Podcast: Affecting the strategic calculus with Michele Flournoy

Michele Flournoy joined Jordan Schneider and I on a crossover episode of the China Talk and Acquisition Talk podcasts. She is a former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, co-founder of CNAS, and and currently the founder and managing partner of WestExec Advisors. We hit on a number of important issues, including:

  • China’s approach to systems destruction warfare
  • How to make a compelling case for technologists to join DoD
  • Nuclear policy and affecting the strategic calculus
  • Whether “legacy” weapons need divestment
  • A “Manhattan Project” for AI/ML

In the episode, Michele drives home the importance of the acquisition workforce to military outcomes. “We don’t invest enough in the tech or business acumen of our professionals,” she said. Being a smarter customer in terms of negotiating contracts and having technical chops has a tremendous impact on the weapons and CONOPS. As Michele points out, Great Power Competition is no longer about nuclear deterrence alone, but maneuvering in cyber, in space, and in other domains that requires a range of options for affecting the strategic calculus.

Battle for Networks

Systems destruction warfare is really the idea that China will try early on to disrupt, defeat and degrade our networks… [The] Pacific is going to be highly contested and it’s going to stay contested. So the traditional approach from the Gulf war and sense where the US comes in, we establish domain superiority.

 

That moment of sustained periodicity is never going to happen. We will get it. We’ll lose it. We’ll have to regain it. It’s going to be episodic.

 

… What we have to do is think asymmetrically about China, meaning, how do we fight in that more contested domain? How do we build a resilient network of networks to be able to continue to operate effectively, communicate, and do command and control in that contested environment?

 

… I do think the network of networks — what’s called being called joint all domain command and control, or ABMS by the Air Force — that’s a really key piece.

The Air Force’s advanced battle management system (ABMS) has come under a lot of fire recently from defense insiders as well as congress. One problem is that there are a lot of interesting exercises, but critics point to exercises being all over the place (e.g., a robotic dog patrolling Nellis AFB). This seems to translate into a messaging problem.

I think Michele put ABMS in the right context. China’s strategy is to degrade our networks that allow the US to deploy its exquisite assets. Since the Korean War, the US has basically had free rein in terms of its C4ISR infrastructure. Even in that permissive environment, weapon systems are developed in stovepipes that cannot easily interoperate without a significant time penalty associated with manual processes.

A satellite that detects and tracks a target cannot relay that information directly to an available aircraft. That’s one sensor-to-shoot possibility, but in a degraded battlefield the US will need many ways of sensing and shooting. Importantly, every potential pair of systems that needs to talk to each other cannot wait years for the acquisition system to churn out a solution.

Perhaps that’s why ABMS seems to be running in so many directions. Ultimately, the Air Force will have to decide what user stories are particularly important when thinking about resilient command and control and focus on getting some high-value wins. But the program will continue to come under fire because defense analysts love to talk about the kinetic effects of weapon systems, such as payload, range, accuracy, and so forth. ABMS doesn’t have that kind of well-defined military requirement.

One potential analytical lens is to say: Suppose China takes THIS capability off the table. That means we cannot deliver THESE kinetic effects. A survey of the types of at-risk capabilities, their overlaps, and how they impact military effects will start to uncover the highest valued priorities for the ABMS roadmap. But it also can translate into dollars — or the opportunity cost of military weapons that can no longer use their capabilities in a degraded environment (when they are needed the most!).

I’m sure smarter people than I have done this kind of analysis or something better.

Battle for Talent

I think workforce comes to the fore on DoD adoption of emerging technologies, and even its adoption of relatively mature commercial technologies. The final report of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence has an entire chapter titled, “Technical Talent in Government.” A lot of that had to do with competing with the private sector for talent. Michele adds to that:

We have enormous amount of tech talent in the military graduating from the academies every year. I think it’s two-thirds of each class is in some kind of STEM major, but they come into the officer corps and then we put them in something that has nothing to do with their tech background.

 

And even if they want to be a technologist for their service, they’re told that’s career ending probably — that’s a blind alley. You can’t make it to flag officer. You can’t make it to general officer. If you’re a technologist that has to change.

Michele discusses many aspects of this workforce problem. One part is making the case that individuals can come into DoD and contribute to really important problems.

I think, if you asked the current generation of young officers, we don’t have the concepts and systems that we need to be effective with China long-term… We want you to be part of the solution. So you’re going to do competitive concept development for your next chair, and you are going to take new technologies coming out of school, and Silicon Valley, and you’re going to experiment with them for a tour.

Unfortunately, many folks in the acquisition workforce don’t have the opportunity to use these skills, or have some kind of creative determination over a project’s direction. Michele points to Special Operations Command as one pocket that has been able to gain agility in this way.

Battle for Flexibility

In order for DoD to harness emerging technologies and CONOPS, Michele argues that changing the whole acquisition system is a “noble cause” but ultimately not the first step.

I think the more important thing to do is to take a sub cadre of folks and really train them well on how to manage technology and emerging technology programs and how to accelerate development and adoption.

Only with that cadre of folks able to “own the technical baseline” can DoD take advantages of congressional flexibilities. Two important aspects of that are (1) a bridge fund to help get prototype efforts started without a 2-year budget delay; and (2) a portfolio approach to budgeting that allows for tradeoffs “

You need both. I do think occasionally you’ll need a bridge fund… But I think the portfolio management is also really important because it would be hard to find a CEO that’s in the world of manufacturing that’s not doing some form of portfolio management.

 

… If you could get the Congress to give the DOD some kind of authority for portfolio managers within mission areas to make some of those trade-offs — you can require reporting or testifying or engaging Congress and so forth — but that lack of flexibility is really hurting us.

Yet the battle for program flexibility runs headlong into our final topic.

Battle for Legacy Weapons

There’s been a lot of discussion recently about whether DoD should divest from “legacy” weapon systems, and if so, what actually defines a legacy system. The Future of Defense Task Force asked for a study on retiring legacy systems, but did not give much guidance on what that meant. Does legacy mean an old system like the F-16, or an old concept like all manned fighter aircraft? Here’s Michele:

The question I think we should be asking is, are there tradeoffs in the quantities of some of what we’re buying in that program of record — we want to trade off some capacity, some quantity, in order to move that money into the emerging technologies and capabilities… So it’s not an either, or it’s not, nobody’s talking about throwing away all the legacy systems and starting over.

Thanks Michele Flournoy!

I’d like to thank Michele Flournoy for joining us on the China Talk and Acquisition Talk podcasts. A compilation of a lot of her recent work is highlighted on the WestExec website here, and some older CNAS reports are here. I recommend Sharpening the U.S. Military’s Edge: Critical Steps for the Next Administration and Building Trust through Testing. Check out this article discussing Michele’s 2020 testimony to the House on deterring China. You can find my blog post on Michele here, and she joined Steve Blank’s class for a great discussion that can be seen here. There’s a ton more you can find using Google!

Full-Text Transcripts

2 Comments

  1. Really good points about our workforce.  We should  also be thinking about the Total Workforce…taking advantage of our civilian technical expertise and develop them as leaders.  The portfolio management idea is an area where I think we could be doing more.

    • Definitely. I think there is this iterative development where portfolio empowerment increases workforce expertise, and a better workforce gives credit to expanding portfolio empowerment, and then cycle through until you get to maturity. But I think to get the flywheel started, some portfolio empowerment needs to come first because how do you build a workforce when it operates in a fishbowl?

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