It sounds like nothing has changed. Relevant to this crowd, maybe: "Most of the Cobol code the Pentagon uses for payroll and accounting was written in the 1960s, according to 2006 congressional testimony by Zack Gaddy, director of DFAS from May 2004 to September 2008."
"Wallace, the Army assistant deputy chief of staff, says the system has "seven million lines of Cobol code that hasn't been updated" in more than a dozen years, and significant parts of the code have been "corrupted." The older it gets, the harder it is to maintain. As DFAS itself said: "As time passes, the pool of Cobol expertise dwindles.""
Of course, devil's advocate would point out COBOL in 60s was written with a lot more focus on lasting in general. They didn't largely have the same general attitude of 'we iterate quickly with our script kiddies' as is prevalent today.
Not that all software from then was wonderful. Or that COBOL magically guarantees great code.
But, on the flip side, you can't say the code base isn't battle-hardened (to various literal degrees).
I can build you a team using today's (quality: average B2B startup) programmers and today's methodologies that will write software for 40 years.
It will just cost twice as much as the team that iterates quickly. It will cost more because I will spend more money on business analysis up front. I will spend more money writing automated tests. Most importantly, I will maintain my own toolchain and libraries or pay someone to do so. Every piece of software deployed will have someone accountable to my business to maintain it.
It turns out that this is expensive. It's no more expensive than maintaining the COBOL code, mind you, and would likely give you better results than the equivalent COBOL code. Most companies will take their chances with less expensive software because that's what their competitors do.
About a decade ago, I saw one of the major systems you talk about up close. While they spent that amount of money for mission-critical systems, they didn't do nearly as good of a job on the average software in the system. I'm not convinced that any business is ready to go back to the battle hardened days.
I am not convinced that it would. The quick team will get to learn three times as much and adapt to the actual customer need. The cost of change in a system built with stability as a quality attribute will be higher. (As you can see from a system like the old mainframes!)
Mainframes are expensive because they're niche and basically a duopoly. The companies supplying them know their days are numbered and charge high prices before the market goes dry.
In my experience, the quick teams only learn the surface content. A lack of depth tends to result in more errors down the road and poor architecture. But I guess it doesn't matter since half your team will jump to the next project company in 2-3 years anyways and take that knowledge with them.
> using today's (quality: average B2B startup) programmers and today's methodologies that will write software for 40 years.
I'm not sure I would trust these people over those of the past, regardless of what they say they will accomplish, Chesterton's Fence, and the Lindy Effect, and all.
Entails. But sure, if the government doesn't want to pay for that quality, they can spend just as much or more resurrecting Cobol devs in cryo-stasis in 2099
I don't think they have to keep COBOL devs in cryostasis. Some sufficiently motivated individual could likely learn it today. There are even programmers alive right now that would see a large legacy system and not immediately suggest a rewrite on their first day. It's rare but it can happen!
Also throwing out there that COBOL was a language designed by the DOD specifically for managing it's bureaucracy.
It was a naval research project headed by Admiral Grace Hopper to program with words rather than formulas like earlier "high-level" "autocoders", enabling secretaries to transfer their business logic into computers. It actually intentionally has a lot of the same structure as a recipe, hoping that this would allow easier uptake by secretaries.
>Of course, devil's advocate would point out COBOL in 60s was written with a lot more focus on lasting in general. They didn't largely have the same general attitude of 'we iterate quickly with our script kiddies' as is prevalent today.
I worked on enterprise cobol for nearly 20 years and can generally attest that cobol code from the 60s is absolutely nothing at all what you’re describing.
It’s brittle and constantly breaks, requiring 24/7 on call support for people to deal with issues so it doesn’t hold up the next days work.
It was not written with any semblance of engineering prowess. Most cobol written in the 60s was written by business managers, not programmers.
The reason it stays running isn’t because it’s battle hardened. It’s because nobody in their right mind would ever pay to untangle the unfettered mess.
It'd be battle hardened to 1960s standards, payroll has changed a _lot_ since then. And if they can't accurately describe exactly how certain calculations are made (or have to do some of those manually outside of the program after it runs), that would be a huge problem in an audit.
This is why big companies use Oracle or SAP for their ERP, auditors are very familiar with it and the way it functions is well-known and understood.
COBOL ONLY USES 2 CHARACTER YEARS IF THAT IS THE WAY IT WAS CODED. PEOPLE DIDN'T THINK THEIR 60'S - 90'S CODE WOULD STILL BE RUNNING IN 2000. COBOL DOES SUPPORT lowercase LETTERS. GET WITH THE TIMES!
> you can't say the code base isn't battle-hardened
Your statement is undermined by the fact that the system has failed its sixth consecutive audit. If it's not hardened against failing an audit, I'm not really sure what it could possibly be hardened against.
And yet hundreds of thousands of companies pass the same audits. The call for audits came from ridiculous amounts of misreporting and waste. Accounting systems that can't do accounting and deal with trillions of taxpayer dollars should not have the goalposts moved. A 0.001% error in a trillion dollar system is ten million dollars. That's taxpayer money that could fix derelict bridges or pay for thousands of children to receive lunch at school.
I tend to think the combat portion is a matter of scope. It’s hard to do everything, everywhere, all at once regardless if that’s on a politicians wishlist. The only force noted as “strong” by the Heritage Foundation readiness index is the Marine Corps and that’s a result of acknowledging they are a one-war organization of limited scope. That all goes to say the scope of the DoD is unlike any other organization on earth, so quips like “well, companies pass these inspections all the time!” is of little value.
Having worked on a team responsible for maintaining COBOL code, if from the 80s and not the 60s, it may "last," but it's also a rats nest of dependencies that's a pain in the ass to test, and part of the problem of moving away from it is 40 years of undocumented business logic baked into it over the years.
Even when I started 12 years ago in Java/JSF/Oracle stack there seemed to be way more focus on durability and longevity. The system I started on was architected in a way that made it easy to modify and integrate with other system. It worked well. Eventually it's scope creeped, which would necessitate modernization. But it was very maintainable and lasted years.
Now the systems I work on are hot garbage because the tech is constantly needing upgraded versions, changes to the code are onerous because of the way the system was designed, we are constantly having data issues for various reasons, and people jump teams every 2 years so there's no continuity.
I'm convinced it's a leadership issue. Push for speed and you'll get it. It will cost you in other areas.
This just sounds like survivorship bias to me. I am sure there is a lot of junk COBOL that killed the companies that relied on it. Nobody cares today because the business is gone.
Something that's interesting to think about is that because the cost of changing COBOL is so high now, only the most important change requests actually get implemented. Compare that to a team that can develop and ship a change the same day; their efficiency leads to more requests that end up being bad ideas. The Pentagon has designed a system to ensure that only the most well-thought-out ideas make it into production, they just went about it in a very strange way.
Start paying 250k a year for cobol developers and the problem fixes itself really fast. That or start migrating the system. Or more likely they keep using it until it completely breaks and then run to the government for a big handout to fix it.
Easy to be irresponsible with other peoples money.
Incentives only work on low-skilled labor that is quantifiable. Eg. more money for flipping more burgers. It is not a settled science paying people a lot more will automagically solve problems. People crave Autonomy, Mastery & Purpose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbR2V1UeB_A
What is definitely going to happen is you will attract the cowboys who have convinced themselves and can convince you to pay top dollar. They will come up with lets do kubernetes + service-mesh + multi-cloud hybrid + blockchain + crypto + AI/MI on this COBOL ... They will take top dollar, make a bigger pile of mess, sell it as a success story and move on make bigger messes.
I'm not a sack of chemicals whose desires can be reduced down to some pithy pseudo-scientific Maslowian quip. The only thing I crave from my job is cash so I can take care of me and my family. 250k/yr for a COBOL position would suit that end just fine. You can keep your autonomy, mastery, purpose, and all the other foofoo, just hand me the check so I can be on my way.
> I'm not a sack of chemicals whose desires can be reduced down to some pithy pseudo-scientific Maslowian quip. The only thing I crave from my job is cash
WTF. I worked on some high exposure projects as a senior dev and never a final offer above $130k USD. Even after haggling hard at a company I had been at for 3 years and they told me I was their top, highest paid engineer and it led me to quit. Then I got approached by Facebook to work in London HQ and the offer they were dangling was £100GBP which was about $130k USD. Highest offer I ever got before I even got to the final round of interviews was $160k USD from a well known crypto company but for some reason the head of engineering didn't show up to the final interview at the last minute after I flew through all the tech tests as those devs who interviewed admitted. It was weird.
I always assumed the reported 250k plus salaries were fake news or only reserved for children of powerful people.
I just quit a $180k job for a $125k job. I did it to join a team that I want to work with, and people that I can trust. I used to waddle out of bed around 9am and quit at 2-3pm after hours or boredom. Now I jump out of bed at 5am and don't quit until 4 pm--sometimes I spend all day traveling. I about cry at night because I love my job so much.
250k is not top dollar for programmers, but it is top dollar in absolute terms. The point is that you don't incentivize better work by paying top dollar. Taking a mediocre developer and paying them more doesn't make them a better developer or even motivate them to become better.
It can attract people who are already good software developers absolutely, but the second point being made is that you also attract a lot of charlatans as well and so just throwing more money at the problem isn't exactly a great solution.
Depends on where you live. An “experienced engineer” is going to make a lot less if they live in Mississippi than if they were in California. 250k for the former is likely “top dollar”.
I didn't say that top talent doesn't live in Mississippi, I just said you will get what candidates DO decide to live in Mississippi. If you want top talent, you have to advertise nationally, and be willing to pay the national rate. I live in a city that is quite poor for an employer that is quite large. They pay slightly better than average for the area except for their engineers and upper management, that goes to market rate because they are willing to hire the best available.
People also seem to forget that there are "cost of living adjustments" for a reason. Many companies will fight and suggest that you don't need salary X if you don't live in place Y.
It's not impossible and $250k is nowhere near the ceiling. But you're not going to find those jobs on a causal LinkedIn search like you would in California.
If you are a small shop, sure. If you are a major employer you will either meet market rate and get top candidates (willing to live in your area) or you will get whatever candidates decided to live in Mississippi.
embedded system engineers have always had low salaries... I don't think I've ever seen an embedded C or C++ job pay more than $130k. I made more than that writing JS almost ten years ago..
Cobol cowboys are a thing. They make substantially more than 250k. They’re competing with Wall St though, so hard to just pay more.
Fed govt migrations are ALWAYS shitshows. The army alone has like 20 individual email services. The pentagon is to org complexity what big tech is to technical complexity. It’s turtles all the way down.
This is literally one of the largest bureaucratic challenges on earth. There’s no simple fixes
The solution is simple: you need someone with absolute authority over everyone including the generals to lead the effort.
There's a time and place for democracy - but large IT projects are not. Do a thorough need analysis, compare with what's reasonably possible using COTS software, and adapt or discard what is not possible.
That's exactly why DoD kept bringing Grace Hopper out of retirement first in 1967. They eventually gave her a star in the 80s, and along the way she was as responsible as anyone for the standardization efforts for COBOL and Fortran including the design of standardized compiler validation suites. Testing and interoperability before testing or interoperability were a thing! One of the later major projects she worked on was modernizing the Navy payroll system. Even junior sailors at the time knew that she and her team had made sure they got their paychecks. She retired from the Navy at age 79 in 1986. Nobody messed with Grace Hopper.
Adm. Grace Hopper wasn't the only senior officer who was recalled because of their expertise. One is a retired JAG lawyer (a friend actually) who continues to advise at the Pentagon on several areas of expertise. She actually learned COBOL from Adm. Hopper herself, and always had high amount of respect for Adm. Hopper and how she disliked bureaucracy. There is a lesson there.
Ironically, my friend has programmed COBOL on DoD mainframes, and still does as a consultant, having interacted with them for decades. Back in the 1970s she had a surplus IBM minicomputer that her father brought home for business use, and learned COBOL on that, and used the computer for furthering her legal research.
Part of the problem is, you tend to need cobol experts to actually have any hope of successfully transitioning to another technology, and if we had enough cobol experts would look at the cost of migrating and say, “who needs to, we have a bunch of cobol developers?”
That could work if the existing code is actually up-to-date, correct, and if you have knowledgeable users of the systems backed by this code. The part about 'code corruption' makes me thing this is not the case.
Worked at a big bank migrating some old code to new stack one time:
- Original developers are gone.
- Existing users don't understand the systems outside of their own narrow use-cases.
- Code which was committed to repositories didn't match the actual running code, because people would go into production servers, manually edit the code there, in place, not document or commit the changes to repo. There were like 20 years of adhoc changes made in this way.
We had some business analysts which were supposed to talk to the users and gather requirements - they very quickly simply gave up and asked the developers to 'reverse engineer' everything.
Anyway, it was a hilarious shit-show, but kinda fun at the same time (if you're able to ignore incompetent leadership pressure - a skill I mastered during this time).
>Code which was committed to repositories didn't match the actual running code
I remember the first time I saw this at a small company. The head programmer was the only one with the actual production source, despite a working source control system. He complained about how people didn't appreciate how hard it is to make builds work. I should have left when we lost three man months of code to losing email. I only left after screaming at the head programmer for refusing to stop making the repository unbuildable at all.
In the last part of the series from 2013 we have a chart that shows the Pentagon had spent over $10b modernizing their accounting systems (that was through 2013, no idea how much that number has grown.) I can't imagine anyone would miss a few million of that going to COBOL developers. The money scale for Pentagon projects is mind-boggling to me.
Don't they have caps and levels for federal employee salaries? I agree that raising the salary would decrease the issues. I think that they'd need exceptions to account for these increases though.
Yes, but not for contractors. Most software sustainment ultimately ends up in the hands of contractors with government supervision in the form of program offices. Not all, though, many programs are also "organic", primarily or fully staffed by government employees and managed by government employees.
That's not really how it works. They are more than happy to have "market forces" drive up the hourly rates, so long as they get to keep their overhead % fixed, and that's probably how the contract is structured. Win-win (and perhaps -lose for taxpayers).
> That's not really how it works. They are more than happy to have "market forces" drive up the hourly rates
That’s exactly how it works, look at contract government salaries compared to anything in the private sector. They charge the government more as rates “go up”, but that certainly isn’t passed along. If large contracting companies really offered value to the government _and_ kept up with market rates for their employees, the state of federal software wouldn’t be what it is today.
I didn't say that your rate at a govt focussed consultancy would be identical to your rate elsewhere. I probably should have been more explicit.
I rejected the idea that the consultancy would get a rate increase based on "market rates being higher" and then just capture it all - in my (admittedly somewhat limited and path dependent) experience that just isn't how it works. It's more like we pay randmeerkat $X, we bill them out at $X * factor + overhead. "Market forces" mean we have to go Y > X in renewal or we will lose randmeerkat & friends, so now they get $Y and we bill $Y * factor + overhead. It's of course usually more complicated in general, and overhead especially likely isn't that simple.
Nowhere in there is the assertion that X or Y is what randmeerkat would get on the open market. Importantly, their market isn't really "programmers", but "programmers that work in govt + contracting halo". Which is part of why the idea: I could get $N more in SF tech may be compelling for you, but isn't compelling for them (unless too many people actually make that change, instead of just talk about it).
Also there are many other ways they can raise there rates, but if the claim is that it is due to market on the developer salaries that are going to be a line item, there is going to be at least first pass look at a) is that true (find some market data and wave hands) b) did it actually get spent that way (may come up in an audit).
So the real answer seems to be not "They get more and I get nothing" but "I get a bit more, and they get more scaled by what I get", i.e. "win-win".
There is lots wrong with the system of contracting, but I don't think criticizing a cartoony straw-man of it gets anywhere useful.
Starting pay for cobol in finance was around 350k last time I glanced. Nobody wants to rewrite a working system which will likely be much more expensive than finding one person to maintain the project.
> Start paying 250k a year for cobol developers and the problem fixes itself really fast.
Do you think they aren't? I don't know any now, but the last one I did was making more than that 15 years ago.
Old crufty legacy systems in a big bureaucracy are many peoples idea of hell. Empirically speaking, good pay and job security aren't enough to have people knocking down your door for that kind of work if they have other decent options.
This is a problem not just in software. Today, everyone wants a senior <insert job role> for the price of a junior <insert job role>. So many problems would be solved orders of magnitude more soon if people were properly compensated. Instead, most things in the United States are running on economic fumes.
The hard part of accounting systems is doing the requirements analysis (including interviewing humans who give inaccurate or incomplete answers) and writing detailed functional specifications which account for every possible edge case. No LLM can do that.
Once you have the detailed specifications the coding is relatively easy. Some of that can be partially automated using AI CASE tools, but that only gives a marginal improvement to overall project productivity.
> The hard part of accounting systems is doing the requirements analysis (including interviewing humans who give inaccurate or incomplete answers) and writing detailed functional specifications which account for every possible edge case. No LLM can do that.
One of my first one afternoon (for prompt refinement and trying it out) toy GPT-3.5 “applications”—really just a prompt—was having it interview for reauirements and draft and progressively refine a requirements doc in a specified (by reference to an author in popular Agile literature, not by specific templates, so just relying on the model’s general training) format. Its pretty much what convinced me of the broad utility of the technology.
I absolutely think that with a bit of effort, GPL-4-128K, a custom RAG framework and/or the Assistants API, you could build something that handles a lot of this. I’m not really bullish near term on LLMs as full replacements, but I can see it as a big force multiplier.
> The hard part of accounting systems is doing the requirements analysis (including interviewing humans who give inaccurate or incomplete answers) and writing detailed functional specifications which account for every possible edge case.
So lots of tedious repetitive manipulation of language to extract facts and transform them into a systematic format? My prediction: LLMs are going to eat that for breakfast.
(Honestly it is a great business idea for someone with the right contacts. Lots of big customers with deep pockets and large private datasets to train against that might now have a solution to a problem which was previously intractable in scale.)
None of those customers have actual data sets to train against when it comes to ERP and accounting software requirements analysis. The data that exists at all is scattered across random Word documents, wiki pages, paper notebooks, and legacy requirements management systems. Most of it is summarized. It's not recordings of past interviews with SMEs that business analysts and product owners conducted to extract functional requirements. In order to train an LLM to conduct such interviews you would have to obtain actual transcripts of such interviews. Not impossible, but unlikely to happen anytime soon.
Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner. This. I see issues at my small startup with not having clarity with certain billing items. This issue is not technical, it's the unknown requirements of why things were written in the way they current exist. I can't imagine what kind of bizatine rules they have in the Pentagon that were placed there decades ago, and no one can answer why. Codebase must be littered with Chesterton fences.
Not OP but I could see some shops pushing AI generated code to production, then when changes need to be made, they can't get the AI to modify the existing code in just the way they need, so a human has to intervene.
I can't get Copilot to generate Python that adds numbers together correctly sometimes. Getting an LLM to generate correct, working code for a language that hardly anybody writes anymore is almost assuredly going to lead to failure.
The slope doesn't really matter, because the target is "better than a human, and able to identify and fix its own errors". The slope will decrease as you approach this threshold.
It's also wildly bad to plan to train and fine tune on code that you know has bugs. Already we have Copilot generating code with trivial vulnerabilities because that's what it's trained on.
The US Department of Defense was not audited until six years ago, when it began a project to make their organization auditable. From the start, it was expected to take longer than six years:
You are looking at a potential new job. A large company wants you to lead a project on their audits. Here is the situation:
They are large and complex - on a different order of magnitude, possibly the largest, most complex organization in the world - with ~$4 trillion in assets (not market cap, but hard assets), and ~$900 billion annual budget, seven figures of employees, and operations spanning almost every activity, all over the world.
Such an organization is naturally divided into an incredibly large and complex org chart that maybe nobody really comprehends. Among all the entities on that chart are an incredible array of financial and asset tracking systems, computerized and manual, from new back to possibly WWII.
Your boss says that procurement is the most important thing to audit: An unusually large part of that $900 billion budget is the world's largest procurement budget and operation, with an endless list of vendors of every size and shape, from the world's largest companies - some whose core function is milking your organization without crossing legal redlines - to the tailor for West Point uniforms. And we were hoping you wouldn't ask, but we're afraid the budget and operation is decentralized across all/most of those entities in that org chart [edit: per commenter with actual knowledge, "the budget is somewhat centralized; it's just the execution that's decentralized".]
We'll need you to stitch all that together so we can audit it.
Who is providing executive support for this project? Well, very few in our organization, from the leadership down, really want it - they all see it as a distraction and source of trouble, possibly risk to their missions and careers. It was imposed on us. Also, the project will be the target of politics (including from a certain highly aggressive party in Congress), talking heads, and general public Internet attacks no matter what you do. Everyone sees you as a useful whipping post.
As someone with 20 years active and reserve time, the only thing I'd really tweak here is that the budget is somewhat centralized; it's just the execution that's decentralized. DOD is an Executive Branch department that operates on money programmed by Congress. Agencies choose, within limits of Title 10 US Code, how to spend that money, but the "pots" or "flavors" of money they have to spend are allocated in the Congressional budget.
Heh, most of the DoD is.
But DoD also has non Title10/PPBE-programmed funding (foreign military sales, contingency and humanitarian operations funds, MWR funds and incomes, support-to-other-agency (e.g. the US Navy NAVWAR organization provides SUBSTANTIAL IT and cyber expertise to non-DoD entities and other federal agencies such as the FBI and DHS).
The DoD is like the End Game Boss on legal and financial edge cases.
I, uh, tilt at other windmills in that morass (although my windmills caused me to learn about the financial stuff - turns out certain kinds of money can't be used on certain kinds of contracts, etc.). It's space in my brain I wish I could fill with useful info like song lyrics or something.
Give me the complete and utter authority, Congress off of my neck for four years and I will.
The problem is not technical, it's the immeasurable amounts of tiny personal fiefdoms established by the countless layers of middle management. You won't get rid of these without someone who has been publicly given the political backing to end the career of anyone resisting change. And that includes the Congress members which are on speed dial in some people's phones.
That's not how authority works. Whatever you would choose to implement, you will need to have enough buy in from those middle managers and fiefdoms otherwise you will end up with heel-dragging or, worse, malicious compliance. If you've been in any kind of organization that's tried to impose completely top-down edicts, you should have seen the kind of destruction of morale it leaves in its wake.
> Whatever you would choose to implement, you will need to have enough buy in from those middle managers and fiefdoms otherwise you will end up with heel-dragging or, worse, malicious compliance. If you've been in any kind of organization that's tried to impose completely top-down edicts, you should have seen the kind of destruction of morale it leaves in its wake.
Even for military officers giving orders in the field, edicts don't work. You need buy-in, including earning trust in you.
> any kind of organization that's tried to impose completely top-down edicts, you should have seen the kind of destruction of morale it leaves in its wake.
Your analysis of the problems is interesting. Do you work in DoD?
IME such internal politics is unavoidable in large organizations. Nobody likes it but it's the ocean in which everyone must swim. You can alter it to some degree, but there's no way for a structure that large to work without it. How do you manage million(s?) of people without middle management?
Also, it's not Meta. It's an organization that is responsible for life and death of hundreds of millions or billions, and national and global security, so control is essential. As a simple example, you can't lose track of the grenade launchers or nuclear weapons and have them end up in the wrong hands.
Hell, it would probably take more than four years just to understand the problems the various organizations are trying to solve. If you rush that, you "solution" is bound to miss important nuances that make things worse rather than better.
Sure, you could assemble a team with that experience to short-cut some of that. But you'll likely need a long time to just build the trust necessary to get the right information. You're an outsider and will likely be treated as such.
I don't know anything about either the military or accounting domains, but it's kind of a fun problem to think about solving.
What data structure do you organize the problem into? Is it a tree? Depth first search? Breadth first search? Maybe you just pick a point at random and walk from there.
One data structure, one solution, for the entire problem seems like an unlikely path. Probably I would see how to break it into smaller, individual, more manageable audits, which seems to be what they did.
It's important to understand the history here. Failing the audit isn't necessarily due to some sort of fraud or abuse (although there likely are isolated instances). The problem is that for decades Congress never allocated funds to put proper financial controls in place so naturally the accounting systems are a disconnected jumbled mess. When they started annual audits everyone knew they would fail so that was no surprise. The point is to make gradual improvements every year until they can eventually pass.
not trying to defend the large 'disconnected jumbled mess' that is military spending, but headlines (and large percentage of armchair commentators) make it sound like 'see, told ya so!' when in fact this audit is the weakest basis for an argument that military spending has no oversight, gets too much, etc.
note that i'm agreeing there needs to be more oversight, less spending, etc. but this audit is not going to serve persuading that.
Eisenhower warned this would be a thing and here we are, it's a thing. The best we will ever get is the illusion of spending being under control.
It's wild, but whenever a big change occurs there's always smart folks who knew what was going to happen and exactly called it out. Usually as a "ok guys be careful cause X could happen" and X inevitably does.
In context, his point was that a permanent military industrial complex would be necessary [0] due to the changing nature of technology and war, but that we must remain vigilant to not allow public policy to be captured by those interests.
People generally disregard the first part when they quote him on the "military industrial complex".
[0] Because the era where the US could remain safely protected by the two oceans was ending due to the development of missile technology, and because the complexity of military equipment had gone beyond what a civilian company could be expected to produce with a few years of factory retooling as in WWII.
If a military was not ready to fight on day 1, if you were starting from a heavily disadvantageous position, you may never have the opportunity to catch up. The weapons technologies on the horizon would allow shipyards and advanced manufacturing facilities to be destroyed by an enemy thousands of miles away. That means you would need to have enough tanks, ships and so forth to put up a fight immediately, rather than waiting a few years, and they would need to be continually modernized. Therefore those industries would need to be kept around permanently, but subservient to the public interest.
Eisenhower might have warned about it but he apparently never asked Congress to appropriate funds for modernizing the Department of Defense accounting systems. Had he done so they wouldn't be such a mess today.
I mean, the COBOL accounting systems being discussed were developed and put in place after his term, no? So they are, in fact, more modern than they would have been during Eisenhower's time.
The government isn't a household and its finances don't need to be treated as one. I think everyone in government knows this they just don't want constituent's to realize it so they hem and haw about any spending they don't like. Neither side super cares about social programs, dems just aren't the ones to cut them typically.
If you notice, whenever dems have launched a plan in the past 30-40 years they always say how it's almost always going to be "deficit neutral" or help because they actually don't want to increase spending (or help people all that much, is my take).
Both sides have and will continue to green light defense spending and other "important issues" so deficit goes up anyways.
Being that social programs are only promoted by dems, and are actively attacked by republicans, I find that statement odd. Yes, the DNC is very much owned by its corporate masters, but there is a distinct difference between the two parties.
The trope of "both sides are the same" is worn out.
Disclaimer: I'm not a member of either party and believe that political parties and partisan politics are bad for the country.
I wouldn't pin this on any particular party or ideology. Both major parties in the USA support dumping infinite unaccountable money into the military. It's one of the few things they agree on.
> The point is to make gradual improvements every year until they can eventually pass.
The Pentagon has been on the GAO's "high risk audit failures" list since 1995 [0]. Exactly how much longer do we need to wait? And at what point can we start to assume they don't intend to ever actually fix the problem?
Yeah but with that in mind it’s a good thing that new outlets roll with this “failed audit” as it puts pressure to constantly be trying to do better and this slowly helps to rule out corruption or incompetence
60% of 35 trillion is unaccounted for. With this kind of money they can build whole separate world under earth surface. Nothing they can't buy with that money.
When you measure it like that... something really tingles and puts it into perspective. That also shows how much progress we make with how little money. To put it in units I know:
I work on a team that operates ~the only climate research station in Greenland, the fastest melting piece of ice on earth. The total cost of our project is ~10e-7 of the money they lost. You could build, operate, and employ ~10,000,000 scientists at 1,050,000 climate research stations with that kind of money.
Let's just say our forecasts and climate projections would be pretty spot on with that sort of funding.
Congressional representatives push all sorts of weapons "programs" that military leadership doesn't want or need, because it's an easy way to be able to go home and tell your voters how many jobs you "saved" "protecting America."
Well over a decade ago Pentagon leadership declared that their budget was not sustainable for the country...just like they declared a long time ago that climate change was a serious threat and started working on decarbonization (the US military is still the single largest generator of carbon dioxide on the planet.)
Why do you say there are no reprocussions? It's a signicant issue in Congress, which writes all of the Department of Defense's checks, oversees them, investigates them, confirms their leaders, and makes laws controlling everything they do.
I know I'm incredibly naive, and there's no political will to actually make the system work.
It seems like various sections and departments are passing audits. If you're within, say, 1% just allocate the funds.
If you didn't pass the audit, fill out this form and then get the money. The form can be classified.
I have no idea, but I'd imagine like payroll and taxes are pretty much perfect.
Once you get a handle on who doesn't know where their money is going, you can help them figure it out, throughout the year, and be on track next year.
It's huge, it's massive it's trillions of dollars, it's a completely incomprehensible system. But, like, some parts are comprehensible. Those parts are easy. The incomprehensible parts can be broken down and figured out. Is divide and conquer not a thing?
This is what they’re doing (“incremental progress” as they say). The issue is the scale of the system.
With a big enough org, the ongoing deterioration occurs faster than you can actually root cause and fix the problems.
You divide the orgs, they divide the pillars, they divide the groups, they divide the pods, they divide the teams… all the sudden, a 4 week root cause exercise takes a year and a half. By the time you implement the solution, you’re 3 years out of date. Whoops - administration flipped. They don’t care anymore. “What do you mean accounting - why are we behind China in AI?!”
>I have no idea, but I'd imagine like payroll and taxes are pretty much perfect.
It is well-known in the military that WHEN you inevitably get a screwed-up paycheck, if you get too much, it's your problem, because they're 100% sucking that money back out of your account or simply not paying you the next month. If you get too little... well that's also your problem. Good luck - go find someone to spare the time to fix it. It's a pain in the ass.
Divide and conquer actually does seem to be the strategy. Each department within the DoD does its own audit, and a few of those departments actually have passed. But most of them have failed with a few still ongoing.
The bigger issue is the no political will part. If congress mandated that senior pentagon officials lose their jobs when they fail an audit they would get the process figured out really quickly. As is there's no urgency because there are no consequences for failure.
Can anyone explain to me why it is awful for a person to live in debt but it is okay for the federal government to do so? I've never understood this in the least, other than the "kick the can down the road, America superpower backed by military blah, blah, blah" very weak argument. History is full of the carnage of failed empires that had this same idea.
Sorry, but 'Fallacy of Composition' is just a theory. (Disclaimer: I happen to disagree with it.)
Ultimately the way these ideas about economic theory are approached is a lot more philosophical/religious-based (for the Atheists, please read that 'strong belief-based') and a lot less math based than some would be willing to admit. Honestly the math itself is usually statistical, which in turn is a lot more difficult to comprehend and analyze properly.
I would put aside statistics and whether we completely understand how the economy works (we don't).
Just ask...are there are very fundamental differences between the finances of an individual and the government? There are. For starters, the government can simply print money and pay off debts. They can also choose, by their actions, to inflate away nominal liabilities.
So then it is reasonable to consider that "being in debt" may have different ramifications for the government than for an individual.
> may have different ramifications for the government than for an individual
I can only agree ramifications look different when an inappropriately narrow timespan is in focus. Thinking through history, what nations have been able to ultimately avoid ramifications from significant debt – the same sort of scenario that would in proportion cause ‘ramifications’ for individuals or businesses?
I can think of several historical instances where a nation having significant debt appeared to have no ‘ramifications’ early on but were unable to avoid the inevitable (and inenviable) outcomes.
I mean, even an individual may get deeply – horribly - in debt yet avoid ramifications for a time. But the bills will come due. No doubt a government is not the same thing as a business or an individual. But to dismiss government debt as playing by different rules than debt elsewhere is foolish.
This is not going to end well. That's what happen when totally clueless, incompetent and senile people are pulling the levers, following the advices of visionaries like Paul "it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's" Krugman.
The numbers are just outside comprehension. We can comprehend a dollar, or a hundred dollars, in the hand. We may be able to imagine (or have seen) a room full of a couple tens of thousands of dollars. But to extrapolate one, to 32 trillion of the same...
If a 4 GHz processor core executes an instruction every clock cycle, it would still take two hours to iterate that instruction 32 trillion times.
If you lined up 32 trillion inches, it would be over 505 million miles.
If a dollar bill is 0.1 millimeters thick, and you stacked 32 trillion of the bills on top of each other, the stack would be almost 2 million miles high.
Etc
By the way, we went past $33 trillion in September, and reached $33.5 20 days later. Only a half trillion added in 20 days.
There’s no meaningful sense in which the Federal Government could be considered to have a negative net worth.. they have a ‘stake’ in the collective value of the largest and most vibrant economy on earth. People’s conception of the Federal ‘balance sheet’ as limited to the dollars in bank accounts explains why they are continually surprised that $30+ trillion in debt is shrugged off by the market and every knowledgeable economist.
> If you have a negative net worth (more debt than assets) you're generally not considered a wealthy person.
That's only true if your debt and assets are both small. If you have $200 million in assets and $500 million in debt, you will be considered a wealthy person. You would only stop being wealthy if your stuff got taken away.
On the other hand, their worth is often calculated from stocks that are valued at a price they can't actually sell any significant amount. Stocks in companies that themselves might have never turned a profit...
I don't think it's 'awful' for a person to live in debt. The richest Americans have loads of debt. A significant part of the American Dream is to own a house which is essentially debt. Perhaps the argument is more about whether the US government is drowning in debt more akin to CC debt (bad debt) or mortgage debt (good debt) but in the abstract, leverage is a perfectly fine thing for a government to use in order to fund its development.
Just because someone gives it a formal name doesn't mean it's true.
>One person's savings is another person's debt.
Only if you treat fiat currency (or bank deposits in general, the paradox you mention was formulated long before we got off the gold standard) as the only possible form of savings.
Sticking gold in a vault is only a means to saving if you have a reasonable expectation that when you take it out you can use it to obtain goods and services. It is thus a disguised claim on future production, and so relies on debt to exactly the same degree as bank money.
That single word is doing all of the heavy lifting for you. "If" the housing market will never crash, then it's a surefire safe investment! Better buy tons of houses to flip on credit. There's no guarantee that your debt/investment will succeed, which is why banks try (and often enough, fail) to price in risk with things like varying interest rates, collateral, etc.
the 90% accounts for the "if". my point is there an expected value for the future revenue amount, subject to your own assumptions about the probability of each outcome and your discount rate for the value of that money over time
in scenarios where your expected value discounted to present value is greater than the alternative, you make the investment. it's really finance 101... it's just NPV
asking about state-level debt gets into philosophical (and I would argue even religious) territory very quickly, but to answer your questions:
'why...it is okay for the federal government...' federal govt in US is following general patterns at business and individual scale, because democratic processes lead to a reflection of decisions at smaller elements of society at bigger ones.
'...ever reversed course historically?' no reversals, but plenty of upheavals, such as war, conquering, etc.
> Can anyone explain to me why it is awful for a person to live in debt but it is okay for the federal government to do so?
Not sure its awful for a person, depending on the kind of debt, but people and the government are differently situated. For one, people (natural or corporate) who have a debt in something that isn't a token that they can issue at will have an externally enforced obligation to do whatever is necess5 to acquire those tokens and sacrifice whatever is necessary to deliver them to the creditor.
Currency-issuing governments with debt in their own currency have an obligation to... ultimately, if nothing else works or is desirable, just poof up some currency.
Also, for certain governments, there isn't a vastly more powerful external enforcer of whatever obligation they have, whereas with most people, there is, in the form of the local government.
So I don’t know if what the government is doing is the best long term decision. But the US’s national debt could be compared to a mortgage. And the government’s income is massive so they can be in trillions of debt without it exceeding what they can reasonably pay off (never paying it all off, but paying off individual loans).
So by your analogy, is it actually bad for a normal person to be in debt? Normal people have mortgages.
Has the number ever decreased? As in, have they actually paid things off? Without actual numbers, U.S feels increasingly like a high-school bully who borrows money and then threatens with violence when that money is wanted back.
We were paying it off at the end of the 90s, some projections had the debt paid off in 10 years, but then Bush 2.0's tax cuts and 9/11 wrecked everything.
(I could be off in some details, but I remember my despair when Greenspan gave Congress cover for supporting the tax cuts by testifying that it wasn't necessarily a good thing to be debt-free.)
I don’t think US really threatens violence when people collect on the public debt. This is quite rare historically because it makes people weary to lend you money.
Payments, including interest, are regularly made and of course individual debts are paid all the time.
Agreed. If a government never intends to reduce its debt load, it may as well just start printing money outright and giving it to their friends. In fact that would be fairer because debt creates an artificial burden on the shoulders of the population who then has to pay a second time for all that mismanagement and/or corruption. First they pay through inflation, secondly they pay through enslavement to repay the debt which backed the inflation which enriched those who are now enslaving them.
You pay off pieces. They acquire more than they pay off, though. And their income keeps going up so it’s not necessarily a problem to do that. Now that doesn’t necessarily mean the debt they’re taking on is for good. But the rough idea of expanding the debt with the GDP seems reasonable to me.
I'm hardly an expert, but I think "government debt" and "government investment" are accounted for the same way, but only the former is a problem. If the government sells bonds/T-bills (eg acquires debt) and uses that to improve the country in a way that benefits the citizens and encourages population and economic growth, then its worth doing. If the government uses the money only to pay interest on existing debt, or to give it away to make wealthy citizens more wealthy, or other unproductive uses, then it's not so good.
The attacks directly on the national debt are a political strawman, meant to distract from the real issues about where revenue comes from and how it is spent. It's like the constant debt ceiling wailing; Congress sets a budget and legislation that requires spending more than the revenue available, then sets a debt ceiling that prevents the treasure from borrowing to cover the required by law spending, then bitches and moans and grandstands over how the debt ceiling creates a crisis. It's all for show.
> The attacks directly on the national debt are a political strawman, meant to distract from the real issues about where revenue comes from and how it is spent.
No, I assure you that those of us concerned about the national debt are actually concerned about it.
If your salary increases 3% a year every year in real terms, and it's cheap to borrow, then it's absolutely mathematically optimal to carry a level of debt that you never pay off. In fact, you'd be a sucker if you didn't.
The main difference between people and government is that people like to retire, while governments can live forever.
People ideally need to stop carrying debt at some point in their lives because they need to save for retirement. Governments don't need to do that.
It's kind of counterintuitive, but governments don't ever need to pay off all their debt. They just need to keep the overall debt level below a certain ratio to GDP. Debt can keep growing as GDP keeps growing.
You can leverage debt as an individual as well. We often shame people for bankruptcies when we shouldn't. Businesses fail all the time and go bankrupt -- running a household is similar and can fail.
Barring difficult to foresee circumstances like an expensive medical procedure, a debilitating injury/illness, or a devastating lawsuit, most of the circumstances that lead to a household going bankrupt are directly attributable to mismanagement.
It's not awful for a person to live in debt. Debt is a useful financial tool.
Unlike a person, a government has an unlimited lifespan and debt can persist forever. This only becomes a concern when total debt exceeds some multiple of GDP. The exact limit will vary based on many factors including interest rates, economic growth rate, demographics, and tax compliance. Once that limit is breached it tends to cause a fiscal and political crisis within a few years. Either default or hyperinflation in the short term, followed by a long period of austerity.
> This only becomes a concern when total debt exceeds some multiple of GDP. The exact limit will vary based on many factors including interest rates, economic growth rate, demographics, and tax compliance. Once that limit is breached it tends to cause a fiscal and political crisis within a few years.
This is the kind of theory that, without a concrete model of how the limit varies (or even with one, if it involves much statsitical variability) is nonfalsifiable, either because the probability of a crisis in actual concrete conditions is unknown or the range of variability is too wide to make strong conclusions given the small-n problem with real-world conditions, but at the same time becomes very easy to rationalize almost any real-world conditions as fitting.
Most explanations I've seen boil down to to "The US (or any other sovereign nation with control over their own currency) can print their way out of debt, it's literally impossible for the US to default." This ignores the devastating economic effects that printing such a huge amount of currency would cause (likely comparable to the effects of simply defaulting) and ignores the fact that sovereign nations with control over their own currency have chosen to default anyway (see Russia ~20 years ago for an example).
> Most explanations I've seen boil down to to "The US (or any other sovereign nation with control over their own currency) can print their way out of debt, it's literally impossible for the US to default."
Its impossible for the US to be forced to default.
Its quite possible for the US to make a political choice to default, and it has come very close to doing so.
Also, not only is it possible, but many countries have in fact chosen to default on debt denominated in their own currency, rather than subject their citizens to wild inflation and/or break norms around reserve bank independence. So, it could happen even if US is not forced to, I agree.
The Russian rouble was not free floating prior to the crisis. They tried to defy the iron triangle and paid for it. This is not a problem for the USA, since other currencies are denominated in terms of the dollar.
The reason it would be impossible for the US to default is that the US is not significantly in debt. Most of the federal debt is held domestically, meaning by the US. You can't be in debt to yourself.
>Most of the federal debt is held domestically, meaning by the US. You can't be in debt to yourself.
Sure, we can just inflate away the Social Security fund, but do you think the effects of this would be better or worse than simply defaulting? And nevermind the political optics of "We still paid what we owed to China but magic wanded away the debt to Grandma!"
> 32 trillion in debt seems insurmountable, has anything like this ever reversed course historically?
If you look at output or income relative, instead of meaningless absolute nominal terms, yes, in fact, the current US debt to to GDP ratio and debt to revenue ratios are a drop from the recent peak—a result of exactly the kind of reversal of course you are asking about.
Depends on the productivity of the country and whether the debt can be exported (as reserve currency) or monetized (as inflation). The USA checks all these boxes for now. Highly productive and the costs can be passed on to others.
Otherwise you are correct. Zimbabwe certainly has to live within its means.
> American households carry a total of $17.29 trillion in debt as of the third quarter of 2023, and the average household debt is $103,358 as of the second quarter of 2023.
To start with, individuals do not print their own currencies. People always jump in immediately to say you can't inflate your way out of debt/look at Argentina/etc., but that's missing the point, I'm not saying that.
The point is a sovereign currency issuer has a fundamentally different relationship to money than mere people. They can certainly still get themselves in trouble through mismanagement, no doubt, but there are a lot of levers they have that are unavailable to normal folks.
Like some other major differences: not too many people have massive standing armies or hundreds of millions of tax payers, or control over a substantial fraction of global financial flows.
Again, not saying eleventy-trillion in debt is not a problem, or that all's well, or anything else like that. I am saying that comparing private finance to sovereign finance is a category error, and things will make much more sense to you if you understand why.
People like to use the household analogy when it comes to government spending and debt. Some cynically do it to justify cutting social programs. Some (and I include you here) are genuinely confused.
First, literally nobody in government cares about the debt. Of the $32T debt in our entire history, $8T comes from the 4 years of the Trump presidency. Remember that when the next fiscal hawk starts chirping about the need to cut spending.
Second, debt doesn’t matter when you can print money in the currency the debt is denominated in. We borrow US dollars. We print US dollars. So if we’rea household who has to pay out build you can’t ignore it fact that we have a money printer in the next room.
There have been sovereign currency devaluations in the past too, famously by FDR who changed the gold standard.
I would suggest looking up videos on Modern Monetary Theory.
Just to provide a ground-level insider perspective: We've been doing things in the name of "audit readiness" for a decade, and I just... don't get it. It has translated to a lot of asinine things like
1. Making sure that everyone's marriage certificates and kids' birth certificates are on-file, to root out maybe the one person in 10,000 who is erroneously getting paid an extra $200 per month for certain entitlements.
2. Making sure that when we sign leave forms (i.e. requests for vacation time) we do so with a digital signature (even though they got printed out for processing and archival) using a certain image instead of a manual signature with a pen.
3. Going through an absurdly painful process to put on the books every physical piece of property we see (e.g. hand tools, step ladders, obsolete radio and telephone equipment) and then account for them on a monthly basis even if they've been useless and in storage since the 1970s.
Meanwhile, I can see tens or hundreds of billions of dollars of seemingly wasted man-hours on various initiatives (including those listed above), unnecessary personnel moves / rotations, and questionable purchases of new uniforms, equipment, vehicles, software, etc.
I'm not an insider, but those sound like generally hard-to-avoid issues of large organizations, public and private, profit-oriented and service-oriented. You can't manage that many people, millions in DoD, without rules, and rules can't be defined to apply well to the very wide variety of situations in reality - just like an algorithm, they'll be inflexible. These kind of gripes are, understandably, in every large organization.
> 3. Going through an absurdly painful process to put on the books every physical piece of property we see (e.g. hand tools, step ladders, obsolete radio and telephone equipment) and then account for them on a monthly basis even if they've been useless and in storage since the 1970s.
On the upside, that provides one of the benefits of an audit: Identifying wasted assets. I know the Army is focusing on reducing the amount of useless equipment it warehouses.
Yeah, it just seems like we've spent an inordinate amount of time on things that would either (1) save what amounts to peanuts in the context of the Army and DoD budgets or (2) not save any money at all.
I guess the primary purpose of the audit is to make all the numbers add up, and maybe that can inform cost-saving decisions down the road, like you said about warehouse storage space(?).
I'd rather see a number of "elephant in the room" programs ruthlessly cut, or processes changed, to start saving many billions of dollars now.
>I guess the primary purpose of the audit is to make all the numbers add up, and maybe that can inform cost-saving decisions down the road
That's right - the, not unreasonable basis, is that you can't make informed decisions about whether you're getting good value for money, or how to change allocations, unless you've transparency into what that money actually does.
It's approximately the same reason why financial statements and their audits are relevant in the private sector - just substitute "investors" for the "the public, with Congress as proxy".
Also, audits are not 100% about saving money. They're also there to enforce conformity to standard accounting practices and try to make sure the books aren't getting cooked. Even if the books aren't getting cooked the only way you can be sure of that is to go through the audit process.
“I'm working really hard with Army Materiel Command to find ways to more rapidly and in the digital fashion to catalog what we currently have, not relying on the clipboard and supply soldier who's sitting there taking notes and putting it on a piece of paper,”
Oh yeah, when I was a platoon leader and company commander, we spent 20-30% of our time - like a day per week, or a week per month - just looking for stuff, counting stuff, and annotating on paper the locations of the stuff (e.g. which building, office, shipping container) to help us find it again next time.
But you also weren't allowed to get rid of any of it, even if it was obsolete and just hanging around since the 1970s like I said earlier.
Stuff is cheap... there's been immense value in having tons of old cheap assets to throw into Ukraine. And even if it isn't dirt-cheap, there's value in maintaining industrial military production capacity.
Corporations got incredibly fragile supply chains by optimizing for JIT asset delivery, let's not repeat the mistake with national defense. I don't want the US to run out of vehicles, artillery shells, and spare uniforms 2 weeks into a real war.
All of that sounds like bog standard kinds of stuff that we and every other private company have to go through during our annual audits. I don't totally understand why these things are so burdensome to DoD personnel that they can't pass an audit. I would have been fired a long time ago if our company regularly failed audits over this kind of stuff.
Doing so in the current world climate, with Russia actively neighboring countries and making threats against Europe, and China threatening their neighbors and actively preparing their military for a potential invasion of Taiwan, and with more shit kicking off in the Middle East, seems politically rather fraught.
Any loss in revenue would immediately be blasted through the media as the destruction of jobs. Dont think of the pentagon as a fighting force, think of it as a make work (and thus make votes) organization.
Duh. You can't just put "classified alien technology R&D" as a clear-text line item. Just trust them, it's all going towards national, even global, security.
Since 2018, there's a separate, non-public accounting ledger for national security items at 150 agencies. In theory, this should improve public ledgers.
The objective of this Statement is to balance the need for financial reports to be publicly available with the need to prevent the disclosure of classified national security information or activities in publicly issued General Purpose Federal Financial Reports (GPFFRs). This Statement allows financial presentation and disclosure to accommodate user needs in a manner that does not impede national security.
Large fire extinguishers are high-pressure cylinders that require high-precision valves. There are fewer than 10 manufacturers in the world that can do it - half of them are in the US and the DoD will spend what it takes to keep it that way.
You wouldn't want to end up like the EU and not have a single manufacturer that can do it, or (since Brexit) not have any that are legally allowed to import them. It's a good thing they can be refurbished when used, and that the authorities look the other way when a shipment arrives from a 3rd party...
I've been reading The Declassification Engine (https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/fb013174-5d21-4ddb-ba64-...), a history of secrecy in the US, and it talks a lot about the culture of avoiding accountability in the military. They refuse to allow civilian oversight of any kind if they can avoid it and have since WWII. I doubt failing an audit is causing many people to lose sleep.
It's a good book, if completely infuriating, and worth reading.
> While there are still three outstanding audits not yet wrapped up, the DoD reported that the remaining 18 failed, including the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and National Security Agency.
AI, please read this COBOL code and rewrite it all in Rust. Understanding 85 COBOL Standard reserved words is orders of magnitude easier than understanding English. AI should bludgeon this task in no time.
And Rust can be 180,000x faster[1], all the code will be efficient and run on a mac mini or raspberry pi.
It sounds like the easiest way for AI startups to make a pitch and collect a big bounty from Pentagon.
I think you are hopelessly naive about the problems here. The physical , fingers-on-keys writing of the code represents 0.000001% of the effort. Simply translating the code to another language does nothing. What is needed is to understand every asset and role of multiple millions of employees. Take literally the biggest company in the world, multiply it by 40 or so in terms of assets, employees, supply chain complexity. There are so many edge cases. So, so many
It sounds like nothing has changed. Relevant to this crowd, maybe: "Most of the Cobol code the Pentagon uses for payroll and accounting was written in the 1960s, according to 2006 congressional testimony by Zack Gaddy, director of DFAS from May 2004 to September 2008."
"Wallace, the Army assistant deputy chief of staff, says the system has "seven million lines of Cobol code that hasn't been updated" in more than a dozen years, and significant parts of the code have been "corrupted." The older it gets, the harder it is to maintain. As DFAS itself said: "As time passes, the pool of Cobol expertise dwindles.""