That sector is going so fast that I don’t know what the specific solution set might look like in 2027 when we’re going to be required — it’s going to be a few months — to have a program element with a number or set of numbers for 2027 on our version of this system of systems. We call it the advanced battle management system in the Air Force and the other services have names for it as well, but you can think of it as a networking system — it’s the way that we’re going to connect in with the joint force.
While we have a general understanding of why networking is so important and a general understanding of the types of things we have to be able to do — we have to be able to sense, we have to be able to connect with each other, we have to be able to decide and act, and we know the general requirements and I think we know the general trajectory of the acquisition program, but what we don’t know is what we’re going to buy in 2027. And if I was going to tell you, I could tell you I’d be 100 percent wrong about that because I don’t know exactly what the world looks like, especially what the commercial networking world looks like in 2027.
So to me that seems to call for reimagining of the way we think about budgeting in the coming years. If we were to have a flexible enough system where we could still have oversight — it is still important that the secretary of defense level has oversight, that the office of management budget has oversight, and the congress has oversight over the taxpayer’s money. That is bedrock in our system. We’ve got to keep it. But we ought to reimagine what that looks like as we experiment learn and iterate. If we could do that we could we could harness the power of one of our huge national advantages which is our innovation sector, our tech sector, that is learning and growing so fast.
What we’re hoping to be able to do is harness that power through a flexible enough budget process that allows us to do that iteration. If we can figure that out if we can reimagine it and work it together amongst all of us I think we have a chance. I’m really excited that maybe we’re seeing some movement in this direction, even from people who I think have been very skeptical about the idea of flexible budgeting. People are seeing the challenge that China presents to us, and they are they’re seeing that we’ve got to do something different — that we ought to take advantage of everything we can including the amazing people who are innovating in our commercial economies.
That was Lt. Gen. S. Clifton Hinote at an excellent event put on by Dan Patt and Bill Greenwalt, “Competing with China through Budget Agility.” Read their accompanying paper. Obviously, I am ecstatic that Hinote is speaking this way. Readers of this blog will recognize these themes of PPBE reform.
One point I’d like to make on ABMS is that much of the technology is mature enough to start networking various parts of the force structure. So in the PPBE world, the Air Force needs to lock down all aspects of the system and describe in detail how it will be built and fielded many years into the future (in that sequence: build, then field).
But Hinote brings up an additional paradox to defense systems development: dual-use commercial tech will be moving along at a rapid pace, making today’s ABMS baseline irrelevant. Whether technology is immature, or mature but evolving, it makes no sense to fixate on a lifecycle plan while making changes to the plan incredibly difficult for the sake of “oversight.”
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