In August, 2018, the department put forward this report to Congress[that] … laid out these eight capabilities. … The Space Development Agency was set up to ensure that those eight capabilities are provided to the war fighter. Those eight capabilities are things like artificial intelligence enabled global surveillance, beyond line of sight targeting and custody, advanced missile threat detection, etc.
What we do that’s a little different is we are accountable to make sure that all of those capabilities are provided and we’re at the department level so we can reach out over Air Force [and] Army. We can reach out and team with the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office and pull all those capabilities together to make sure that we achieve that mission.
We’re accountable. We have to provide all of those capabilities, but we’re not responsible for building all those out. That’s a key differentiator. So for example, the transport layer, that’s the layer that provides our … network that’s going to enable us to do communication all across the board. We’re accountable and responsible for building that out. But for example, the tracking layer that’s going to do the advanced missile detection, we’re accountable to make sure that gets done and plugged in to the entire architecture, but Missile Defense Agency is the one that’s responsible for actually building those out.
That was Derek Tournear, acting director for the Space Development Agency (SDA), in a nice interview at Politico, “The growing pains of the Pentagon’s new space acquisition arm“.
Let’s review the organizational design a bit. The SDA is an office of 27 people in an effort to grow to 200. It will be in charge of integrating a unified space architecture. The SDA sits underneath USD(R&E), and has no formal control over the organizations actually responsible for developing and operating most of the space assets, namely in the future Space Force as well as the Space Command and Army Space and Missile Command. USD(R&E) is the formal boss of space developments within the Missile Defense Agency, as well as various technology labs like DARPA.
The SDA will not be managing many major developments itself. Even with its peak staffing of 200, its difficult to imagine such an organization managing more than 1 or 2 MDAPs in addition to other duties.
The SDA can only influence the direction of space development at the level of Deputy Secretary of Defense in most cases. Otherwise, a compromise between USD(R&E) and USD(A&S) would have to be reached, and then between USD(A&S) and the service level executives.
And yet the SDA is to be accountable for the successful delivery of the eight new capabilities along with an architecture. It is difficult to believe that one can be accountable for results when one is not responsible for getting it done, and then given enough authority to execute.
For example, the ones managing the development at the SYSCOMs will inevitably feel constrained by the external design demands of the SDA. Because there is a split design process, if things go wrong (and assuming the contractor successfully identifies government requirements as the culprit), then the SYSCOM — with its more detailed knowledge of the development in question — can likely trace responsibility for error back to SDA demands. And so the SDA cannot have influence over the design process without having some responsibility in day-to-day management of complex systems whose design will be in flux, maintaining the integrity of the architecture.
Generally in bureaucratic organizations, numerous officials make decisions that impact a project — they have some small, partial responsibility — but the impact is usually not traced back to them — they have no accountability for results. It is hard to imagine how an office can be held accountable for results when it doesn’t have authority and responsibility to go with it. The concepts must be tightly bound, because their diffusion leads to confusion, poor results, no one paying a penalty, and no institutional learning.
Does that mean we need a space acquisition czar? I don’t think so. Perhaps a better method is to have a Space Development Council, whose members include representatives from the operating SYSCOMs, COCOMs, and labs. They can, through debate and voluntarily setting standards, gravitate towards an architecture rather than have one preordained and executed upon. This might alleviate some of the inter-organizational jealousy.
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