Talk about capabilities, not about numbers

I haven’t gone off on my numbers rant yet. The whole 355 ship Navy —  500 ship Navy — you know, it just drives me insane that we even have that conversation. Talk about capabilities, not about numbers. Why do we talk about numbers? That’s my big thing about the budget is we get into this epic fight, it should be $780 [billion], it should be this. Okay so we get $780 and we build the littoral combat ship, which doesn’t provide us the capability that we thought it was going to provide us — but there’s a bunch of them.

 

… When you say if you’re not growing you’re shrinking, you’re not necessarily shrinking in capability. Well it depends on what you mean… Let me let me put you this way… you can absolutely be growing the top line and not achieve the capabilities you want because you’re being wasteful… What I would hope you could agree with is… we have spent defense dollars in a very ineffective way in the last 20 years.

 

… We’re sort of living in that you know last war. The more platforms you have — it’s the first gulf war, which was so spectacularly successful. We’re not going to face that type of opponent again. So how can technology help us achieve our goals in a more cost effective way? I’m 100 convinced that it can, but if we’re focused on ‘top line’s got to be bigger bigger bigger bigger, we’ve got to have 500 ships, we have to have 25 percent more airplanes’ — if that’s where our focus is, just throw throw the money at the problem, then I think we’re going to be in a world of hurt.

That’s more from HASC chairman Adam Smith at the Reagan Institute event, The Future of Defense Spending. Roger Zakheim was interviewing him and initially pushed back on the idea that capabilities are not directly linked to topline budgets. “When does that happen?” Zakheim said, “Let’s play history. When have we ever seen a more effective military come out from a reduced top line? I can’t think of a time when we’ve been able to do that.”

Adam Smith didn’t have evidence in the case of the United States military, but reiterated his proposition. Certainly it is logically true that wiser choices can be made. The private sector demonstrates an ability to “do more with less” all the time.

I might add the interwar US Navy as an example where the unique role of the General Board and other factors allowed the budget squeeze to result in experimentation. The treaties limiting capital ships also helped move funds away from legacy battleship concepts and toward aircraft carriers. See more on that from my conversation with John Kuehn.

In my mind, it is a big deal for Chairman Smith to say “Talk about capabilities, not about numbers.” Since the McNamara management revolution, the Pentagon has communicated itself in numbers. This reliance on formal quantitative analysis in advance of program start, and then continual measurement of progress to baseline, is not only a bad mental model for oversight, it leads to poor outcomes.

I’m taking this somewhere Smith did not intend, but there’s a deeper truth to the fact that over-optimization of programs based on an analytical checklist leads to deeply corrupted programs.

If Congress members want DoD to be more innovative and drive greater capabilities within the same funding or less, Congress will have to walk-the-walk. DoD has seen more than 50 years of acquisition reform. You can’t expect the same process to create different results.

Congress has to be willing to use the levers that have been too politically sensitive in the past — budget flexibility and the PPBE. Otherwise, the governance structures will be completely at odds with what needs to happen at the execution level — which must align with commercial best practices such as agile development. If DoD cannot integrate commercial technologies in commercial cycle times, it can only far further behind and leave the initiative to our adversaries who have the same access to commercial tech.