The following is a romantic tale involving Chipper, the triple dipper and Katy, the sailor and the United States Army that keeps us safe 'over there' so we do not have to fight 'them' over here.

The United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) is a federal agency and a major Army command made up of some 34,600 civilian and 650 military personnel,[1] making it the world's largest public engineering, design and construction management agency. Although generally associated with dams, canals and flood protection in the United States, USACE is involved in a wide range of public works support to the nation and the Department of Defense throughout the world. wiki

The U.S. Army Materiel Command (AMC) is the Army's premier provider of materiel readiness - technology, acquisition support, materiel development, logistics power projection, and sustainment - to the total force, across the spectrum of joint military operations...AMC operates the research, development and engineering centers; Army Research Laboratory; depots;arsenals; ammunition plants; and other facilities, and maintains the Army's prepositioned stocks, both on land and afloat.

The U.S. Army Enterprise Solutions Competency Center first began as an Enterprise Resource Planning Special Projects Office (ERP SPO) in December 2004. Mr. Ed Thomas, then the Director of the Software Engineering Center, Communications Electronics Command at Fort Monmouth, had the original idea to build an Army capability to support the implementation of ERP. http://escc.army.mil/History/index.htm

Okay. The Army owns a competency center and it evidently has nothing to do with personnel decisions. It has something to do with outsourcing because in its advertising blog it talks about ...the Army's recent trend toward adopting ERP, a Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) product. It also has something to do with ... three core mission areas -- Technical Consulting, Enterprise Battle Lab, and Education and Training -- covering eight practice areas.

The ESCC is located in the Software Engineering Center at Fort Belvoir, Virginia (SEC-B) under supervision of Mr. Chip Raymond. SEC-B has been commanded by COL Thomas Loper since the fall of 2006.

So it looks like we are dealing with an army program having something to do with software that hands out billions of dollars to private corporations. And of course Chipper is one of those triple dippers.  He is retired from the regular army so he receives a pension and has done so for 20 years--he is now 61. But he works for the civilian army corps now so he gets a good paycheck and he is building up his second retirement pool.

Chipper at 61 years of age was probably getting a little bored with the job, the army lingo and his wife and children.

Katy Campbell, a 47 year old was also looking for something different.... had landed a new job a few months earlier at a Northern Virginia technology contractor called Enterprise Integration Inc., and was quickly promoted from office manager to "corporate liaison."

Hours after a mutual friend introduced them, Raymond and Campbell joined others on a rented 30-foot sailboat, an outing that launched their relationship. "She was not a sailor," Raymond would say later, "but she became one."

Ah, La Mer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fd_nopTFuZA

And yes she was not a money maker for her company, but soon she would become one. A heartfelt relationship soon developed between the two. And her company... was soon awarded a six-month, no-bid contract to support Raymond's center, which came to be known as the Enterprise Solutions Competency Center. In the end, the contract was worth almost $600,000. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/06/AR2009080603918_3.html?hpid=topnews&sid=ST2009080700067

Campbell's work included networking throughout the Army -- sometimes at conference booths -- and producing publications and educational material for Raymond's center. She and Raymond met regularly at EII's Alexandria offices for lunch. For exercise, they made a ritual of walking through the woodsy, rolling hills around the Fort Belvoir golf course. They also continued sailing together on the weekends, plying the Chesapeake Bay on a 40-foot Catalina 400 sailboat called Sea Eagle.

Oh and emails ensued. She called him bubba and he called her princess.

"Why are you awake at 0100?" she asked in an e-mail.

"Been waiting for your e-mails. You fell off the earth. Busy day??"

"You need to stop being cranky and get some sleep."

"You're being mean to me," he said. "Phooey."

"Eyes only . . . this is the breakout," he wrote at the top of the e-mail.

"Danke," she responded. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyCQ6vKqgnU

Walking and roaming through the pretend environment created by some government paid golf architect, having lunches and sailing on La Mer. And over the next four years, the relationship grew until, somehow, Sailin' Katey had procured 190 million in government contracts.

"Nobody ever pointed out that what I was doing was wrong," Raymond told The Post. "I was never counseled."  http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheat-sheet/?cid=hp:cheatsheet5#cheatrow_8215

The close ties were typical, Raymond said, in part because of the overhaul of the procurement system more than a decade ago. The ambitious plan was intended to encourage agencies to operate in a more entrepreneurial way in order to reap a windfall from the "peace dividend" after the Cold War. The reforms included massive cuts to the Pentagon's procurement workforce and a far greater reliance on private contractors. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/06/AR2009080603918_3.html?hpid=topnews&sid=ST2009080700067

This Washpo article is such a fun read. No kidding. An investigator will all of a sudden opine that there is at least an appearance of impropriety. Chipper Bubba cannot for the life of him figure out what all the hub bub is about.

And why should he when a Secretary of Defense handed on contractor 7 million bucks for an advertisement and three years later became its CEO amd subsequently saw to it that his own company received tens of BILLIONS of dollars in no bid contracts or contracts so 'fixed' it could never lose in the bidding process. And of course I am speaking of the war criminal Dick Cheney.