Bill Thompson

I was their technical advisor.

And one of the things I kind of learned about government at that point was these systems have their own incentive, and the incentive's not the output of their purported mission.

The incentive is the growing of the organization and the execution of budget.

So while they're in there, you know, I've never seen a field grade officer get dressed down more than when he didn't spend all of the money that he was budgeted for for that year.

He would go to the Pentagon and they'd be like, well, you didn't execute $300 million of OCO, of Overseas Contingent Operations funds here.

And they would dress him down for an hour.

Instead of tying it to mission to say, did you achieve your mission objectives?

We started the year agreeing from the president's framework, the NIPF, the National Intelligence Priority Framework.

We wanted to achieve these effects.

What you would want to hear is we achieve them and we save 25%.

But instead it's we achieve them, but we didn't execute all of this money.

Well, you're fired.

And I literally have seen that happen.

I've literally seen that happen.

Yeah.

And that kind of shifted my thinking in that-

these systems have their own incentive to exist and to grow because those guys that were holding that general officer, that 06 is that colonel's feet to the fire.

They also have an incentive to because they were part of that trickle down and they've got bureaucracy that surrounds them.

And if they didn't execute it, that means they didn't execute it.

And that means they have to go to whomever.