The chairman of the House Armed Services committee today passionately pushed back on the idea that wasteful spending on defense systems is the result of ineptitude or a lack of oversight in Congress, telling reporters, “We’re not making ****ing widgets here.” … “What’s actually happening is a lot of very smart, dedicated people are dealing with an incredibly complicated situation and making mistakes, not correctly anticipating what is going to be possible and what’s not going to be possible.”
That was Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) in an interesting Breaking Defense article. My co-host of the NatSec News podcast Matt MacGregor has a great response on LinkedIn:
Love this point by the HASC Chairman! I’m beyond tired of people who have never managed a major technology development effort saying “well if only you had followed this 5 step process,” everything would have worked out great.
Technology is hard, integrating many technologies into useful capabilities is even more so. Expecting a cost estimate or program baseline to reflect all the contingencies that might arise in such a complicated undertaking is foolishness.
Unfortunately the return of hard cost-schedule baselines is returning to the Air Force and Space Force. But someone has got to make those program baselines work. There will always be mistakes in the planning of military systems unless no great leaps are anticipated. That’s why planning should be continuous and delegated to the ones responsible for execution.
Entrepreneur Marc Andreessen says that if you want a company to digitally transform, you have to find the smartest technologist in the company and make them CEO. The VC firm Andreessen Horowitz was based on the idea that technology founders can be groomed into the business skills to grow the company, but a business person cannot be groomed into understanding the technology that needs to be built.
In defense acquisition, I think that idea is reflected in the delegation of authority to a merit-based personnel system.
And here’s Chairman Smith on specific programs:
He pointed to programs like the Navy’s attack submarine initiative and the forthcoming B-21 bomber as examples of improvements. Smith did, however, express strong skepticism for one of the biggest potential acquisition programs on the military’s horizon: the NGAD sixth-generation fighter jet. Essentially Smith said that he’s wary of making massive bets on single programs, and the NGAD represents a “whole lot of chips in the middle of the table.”
A single copy of the NGAD fighter will be in the “multiple hundreds of millions”. Kendall recently announced that NGAD is far too “complex” to pursue quick turnaround programs like Roper’s digital century series idea. He said that NGAD would include a “family of systems” with up to five autonomous aircraft in addition to the crewed airframe. But it would seem that the “family” is within a vertical stovepipe of NGAD, though they want to achieve interoperability with the B-21 family. The B-21, by the way, will cost $550 million or more per copy
These are exquisite systems that will be highly capable, but as Smith says, it’s sucking up a lot of funding from alternative airframes, weapons, networking. Moreover, Smith says these approaches are “betting” on future technology.
I think Smith puts the B-21 into the “improvement” side because even though it integrates advanced mission systems in new ways, the airframe and propulsion are using legacy designs. IT was thus deemed a lower technical risk. It was also handled by the Rapid Capabilities Office, which was outside the traditional acquisition system with delegated authority and quick access to the top. It’ll be interesting to see how much room the Advanced Aircraft directorate will have to run on NGAD.
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