There’s no free lunch in DoD organizational design

When Burke became chief of naval operations, the conflict between the Bureau of Ordnance and the Bureau of Aeronautics in the guided missile field, under way since the end of World War II, was particularly intense. In fact, its apparent intractability was the major reason that Burke agreed with the secretary of the Navy that an entirely new organizational arrangement independent of the bureaus— the Special Projects Office—should develop a ballistic missile system.

 

Despite the establishment of the Special Projects Office, Burke continued to support the bureau system and believed it could be made to work effectively. He understood that the main problem was finding a way to integrate into a whole the interdependent elements of complex weapon systems whose subsystems were often developed by more than one bureau.

That was from Elliot Converse’s Acquisition History Volume I: Rearming for the Cold War. Of course, a few years later in the 1960s the Navy bureau system lost its statutory role and was abandoned for the program office structure. It was thought that a program manager should have all aspects of the program under his or her control in order to assure success. As former SecDef Robert Lovett said:

The whole idea of the performance budget is to set up a unit that is going to cost so much, put some fellow in charge of it, and give him the authority and hold him responsible. As it is now, the responsibility is so dispersed that it is virtually impossible to trace it.

Unfortunately, there is no free lunch. Moving from a system that funded organizations to one that funded programs had its own effects DoD is living with today. First, each program is largely built in a silo and optimized for its own needs. That creates interoperability problems between elements of the force structure. The crisis today is getting each system to “talk” to one another without slow human-in-the-loop processes.

Second, each program is built “full stack” and doesn’t leverage economies of scale that might come from enterprise capabilities. The software community is leading the charge here with infrastructure and platform as a service. But the continued program orientation of the budget provides a problem of adopting these enterprise tools. More on this to come…

Here, I wanted to point out that the program office structure came with its own problems and people are now looking for solutions take us back to a more interdependent organizational design that was consciously abandoned in the 1960s.