Conversations over several years tended to reinforce the impression that there was weak, but nonetheless real and expanding, disgruntlement with Defense Acquisition’s inability to provide an account of how it worked and a justification as to why…
“We are going to invert that approach and take a clean sheet of paper and write the absolute bare minimum to be compliant in 5000.02, […]
Parenthetically we may note that CPFF contracts might be used more effectively than they have been in R&D work. Rather than concentrating on the final […]
If PMs indeed can have little influence over program outcomes, it is unreasonable to hold them fully accountable for those outcomes; however, this opposes NPM’s approach that has guided defense acquisition for more than two decades.
Victor Deal talks with me on the role of contracting, how the price of a screw can be worth the tank it goes on, the […]
Never underestimate the impact of the program budget process.
What I mean by bourgeois equality is equality before the law, that’s essential, but it’s not sufficient, because exactly as you say, you need equality […]
Thus, contracting authority is fragmented. The project officer is responsible for the success of the project, while the contract officer is the legal representative of […]
The LCS modules, private contractors, Murphy’s Law in the Pentagon, Israel’s defense industry, Trumps executive order 12771, JEDI cloud, and the F-22.
“Wicked problems” are problems that don’t just sit there and let you work on them. A tame problem is like an engineering problem or like […]
Here is Navy Matters on single vs. multi function system design: So many people want to cram every capability they can think of onto every […]
First, were you aware that the Pentagon even had an Office of Defense Industrial Policy? It sounds suspiciously like the kind of government organization that engages in economic planning, a practice anathema not just to Republicans but to many Democrats as well.
Other tech industry executives pushed back against the idea that Silicon Valley workers are less inclined to work with the Defense Department solely because of cultural differences or qualms about the moral implications. “It’s much more an economics issue,” said Rachel Olney, “Dealing with the U.S. government is extremely time consuming.”
In 1969 John Kenneth Galbraith penned a piece for the New York Times titled The Big Defense Firms Are Really Public Firms and Should be Nationalized arguing, among other things, that it was folly for defense contractors to claim that they were private corporations.
Do you think that the distinction between growth at the frontier and catch up growth is always so well defined? So if you think about China, they seem to have innovations: how quickly they can build things; they have an autocratic government, but they’ve managed to keep reasonable stability and the public on board. Isn’t that kind of innovation like a technological innovation and their growth in a way is at some other frontier rather than being just catch up?
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