Here’s a flash talk with DIU’s Mike Brown at the Aspen Security Forum:
There are so many innovations in the commercial sector that could be valuable to the military, and we have to get them to our warfighter faster. What’s the problem? Why can’t we get that to the military quickly? Sounds like an easy problem.
Well, to answer that question, we have to go back in time — all the way to 1961. 1961 was referred to yesterday by Jack Reed, and we’ll get a little bit wonky. PPBE. Anyone who has been around the Pentagon knows exactly what I’m talking about. Planning, programming, budgeting, and execution. State of the art when McNamara brought it from Ford motor company over to the Pentagon in 1961.
This was the era where the Defense Department was developing most of its own technologies. It didn’t need commercial technology. That has changed today. In fact, eight of the ten modernization priorities are commercial. Artificial intelligence, autonomous systems. Rapid launch, satellite imagery. All the things we just talked about. In that era where the Pentagon was a “first mover,” first to market or use, this system PPBE worked pretty well. It’s not working for commercial technology. In fact, it’s really a roadblock to bringing commercial technology in.
… Budgeting is the part that needs the most help today. As many of you know, it takes us two-and-a-half years to program a dollar to be spent against a requirement. A year-and-a-half to build up that budget by line item. A year Congress to approve that budget, and that’s if they approve it on time.
Watch the whole thing, interesting throughout. Mike Brown gives four elements to a “Fast Follower” strategy to adopt commercial technologies to defense missions.
- Requirements: Don’t need them. Need a simplified version, simplified version of assessing need and vendors.
- Need org homes for commercial tech: Need single organization to assess and procure each capability like commercial imagery, drones, etc.
- Commercial Acquisition Framework / process: Send a hard technology problem to industry to ask what they’ve got. Send us your normal pitch deck. Award prototype contract, focused on speed, on commercial terms, don’t own IP.
- Consistent budgeting for capability: Instead of creating programs of records, buy a specific item. This requires Congressional flexibility. We need satellite imagery budget, let DoD find the best vendor and tech without redefining new requirement/program.
Naturally, I would assume that the consistent budgeting for capabilities would be aligned with the organizational homes for those capabilities represented by streamlined requirements documentation. However, it’s impossible to completely get rid of overlapping areas of responsibility. For example, satellite communications and nuclear command and control cannot be completely disentangled. And then when commercial SATCOM wants to go one way, how does NC3 get its requirements back in there?
Ultimately, I think that flexible portfolio budgets to responsible organizations with high-level capability or mission requirements is the right direction. But how these organizations and funding streams interact to create strategic coherence is a problem area. Many will call for direct centralization of authority. But the right answer is coordination by mutual adjustment, which is the process that has been empirically found to work in markets and science. This means creating structures for program transparency, peer review, debate, and appeals to leadership for breaking deadlocks.
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