Here’s the excellent Steve Blank on the War on the Rocks podcast:
We’re recording this in the middle of the battle for Ukraine, and I think we have an on the battlefield experiment of what happens when a 20th century industrial age military faces a 21st century agile, distributed, using commercial technology army. I think the results for the 20th century have come in. They’re at the bottom of the Black Sea and their smoking ruins on the road to Kyiv. I’m afraid the DoD looks a lot closer to Russia’s army than it does to the Ukrainian.
… The state of corruption in Russia — someone estimates half to three-quarters of the money are in apartments in London rather than weapons in Ukraine — but I still think the whole nature of Cold War infrastructure, that you have 30 year lifecycles in technology that you can predict not only the technology but the threats, that our defense department has all the technology they need to fight and deter a war, all these assumptions are gone. And yet, our defense department is still organized like their the best.
We do have world class people and organizations in the Department of Defense, but it is for a world that no longer exists. That’s a big idea. The world has changed rapidly about where the most advanced technologies lie. AI, machine learning, quantum, commercial access to space, biotech, are no longer inside federally funded R&D labs or the primes. It’s not that they don’t have those people, they can’t pay them baseball star salaries that startups can or commercial companies can. They can’t move as fast, they can’t acquire as fast, and more importantly, they don’t have that innovation culture that we’ve been operating under in a Darwinian way in Silicon Valley and other innovation ecosystems…. I’m not pessimistic. I’m despondent. There’s a difference.
Another way of framing it is that defense organizations had long been trying to chart its own course of technological innovation. The whole acquisition process is very inwardly focused, with bespoke requirements tackled by labs, primes, and FFRDCs. When DoD was over 40 percent of the economy in World War II, and over 10 percent in the 1950s, it perhaps had enough oomph to be leading the commercial sector. Indeed, famed scientists from John von Neumann to Edward Teller actively participated in defense programs.
However, as defense has fallen closer to 3 percent of the economy, it is simply being swamped by the depth and breadth of R&D in the commercial sector. Steve Blank and others like DIU chief Mike Brown have been championing the “fast follower” strategy where DoD must adopt commercial rather then reinvent the wheel.
I think that secular trend that is in fact desirable — to stay ahead of adversaries we should want the commercial economy to be highly innovative with a small defense sector leveraging those outcomes. But I think more important is the acquisition process within DoD that continues to treat weapons technology like it did back in the 1950s and 1960s when DoD was the leader. Steve Blank said it — DoD relies on prediction of 30 year lifecycles. That’s just not how commercial industry builds, and puts an artificial wall between DoD and the commercial world.
I’m not quite sure that DoD needs commercial tech companies building for it. Maybe it just needs purpose-built firms to repackage commercial technology for defense needs.
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