While these issues exist, we should look to the countries that have successfully overcome them and shamelessly copy their successful strategies.
The US government already does really well at training people for the military, both leaders and fresh high school grads.
Personally, I think we need to stop passing 2000+ bills into law and instead give our technocrats some high level requirements that they can figure out themselves (hopefully in more of an agile than waterfall way). Assigning a technical person micromanaged requirements written by politicians and lobbyist lawyers will never be an appealing or successful formula.
Perhaps. So what countries overcame these issues by training new people and not addressing the internal systemic issues that lead to the drain or burnout of skilled workers?
How does training of new people address the established culture that encourages hitting milestones (internal) but not achieving the overall mission? How does training of new people address the fundamental problem of developing and testing using 3-20 separate networks with data sharing consisting of bobnet (sneakernet but Bob is the only one authorized to move data between systems)? How does training of new people prevent poaching by contractors or private companies paying 2-3x the salary? How does training of new people fix the problem of inexperienced (training isn't experience) novices running acquisition programs and getting bullied by contractors?
The fundamental model of IT acquisition and software development within the US government is broken. Training the next generation isn't enough, and universities already do that well enough. You have to break the existing system.
Yeah, my comment wasn't geared towards fixing those downstream issues before fixing the upstream ones. I'm not arguing "pay the existing employees more and expect output to magically change".
When I said we should look at successful country strategies, I expect those strategies will include things like "don't let legislators and lobbyists be apart of contract details -- only high level requirements" and "outlaw the bribery that you call donating to a legislator's political campaign". Perhaps even change the government worker model to encourage small enterprises within existing government (like USDS, 18F, etc) and empower them to help earlier in the design process -- like during requirements gathering.
The US government already does really well at training people for the military, both leaders and fresh high school grads.
Personally, I think we need to stop passing 2000+ bills into law and instead give our technocrats some high level requirements that they can figure out themselves (hopefully in more of an agile than waterfall way). Assigning a technical person micromanaged requirements written by politicians and lobbyist lawyers will never be an appealing or successful formula.