Podcast: A clean-sheet approach to Space Force acquisition with Cynthia Cook and William Shelton

RAND researchers Cynthia Cook and William Shelton joined me on the Acquisition Talk podcast to discuss their new paper that takes a fresh look at the space acquisition enterprise. Not only is the US Space Force much smaller than its sister services (just 16,000 compared more than 10x that number in the Marines), it is also much more reliant on technology. They argue that the nation’s newest military service has a huge opportunity to shape a more agile process and flatter organization. This includes:

Creating a culture of “warrior engineers”
Embracing funding flexibility and portfolio management
Empowering a single space acquisition decisionmaker
Coordinating enterprise architectures and capability roadmaps
Increasing cross-pollination between government and industry

Download the full-text transcripts

In the episode, Cynthia and Bill emphasize the need for the Space Force to think differently about program management. Often, managers are incentivized to deliver on their baseline program instead of taking responsibility for broader integration issues. For example, the GPS capability set was broken out into separate programs for space vehicle, ground, user equipment, and launch, causing synchronization issues.

Bill explained how “As a program manager, I had the iron triangle. Don’t mess with my cost-schedule-performance. Anybody comes with a new idea, if it’s going to make me slip or cost money, thanks for your interest in national defense but I’m going to do what I got to do to meet my APB.”

Changing this system of incentives requires a different personnel structure, system of promotion, dedicated contracting officers, and methods of accountability. This is particularly true as space systems rely more on commercial, proliferation, and “good enough” solutions rather than exquisite systems that take more than a decade to field.

Paradigms, Past and Future

A few of acquisition paradigm shifts at the heart of the RAND paper include: (1) moving from program stovepipes to enterprise architectures; (2) from exquisite systems to proliferated; and (3) from defense-unique to commercial dual-use. Yet a fourth shift is one that doesn’t get as much play in the punditry: from acquisition as a support function to a warfighting capability. The authors write in the paper:

Acquisition cannot be divorced and separate from space operations… Just as requirements cannot be divorced from understanding technology trends, acquisition needs to be deeply imbued with operational knowledge and culture… acquisition needs to be reimagined and understood as a warfighting capability critical to the mission.

I agree with the view. One overarching trend is towards increasing technical content in military operations. This is particularly true of space, where operators are not actually operating in their domain but remotely and often digitally. Yet through IT, space operators interact with systems which create significant military effects.

Creating overmatch is all about improving these systems and integrating them into CONOPS at the fastest possible rate. This rate of change is governed by the acquisition process’ ability to present interesting capabilities for experimentation and and deliver on fielding.

The RAND researchers quote Irving Holley Jr.’s 1964 classic Buying Aircraft: “… the procurement process itself is a weapon of war no less significant than the guns, the airplanes, and the rockets turned out by the arsenals of democracy.”

Flexibility and Oversight

The desired paradigm shifts are not necessarily opposed by the regulations in the contracting and little “a” acquisition process. As Bill argues:

The Federal Acquisition Regulation is intended to be flexible and is flexible. If you look at [DoDI] 5000 and its iterations, all the stuff you want to do, I believe you can do within the reg if you’re willing to tailor.

But there are some higher level issues in requirements and budgeting that do need change. This includes the dual concept of funding flexibility and portfolio management. The consolidation of budget line items into portfolios tied to high-level mission statements was the number one recommendation made in the quickly retracted May 2020 Alternative Acquisition System for the Space Force report. It is also a major element of another paradigm shift from program managers to capability managers. Here’s Bill again:

It would be great if I had the funding flexibility — one big program element that I could reallocate funds to different pieces of the capability to make sure things were delivered on time. So if you’re running launch services as one program element, you’re running the satellite development as one program element, you run running the user equipment and a ground station, each a separate program elements — if one gets behind and one’s too far ahead, how do you move resources from one to the other so everybody’s at the same time?

These kinds of tradeoffs should be able to be made by responsible officials at the speed of relevance rather than through congressional action and everyone in between. One of the challenges to end-to-end integration of responsibility, however, is that there will always be overlapping responsibilities for a capability. Indeed, the standup of SMC 2.0 with an Enterprise Corps for such things as C2 and launch means that capability managers will often engage in matrixed coordination. Ultimately, that is desirable.

Another major aspect of funding flexibility and portfolio management is the role of oversight. As Cynthia observes:

What is the role of Congress in this? What would they be giving up if you have a much smaller number of funding lines? Right now, all the different programs give them insight into spending and so forth.

If you were to fund in a different way, how could you support Congress in their oversight responsibilities by giving them metrics so that they can understand the progress towards the delivering of capabilities that are key to the nation’s defense. So that’s really the key question to me. Does it need to be done by having all these different separate funding lines, or are there other ways of providing data so that they can execute their national responsibilities?

I think that’s going to be a key element of debate in the prospective PPBE reform commission. But it doesn’t mean the Space Force cannot start piloting some of these methods. Program metrics can be viewed as a conversation between multiple levels of stakeholders including Congress and the GAO. Some of this will require data reporting like correlating obligations data with programs and value. I think a key element of that is recognizing that measuring cost and schedule growth to a fixed APB is not conducive to effective outcomes:

Cynthia Cook: The challenge here is that if you set a technical baseline in stone and managed to it, you’re going to be delivering yesterday’s capability. You need to approach this in a more flexible way —

William Shelton: Not just yesterday’s last decades… We’re asking program managers to think differently. You don’t have those guardrails anymore. Saying something is in and out of scope gets a little tougher, right? You don’t have as much structure. So you’re looking for a different kind of program manager. You’re looking for somebody who is flexible, who is risk tolerant, who can do the calculus about — all right does it make sense for me to try to develop this state-of-the-art widget? And if it fails, what do I have as a backup? And can I run those two things simultaneously?