Conversations over several years with practicioners, academics, consultants and postgraduate students researching DA [defense acquisition] issues tended to reinforce the impression that there was weak, but nonetheless real and expanding, disgruntlement with DA’s inability to provide an account of how it worked and a justification as to why…
The dominant DA discourse about which the various DA actors were expressing concern was characterized by strong claims around the ability of competition to deliver endless progress, and by implication, notions that if large, ongoing improvements were not being made, it was the actors at fault, not the competitive market model itself. This discourse acknowledged… no critical appraisal [of competition].
Rather, all that was needed, was for an ever greater application and effort to be made toward implementing the present course and all DA’s enduring problems would eventually be resolved.
That was from an enticing book from 2017 called Emerging Strategies in Defense Acquisitions and Military Procurement. Even though it is 164 bucks, I’m considering the investment.
These points are what I was trying to get at in the intro of my history paper. Policy-makers seem to have a consensus on acquisition best practices, leading to the need for “improvement” rather than “reform.” So when 31 experts testified to Congress on acquisition in 2014, the most cited issue was the training and incentives of the workforce.
It isn’t surprising that the workforce looks back to its leaders with bewilderment. After several years of dedicated research, I am still bewildered.
Here are the editors again:
Based on our analysis, the apparent lack of progress towards a unified DA theory is due to the present body of DA knowledge being so complex and highly fragmented it has defied being drawn into a coherent, holistic theory… The core assumption behind this book is that no comprehensive DA theory as yet exists and there is a need to understand why this is so…
What follows in this book is not intended to solve the theory development in DA, poor or otherwise, but is an effort to open up discussion about the current limitations… The first step in such a process involves breaking out of the imprisoning frame of ideas which have to date compelled DA to operate in specific ways.
That is a good perspective to take.
Complex institutions like defense acquisition have built into them a tremendous amount of knowledge, far more than any individual who studies it. When thinking about acquisition reform, we must act very carefully.
Like in the complex natural eco-systems, the first principle is to assume that every existing part has been introduced for a good reason. Forester Aldo Leopold said:
If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.
Perhaps we don’t like today’s Defense Acquisition System. It is after our own making, unlike the ecosystem. But still a cautionary principle applies. Even Robert McNamara had more than a decade of precedence before his “sharp” pivot of the DOD in 1961.
It sounds like another expression of the cognitive principle of Chesterton’s Fence. Which is basically, if you come across a fence in the forest, and you have no idea why it is there, don’t remove it, because someone built it for a reason. If you can figure out why it was built, then determine that this need no longer applies, THEN maybe remove it. Check it out!
Cool reference thanks for sharing!