Here’s a lengthy slice from the recently exited DIU director Michael Brown on the Venture Stories podcast discussing a major barrier to military innovation. I’ll forego the indentation below.
By the way, I will be hosting a panel discussion at this year’s GMU/DAU Conference on defense budget reform. Michael Brown will be one of the panelists as will former USD A&S and current Vice-Chair of the PPBE Reform Commission Ellen Lord. Be sure to register for the event, I’d love to see you there!!
… Senior DoD leaders might have the flexibility to say, ‘this is an emerging threat, I need to allocate money there, or, I can leverage some new commercial technology to solve that — But it takes two-and-a-half years to program one dollar of spending in DoD, which means I had to know exactly what I wanted to spend two years ago.
Imagine that analogy in the corporate world. If I’m a CEO, which I’ve been, and I tell my board of directors ‘Here’s the budget but don’t make any changes. This is what we’re going to spend three years from now.’ I’d be laughed out of the room because you can’t predict the future. So that’s the way our government operates. It does need to change. There are some efforts right now looking at how we could reform that process. I’m hoping we’re going to see some great recommendations that can be adopted from that work.
I recently made a presentation to the PPBE commission, in jargon Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution. That’s the system that Secretary McNamara put in place. I’m sure it was state of the art in 1961 from the Ford Motor Company or where ever it came. It basically assumes a linear systems engineering process that you can predict the future. That may have been how autos were designed in the 1950s, but the world is anything but predictable and we need more agility.
So two thing. What do we do in the tech world when we can’t predict the future? We’re agile. We realize that and move faster because you got to try something and adapt. You can’t spend 10 years in a room thinking you will design the future. You’re not. Agility is number one. We have to take that two-and-a-half years and only take one year to do the budget. That’s DoD developing it and Congress approving it.
… Part of designing that process would be more agility and less granularity. I can’t get a budget approved in a year if I’m going to look at 10,000 line items. That’s what the defense budget looks like. So staffers on the committees, not the representatives, are making the tradeoffs in the military for what we’re going to buy. Do I want more A-10s, do I want more F-35s. Is that the right place to make those tradeoffs? I want the Secretary of Defense and the Combatant Commanders making those decisions. That’s not how we do it today. Congress is telling the military, ‘No, you must buy this many F-35s. You can’t retire that equipment early because maybe that preserves some jobs in my district.’ Well, that’s not optimizing the defense capability within the large budget, but limited budget, that we have.
Need fewer line items,. Got to have more trust in the Defense Department to make those tradeoffs — which is what a board of directors should expect a CEO to do. You have to make the tradeoffs on what we should spend, and you need to reflect the changing conditions. We can’t do that today, so we’re not getting the most for our taxpayer dollar.
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