We need reform in our requirements processes and our budgets to allow for the same speed and agility the #AAF gives us. We have a framework for urgent acquisition, but there is a grueling long process to write and approve an “urgent” acquisition requirement. We have Middle Tier Acquisition that doesn’t require JCIDS but we have implemented other processes to replace it. 🤨If we must budget on a POM cycle then every program budget needs a line for the unknown future innovation. I understand the point of justifying every dollar years in advance but it does not enable industry and acquisition to meet the warfighters needs.
That was Joanne Johnson, program manager at SOCOM, on a LinkedIn post. She shared the following poll results, which showed 86% (of a small sample) believed acquisition problems were in requirements and budget.
I responded to the post: The requirements problem and PPBE cannot be disentangled. Of course, the requirements pull approach was instituted in DoD as part of McNamara’s PPBS with the Joint Strategic Operations Plan. The “whiz kids” needed military requirements to set the parameters of their systems analyses.
The founders of the PPBS were Charles Hitch (who became McNamara’s ASD Comptroller to run it) and Roland McKean in their 1960 classic “Economics of Defense in the Nuclear Age.”
McKean, however, later found PPBS led to too much centralization. He wrote how it is “good practice” in budgeting for R&D to leave an “empty place here and there.” This allowed decision-makers to postpone commitments until more information presented itself.
And I love this quote from James Schlesinger, who later became SecDef and was a protégé of McKean at RAND (McKean was a co-author on an early version of the paper):
“They [McNamara’s systems analyses] are perhaps especially prone to ignore certain costs… probably because these costs are so hard to measure. If such costs are neglected, people are in effect insisting that performance be improved or efficiency increased—no matter what the cost!”
Read that again. It’s a deep idea and comes out vividly in major defense programs time and again. Anyway, make 2021 the year of budget reform!
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Of course, our friends over at MITRE have already made recommendations for an Adaptive Requirements Framework and an Adaptive Budgeting Framework to complete the speed and agility kicked off by the AAF.
I think people know in their bones that requirements, budgeting, and oversight are all entangled and overwhelm anything done in the little “a” acquisition side of the house. What’s holding back defense leaders from discussing these problems?
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