Mosaic warfare is a concept that evolved over the last 5 or 6 years, both at DARPA but also by folks like Dan Patt and David Deptula, where we think about generating force packages and missions just in time. Being able to rapidly compose systems, assets, people, and fighting a mission with exactly what you need at the right time. That philosophy is really important for acceleration. Why? Because it’s compositional. It means you don’t have to develop everything at once. If you have assets on the shelf, you can rapidly compose them. If you take that philosophy all the way to how we build systems, that’s how you get away from spending 20-30 years building a platform. If you think of them as composable systems where you can rapidly put them together and change them, that’s how you accelerate change.
It’s interesting fact that might be good to share. Between 1945 and 1974, the mean time to develop a new aircraft from new start to IOC, initial operational capability, was five years. Then in 1975, the DoD-5000 series was published. And since then, the time to IOC actually increased at a rate of approximately five years per decade. The F-18 took 11 years to get to IOC. The B-2 took 16. The F-22 took 20. And that’s not a graph that has changed for the F-35 and so on. So when the chief says accelerate change or lose, that’s what he’s talking about.
That was from the DefAero Technology Report with Air Force chief scientist Victoria Coleman. I believe the chart she was looking at actually came from the excellent Dan Patt and Bill Greenwalt report, replicated below:
I disagree with some of Coleman’s interpretation. The DoDI 5000.1 was issued in 1971 while the 5000.2 came out in 1975. But ultimately most of the requirements in the 5000.2 were already part of the process, but contained in other regulations or memos since the milestone/development concept paper implemented in 1969. Moreover, the milestone process was based on McNamara’s DoDI 3200.6 from 1962 which had the exact same stage gates, just called “key decision points.”
I think the crucial change was the adoption of the PPBS and systems analysis in the 1960s. Consider the facts more closely. The Air Force failed to develop a single fighter in the 1960s except the F-111. The F-111, formerly the TFX, was hailed as a shining example of McNamara’s systems analysis/PPBS approach. Yet it must be considered a failure. Sure, the F-111 reached IOC in 1967 which was about 6 years, but it had to go through several more years of defect correction until it was fully operational. Robert Art has a great book on this story, The TFX Decision: McNamara and the Military.
As for other quick and successful aircraft, the A-10, F-16, F-117, and F-18 were all highly irregular — not born of the “formal” acquisition process. The F-18’s troubles in that group are interesting. Originally required by Congress to be a common aircraft with the Air Force’s choice of the F-16, the Navy broke away and decided to adapt the YF-17 from the lightweight fighter competition. The YF-17 to F-18 was troublesome since the YF-17 was designed for the Air Force by Northrop which never made a Navy plane. McDonnell Douglas took over the prime role for the F-18, and basically built a new aircraft but was forced to make it look like the YF-17 for political reasons. The program faced cancellation every single year of its development, and the Navy in any case changed requirements often. But it’s not fair to put the F-18 “post-5000.2” while the F-16 was “pre-5000.2”.
The F-14 was a system of the “regular” process introduced in 1974 (with great cost growth), but the F-15 would also have been very different had John Boyd not affected it in the 1960s when it was the F-X program. At any rate, there was a gradual change over time from the rapid development of the 1960s to the lethargic processes from the 1980s and after. The introduction of the DoDI 5000.2 doesn’t represent a clean break. In anything, 1961-1968 is the clean break when Robert McNamara introduced the PPBS. Still, an organization as large as DoD takes time to change, and pockets of irregular brilliance pop up now and then to produce excellent systems.
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