Lisa Porter joined Jordan Schneider and I for a discussion about Science & Technology (S&T) in the national security arena. She is co-president of LogiQ, a consulting company, and before that was deputy director of USD(R&E), founding director of IARPA, executive vice president of In-Q-Tel, and senior vice president of Teledyne Scientific & Imaging, among various other positions. We touch on:
- How the error correction of free markets is absent in DoD
- A round of overrated/underrated on critical S&T areas
- The split of AT&L into USD(R&E) and USD(A&S)
- How successful government organizations empower their staff
- Why the US lost it’s dominance in space launch
Read the full-text transcripts here.
During the episode, Porter discusses how many people in national security misunderstand the phrase “space as a warfighting domain.” The popular imagination brings up ideas of spacecraft moving dynamically such as in Star War or Battlestar Galactica, but ignores physical realities. It takes a lot of time and propellant for satellites to move from one orbit to another, or to avoid kinetic threats, as demanded by the Law of the Conservation of Energy.
The near-term focus for warfighting in space is about smart investments in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), such as space situational awareness, missile tracking, resilient communications, and proliferation of spacecraft. Porter cites the Space Development Agency as one example where good headway is being made in these areas, particularly proliferation where they are trying to prove whether spacecraft production can be increased from once every few years to tens or ultimately hundreds per year.
One major issue that Porter doesn’t see enough emphasis from is continuous upgrading and replenishment of spacecraft. There is not yet enough cost-effective launch capacity to perform the task. While the commercial industry is investing heavily in space, DoD has not yet provided a clear requirement or funding for the replenishment mission over the next five-to-ten years to signal its importance to industry.
A major impediment to growth in national security space is the over-use of export controls like ITAR. Porter argues the US is behind where it should be with launch, whose export control policy was driven by fear of other nations being able to make ICBMs. The controls stopped investment and knowledge sharing with allies who had to develop their own launch capabilities. “All we did was create a situation where we’re no longer the best providers of launch,” Porter said, “and now we’re coming back, of course, but… we lost command of a global market in launch and we didn’t gain anything. The thing we were afraid of [adversarial capabilities] still materialized.”
Winners and Losers
One of the major difficulties of defense acquisition is that it is an inherently non-market environment, but there is a desirability of injecting market-like principles into decision-making. Ultimately, DoD has to decide where it will allocate its funding. Porter describes some ways it can do so without the heavy hand of centralized planning of outputs.
Government is not set up to pick winners as well. Instead, it should set up mechanisms that allow it to reward winners that emerge rather than subsidizing those who the government thinks are going to win…
The COTS [commercial off the shelf] program that my colleague Mike Griffin started when he was NASA administrator, I think is a great example of how you try to balance that competition with the reality of, hey, this isn’t a commercial market… So setting those milestone payments up and saying, ‘Okay industry, I’m not picking a winner, it could be Space X, or it could be Joe’s Launch down the street. I’m going to tell you what I want to see you do. And if you do it I’ll pay… It’s not like Mike Griffin went to Elon Musk and said, I’m going to pick you as a winner.
In my mind, government program offices in these situations need to be a little like startups when they are fundraising. Program offices must to entice companies to invest their funds into a business opportunity.
A lot of that requires clearly describing the vision and potential size of the opportunity. These are the near-term milestones that get revenue opportunity, and here’s the big production prize on the back end.
We have X space vehicles that will need Y pounds of propellant per year, and the capability provides government a total cost avoidance of Z dollars — or whatever it is. That is something a commercial company can take to the bank, so to speak, when it’s looking for funding or borrowing. It also incentivizes government to think about aligning their needs with commercially-adjacent technologies to sweeten the pot and attract the best firms.
Empowering personnel
One of the chief complaints about civil and military service is that people get paid more and have better resources out in the commercial sector. Yet that is probably not the primary source of workforce issues.
I think we have to recognize it’s not about the money. It’s about people who come for the mission and they stay or they leave depending on whether you allow them the authority essentially to execute. The problem the Pentagon has is it attracts some good people and then it boxes them in so much that they can’t actually do what they came to do. I think that’s the challenge.
During my time at In-Q-Tel, by contrast, and in DARPA, by contrast — which does have excellent staff — empowers its staff. It says, you know what? I hired you because you’re good. I’m not going to put you in a closet now and not let you do anything.
The acquisition system revolves so much around program planning that it puts people and their aspirations in the rear seat. My general view is that when faced with complexity and uncertainty, the best institutional move is to focus on the process of building and rewarding excellent people who have the authority and responsibility to make programmatic choices. A founder culture for government, in a sense.
While I think there is some logic there, Porter provides a fair warning:
In the department of defense, stupid has a long tail because there’s no free market corrective factor. And that’s the thing you have to be very mindful of when you look at Silicon valley and you say, ‘I want to adopt that kind of innovation culture into the Pentagon.’ You have to realize that those correction factors are not there in the Pentagon. So you can’t just abandon discipline as part of the investment thesis of what you do. You have to still recognize your responsibility when you’re a steward of taxpayer dollars
Thanks, Lisa Porter!
I’d like to thank Lisa Porter and Jordan Schneider for a great conversation! Be sure to check out Porter’s recent testimony to Congress on Microelectronics and on AI/ML. Listen to her on OODA Cast talking innovation and leadership, watch her discuss innovation partnership while at USD(R&E), and read a good Q&A with IEEE back when she was at IARPA.
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