Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA): I’m honestly a little bit more on the side of we need to blow up the whole system here because the reality is that we still will have some big clunky industrial era type weapon systems that we need to keep on costs and on budget, but I think that increasingly the majority of the acquisitions that we need to be making will be these more agile mission-oriented types of technologies fulfilling totally new operational concepts and things that we get often right off the shelf in the private sector very quickly and have to adopt with a lot of flexibility and adapt as they come along.
… I think that it’s true you’ll certainly hear people on the Hill saying, ‘Oh we’re losing oversight if we change the way that we buy for the military.’ But the truth of the matter is that the current system doesn’t really give us the oversight that we need anyway. We’re sort of circling the drain with this system where DoD describes an intricate detail the ways that it isn’t buying effectively, congress sort of signs off on that oversight, and we just keep going in circles. We have enough oversight to tell us all the ways that the F-35 program is messed up, for example, but has that actually helped anyone? Have we been really agile and fixing it?
I think that’s a whole other question so we need to fix this whole budgeting and acquisition system that’s fundamentally broken and my hope is that with this mission-based pilot we might find a way to keep the oversight but have it focused on the things that matters… As a member of Congress, I can keep DoD accountable by asking that they show us how the money that they spend in a mission-based funding bucket actually meets the mission and if it’s not meeting the mission then we can dive into more detail and determine what do they need to change about how they’re spending this money.
That was from an event hosted by the excellent Dan Patt, Transforming Defense for a Competitive Era.
We’ve had 50+ years of acquisition reform, but the past year or so has been perhaps the first time we’ve seen a robust discussion of budgeting and oversight. These issues are important because DoD doesn’t have a technology problem, it has a technology adoption problem which is primarily driven by institutions. Budgeting and oversight sets the governance structure that creates a system of incentives which is the primary driver of outcomes.
Here’s a little more on the mission-budgeting concept:
Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA): We can’t just change what we buy we also have to change how we buy it. Software is going to win wars, so we need to change our buying habits so that we can buy software. You just don’t buy it the same way you buy hardware and that means we have to have more flexible quick funding that directly addresses the operational challenges our troops are facing or meets the needs of these new operational concepts that Michele [Flournoy] is talking about developing. So that’s why I’m working to establish what we’re calling a mission-based pilot which would experiment with a new way of budgeting to fix these issues. The mission-based pilot would restructure funding so that it’s tied to specific missions instead of specific hardware.
So picture this, instead of buying a single piece of hardware — say a fighter jet and forcing it to address multiple missions over the years spending billions of dollars fixing it only deploying it decades after we wrote requirements for it — I mean if this doesn’t sound familiar? We’re talking about the F-35 here, folks. We could just define an operational challenge that our troops are facing right now assign funding to it and quickly buy a flexible range of solutions that might help address it and I think that’s really the approach that China is taking here. They have an operational goal. They don’t have a lot of rules or restrictions on how they’re going to reach that goal, whereas we just always buy gadgets.
Michele Flournoy: … I think along with what Seth’s talking about in terms of a pilot having greater flexibility from Congress to allow the department to manage portfolios of capability according to mission area would be huge. I don’t know a single CEO trying to run a major business that doesn’t do quarterly portfolio reviews and look at – okay, what’s not working and I should do some divestment? What is working or it’s even better than I thought it would be and I want to double down and speed that up, accelerate the progress? The fact that the department is so hamstrung and its ability to manage across its investment portfolio for a given mission is really challenging and I know that congress doesn’t want to lose the power of the purse — they want don’t want to lose their oversight — but I think there are ways to do this that would keep Congress informed.
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