Re: SBIRS, Ada and Ignorance

["Steve Whalen" <SteveWhalen001@hotmail.com>]

I'd like to respectfully suggest to those who are going to try to set
this record straight that you include these people in your
correspondence:

Senator John Warner of Virginia

Senator Carl Levin of Michigan

Senator John McCain of Arizona

Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut

All of the above Senators are members of the Senate Armed Services
Committee which has "oversight" of the U.S. military, and their web
sites can be found at: http://armed-services.senate.gov/

Since our Senators serve 6 year terms, they are somewhat more
insulated from the immediate pressures of daily politics and vendor
pressures (but only compared our House of Representatives <g>)....

They are the people who can get such misrepresentations as were made
by the Air Force civilian leadership investigated and corrected.

One thing that might be helpful to include in any correspondence to
anyone in a position to help, would be a list of questions they could
ask which would help them to see that the Air Force's civilian
leadership's statements are on their face, incredibly nonsensical to
anyone who knows anything about programming or managing large
projects.

Questions like:

Were the specifications from which the Ada programming was to be done
complete before coding began?

Has anyone independent of the vendor or project management made an
assessment of why the project has gone so wrong?

How is it than many of the largest and most complex project have been
successfully programmed in Ada?

etc.

Steve