Preparation for Joint Warfighting is impeded by difficulties inherent in equipping a Joint Force by the separated Services. Divisions continue like fractals to the finest levels of former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara’s program elements and the shore establishment’s program sponsors. Each identified program “belongs” to some warfare specialty where its existence and partitioned identity is treated as the equivalent of a “Command at Sea” to be protected until it can be handed over to one’s relief.
It is unimaginable or impolitic to peek over the partition to see if one’s “requirement” might be met by adding a function or stanza of software to another’s program or to depend on another to perform their task effectively — just as one would in Joint Warfare. These divisions are exacerbated by the Congress’ insistence on the auditable separateness of the Program Elements and contract awards that can be traced to their districts and trumpeted as effective representation.
A more streamlined acquisition program structure and a reduced staff requiring programs to sponsor would act a direct counter to this centrifugal sociology; but a more englighted, Network-Centric approach, perhaps with a different reward system, could lead to the desired results. The Shore Establishment analyst could be encouraged to introduce “new” capabilities by studying the existing inventory of hardware-software building blocks through the use of the modern information sharing tools of this digital age Those pursuing the new capabilities could be rewarded more highly for, say finding ways to add a new piece of information to an existing data link rather than marketing a whole new set of communications gear that would be dedicated to their peculiar function.
Congress could reinforce this behavior by encouraging consolidation of Program Elements.
That was R.A. LeFande, “Network-Centric Acquisition: The Key to Joint Warfighting” in Program Manager March-April 2002 issue.
Reading the old literature is great. The ideas I’ve been grappling with on the questions of consolidating program elements and enterprise tools have already been well articulated in 2002. Cloud and APIs were early but already existed at the time. The Air Force’s enterprise tools, which got started in 2018, in some ways could have been a reality much earlier. Not so much for containerization, but you could have seen cloud-native applications with APIs and microservices.
These types of missed opportunities must be everywhere. But as the LeFande argued, the program element structure of the budget forces the stove-piping of platforms and capabilities, which very much works against Joint Warfighting. Usually, the argument seems that program elements should be tightly defined in order to ensure from OSD that the services will be interoperable. Ironically, it has the exact opposite effect. As LeFande poetically puts it, the divisions between various programs both within and between services extends down in infinitely complexity, segregating effort that should enjoy synergies.
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