The Defense Department was never intended to innovate?

Innovation leaders often cite Eastman-Kodak as an example of an enterprise that was too dim-witted to see the writing on the wall and so fell from its lofty perch. But Kodak’s executives weren’t ignorant. They knew technology was changing and in fact invested billions of dollars in digitization. Kodak’s fatal problem was an inflexible organization that couldn’t adapt quickly enough to forces outside of its control.

 

Similarly, the Defense Department was never intended to innovate—in fact quite the opposite. It is a hierarchy. Safe and reassuring, fulfilling deeply rooted human needs for order, hierarchies are great at promoting standardization by reducing the transaction costs of information. But since they exist to impose conformity, they work precisely to prevent innovation. 

 

Despite repeated paeans to disruption, actual innovation in the national security sector is typically either smothered by bureaucratic antibodies or so detached from actual governance processes that it produces little aside from good press. Although many of the participants in the “innovation ecosystem” are smart, creative thinkers, their organizations are generally disconnected islands with little accountability or rigor, almost wholly removed from acquisition, planning, and budget execution…

 

But innovation can’t be commanded. It can only be encouraged and enabled… Ultimately, my seminar in Silicon Valley reminded me of what Clemenceau said of war and generals: innovation is far too important to be left to the acquisition officers. If we want real innovation at the Pentagon, we must be willing to disrupt its very foundations. 

That was an insightful piece by Zachery Tyson Brown, “All This ‘Innovation’ Won’t Save the Pentagon.”  I would add that nobody can be a great acquisition officer who only knows the formal acquisition system—and I am even tempted to add that the acquisition officer who only understands formal acquisition is likely to become a nuisance if not a positive danger.

A second note is that we don’t often hear from commentators a credible path of rectifying the situation based on sound theory and historical fact. The inflexible hierarchy that the author points to is a reflection of the program budget revolution after WWII, and the influence of Robert McNamara’s view of scientific management. The first and most important aspect to real reform in the direction the author implies is to reform to budget process back into organic classifications by organization/object. See more on that here.