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If you're one of the umpteen US generals who lied to the public and the politicians about winning the war in Afghanistan, making progress and so on, then you ought to be punished. There's already a problem of there being too many suck-ups in the military, there are only so many slots open to become a general so they have to please all of their superiors. But the way to fix this isn't to make the system even more uncompetitive and stratified. We need to open up more new posts, appoint people who get results. Real-world success should be rewarded and failure punished. If we don't get rid of the old guard who lose wars to illiterate goatherders with 1/1000 of our resources, how can we expect to win wars against strong opponents?
These people and systems are not functioning at anything near peak performance. It is possible to win wars against opponents you massively outclass, though this might be a novel concept to the average NATO commander. Or even if we can't reach a vaguely decent level of performance, could we aim for 'dignified exit within a year of realizing we can't achieve our political goals' as opposed to 'subsidizing a pedophile-run army and funding corrupt Afghan officials for hundreds of billions in the vain hope something will change and we'll suddenly achieve our goals'?
People obey incentives. If we don't provide a serious negative incentive for global failures like 'losing the war', they'll simply optimize for avoiding local failures like 'bad press coverage' or 'falling behind schedule' or 'looking bad to my superiors'. But these local failures are there precisely to avoid global failures. The whole point of press coverage and oversight is to correct mistakes rather than letting them get entrenched. Only a severe punishment for global failure can get people to acknowledge local failure. If admirals and top brass knew they'd face serious punishment if their warships crash into civilian freighters (and kill seven sailors in the case of the USS Fitzgerald), they'd take the time to train them better and maintain their fleet properly rather than accept every political request to do missions and run themselves ragged.
If we don't punish the gain-of-function researchers who unleashed this catastrophic disaster, they will do it again and again. We already obliterate the careers of geniuses who have sex in the workplace. And then we wonder why fertility rates are falling... If we're going to punish people, it should be for some kind of actual failure.
I'd be very happy to see a world where there wasn't a single gain-of-function researcher, we should be moving towards that scenario at great speed. Militaries do need generals - but there's a lot of competition to become a general. There are plenty of aspiring officers.
On the other hand, if you save the govt 500K or 1M through some method, you should get a large bonus for your work.
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