Production can be 1,000% harder than design, says Elon Musk
Designing the production system of a new product is at least an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude harder than designing to initial […]
Month: March 2020
Acquisition headlines
Will Roper on the Air Force pitch bowl: “Post SXSW cancellation, we changed our Pitch Bowl in Austin to a YouTube Live event. Results were […]
Growth of contract regulations
In 1947, the “Bible” of the nation’s military contractors—Armed Forces Procurement Regulation—was a slim volume of about 100 to 125 pages long. Today, the A.F.P.R., […]
Will the MQ-9 follow the digital century-series pattern?
The Air Force is looking for a replacement to the stalwart MQ-9 Reaper and intends to explore options ranging from commercial drones built by emerging tech […]
Podcast: Leaping the valley of death with Matt Steckman
Matt Steckman joined me on the Acquisition Talk podcast to discuss about a wide range of issues facing growth-stage companies in the defense industry. He […]
What is holding modular open systems back in defense?
When used in conjunction with such concepts as modularity and functional partitioning—the use of self-contained functional components to build systems—the open systems approach was also […]
Here are the pilot programs for the new Software Budget Appropriation
The separation of software development [funding] into research, development, test and evaluation (RDT&E), procurement, and operations & maintenance (O&M) appropriations — and the use of […]
Are 80 percent of lifecycle costs predestined by PDR?
One of the potential pitfalls of the rapid prototyping path could be the neglect of production and sustainment costs in the effort to ensure that […]
Acquisition headlines
More delays ahead? Amazon ‘Quite Likely’ to Prove Pentagon Made an Evaluation Error in JEDI Cloud Contract, Judge Says. So much for the economies of […]
The last frontier of acquisition reform
I think the Pentagon is going to look in the long term to the last frontier of acquisition reform, which is the budget process. One […]
Defense is too big, complex, dispersed to be managed from a single point
It has been suggested in some quarters that I am unwilling to decentralize decision-making authority. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I strongly believe […]
Podcast: China’s approach to military tech with Tate Nurkin
Tate Nurkin joined me on the Acquisition Talk podcast to discuss China’s weapons technologies. He is the founder of the OTH Intelligence Group, and a […]
Tech transition still hard for defense establishment to imagine
It’s never been easier to get a small contract. There’s pitch days, their DIU, there AFWERX. That’s not the challenge. The challenge is, how do […]
GAO agrees with Air Force in light attack aircraft protest decision
The protester argues that the Air Force’s decision to acquire aircraft from Textron pursuant to the agency’s authority under 10 U.S.C. § 2373 does not […]
The best IP protection is to innovate fast enough
The real way I think you achieve intellectual property protection is by innovating fast enough. If your rate of innovation is high, then you don’t […]