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 us without the use of subdivided appropriations down to the gnat’s eyelash. We’re gonna have to provide more funding flexibility in broad portfolios of capabilities and allow more fungibility between what we invest in, in execution year. The idea of appropriating a certain dollar for a certain purpose for a certain program with a certain contractor immediately destroys our monopsonistic advantage. It limits the flexibility to such a degree that we can’t compete with China or Russia in terms of the speed of decision-making that is necessary. These are the things I’d love to have real serious conversations about with the staffers on the Hill — not to avoid oversight, but to reinvent oversight.
That was Maj Gen Cameron Holt, chief of contracting at the US Air Force, speaking with Jared Serbu, “Gearing up for great power competition also helped the Air Force prepare for COVID-19.” It’s tremendous that Holt is talking about the kind of budget reform I have been advocating for some years now. This matter really does come down to a style of oversight. Portfolio budget requires a shift from the predict, control, and measure style over oversight into one of based on insight and investigation.
In other words, get rid of Acquisition Program Baselines and instead focus on automated tools for real-time insight into funding allocations, and then investigations of targeted projects in terms of costs, operational performance, legal conduct, and so forth. This way, the system filters out bad actors through accountability, but empowers the services to experiment and move faster.
The whole premise behind such a change is (1) better stewardship of taxpayer funds; (2) ignite discovery and innovation for the economy more broadly; and most importantly, (3) ensuring military overmatch during an era of great power competition.
Here’s Holt on gearing up for an emergency:
Literally, we stood up an Air Force wide task force with four lines of effort, each of which led at a high level, in 48 hours out of an iPhone 6. That’s the first indication where I knew that we would be having to making things up as we go along, and there would be a lot of audible calls played, but we were ready to go.
Regardless of the planning done ahead of time, when an emergency hits (like a ratchet up in conflict) there will be a large degree of ad hoc execution, often accompanied by task forces. The thing about planning is not necessarily to predict all those steps to mobilization like a Schlieffen plan, but prep for things you know you’ll need.
For example, expanding industrial capacity to produce more munitions (in the broadest sense). Consider how government could facilitate industrial expansion, whether that’s through a dedicated program or through ad hoc teaming between companies:
One example was the need to quickly ramp up production of the nasal swabs needed to conduct coronavirus testing. Puritan Medical Products, a fairly-small company in Maine, was the nation’s leading supplier to the health care industry. But when the government first approached the firm, its executives saw no clear way they could ramp up production at the scale and on the timeline federal officials were asking for.
“… So we asked Bath Iron Works’ leadership if they would partner with us and with Puritan to help them rapidly stand up machine tools and the plant and equipment necessary. They said, ‘Absolutely, we’re in,’ and they and their supply base set up all those machine tools to rapidly start churning out a high number of nasal swabs. It was incredible to watch.”
Leave a Reply