At the Air Force “Spark Tank” innovation award — presumably titled after CNBC’s Shark Tank show — Mark Cuban asks a young innovative airman why anyone would build an overly expensive system. The airman responds “Welcome to the military.” After a good bit of laughter, the Secretary of the Air Force stands up, walks over to the airman, and hugs him!
A bit later on, the airman clarified what the “boots on the ground” want: “we want mechanical, we want reliability, and we want simplicity.” He got a good bit of applause for that.
See the video and some commentary via Tyler Rogoway. (HT: John T.)
Sure, the airman’s response to Mark Cuban was pretty funny. Cynicism can be funny. But “Welcome to the military” did not exactly provide Mark Cuban any context to understand what is going wrong. In fact, its pretty damning upon the system that Mark Cuban, a successful entrepreneur and generally smart guy, seems to have no clue about what’s going wrong. How can you convince the public sphere to support a reform when it can’t be explained to an actively engaged businessman?
Is the problem contract regulations? Or the layering of bureaucratic hierarchies? Or proliferation of activities around Defense Acquisition Board meetings? Or the slow moving requirements process? Or interference from the Congress? Or a risk averse culture? Or budget justifications? Or short tenures for program managers? Or is it the MILSPECs? Or the revolving door? Or funding instability/sequestration? Or poor oversight of test and evaluation? etc.
For the past 70 or more years, there have been Task Forces, Blue Ribbon Committees, Reform Panels, and so forth. They always seem to come out with many hundreds of recommendations. The Commission of Government Procurement provided 113 recommendations in 1972. Here’s Packard responding to that:
Here is a brief summary of where we are on this report. There were 113 recommendations. Forty-eight have been accepted and implemented. On thirty-three more recommendations, I believe that the actions we have taken are completely consistent with the objectives of the Panel though we may differ on details and procedures. Only eleven of the recommendations have been rejected against eight-one implemented. Twenty-one are still under consideration.
And the same thing happens today. The Section 809 Panel has 98 recommendations, and the Defense Innovation Board has a further 16. How is a vast organization supposed to organize and move towards hundreds of things? Of course, the acquisition system is complex, but it creates a huge barrier to entry for any smart individual trying to figure out what really matters. If you could tackle one thing, what is it?
The airman should have had access to a nice, simple, one-liner that gets at the problem. Now, most experts would probably say: “acquisition policy is sound, but our workforce is poorly trained and lacks the incentives.” That is what came out of a 2014 compendium of expert views submitted to the Congress.
Now, I think they got it wrong because they emphasize getting workers to do what “the Hand” writes as policy (as though they were pieces on a chessboard), rather than emphasizing the aspirations of the workers themselves. What is their career path, how they can contribute to policy, what is their authority and responsibility, what freedoms do they have?
Culture is obviously important, but what stands in the way of a more productive culture? Certainly it has to be the expression of deviant opinions, the ability for different perspectives to not only have a voice, but to follow through on that perspective (innovation) provided proper testing and evaluation after-the-fact.
So then, what is the most important factor in suppressing ideas that do not conform to the orthodoxy? What stops defense officials from creating a diversity of weapons R&D projects which provides a hedge against the uncertain growth of technology, or the uncertain combat contingencies of the future?
I’ll just jump to the conclusion: all the hoops you have to jump through are ultimately to line up funding. It requires getting the approval of over 50 offices, each of which has in effect a veto, and extracts concessions. It means that only fully justified projects with articulated information that accords to the layman’s “common sense” can be approved. It leads to “safe” proposals interspersed with “unsafe” fantasies. Yet in the market economy, it has been obvious that many of the most important innovations were those that no group of 10 people could agree on. Here’s former Boeing VP George Scharier:
Anything that the majority agrees to probably is wrong for tomorrow. It is right for today, but probably not right for tomorrow. I wonder about such wild ideas as you would ever fly an airplane with a jet engine or have an atomic bomb or radar, or many of the great things we base our defense upon. At the time they were initiated, certainly any group of 10 people you could have get 10 together, presumably knowledgeable, would probably have voted them all down.
If funding was made available not by project outcome — which has to be agreed upon by many layers of bureaucracy — if funding was instead made available to the Technology Labs and Program Executive Offices actually doing the work, and allow them to make incremental project decisions without fully articulated plans, then we can side-step all these acquisition problems. Give them a budget, let them optimize within that budget, and force them to show what they have done and evaluate their decisions after-the-fact.
Budgets are a forward looking plan, and if you put them in terms of projects, then you’re in effect locking in the future based on information that was only available in the past. Now that’s unwise if you expect a reasonable amount of uncertainty.
OK, so what’s the simple one-liner that the airman could have said to Mark Cuban? What can we put on a picket and march around with? I don’t know. But here’s one attempt:
Bad ideas are pursued because you cannot find 100 bureaucrats to agree on a good idea!
Here are some other picket signs:
Hold me accountable for what I do, not what you think I should do!
Evaluate people, not projects!
Save the force, kill the program budget!
Manage weapons risk; diversify your funds!
None of these one-liners are probably the one. But there needs to be a slogan that gets to the heart of the matter, and that the acquisition community can focus its efforts on. When smart and engaged insiders can’t describe the problem within 5 minutes, which can then get boiled down into one line, then how can you expect Congress, business, or the public to get involved?
Ultimately, the suppression of any kind of competitive project has the aura of “scientific management” because you are eliminating duplication and “optimizing” the portfolio. Similarly, the suppression of real-options let’s you measure performance only by locking in long-range plans. But the suppression of non-consensual ideas about alternatives and their costs is by far the biggest problem in defense acquisition, and the program budget is by far the biggest obstacle to starting a non-consensual project.
In the private sector, you only need to get one investor to believe in your project to receive funding. In weapon systems acquisition, you’d need literally hundreds to approve it, and hundreds more to approve changes to it. Sometimes, by the time you get approval through all the layers, the entirety of defense leadership has changed over, starting the process all over again.
I’ll leave you with a quote from Peck and Scherer’s 1962 classic, The Weapons Acquisition Process:
When technological uncertainty is substantial, it may be desirable to base weapons program decisions on something resembling interpersonal confidence rather than, or as well as, on objective analysis. The history of technology is replete with examples of innovations which were supported, not because the logic behind the idea was overwhelming, but because someone with funds believed in someone with an idea.
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