Here are some findings from a 1989 Congressional study on French and British acquisition policies:
Armament Engineers complete their seven year educational program at about age 25. Although some are selected for further education, most go on to what French officials described as a five year, “hands-in-the-grease” assignment in an Armaments Directorate production facility…
It is not uncommon for this first tour to be followed by another five-year assignment at a similar facility but with a higher level of responsibility. During these tours, armament engineers may spend considerable time on sea of field trials of equipment in whose construction they were involved, developing both their relationship with operational officers and their experience for future assignments in design bureaus and program management offices.
After ten to fifteen years of experience, an armament engineer may become a program manager for a small, single service weapon project. Program managers for more complicated projects such as a sea launched ballistic missile would have about twenty-five years experience…
An advantage of the separate and professionally competent Armaments Directorate that was cited repeatedly by French officials is continuity of personnel—both within the Directorate and in certain critical assignments such as weapons system program management. The Armaments Directorate builds institutional memory into the acquisition system as a result of the continuity of its personnel.
The value of technical expertise, experience, and staying on board long enough to pinpoint responsibility cannot be over-emphasized. An important element of that is the “hands-in-the-grease” part. It generates the kind of knowledge which cannot be gained in school, no matter how prestigious. By contrast, here are some views of Britain’s military acquisition, which corresponds much more closely to the U.S.:
The tenure of a civilian program manager is about 3½ years. Military officers only stay in the position for 2 to 2½ years…
A senior British procurement official expressed the view that a specialized engineering corps, patterned after the French armament engineers, is not needed to ensure effective weapons acquisition by the government. Both he and other British defense officials emphasized that the key to effective weapons acquisition is the management capability of program managers.
Professional managers, the senior official continued, can perform the program management functional as well as technically oriented engineers; they can compensate for their lack of technical expertise by turning to professional engineers who work in the research establishments run by the Procurement Executive.
And here’s the best snippet of the report, the fact that Britain and France operate without a tightly wound program-oriented budget. For them, the program and the budget are two separate, but constantly related, processes.
It is important to note that the French and British distinguish between program planning and budgeting. They continue to budget on a yearly basis. Moreover, the two functions are assigned to different parts of the ministry of defense, program planning to the chief of the defense staff, budgeting to the ministry finance office.
The U.S. could get a great deal of benefit from having technical expertise in program managers who have 15 or 25 years of experience, like Adm. Rickover. But that would take decades of development and change. It should still be pursued, but the biggest immediate impact we can have on the DOD is to also disentangle the program from the budget; to move to an organizational budget with a more flexible and after-the-fact oriented analysis of programming. (I said something similar two days ago, and many times elsewhere. A more thorough discussion is here.)
Source: “A Review of Defense Acquisition in France and Great Britain.” (1989, Aug. 16). Report of the Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Armed Services, House of Representatives, One Hundred First Congress, First Session.
Leave a Reply