… funding for Advanced Components Development and Prototypes (6.4 funding) has increased from 20.4% of total RDT&E funding in 2012 to 30.2% in the enacted 2021 budget and 32.9% in the 2022 budget request. This indicates that the DOD has increased the type of RDT&E funding that should help new warfighting capabilities successfully emerge from the valley-of-death. Our analytics also show that this increase has come at slight expense to all other budget activity titles.
That was an interesting article from Vector Analytics. Check out the link for some charts.
I think there is reason to be hopeful, particularly the efforts since the FY2016 NDAA to boost prototyping and accelerate the fielding of new technologies. We’ve been aware that BA 6.4 has been getting boosted over recent years, which maybe attributable to middle-tier programs to some degree.
But the change is perhaps to be expected. There was a boom of new defense programs in the 2000s which culminated in a crisis of Nunn-McCurdy breaches and the WSARA reforms. Several years ago, analysts started noting that cost growth and Nunn-McCurdy breaches were falling. But that was primarily because so many programs got rebaselined and started transitioning into production. The “next-generation” of developments was getting underway in the mid- to late-2010s.
Of course, looking at aggregate budget figures tells us nothing about whether particular programs are actually getting prototyped and fielded. Anecdotally at least, the jury is still out for a lot of innovative new programs. Vector Analytics takes a little closer look:
Hypersonics experienced an extremely steep ramp-up of funding starting in 2017, with most of that increased funding associated with Advanced Components and Prototypes (6.4). That ramp-up is noble, however, we find the void of SDD (6.5) and Operational System Development (6.7) funding somewhat troubling.
… Directed energy DOD RDT&E funding looks much different from that of hypersonics. The figure below shows that a majority of directed energy funding has been allocated to 6.1 – 6.3 budget activities through 2017, then an uptick in Advanced Components and Prototype funding (6.4) started in 2018. This figure illustrates a more typical RDT&E ramp-up for a new military capability…
Finally, let’s look at DOD RDT&E trends for ground robotics. This capability has had programs of record for several years, there is evidence of SDD funding as early as 2012, and since 2018 both Advanced Components and Prototypes and SDD funding has been steadily increasing.
Certainly, if we looked budget figures by system types back in the 2000s, we would have seen programs moving through the RDT&E budget activities and into production. That doesn’t mean that they were the right programs or well executed. It just meant they were following a plan.
The lack of BA 6.5 for hypersonics and directed energy might just reflect the fact they are middle tier rapid prototyping programs, and not a signal that programs are failing to get to the next stage. I’d be interested to see what programs fall under BA 6.5 for Army ground robotics, but that could be a success story from Esper’s night court zero-based budgeting reviews.
Overall, I think there’s an interesting case to be made that transitions are going better than before. The rhetoric certainly feels different the past five years. However, I really would like a treatment of the individual programs and their progression rather than top-level budget figures for a portfolio. That would require something that looks more like Project Hindsight from the 1960s where they traced individual technological “events” that were necessary for a weapon system to succeed. Integration into doctrine and warfighting tactics is another layer of analysis. It is unfortunate that there is a dearth of these kind of retrospectives and project histories that can really tell us about what is going on.
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