Military services are about creating cultures

Military services are about creating cultures. They’re about creating the people who are dedicated to supporting specific warfighting domains, and those cultures permeate everything in their organization, including those things that we might find in the boring little details that make up everything a service does.

 

We can often hurt ourselves in this conversation because we get confused. We think we need a new service because we need to fix acquisition. We need a new service because we need to go fast or we need to be innovative. Those are all things we need to do by the way. It’s not an either or, I’m just saying that’s not why you need a separate service.

That was Lt Gen James McLaughlin, USAF (ret.) speaking at a CSIS forum, “Strategic National Security Space: FY 2020 Budget and Policy Forum.”

It is interesting how the argument for a new service is to create a dedicated space culture. Culture is a concept that is completely intangible. It implies no specific outcomes, which is how our policy debates are “supposed” to proceed. Culture is an input into acquisition process. Going faster, such as using agile methods, and other aspects of acquisition reform also target inputs rather than outputs.

An important concept is that when we are dealing with long time frames and high uncertainty, you want to focus on inputs and techniques. When timelines are short and there is relative certainty as to causes and effects, then you focus on outputs.

Creating a new service for space focuses our efforts and analysis on inputs. What is the personnel system? What development processes will be used? Who decides priorities?

Yet McLaughlin later says that all funding for the new space service needs to be completely traceable to a defined military capability. This is clearly a concern because Congress can quickly roll back the reforms and increase oversight if a clear cause and effect relationship is not established between funding and program outcomes.

There is some incongruity with the idea that the drive for a new space service is cultural. Culture presumably means spending funding on training, internal communication, processes, and yes, spending funds on failed experiments and rapid learning. The type of culture desired for a space service is largely intangible. It does not track to a pre-specified plan of outcomes. And so there must be a greater tolerance for ambiguity, because cultural changes will not happen over an election cycle.