Decision Making

It would have been the summer of 1987. I was a Lieutenant in the U.S. Navy and responsible for testing an upgrade to the mid-course guidance unit of the Tomahawk Anti-Ship Missile (TASM). The testing included a live test where the missile would be flown in moderate proximity to a manned helicopter.

As there was some risk of flying the TASM in proximity to the manned helicopter, I brought in expertise from Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (APL) to quantify the risk. The engineers from APL developed a report which stated that the risk was low. Five flight control systems which had never individually failed in flight had to fail, and had to fail in a specific sequence in order for the manned helicopter to be at risk. They calculated the risk of the TASM impacting the manned helicopter as: .00000000000000000000000225. That is a really, really small number. A safe number. Or, so I thought.

The following week there was a Mission Readiness Review (MRR) scheduled at Naval Air Station Point Mugu. The MRR serves as the venue in which all participants verify (or not) their readiness to support the mission: in my case the flight test of the TASM mid-course guidance unit.

This is where things went very wrong. The first presenter was the Range Safety Officer, a Navy Lieutenant Commander. He took his position at the head of the table and read from his notes, “The mission is inherently unsafe…”

Anything he said after that was irrelevant. A down-check by the Range Safety Officer killed the mission.

This week the House and Senate versions of the Stimulus bill were widely released. I slogged through the 778 pages of the Senate version last evening: it is not an easy read. Why is that? Why is something so fundamentally important (or, so we are told) so lengthy, so complex and so difficult to read? Could it be intentional? Could there be an intentional effort to make the mortgaging of our collective future too complex to readily comprehend to make its passage easier? Not the bread of post-partisanship.

Absent from the discussion has been meaningful analysis from the main stream media.

Liberal-leaning outlets (MSNBC, CNBC, CNN, CBS and ABC) have largely limited their discussions to Republican efforts to derail the effort. I have heard not a single word from the liberal-leaning outlets regarding the negative impacts of the plan. Negative comments have been saved to criticisms of Limbaugh (who correctly calls for its failure) and Bush (for allowing it to happen).

Conservative-leaning outlets (Fox) have done a decent job of discussing the negative impacts of the Plan but have failed to adequately address the positive aspects.

Both the liberal and conservative media have failed to serve the general public with unbiased reviews, explanations and discussions of the Plan.

In my experience with the TASM test, someone made a bad decision based on accurate detailed information. In the case of the Stimulus bill, the Nation is in the process of making a bad decision based on incomplete information.

Bottom line: Last evening a liberal friend of mine said, “Socialized medicine is coming: get over it.” Quite so.