sci/tech tie-in…
Sorry to hear about your experiences, especially in light of the numerous sordid stories out there regarding military contracting. Especially galling – and coming from your area of technical expertise – was the story of David H. Brooks and his defective body armor. Colbert did a particularly spot-on evisceration of that scumbag (3m51s, after an ad).
I almost wish I believed in Hell, then I could hope he burned there forever. I’ll just have to settle for hoping his remaining years are as miserable as possible.
Cain
@Elmo:
The reason is that these other places are republicans and they rely on their government conservative contracts to get them the deals and they in terms give a little kickback. While at the same time they gush about the ‘free market’. These fuckers like to talk through both sides of their mouth.
fuckwit
The corruption is getting to the level where it makes the Soviet Union look like a bunch of honest joes.
Chris
@fuckwit:
You know what they say; everything we said about the Communists was true, but everything the Communists said about us was true too.
...now I try to be amused
How to make the Navy Yard safer? Fire “The Experts”!
sharl
@…now I try to be amused: I just remembered that, back in the early years of my involvement with NAVSEA – the folks who occupy the building at WNY where the shootings took place – the particular bunch I was working with were located in rented offices over in Crystal City VA. Quite a few of their groups were over there.
After 9/11, Rummy issued an order for all military activities to be relocated in more secure locations, typically military bases or similar facilities with secure fences and guarded gates. In theory not a bad decision in some cases, at least where access by the “regular public” wasn’t an issue – coming from a guy notorious for originating and implementing bad ideas – and who knows, it could have saved some money to boot (not likely with that bunch though).
Just goes to show that there is no “silver bullet” for solving a complex problem that involves the eternal conflict between operational efficiency and site security. And when you toss in the challenges of identifying mental health issues – and doing so within legal constraints and with competence – and add our gun culture* to that mix, it just gets a whole lot messier.
(*I don’t think the gun business is – or should be – a major consideration in discussions of this particular incident, given the actual firearms acquired and how he acquired them. Yeah, I know that puts me in Camp Gun Whacko in this case, and no, I’m not happy with being in that crowd.)