There is an interesting story about a single crayfish that managed to reproduce asexually creating offspring with the exact same genetics. The offspring, called marmorkrebs, were thus a great opportunity to do experiments in nature vs. nurture. Here’s Michael Blastland on the EconTalk podcast:
We can use this, because it suggested to them that here was a way of understanding that old thorny question about the balance of forces between nature and nurture. You know, because we’ve got half the problem contained. It’s absolutely nailed down: They are genetically identical.
So, if we see differences in these creatures, well, it’s got to be the other one. Hasn’t it? It’s got to be the environmental cause in that case.
So, they got a few, hold of a few of these things, and they started putting them into tanks in the lab. But, they also went a step further–and this is where it gets really interesting, because they also standardized their environments.
… The marmorkrebs–you know where this is going–they’re fantastically varied. You can take marmorkrebs from the same batch of eggs and one of them turns out 20 times the weight of another. The physical variety is just astonishing.
They’re genetically identical, their environments are identical. They’re all fed to excess–no competition for food. One is 20 times the weight of another. The carapace on every single one of them, the shell, has a different pattern of markings. They have these little feeding parks [?] around the front of the mouth: they have different numbers, different physical numbers. It’s like having different numbers of teeth. So, they’re physically different.
They’re also behaviourally different. Some of them like a crowd, some of them are loners. Some of them were really gregarious. Some of them are dominant. When you bring them together, some of them turned out to be dominant and some of them are kind of subservient. Some of them feed when they’re laying, some of them don’t. The point in life when they start laying eggs is quite radically different. Their lifespans vary by a factor of three.
I thought that was a pretty cool story there about what Blastland calls the “hidden half.” Genetics and environment were exactly the same, and *still* there was tremendous variety in outcomes. This reminds me of the three-body problem and the effect of resonance between frequencies, because there’s a completely deterministic physical process out there and *still* predictions are rendered meaningless.
What does this have to do with defense acquisition? Many planners presume that if programs go through all the regular steps to documentation and execution, then programs should be regularly successful (i.e., on cost, on schedule, and hitting performance objectives). Emphasis throughout the DoD is on process and control.
We should be skeptical about these practices. Large and complex military developments are riddled with uncertainty stemming from technology, operational needs, human foibles, economic effects, etc.
What does this mean? Let’s say the DoD wanted to run an experiment. It had dozens of program offices which have the exact same composition in terms of personnel (to the extent possible). They turn the exact same requirements and funding into an acquisition program according to the exact same procedures, and contract in the exact same way.
From this, I’d expect to see *tremendous* variety in terms of outcomes. Some with huge cost growth, others with savings. Some where performance or sustainability was increased, others decreased. Some which changed direction and provided an alternative but viable solution, others which failed to deliver anything.
It seems the height of hubris for acquisition planners to say they would be using “scientific” methods through process and control to create successful programs when weapon systems acquisition is so complex that it dwarfs the challenge encountered by the biologists who had perfectly identical DNA and nearly perfectly identical environments, and couldn’t make individual predictions.
Of course, I don’t think this means we know *nothing* about acquisition best practices. As we learn in other scientific domains, we can make decent predictions at the aggregate level even if predictions at the individual level are meaningless. (e.g., we know marmorkrebs have some distribution of weight, but not what any individual will weigh). Not sure what to make of that in practice except good judgments about canceling, pivoting, or accelerating projects.
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