Here’s a slice of a panel discussion that includes former HASC Chair Mac Thornberry, former USD Policy Michele Flournoy, and Rep. Elaine Luria:
Mac Thornberry: There are cultural issues in both the pentagon and congress on being able to move at the speed that events require. So if North Korea decides in short order they’re going to do something, we have to be able to move appropriately at that speed. A budget process that takes two years to even maybe get the money appropriated, that and before you ever start building something, doesn’t cut it.
You can’t treat everything the same. Carriers and you know big expensive things are one thing, but a pool of money for AI applications, for example — the National Security AI Commission recommended congress do more of a portfolio approach for these fast-moving technologies — does help.
I think and when it comes to some of these threats especially from China and to the lesser extent North Korea and Iran and Russia, but with some of these threats that sort of flexibility of funding I think would help augment what congress and secretary lord have done as far as the acquisition authorities. They’re in place but you’ve got to deal with the culture and the money to actually get something out of it.
Courtney Kube: Is there anything else other than AI that you think that there could be that sort of like a pool of funding that might be applied?
Mac Thornberry: I think ship maintenance has been and there’s been pilot programs on that, but I think multi-year money for that because we have huge delays when there are CRs on that… The other thing I would add is a broader category of kind of bridge funding for innovation adoption. so right now what you’re having is many new innovative technologies being demonstrated or piloted you know you go to AFWERX or SOFWERX and you’re the best in class and then there’s a wait, 18 to 24 months and we’ll get you in the program in FY24 or FY25. For small companies it’s like that’s a death sentence.
So we need to have a pool of money that says now, based on the successful prototype, we’re going to continue to develop that capability to get it ready for full-scale production when you can actually get the programmatic funds. There those kind of bridging funds are absolutely key for a whole range of ready and emerging technologies.
Mac Thornberry for the win! I sure hope he and others who understand these points can help appropriators come along for the ride to improved acquisition. Innovation funds are a nice stop-gap to these problems, but moving toward portfolio management is the ultimate solution.
Of course, not every new tech idea should “cross” the valley of death, but acquisition officials and users responsible for execution should be able to make those opportunity cost tradeoffs so valuable things are not left behind for the Chinese to sweep up their IP at a discounted price.
Here is Michele Flournoy jumping on a similar topic:
One of the challenges is we need to be able to bring along congress, particularly appropriators, who tend to be very rightly conservative about how they spend taxpayer dollars. But we’re in a little bit of a catch 22 where someone like the navy will come and say, “we’d like to buy a few unmanned surface vehicles so that we can play around with them experiment develop a new operational concept,” and the congress comes back and says, or the appropriators say, “No, no, no. You clearly don’t know what you want to do with these things so why would we let you buy?”
Beautifully said. The way out of the catch 22, certainly, is to inundate the system with thousands of pages of analysis and a bureaucratic consensus. Such well-laid plans are hard for those conducting oversight to argue against, or can be modified to include those criticisms, and then billions of dollars are opened up. The problem is that a consensus-based analytical plan almost invariably leads to THE WRONG SYSTEM SOLUTION, one riddled with errors. Yet that becomes the baseline acquisition officials must execute to.
I think this is a better mental view for the valley of death than a small company not able to get a SBIR Phase III.
Here’s more from Flournoy on the need to turn acquisition officials into “special ops acquirers of commercial technologies.”
I just want to say that I think part of this equation of rapidly fielding new capabilities is sort of building again on what Ellen Lord did when she was under secretary for acquisition, which is really creating a much more speedy highway for largely commercial technologies to be more rapidly integrated into the force. There are AI tools today that can give us huge decision advantage. They need to be in every COCOM.
… There are things today that we could do to build our resilience on the cyber side in the space side that we should be investing in right now, largely commercial. Doesn’t need a new military requirement. Doesn’t need to go through the traditional 5000 process acquisition process. We need to create that fast track and train and incent acquisition professionals to really be sort of special ops acquirers of commercial technologies, which we really haven’t done at scale yet.
There were talks of Flournoy becoming SecDef after the 2020 elections. Imagine if Flournoy was SecDef and Mike Brown was USD A&S. I think that vision of agile acquisition and commercial tech could have had a real chance of implementation. But it wasn’t in the cards. I fear that only a significant emotional event leading to a major war would set DoD upon the path, but by then it will be too late.
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