Here’s Special Assistant to the SecAF Dr. Tim Grayson speaking at a recent Hudson Institute event hosted by the excellent Bryan Clark and Dan Patt discussing development strategies for the Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) aircraft:
I’ll pick on F-35 which was really our last really big fully integrated system. It’s got the communications data links, it’s got the sensors, it’s got the electronic warfare payload, all of that was vertically integrated with a platform program. Now we’ve got a model [for NGAD] that says okay, for management purposes, it still might be a program office that is anchored on a platform program, but there are two variants of that.
First of all, it’s not just buying platforms, it is buying the balance of those mission systems. But it starts buying them independently of the platform. It’s in coordination with the platform, and what the platform needs, but it’s not all done through one contract, one vendor, is one vertically integrated thing.
The other thing is even within the platforms themselves they’re looking at notions of, it isn’t just one platform per program — but you may actually have an evolution of different platforms, maybe it’s an evolution of one platform or even multiple different types of platform acquired under one program heading.
The first point is to disaggregate weapon systems and manage them in separately. Dr. Grayson mentions that neither model of prime contractor as lead systems integrator, nor government as lead systems integrator, works. It has to be a “hybrid” model.
The second point I think gets back to Roper’s vision of something like a digital century series, where different models can be prototyped and deployed in a more rapid and austere manner. Now, the NGAD’s unit costs will be in the hundreds of millions, which means this will likely suck too much money out of the budget to afford follower programs. But having the flexibility in the budget to make those tradeoffs between the exquisite system and other elements in the family of systems like UAVs, weapons, sensors, etc., could help improve the likelihood of success.
Former Commander of Air Combat Command General Mike Holmes also stressed the same point of NGAD requiring substantial flexibilities to go after different elements of the family of systems within a single, broad funding line:
What it really boils down to, and this is probably the single biggest challenge in this family of systems model, is every time I do a new variation — and I’m thinking specifically a new variation of platform, but frankly it could also be a new variation of mission systems which gets even messier but let’s just talk platforms — every time I do a new variation of the platform, new platform cannot equal new program.
Historically the way we do programs, and the platforms associated with them, they’re really vertically integrated ecosystems. I’ve got NRE [nonrecurring engineering], I’ve got contract initiation, I’ve got manufacturing, I’ve got spares, training, all of those things repeated for every platform. Therefore, if I have “N” platforms it’s going to be “N” times the cost and and we very quickly go bankrupt in this family systems model. That’s even before we get to the adaptability and the interoperability.
Certainly, these issues are core to the concept of PPBE reform. Before PPBE, the military services received funding lines based on broad portfolios that provided substantial latitude. This allows the materiel commands to achieve a process of recombinatorial innovation within a family of systems. It thrived on austere prototype competitions where leaders retained the option to scale what works when the time was right. PPBE introduced hyper-rational planning, such as that inherent to lifecycle planning, cost baselining, and the “program of record” concept. This phase-in was complete by the 1970s.
Though PPBE gets arcane pretty fast, being able to do different things within a budget line item is really the delegation of authority to make choices. It is the idea of individual responsibility. Delegating acquisition decision authority to the service acquisition executive (which is super centralized anyway), or even the program executive officers, is really not delegating much authority to make integrated decisions. Almost all MDAPs were delegated from OSD to the services since the 2017 timeframe. But that won’t achieve a true delegation unless it is coupled with requirements and budget authority. That is what PPBE reform is about in my mind, along with building back the checks-and-balances into the system so that joint objectives are achieved.
Leave a Reply