Is French military procurement more efficient because politics stays out?

The Rand Corporation’s Thomas McNaugher, for example, has long rejected the economists’ common assertion that the root of the acquisition problem is found in a government’s contracting techniques. Instead, he places the blame for poor performance squarely on institutional factors, such as the role of the Congress in weapons acquisition in the United States, which places political pressure on the Pentagon to spread the wealth of a given program to as many congressional districts as possible, raising costs.

 

… Unlike in the United States, where each of the armed services has its own defense procurement agency and where Congress looms large with respect to how the government buys its weapons, the French defense acquisition system is extremely centralized. One single executive agency, the Delegation Generale pour l’Armement (DGA), is responsible for the contracting and management of all weapons programs, from initial inception to delivery, including export sales. France’s legislative body, the National Assembly, has little ability to intervene in specific weapons programs, since it only votes up or down on a “global” package of defense expenditures, as presented by the government in its multi annual “defense programming law” (“loi de programmation militaire”).

That was from an excellent 2009 report by Ethan Kapstein and Jean-Michel Oudot, “Reforming Defense Procurement: Lessons from France.” I added that emphasis on France’s parliament not meddling too much in weapons programs. I think it is unrealistic for Congress to keep its hands out of the cookie jar. But perhaps they can move somewhere in the middle by aggregating project line items into broader budgetary portfolios.

The centralization of the DGA relative to DoD isn’t important for me. The DGA itself is perhaps not much larger than the F-35 program office, let alone an entire service. There are limits to the size of administration.

I think this next part is pretty key. Remember, France places an emphasis on in-house military research “which has enabled it to specify in detail the weapons it seeks to build and the price it is willing to pay”:

The point we wish to emphasize for the moment is that the technical capacity of the DGA (which gave it strong monitoring abilities), when coupled with hard budget constraints, motivated and enabled the government to engage in arrangements with its suppliers that provided firms with strong incentives to control their costs.

This is basically the opposite of the “requirements” approach, which in its name conjures up the idea that it is a must have regardless of cost growth. The fact that the French have most elements of the United States’ force structure on a budget less than one-tenth of the United States is pretty impressive, including domestic fighter aircraft, aircraft carriers, ballistic missiles, nuclear submarines, satellites, etc.

I was listening to some podcast where a former NATO commander from the United States said that his favorite fighters in the inventory were actually the French Mirages because they were cheap, easy to maintain, and maintained high readiness. The Air Force made clear it had no intentions to buy such aircraft when it rejected entirely Northrop’s self-funded F-20 Tigershark.