“It is a good thing that we are a rich country, because poorer countries just could not afford to waste this kind of money,” the undersecretary of Defense for research and engineering said here last night. “For the two-and-a-half years I have remaining as a political appointee in this job, I will be asking you, at every chance I get, to look at what we’re doing and find ways to either eliminate it or shortcut it, because most of what you’re doing, by definition, is not value added.
“And that sounds harsh,” Griffin continued, “but the Chinese are testing (every few) months, and we’re testing (every few) years. They are not inherently brighter or more skilled, nor do they work harder than we do, (but) they are not doing a lot of things that just do not need to be done. They are not consulting a lot of people who just plain do not need to be consulted.” The audience burst into rueful laughter.
“I’m a guy who burned up his own rocket engine in a test firing one time,” Griffin said. “I once crashed six computers all linked together driving a major flight simulator (because I) committed a software error in assembly language…. That was embarrassing.” But, he added, he fixed the problem and ultimately delivered the simulator on time.
“I cannot remember a single time when I ever did something right the first time,” Griffin said. (Well, he added, there was one piece of software he wrote that executed correctly the first time around, but that was so unusual he freaked out and spent more time double-checking than he would have if he’d actually found a bug.) So, he said, “I have yet ever to penalize anyone working for me for the first mistake. Now if you do the same dumb thing twice….” The room erupted in laughter.
“We’ve got to be willing to trust our juniors, to push decisions down on them and let them do it,” he said, “eliminating people from the decision loop (and) eliminating steps from the process.”
That was Sydney Freedberg reporting back in August 2018.
I liked USD(R&E) Griffin’s point there that because the US is so wealthy, it can afford to make acquisition mistakes for decades on end without a change of course. This is a very similar point to what Allen Schick wrote about the Planning-Programming-Budgeting System, also called the performance budget, or simply the program budget. He was an early critic of the PPBS back in the 1960s, and in 2014 he reflected on the adoption of the PPB System across countries. He found that the PPB was costly to implement, so only the best organized bureaucracies could administer it, yet it did not provide noticeable benefits.
Without exception, performance-based reforms can be effective only in well-managed governments which have low corruption, elevated levels of public trust, highly-skilled and well-motivated public employees, reasonably efficient and accessible public services, attentive media and groups, and the freedom of citizens to communicate their concerns to government…
This is why early adopters of performance-type budgeting were among the best managed countries in the world. They were ready for PB; others were not…
Given large investments in measuring performance and collecting relevant data, why hasn’t the expectation that better informed governments will make more effective use of public money been realised? Why is evidence on results often shunted aside in allocating scarce resources? The simple answer to these questions is summed up in the aphorism, “information is not transformation.”
Schick believed that organizations operated effectively under incremental budgets classified by organization and object of expenditure. It seems ironic that the US is so efficient that it can shoulder the burden of bad ideas that it convinces itself are good, while others abandon it for a more practical method that aligns better with market principles of incrementalism.
I believe these two issues are related. Michael Griffin is talking about rapid and competitive developments. The PPBS is this big lumbering system where project plans need to be articulated two years in advance of appropriation, which when locks in the expenditures which may result several years later. Most often, management requires the elimination of competitive programs into development.
Imagine someone in China or Russia went up to their military leadership and said, “I’ll need $50 billion (in our currency) for R&D and another $300 billion for procurement of a fighter aircraft.” The boss may respond, “have you built one yet?” To which the response would be, “kind of, but not representative of the production model at all, but trust me, we understand the risks of this ambitious project that requires more R&D than two Manhattan projects.” And the boss might then say, “Let’s do this thing one step at a time, I’ll cover your start-up costs but to get a larger commitment you got to prove you’re making more progress than the other guy who’s plan we’re also funding.”
Only wealthy nations can operate by a rigid system of prediction and control like the PPBS. The incrementalism of traditional budgeting actually allows for competition and the option to change direction rather quickly.
This also reminds me of Adam Smith’s point from the Wealth of Nations in 1776. He observed the positive correlation between national wealth and the size of its government. People then suspected that bigger governments made nations more wealthy. Smith, however, correctly recognized that wealthier nations based on a liberal market order are better able to burden a larger government.
Back to USD(R&E) Michael Griffin, I recently saw this article in the Daily Beast with a disagreeable title:
The Pentagon’s Technology Chief Is an Utter F*cking Fool: If you spout the right shibboleths, you can rise high in the ranks of the defense establishment despite being dangerously ignorant. Michael Griffin, case study.
Sarcastically, the article wrote how “Michael Griffin is the first person to consider that war exists at the intersection of people and technology.” And it went on with this bit:
Griffin’s zipless Pentagon procurement process is a complete chimera. In practice, it’s just another way to more efficiently redistribute wealth to the big defense companies like the one that the current acting Pentagon chief used to run. Griffin talks about his vision for the Space Force in similar terms: “build[ing] out the next-generation space deterrence order of battle, leveraging U.S. commercial capabilities, on rapid timelines and at reduced cost.” That’s more gobbledygook that sounds fantastic to the boardrooms of Lockheed, Boeing and the legislators they bankroll. It helps that Griffin calls it “disruptive.”
I found the whole article from Spencer Ackerman confusing and unhelpful.
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