I Love Armies

 The first two paragraphs of a NYTimes article on getting Leopard tanks for Ukraine:

" Nearly a month after Berlin gave European allies permission to send German-made tanks to Ukraine, the flow of tanks so many leaders vowed would follow seems more like a trickle.

Some nations have discovered that the tanks in their armory don’t actually work or lack spare parts. Political leaders have encountered unanticipated resistance within their own coalitions, and even from their defense ministries. And some armies had to pull trainers out of retirement to teach Ukrainian soldiers how to use old-model tanks."

I particularly laughed at the second sentence: maintenance is always problematic, particularly in armies which haven't fought wars.  

On the Margins--a Metaphor

 Behind our townhouse there's a strip of lawn at the foot of a sloping bank up to a strip of the woods which remain from the original landscape before the townhouse cluster was developed.  Originally when I bought the townhouse from the developer the bank was planted to grass.  When the maintenance company's crew mowed the lawn it also mowed the grass on the bank.  For a few years.

Unfortunately the bank was good Virginia red clay, so the grass never thrived. It was invaded by weeds, which soon the mowing crew decided not to cut. Over the years some woody brush has filled in behind the weeds, which have advanced down the bank and into the strip of lawn. Just the other day I noticed how narrow the strip of lawn had gotten, as each year the crew abandoned more land to the weeds.

The situation reminds me of the borders of our fields, back on the farm I grew up on.  Something similar happened there.  First you have a fence, and a few weeds grow up around it.  The fence posts prevent you from mowing under the fence, so you mow within a foot or two of it.  But areas which aren't mowed become a niche for brush to grow up, which shades the adjacent area, where the weeds invade next. 

When mowing hay, you don't really want to cut brush which might get baled, or which might clog the cutter bar of the mowing machine.  So each year you mow just a tad further away from the original fence, and so the brush becomes a hedgerow, and the hedgerow grows and grows.

Which is sort of like my sideburns.  Particularly since covid, I go a long time between haircuts. When I shave each morning, somehow my sideburns become a little longer, meaning when I do get a haircut the barber needs to shave them back to their original place.

Bottom line: I think hedgerows and sideburns become good metaphors for what happens on the margins of states, the Roman empire, and organizations. Often the returns from maintaining them don't really justify the investment needed to sustain the difficult maintenance. 

Maintenance Is Not Sexy--Methane

I've blogged before about the plight of maintenance.  I learned with ASCS automation that building new systems means increasing the burden of maintenance and decreasing the time and people available to do more good things.  I've applied that learning to other things.  

One is infrastructure--we don't maintain our roads and bridges as we should. Another is pipelines, as described here.

People like new ideas, new things.  Someone has a bright idea and others join in the applause. This often results in new legislation or whatever.  The people who originated the idea/legislation/proposal move on and eventually die.  Their replacements, even those with nominal responsibility for maintenance, have no pride of authorship, no emotional commitment to the project, so devote their attention and time to other efforts.

For proof of my thesis, compare the state of the pots and pans in your kitchen after years of use with what they looked like on the day of your wedding, when you received them.

The Lessons of Fairfax Scools

 As I understand it, the Fairfax school system had problems with remote learning back in the spring for two reasons--using older software (Blackboard, I believe) and running it on their own server instead of in the cloud.  The outcome was initially a fiasco, as the system couldn't handle the big load.

This problem, and my experience, suggests that the educators advising the Fairfax County School Board weren't paying enough attention to their infrastructure, likely because they regarded it as a distraction from the real job of educating students and running the system. 

As I used to say: "maintenance has no sex appeal".

(Wall) Maintenance Is Never Sexy

That goes for Trump's wall, as well. Among the items mentioned in the article are:

• Painting (Trump wants it black, not rust).
• Repairing sabotage--quite expensive because you need a crew and access to reweld.
• Maintaining roads for access and electronics. It's not clear to me what sort of electronics are involved and how durable they might be.
• Storm gates to allow storm water to flood arroyos. The gates have to be raised during storm season and monitored for people going underneath them.
• Undermined foundations.  Downpours can work to erode dirt from around the foundations,  leading to collapse.

The article says DHS isn't providing estimates on the maintenance costs.  It has a quote predicting in 20 years or so it will be a rusting relict in the desert. 

I can readily believe if and when we get immigration legislation and the situation in the Northern Triangle of Central America settles down Congress won't be eager to appropriate money for maintenance.  That fits with one lesson I learned in government--maintenance isn't sexy--it doesn't get management attention, you don't get medals for it, you don't get money or people to do it.  

Maintenance Isn't Sexy: USNavy

I see I've not set up a label for "maintenance", but I'm sure I've observed that it's an important and often overlooked issue.  What happens when you build a system, as we were building a software system in the mid-80's, is you can't keep building without adding more people/resources.  If you start with 10 people working on the new, once it gets deployed, you need 1 person to maintain the deployed software, leaving only 9 to build the next phase.  And so on.

Furthermore, maintenance is not sexy. You can't tell the people who are paying the bills they won't get anything for their money, just a continuance of the current service (maybe sneaking in a couple tweaks along the way).

The DC area Metro system has found this out.  They built a system starting in the mid-70's, but skimped on maintenance along the way.  Consequently last year and this service has been restricted on various sections so they could do catch-up maintenance.  People aren't happy about it.

Now it seems the USNavy is in the same boat.  GAO has surveyed their shipyards and produced a video of their major points.  An example, using 80+ year old equipment to service nuclear submarines, then discovering the furnace didn't heat the parts evenly, so they had to reinspect years worth of work.

I'm cynical today, so I'm sure Congress will continue to give DOD new weapons/things they don't ask for and fail to provide the money to fix the shipyards.  That will go until we lose a ship because of faulty repairs.  (Training is "maintenance" of your human equipment and lack of training is blamed for the recent collisions the Seventh Fleet has experienced .)