There were two basic problems. First, the documentation was not timely; it was generally written during or after the development cycle. In these times of severe competition for resources, requirements documents justifying a program must precede development to ensure the proper commitment of resources to the Marine Corps’ R&D effort. The Marine Corps needed to put new equipment into the field as quickly as possible, but found this goal difficult because an extensive amount of time was being spent in the TSOR-to-SOR [Tentative Specific Operations Requirement / Specific Operational Requirement] documentation cycle. Second, there was considerable inefficiency associated with this materiel requirements documentation system…
The project officer, usually without detailed technical knowledge himself, had to develop required item characteristics without a factual basis and put them into a document. Where did he get the characteristics? You guessed it—from a fertile and sometimes overactive imagination! The result was a project that could not be substantiated, that was generally doomed to failure, and that took everyone concerned with its progress an inordinate amount of time to determine that it wouldn’t work…
If a project officer at the lowest level, usually a major or lieutenant colonel at the Development Center, prepared a document, it had to be processed through the Fleet Marine Forces, the entire Development Center, and then sent to HQMC. There, staffing involved getting approval from every staff section that might have any interest in the requirement, no matter how remote. For example, if a document for a new individual ground weapon was being processed, not only did it go to the ground staff sections, but also to the air staff. If the “duty expert” in a particular staff section was away for a month or so, the document sat and awaited his return… For anyone else to “take up the slack” would be almost unthinkable in a bureaucratic system.
That was from Major J.M. Lutton’s “Why Document Material Requirements?” from 1975, found in Marine Corps Gazette (pre-1994); Oct 1975; 59, 10.
I don’t believe that the amount of formal coordination required throughout the bureaucracy has changed much since 1975. And 1975 was just a few years after the Laird/Packard reforms had supposedly streamlined acquisition from the McNamara years.
The layering of bureaucratic approval is harmful not only because there is a chance that any one of them will veto the requirement (e.g., if each official has only a 5% chance of veto, then it’ll only take 20 “layers” before the requirement is as good as dead, on average), but also because there is an even greater chance that the official would rather not be an obstruction and prefer instead to extract concessions, such as changes or new requirements, in order for them to contribute creativity or exercise oversight.
Today, rather than reform the requirements process — or even more radically, proposing some “technology-push” approaches — rather than that there are authorities to skirt around the thing, such as Urgent Operational Needs (UONS) and rapid acquisition authorities. Still, these proceed from a requirement, it just didn’t have to go through the JCIDS process.
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