Name:   Talullahhound - Subject:   Hodja Date:   2/23/2016 3:35:06 PM

I don't know what year your instructor told you about the "civil service rocket", but let me remind you that before the government started contacting all of the developmental work to industy, the government employed some pretty smart people to develop and make early equipment.  You may remember that Von Braun was a governement employee as were a lot of the German scientists that were hired by the U.S. government after WWII  to develop rockets and missiles.  I am just barely old enough to remember when the govenment had labs and actually developed stuff. 

When I hear of stories like yours, it makes me a bit angry; because talk like that only reinforces this idea that civil servants are a lesser breed of cat.  In the course of my career, I found a lot of military who came to work in offices with a superior attitude, only to realize in a short period of time that the vast majority of civlians worked just as hard as they did, and left that assignment with a different perspective.  When I was Director of a Technical Office at the Defense Technology Security Administration (my next to last job), I had 11 people with PhDs (all but 3 were retired military) in some kind of Engineering and the rest had no less than a Masters.  Do you know that Air Force Officers that worked in that office, used to beg to come back as civilians?  And I rehired most of them, because they were great people and very smart people. 

The civilians provide the continuity and the military provide the military perspective.  Would you care to work in an organization where everything had to be reinvented every time people were reassigned?  If I wanted to be snide, I would say that the first thing that most military want to do when they arrive at a new office is to rearrange the furniture, so they can say right off the bat that they had impact. We could say that all military just worry about their OPRs, and most civilians don't give a damn about their annual rating.  But I don't want to be snide, because that would disrespectful to the majority of those that I have worked with that I found insightful and smart.

One thing that puzzles me Hodja.  If these people are as bad as you say, why do you work for them?