The Pentagon’s recipe for brownies is 26 pages long
reason.com
reason.com
One might similarly point and laugh at NASA specifications for hand tools used on the Apollo program. Yeah, a screwdriver is a screwdriver, but there's a world of difference between the $3 one you can pick up at Sears and one that's designed to be usable under extremely harsh and unusual conditions in space. Similarly, there's a world of difference between the pan of Duncan Hines brownies you might make when you want a chocolate fix, and a supply contract for millions of brownies that are going to go into MREs.
The thing is interesting because it provides a window into government procurement, which is something most people really don't understand, but it's not meant to be, and really isn't, humorous.
(That said, however, the spelling error in the title is pretty bad.)
If your contract doesn't say, "You can't put sawdust in the brownies," there will be a contractor who says, "What? You didn't say I couldn't."
You might laugh. You might suppose there's some common understanding of quality that everyone can deal with. Especially when it comes to brownies. To some degree, I'd agree: it's a defensive attempt to avoid problems encountered in the past, and maybe an overreaction.
The thing is, though, with weapons systems, the equivalent of putting sawdust in brownies happens all the time. The contractor doesn't live in Alaska, or on a carrier deck, where the thing will be deployed, and if the contract doesn't specifically mention cold or fungus or salt corrosion, it'll get overlooked. Worse, the contractor really has no experience in a combat zone, and has no idea what sort of abuse their equipment will undergo. The contract has to say.
The defensiveness comes partly from the fact that these systems get a single iteration. There's some back and forth during testing and verification, and there are always contracts for upgrades and improvements. But by and large, you really need things to work right the first time. Hence the heavy reliance on contracts and standards.
They're like an API telling the civilian contractor what's required in a battlefield environment. He really doesn't know things that soldiers consider obvious.
3.2 Ingredients. All ingredients shall be clean, sound, wholesome, and free from foreign material, evidence of rodent or insect infestation, extraneous material, off-odors, off-flavors, and off-colors.
3.2.1 Sugar. Sugar shall be white, refined, granulated, cane or beet sugar. Powdered sugar of equivalent quality may be substituted for part of the granulated sugar in the brownie formula to control spread.
3.2.2 Oatmeal. Oatmeal shall be the commercial product known as quick cooking oatmeal. It shall have natural rolled oat flavor and odor and shall be clean and free from burned particles, rancid, musty, sour, or other undesirable flavors and odors.
. . .
They factored out the "all ingredients" part of the standard.
You know, I'm sorry to admit, but I've written these things before. There's a real tradeoff to make there. On the one hand, there's a virtuous impulse to do as much factoring as you can so you don't have to write things twice--or heaven forbid, update them multiple times when they change. On the other hand, you then find yourself calling for MIL-STD-340985 sugar and MIL-STD-320598 flour and MIL-STD-24098 molasses with deviations allowed to items 4, 5, and 9 of paragraph 6 when using process B of MIL-STD-32409 Baking Instructions. And there's sort of a desire by users of the document not to need to have twenty books open at once just to figure out if they can use this flour or not.
Writing this sort of thing well is a lot harder than you would think.
Edit: Upon reflection, there's a real parallel between that and walking the fine line between copypasta code and spaghetti abstraction.
Or more broadly, what would allow the DoD to cancel that contract in the first place in that example, if the specs didn't say they had to be free of the stuff?
In other words...in large institutions, nothing is very efficient.
Give a simple brownie recipe to enough people and one them will burn down the house because you never specifically said to turn off the oven when done baking.
There is a common organizational failure mode where new instructions are added whenever anyone messes up, ignoring the fact that the complexity of the instructions is leading to lots of mistakes.
You're confusing quality/policy issues in corporations with inter-entity contracts between an easy to cheat organization (the military) with a group of people who have a history of cheating (the military contractors).
It'd be nice if our system of interpreted case law were turned into some form of checklists and procedures; then we wouldn't need lawyers.
That is to say, the one "contract" that affects every man, woman and child—federal law—has been screwed up in exactly this way, by providing so much of it that no one has any idea what it says without years of study. There is a difference between clarity and verbosity.
Sure you would, they'd just look a lot more like programmers.
But the unintended consequence is that the complexity of demonstrating that you are not cheating the military creates enough overhead to make profits easy to hide. Furthermore the overhead is enough to make it unprofitable to be a military contractor unless you are actively exploiting ways to squeeze the system.
He may have just been justifying his own behavior, but I don't think so.
It's not uncommon to find documents like this is government. Everything must be explicit so that there is little room for assumptions (I guess that's why it's called a specification). If you have a question about something, you refer to the spec. It also ensures that each brownie produced meets a certain quality standard, and that contractors producing the brownie know exactly how to produce them.