I find the bit about no English manuals hard to believe...so I will hold off on the "way to go morons!" comment; for a bit.
Buy flat-pack furniture from a well-known Scandinavian chain store and you can be sure the instructions will be in English.
But spend hundreds of millions on European-built torpedoes for your navy, and apparently that is not the case.
Australia's defence procurement agency has tendered for someone to translate the highly classified instructions for a new torpedo, revealing that the technical documents that come with the weapon are written in Italian and French.
In May, the Australian National Audit Office said the project would not deliver what was originally specified, was behind schedule and was sloppily administered.
The auditor found that the procurement agency, the Defence Materiel Organisation, approved the torpedo under the belief that it was a proven weapon, already in use by other navies, rather than a developmental one. It took five years for the DMO to discover otherwise.
''At the time, Defence advised the Government that it had misunderstood the French and Italian acceptance processes,'' the auditor said.
Defence has said that it will pay no more than $110,100 for the translation service, but it will cover the cost of flights and accommodation.
I am sure someone brought up the idea of, "Why don't we teach all our torpedo operators/maintainers French?"
.
2 comments:
I would not have expected more. Do not tell that with over 7,500 employees DMO got it wrong again?
We need to be careful not to raise the bar too high, our expectations, based on recent performance, of the DMO & Defence in general may ultimately give cause to dissapoint!
Post a Comment