Mike Petters
Analyst · Melius Research. Your line is open
Sure. So I think as we – as you’re reading in the papers all the time, I think there was authorization for some relief for COVID impact that legislatively that the Pentagon has authorization for, but it was never funded. And so there is a debate right now about, how do you get that funded? And that speaks to stuff that you could say was 100% related to the virus, the – whether it was new cleaning stations or quarantines or things like that. What’s behind that, though, is any sort of follow-on delay in disruption. Our customers have told us that they want to cover that. They want to find a way to cover that. It’s not really clear to us right now how that’s going to play itself out. There’s legislative work going on. There’s work with the customer going on. But our basic assumption for our report today is that while we think that there’s a possibility that could happen, and we’re pursuing all the angles, our basic assumption is we’re assuming that’s not in the numbers yet. And so that’s definitely an effect for us. Secondly, Carter, you know us pretty well. Whenever something doesn’t quite go right, our first inclination is to say, hey, that’s on us. We didn’t manage that right. We didn’t have the right qualified person or we didn’t have the right instruction. I mean, getting the quality and the qualified person and the sequence right and getting the instruction right, we start in with a very clear eye view, say, hey, look, that’s on us. We did not get that. That inefficiency was our issue. And we had some of that here in this quarter. But you don’t have to scratch very far behind those things. And we have those every quarter, but you don’t have to scratch very far behind those things that either there was a direct or indirect or direct impact of COVID or an indirect impact of COVID or we just don’t have the degrees of freedom that we need to be able to recover from that inefficiency because of COVID. And so the challenge is we can isolate costs in our business that are 100% COVID related, but when you move to the rest of it and say, we have inefficiencies in the program performance, to try to separate out how much of that is, this is because we didn’t have the right person at the right time, and this is because we had impact from virus, it becomes really hard to separate all of that. And that’s why we reported it the way we did.