Pentagon has increasingly articulated a desire to adopt the best of the commercial sector into the military. But a new report suggests the department hasn’t been able to establish an acquisition environment ripe for integration of cutting-edge tech—instead, it’s been dabbling in “innovation tourism.”
… According to the report, the crux of the issue isn’t necessarily about how much money is being spent or even problems with acquisition and innovation offices themselves. It’s a problem of organizational structure.
“An organization as large as the DOD—which controls roughly 45 percent of the U.S. government’s discretionary budget—cannot rely on impromptu conversations, serendipity, and old-friend networks to diffuse knowledge across the acquisition ecosystem,” the report reads. “However, that is where things stand today.”
…. CSET makes three main recommendations in the report: Define innovation goals and increase transparency; share and use market intelligence across the acquisition ecosystem, including requiring information sharing among program offices and innovation offices; and create safe spaces like consortia for collaboration.
That was a NextGov article recapping a Center for Security and Emerging Technology report. The actual report I think defined the problem quite well. But I do not agree with the conclusions, which in my mind amount to the charge of DoD officials not trying hard enough. Sharing market intelligence, driving innovative programs of record, and fostering consortia of firms pursuing critical technology areas — these are all things that are people’s job today.
For example, what are people supposed to do with exquisite market intelligence that has no requirement to get resourced? You’d need some kind of portfolio funding that can capitalize on that, right?
I’m of the opinion that DoD is pretty darn optimized when you look at it closely. But it’s an optimization under the PPBE constraint. DoD has reached a “local” maximum in terms of effectiveness, but that’s a pretty low when compared to what it could be by addressing fundamental issues in governance (PPBE, requirements, oversight). At the very end of the report, the researchers appear to recognize this:
Reducing those barriers will require a series of major reforms of the current acquisition ecosystem, which many experts have discussed in countless articles over many decades. For instance, the 60-year-old Planning, Programming, Budget, and Execution system that the DOD still uses to allocate resources is poorly suited to the rapid, flexible, dynamic process of commercial innovation. Major acquisition efforts can take years to complete, and the military is largely unable to adjust program requirements to accommodate new technological advancements. Without relaxing these requirements and allowing for flexibility at different stages in the program, the platforms and systems the military acquires will consistently lag behind the state of the art.
The authors cited Dan Patt and Bill Greenwalt’s excellent paper Competing in Time which advocates for PPBE reform.
[Update: The total count of articles on defense PPBE reform is really quite low, perhaps a few dozen in the past 50 years — primarily associated with the New Public Management crowd in the 1990s and public policy dissertations in the 1970s. The authors may be conflating PPBE with little “a” acquisition.]
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