I was pleased to have John Ferrari join me on the Acquisition Talk podcast to discuss a wide range of issues facing DoD’s ability to field game-changing technologies in an era of strategic competition. He recently retired from the Army as a Major General and director of program analysis and evaluation at the G8. He is now a non-resident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and Chief Financial Officers of QOMPLX, a data analytics and cybersecurity firm. We touch on:
- The impact of inflation on defense
- How the Army IVAS HoloLens program shows the future of acquisition
- Ways for organizing JADC2 and interoperability
- The challenges of running DoD on PowerPoints and disjointed IT systems
- Whether new entrants can scale in defense without suing the government
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In the episode, John argues that DoD’s process looks to replace existing “legacy” platforms with newer versions of the same thing: aircraft, ships, ground vehicles, satellites, etc. This focus on the future leads to a dearth of experimentation today, leading to poor choices on those “next-gen” platforms. Instead, he argues that so-called legacy systems should be used as experimental test-beds for integrating new technologies.
For example, outfitting a navy ship with fiber optics and 5G, deploying a commercial-based operating system, and allowing nontraditionals to quickly deliver capabilities against that. Another example is the Army’s JLTV program, which is basically a small MRAP and while it met its requirement from 2012, has none of the new technologies widely available in the auto-industry like anti-lock breaks and backup cameras, not to mention a suite of sensors and automated software updates found in a Tesla.
DoD doesn’t have decades to move towards military technologies that have caught up with the 21st century. “If you’re building new systems and it takes you 30 or 40 years to get there, rather than taking commercial technology today and embedding it in the current systems, you’ll never get there.”
While the Secretary of Defense can accelerate this move towards rapid experimentation and adoption, it takes his personal attention to each and every project. That cannot scale. The system can only move as fast as trust allows, and since the 1970s there has been a major breakdown in trust between the executive and legislative branches. John argues that information technology provides an opportunity to build back trust, similar to the way parents have learned to trust putting their child into an Uber because they can track location, see the drive’s profile, and so forth.
Irregular Starts
Here’s John discussing the Army Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS), which provides soldiers a heads up digital display that is networked to each other as well as other information sources like sensors.
A couple of years ago the Army decided, after 20 years of trying to build its own network WIN-T, that it would abandon that effort. Go figure the Army was trying to out-compete Verizon, AT&T, and all the giant global telecoms. So with that was this gap, some funding, and nothing to do until it figured out what it was going to do next for the communication system.
By the way, this seems like the way a lot of innovative defense programs start. Money usually has to be lined up according to a specific plan, so when one program gets cancelled or restructured, the money is already there and has no baseline to execute to.
It has to be unexpected, because if a program is winding down, there’s already requirements being lined up for the successor. Kessel Run is another example, where AOC 10.2 got cancelled for not delivering and an organic software shop decided it could smuggle devsecops into defense acquisition. I think a survey of programs would reveal quite a number of illustrations.
Not Your Mom’s Requirements Process
Back to Army IVAS, here’s John:
[The 82nd Airborne] had been using mobile devices and were very comfortable using those types of handhelds and devices in actual combat operations. Microsoft had an idea, to use it’s goggles and its X-Box technologies, to really leap ahead and knit together the smartphone with a wearable device and goggles. And so within a year, they had working prototypes and within two years they were off to building a program of record.
But what was great about the program? No requirements documents. The end state was what was developed on the ground and in coordination. They [software developers] would go out in the field. Soldiers would say, ‘Hey, I don’t like this.’ They’d re-code it at night and they’d be back out in the field the next day. No change order documents, no program of record, no funding line.
The idea that irregularity in the acquisition process leads to improved outcomes is probably true but impossible to prove. Just one example coming out of the IVAS program, with the heads up display soldiers were more accurate shooting from the hip. After using the intuitive displays, it didn’t take long for one soldier to relearn shooting an now he will “never miss it.”
Eric: … And so they actually have to relearn and that would have been something impossible to have predicted in the requirements stage. Is that what was going on?
John: Not only impossible to predict, but heresy… If the Army had done this in the requirements sense in the normal way of doing things, it would have said, IVAS has to be designed so that soldiers can fire their weapon in accordance with field manual XXXX.
John put it another way:
Nobody sat around and said, what I want to do is blow up the hotel industry by renting out people’s rooms, so let’s invent a smartphone to do that. That’s not the way it works. You have to put the technology in the hands of the war fighters and they will innovate how they fight around it.
Bringing JADC2 Together
One of the big debates right now is how all of the systems DoD operates can be networked together to create a resilient “kill web” — an internet of military things. The general perception is that there’s no focus on the effort, that unless a program office is created and put in charge the services will go their own way and never connect. Here’s John’s take:
This is the classic absurdity of the entire system. You or I could right now take out our smartphone type out an email, put an emoji in it and send it to the president of Iran. It’ll translate itself. And he can read it in Farsi. He can listen to it in Farsi. You can type it, he can listen to it, and the emoji comes through exactly how you sent it.
Yet we at the Pentagon need a program office and requirements documents to figure out how to pass graphics from United States English speaking to the British English speaking and how to pass a graphic from from a plane to a soldier.
He argues that there’s a natural monopoly of sorts in operating systems, because without it you cannot be passing data back and forth. But that doesn’t mean there will be a single company to rule them all for DoD.
In cloud, DoD originally went for a monopoly provider in the JEDI program, but realized that many commercial enterprises had already moved towards a multi-cloud system (the JWCC). The same thing may happen in operating systems where you could potentially have Microsoft, Anduril, Palantir, Google or others competing. John observed:
You’ve gotta be able to send an email and make a phone call from one device to another. So they cooperate on the standards of information interchange, and then they compete on user usability…
That’s part of the, the culture that’s got to change, which is, ‘Hey, you guys get together. You figure out the standard.’ Because right now the approach is, ‘Hey, JADC2 will stand up a program office and we’ll come up with the standards and tell you all.’
Holy cow, nobody’s going to adopt whatever we come up with in Department of Defense.
Global Companies Have to Pick Sides
With rising geopolitical tensions, people in many OECD countries are increasingly weary of China. The percent of people in the US, for example, who view China unfavorably increased from 47% in 2018 to 73% in 2020.
I think the challenge for the tech industry right now is going to be picking sides. So the world, technology, the internet is balkanizing into really three different places. This kind of notion of one global internet — the tech companies say, ‘We’re not nationalistic. We’re not a US company. We’re a global company. We are global citizens.’ That’s breaking down.
John points to Microsoft’s big push into defense, AWS has long been a major defense provider, and even Google has reaffirmed its desire to support DoD. Here’s a provocative statement:
The question is why do we have the Defense Logistics Agency? Why don’t we just outsource that to Amazon? I understand why we had it in the past. It was Amazon before Amazon. But there’s no reason to have it today other than we have it.
It’s often hard to break into government because of the unique go-to-market requirements. The core competence of the defense primes, John argues, is dealing with government, writing proposals, cost accounting, documentation, etc.
This reality is reflected in the way Wall Street rewards innovative commercial companies and the way it rewards defense companies. Defense companies stock price is boosted for producing cash and dividends whereas commercial tech firms are rewarded for the potential for future growth.
Thanks John Ferrari!
I’d like to thank John Ferrari for joining me on the Acquisition Talk podcast. There’s a ton more of interest, so listen to the whole thing! A lot of his articles are compiled at his AEI webpage, including The Navy should Innovate Now and Energizing Data-Driven Operations at the Tactical Edge. Watch his appearances on Government Matters.
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