Take-aways from the updated DoD Directive 5000.01
Overall, DoDD 5000.01 went from 10 pages to 16, though two of those are for a table of contents. In terms of word count, it […]
Month: September 2020
Podcast: Defense Budget Reform with Katharina McFarland, Bill Greenwalt, and Bob Daigle
I was please to host a webinar event with George Mason’s Center for Government Contracting featuring three former Pentagon executives. We discussed my white paper […]
Acquisition headlines
Inside project convergence: How the US Army is preparing for war in the next decade. “… this generation’s digital Louisiana Maneuvers” in the Arizona desert, […]
Are SBIR funds just too difficult to win for their worth?
To clarify the math, if it takes two man-months (~320 hours) to prepare a SBIR proposal, and you have a 20 percent chance of getting […]
It’s not just my imagination — why funding is so important to tech progress
Here’s my last excerpt — I promise — from Jason Crawford’s excellent interview on the Venture Stories podcast, “Progress Studies in 2020.” Jason: I want […]
Technology s-curves and the future of defense tech
Where some of the discussion about the stagnation hypothesis gets kind of confused and confusing is when you get back-and-forths that go like this: people […]
Throw out the linear model of innovation for tinkering at the frontiers
One of the posts I wrote was a case study of the transistor. The transistor was invested at Bell Labs in the semiconductor research group. […]
Gov’t funding is short-term, project-based, risk-averse, and prone to groupthink
One hypothesis I’d like to investigate is that we’ve gotten a little too centralized and monolithic in our funding. That is something to address. The […]
US policymakers must avoid the same mistakes with China that they did with the Soviets
US policy makers tend to have this view of Chinese technology policy as being long-range, strategic, and top-down. We know that the most successful parts […]
Acquisition headlines
Will Roper: Startup.mil to Startup.com? “Like the impeded response of Xerox to personal computers, Sears to e-commerce, or Blockbuster to video streaming, our military could […]
David Packard argues against progress payments
At the present time the Department has about $10 billion tied up in progress Payments. This has increased from a level of about $4 billion […]
CSAF says ‘Accelerate Change or Lose,’ but can he follow through?
… we must reframe platform-centric debates to focus instead on capabilities to execute the mission relative to our adversaries. Programs that once held promise, but […]
AI/ML business models
If you’re building just the infrastructure, just the tooling and the nuts and bolts, you look like a software company and somebody else deals with […]
DoD can’t do rapid prototyping like it used to
The Albacore lessons tell us exactly how to develop new technology: theorize, research, test, develop, refine, test some more and when you have a solid concept, […]
Podcast: Blockchain’s potential for government with SIMBA Chain’s Joel Neidig
Joel Neidig joined me on the Acquisition Talk podcast to discuss how blockchain technology can support the military across a wide range of use-cases including […]