There’s a new book, published last month, about one of the most important defense acquisition stories of the last twenty years: James M. Hasik, Securing the MRAP: Lessons Learned in Marketing and Military Procurement (Texas A&M University Press, 2021). It’s a valuable case study, with lots of valuable detail, along with reflections on broader issues of military innovation and procurement.
… Part of Hasik’s concern in the book is to explain the US military’s failure to embrace the MRAP sooner—and, by extension, why innovation and agility is so difficult, in the modern defense sector. Here, he offers multiple explanations. One of them, not surprisingly, is that the US military and its acquisition bureaucracy tend to be slow-moving, and hostile to new ideas that might threaten existing programs and established “long-term priorities.” In the mid-2000s, the low-tech MRAPs did not seem fit into the military’s vision for high-tech suites of systems and vehicles, such as those to be offered by the army’s Future Combat Systems (cancelled in 2009). There was also “Humvee mafia,” bent on up-armoring existing vehicles, rather than embracing new ones with a novel design.
A secondary source of delay, before 2007, came from the industry side. Force Protection was ambitious and prescient, but not well managed. As Hasik puts it, “underdevelopment and turmoil at the companies making them sent a strong signal of industrial unpreparedness for large orders.” Perhaps it also didn’t help that the South African expats and their vehicles came from a white supremacist regime, which potentially created some “political queasiness,” as Hasik suggests briefly, among some of those who were considering Force Protection’s proposals.
That the excellent Mark Wilson providing a review of my colleague James Hasik’s new book on the MRAP. Make sure you pick up a copy of the book.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record… Blaming “the acquisition bureaucracy” for the delays in procuring MRAP is a lot like blaming WalMart because you didn’t get around to going to the store. All of the significant delays were in deciding to buy something and deciding what to buy — neither of which is the job of the acquisition system. The corollary is that nothing you do to the acquisition system will speed that process up.
If the authors had fingered “the Services’ requirements bureaucracy” instead, that would be more accurate — and would be heard very differently by the book’s intended audience.