There are a lot of exceptionally competent software professionals in the DoD. I meet them regularly in my training classes and continue to be impressed by their conscientious attention to the mission and their desire to do the best possible job. They also work hard to improve their technical knowledge. I suspect that some of them work harder at it than many in the civilian sector simply because they realize that non-military people continue to underestimate them. Moreover, it was a group of civilians, most of whom have no experience in uniform, who produced the wrong-headed NRC report from which this decision derives. The authors of the NRC report, technically superior to me in every sense, failed to understand the larger issues of Ada vis a vis the Department of Defense. Mr. Paige responded as he did for reasons I do not fully understand, but I do know something about the management process and the politics of large organizations. Now we have to live with this unfortunate set of circumstances. The issue with the Ada mandate is far more complicated that the level of technical competence of our uniformed personnnel. It is, as many things are, political not technical. The fact is that the DoD management, from the top down, could not figure out how to manage the single-language policy. I continue to believe that it was a correct policy. The failure of Ada policy is not a failure of Ada, nor is it a reflection on the intelligence or software knowledge of the participants in its management. It is, rather, a management failure. It is the realization that this was a management failure that I find most troubling. If the professional managers in the DoD could not manage something as simple as a single-language policy, how can we imagine they will be able to manage a more complicated, multiple-language policy? And these professional managers are some of the brightest, most dedicated people I know. Yet the single-language policy was beyond their ability to manage. Perhaps software policy, by its very nature, defies any attempt at conforming to a coherent set of management policies. Perhaps we are so skilled in the technical issues related to software that we are unable to rise to the challenge of the management issues. Whatever else we might say about Ada, we do know that Ada has proven that it can do the job in every application domain for which it has been used. We know that, as a technology, Ada does work. This being the case, what other reason can we possible propose for our failure to make Ada policy work? Richard [log in to unmask] AdaWorks Software Engineering Suite 30 2555 Park Boulevard Palo Alto, CA 94306 (415) 328-1815 FAX 328-1112