Of course there is the procurement cycle, which to make it very simple, it’s too long. As technology is changing rapidly, if you’re saying that basically from the time you have an idea at a minimum you’re looking at two years before you can buy it — well by the time that timeline is done what you’re working on is obsolete. I find the F-35 program enormously frustrating.
I expressed that frustration in a variety of different ways, with all due apologies to Lockheed and others, it’s not necessarily their fault it’s the process that was put in place. And it’s not just the F-35, the tanker program has had similar struggles. We don’t really know how to buy software and technology in the rapid way necessary to get us to where we need to be. We’ve got to speed up that cycle.
For one thing we’ve got to give the pentagon greater flexibility in terms of moving money around so that they’re not locked into a two-year or five-year cycle. So it’s like you’ve got the money, this is the way you’ve got to spend it for five years no matter what innovation comes along. You’re locked into that we’ve got to open up that flexibility to enable them to make more rapid decisions.
That was HASC Chair Adam Smith at a Naval Postgraduate School event.
No doubt he’s right. It’s hard to blame big primes for program outcomes because they are simply responding to DoD’s own processes. If defense officials had flexibility to allocate funds across a portfolio of efforts, then it would drive down these long cycle times that incentive them to pack requirements into a single program line item.
But these “programmed” budgets are useful for congress members because it allows them to know in which districts the funds will end up (particularly after EMD is awarded). They didn’t have that kind of insight into the budget before the 1960s, where appropriations were largely based on “lump sum” discretion. There was an interesting incident in the 1930s where a representative tried to earmark an autogiro project and the Army objected based on a long standing tradition. Back then, budgets didn’t give members insight into what the military was buying, just broad classifications (like Ordnance Department, major equipment). Oversight was exerted through investigations into program outcomes.
Here’s a nice story from Adam Smith on principled restraint:
Last big impediment to this is where I work, the United States Congress. We have some incentive problems of our own, the biggest incentive being that if it’s in our district we have to keep funding it no matter what. We have to come up with whatever creative argument we can as to why it has to continue to be funded in our district. I understand political realities. I got elected to the state senate when I was 25 years old I’ve been running campaigns pretty much my entire life and I know how that works. But we can’t let that get in the way of spending dollars efficiently and effectively at the Pentagon.
I will tell you also, and I realize this is the wrong audience for this, but for those of you politicians listening, constituents understand that a heck of a lot better than you think. When I was first elected my first term in congress, my first big votes was whether or not to build more B-2 bombers. A good chunk of it was built in my district or as my MLA at the time used to joke that the wing was built in my district and the thing is pretty much all wing, so you can gather how much is built in my district. But I didn’t think it was a good expenditure of two billion dollars to keep buying them. I voted against building more B-2 bombers.
It took a long time for Norm Dix [?] and the Northrop company to forgive me for that but my constituents, they listened to my reasoning and they knew that it was what was in the best interest of the district and they were perfectly fine with it — probably not all of them but enough of them that I kept getting re-elected. We have to be more innovative in congress as well and not be locked into the idea that if it’s our program we have to keep funding it and the reason for that is because we have a big challenge right now we cannot afford to waste money.
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