DoD still operates with enterprise processes and management practices designed around programs from 60 years ago. These program-centric constraints drive longer timelines, fewer quantities, and higher costs that erode DoD’s military advantage and increase operational risks.
… Instead of overseeing the execution of 50 separate programs, PEOs would be responsible for delivering integrated suites of capabilities to maximize portfolio measures. Portfolios optimize interoperability and cybersecurity by harnessing digital and mission engineering, architectures, APIs, and infrastructure. Meanwhile, PEOs would develop portfolio strategies, processes, and contracts to maximize competition and enable the delivery of better capabilities sooner. Programs would no longer be locked into APBs. The key measures would include how each capability maximizes portfolio measures and mission impact.
That was from the excellent Pete Modigliani, writing in the Bad Ideas series from CSIS — Bad Idea: Managing Defense Requirements, Budgets, and Acquisitions via Programs. Read the whole thing! He nicely walks through why it takes 10-15 years to deliver a program capability, and then what a portfolio might look like.
The very idea of a military program presumes a well-defined “thing” that exists in the world, evolving in linear ways across a small number of metrics. I have airplanes. I need them to go faster, farther, and have better radars.
Portfolios allow for ambiguity and open-endedness. I need to maintain air dominance. Maybe some autonomy can best a fighter pilot like Deep Blue did in chess. Maybe I can have swappable nose-cones for different missions. Maybe I can get a fuller picture of the battlefield by networking sensors.
Certainly technology and war are engulfed in uncertainty. The market place of ideas — in the economy and in science — rewards people for thinking about how things could be different or how everyone else could be wrong. What an entrepreneur does is look at how other producers are combining labor and capital, notices an error of production, and sets out to correct that error. Often, what is or is not an error becomes a matter of subjective opinion, because it depends on so many contingencies about what is likely to work (tech) or what is likely to be useful in the real world (requirements).
In any case, the DoD system for managing programs seeks to perpetuate errors because only existing things can be analyzed and costed to the extent necessary for approval. It would be like imagining that the personal computer would have been supported by Xerox headquarters, whose program was printers. They transitioned the laser printer, but nothing else.
Leave a Reply