Podcast: Getting weapons into production with USD A&S Bill LaPlante

The Undersecretary for Acquisition & Sustainment (USD A&S) Bill LaPlante joined us at the 2022 Conference hosted by George Mason University and Defense Acquisition University. He was on fire and dropped a ton of amazing insights, so I had to republish the audio to the Acquisition Talk podcast. I’ll link to the video when it’s up, but you’ll get to listen to it here first. Bill LaPlante touches a number of important areas. The outline of the discussion is below.

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• 2:30 – Production really matters
• 3:30 – Minimum sustaining rates
• 4:50 – HIMARS produced in a converted diaper factory
• 6:45 – In 70 years of demos, DoD has not gotten hypersonics into production
• 7:50 – DoD was bad at prototyping until MTAs and OTAs
• 8:30 – Don’t tell me it’s got AI and quantum, don’t drop “DevSecOps” — production at scale
• 9:20 – If something blew up in INDOPACOM next week, what does DoD have in quantity?
• 10:30 – Null Program found it takes 4 years for DoD to produce nothing
• 11:15 – Tech bros aren’t helping much in Ukraine
• 12:45 – RFPs, source selections, money — that’s what matters
• 14:30 – FFRDCs get paid to write a paper that finds when quantity goes down, price goes up
• 15:00 – Predicts that Congress will put billions into the industrial base, production lines
• 15:30 – M777, HIMARS, Stinger all have obsolescence issues
• 17:30 – National Armaments Directors from 45 partner countries meet to coordinate
• 18:30 – Industry won’t invest without demand signal, DoD left them “holding the bag” in the past
• 18:45 – Supply chain issues in microelectronics, solid rocket motors, actuators, rare earth magnets
• 19:15 – Allies must not only be interoperable, but interchangeable
• 20:00 – Industry must be forced into interchangeability, like MOSA, because it lowers barriers to entry
• 20:30 – Take advantage of allied non-recurring development, like on E-7 Wedgetail
• 21:30 – US weapon production lines opening in Japan and Australia is a key deterrent
• 22:45 – Outsourcing production was a bad idea, dev & prod must be co-located
• 23:45 – Japan strategically kept rare earth processing capacity
• 26:00 – In JADC2, latency matters, link budgets matter
• 27:40 – Services working together very well on JADC2
• 28:30 – JTRS architecture was flawed from first principles, no one caught it
• 29:00 – Service oriented architecture was wrong for things like GPS OCX
• 32:30 – $50B spent on MTA, $2B for SWP (and another $8B in the FYDP)
• 33:15 – MTA, SWP, BA 8 are small slivers compared to traditional acquisition
• 34:15 – Cycle time from Milestone B to C has not increased since 1960s, still 5-7 years
• 35:40 – Definition of success: production, relevant in high-end fight, and DOTMLPF
• 36:15 – Derek Tournear and SDA on path to do something remarkable
• 36:45 – Conventional Prompt Strike MTA may be first hypersonic in production next year
• 37:00 – Not many MTA successes in production yet
• 37:30 – OTAs not good for large weapon systems where DoD needs data rights
• 40:30 – Requirements, PPBE, and acquisition report up different chains, not synced
• 40:00 – How Air Force RCO decisions are made at the top, quickly
• 41:30 – RCO model doesn’t scale to entire DoD, senior lead attention limited
• 42:20 – PEOs must be able to trade requirements and money in year of execution
• 42:30 – Cool if PPBE commission could make PPBE agile
• 43:30 – Example of how cost estimator guessed funding need, but it couldn’t be changed
• 44:15 – Appropriators won’t want to give DoD flexibility
• 44:30 – Without PPBE reform, DoD is doing a “Poor Man’s” version of portfolio management
• 46:25 – Remembering the late Ash Carter
• 47:00 – Acquisition community was not at war until 2009
• 47:30 – Creation of the Senior Integration Group (SIG)
• 50:00 – Pentagon term of the month is to McGyver solutions, e.g., L3-Harris Vampire
• 51:30 – Bipartisan support for national security
• 52:40 – DoD response to inflation
• 53:00 – Believes suppliers are hurt by inflation, but no data yet
• 55:30 – Expects CPIF contracts will slip due to inflation, not trade requirements
• 56:00 – Reduction in production contracts partial reason for industry consolidation
• 57:30 – Competition changes behavior, no question
• 57:50 – Little difference between classified info on Ukraine and public news
• 58:40 – Acquisition is fun

That’s a long outline because there was so much of interest!!! I’ll give one story LaPlante related at length because he used it to show why PPBE reform is so critical:

We have a situation — I won’t name the program — where the cost estimate was done for the program (because it had to be done) before the acquisition strategy was fully developed. We’ve updated the acquisition strategy to be better. I updated it last week.

 

Then they came back to me and they said, ‘The problem is, sir, you put the acquisition strategy together, you moved this. They don’t have the money sequence that way to do it.’ I said, ‘Okay, we’ll ask them to change it.’ ‘It’s too late. Got to wait until next budget cycle.’ I go, ‘How did they put the money in the program? How did they program it?’

 

The cost estimator just made a guess. They said ‘It’s going to cost this much for this part. We think it’s gonna be this many years in development, this many years in risk reduction, production.’

 

I don’t blame them. And they had to put something in. But I said, ‘Okay, but now that we have a good acquisition strategy, can’t we go back and change it?’ ‘No. The budget closed.’ That’s the PPBE process that has to be fixed right there.