Pournelle’s Law of Bureaucracy

“In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.”

Here’s the wikpedia entry on Mr Pournelle. According to the entry, he describes his politics as “slightly to the right of Genghis Khan.”

“Pournelle opposed both Gulf Wars, maintaining that the money would be better spent developing energy technologies for the United States. He is quoted as saying “with what we spent in Iraq we could build nuclear power plants and space solar power satellites and tell the Arabs to drink their oil.”

Presumably Mr Pournelle would deploy his Iron Law at this point to show that a National Security Infrastructure (aka Military Industrial Complex) is more interested in testing out its new toys and creating justifications for newer toys than in actually, erm, ensuring National Security via energy independence etc.

As Kurt Vonnegut used to say, “so it goes.”