What ever happened to the DoD’s Better Buying Power?
Here is Steve Grundman discussing Ash Carter’s Better Buying Power rollout: “… the term incentives is this campaign’s refrain, appearing 13 times in the document […]
Month: October 2020
Senator Sullivan: DoD acquisition is one of our “biggest vulnerabilities… It’s hurting us”
Senator Tim Kaine. It might be productive for the committee to have hits and failures of recent acquisition programs and get the DOD to tell […]
Battleforce 2045 and whether the Navy can get to 500 ships
Dr. Esper’s roll out of Battleforce 2045 is pretty flawed because they don’t have the ability to be more specific about it because of OMB […]
Vannevar Bush argued for a wholly top-down approach to military R&D
Traditionally, the advanced military thinking on the improvement of weapons and on new methods of combat has been left to the lower echelons. The theory […]
Analysis: How DoD supports the COVID-19 response using Other Transactions
The DoD’s extensive contracting workforce is closely supporting Health and Human Services in executing Other Transactions (OT) contracts for COVID-19 under the joint Operation Warp […]
There’s no “value” in Earned Value Management
The problem here is that EVM is based on a detailed and accurate “plan” at the start of the initiative. And Agile avoids that detailed […]
Acquisition headlines (10/18 – 10/24/2020)
Cheap drones vs. expensive tanks: a battlefield game-changer? “The war has been most visibly characterised by ‘kill cam’ footage of drones attacking armoured fighting vehicles, including […]
Yes, America’s military budget process is terrible
Central planning did not work any better in the Pentagon than it did in the Soviet bloc. Not that we were not warned. The problem […]
Notes from Will Roper’s talk to students: Tons of great insights!
Here are some notes of mine from watching Air Force acquisition chief Will Roper’s talk given to Steve Blank, Joe Felter, and Raj Shah’s class […]
The Manhattan Project did not follow so-called “best practices” for management
This characterization of the roots of PM [project management] represents a certain irony: the Manhattan Project did not even remotely correspond to the “standard practice” […]
Air Force contracting chief talks budget reform, Covid-19, and great power competition
This applies to Covid, it applies to emergencies and to great power competition: We have got to figure out a way to let Congress oversee […]
Kill chains vs. kill webs
Software-defined tactics are the key to quickly adding capabilities to different assets that are supposed to work together. It’s kill chain vs kill web for […]
Podcast: Navy shipyards and defense supply chains with Maiya Clark
Researcher Maiya Clark at the Heritage Foundation joined me on the Acquisition Talk podcast to discuss her recent paper on the Navy’s public shipyards as […]
Acquisition headlines (10/11 – 10/17/2020)
U.S. Military Investments in Autonomy and AI .”The FY2021 U.S. defense budget request allocates $1.7 billion to autonomy to enhance “speed of maneuver and lethality […]
China focuses on applied tech much more than the US
Emily … Nate [Picarsic], my colleague, and I had these massive databases of Chinese science and technology resource allocations (i.e., funding) and prizes given out […]