Here’s an interesting exchange from the Feb 9, 2023 House Armed Services Committee hearing on the future of war between Representative Ro Khanna and Christian Brose, former SASC staff director and current chief of strategy at Anduril:
Rep. Khanna: What can we do to get the budgets to adopt innovation faster?
Christian Brose: I’ve thought a lot about this, worked on this in government and out of Government, and I guess what I would tell you is the conclusion that I’ve come to is that we are wildly overthinking this problem. I think that the answer basically comes down to we need to buy more of the things that we say are important and that we say our priorities. That’s the thing that doesn’t happen. It’s not necessarily the fault of the acquisition system. It’s the entirety of the system that is not prepared to really incentivize disruption.
Rep. Khanna: Just to push you a little bit on that. As the Pentagon budgets four or five years in advance, a lot of these technologies are one to two years, how do we sort of structurally overcome this?
Christian Brose: I would say in the next month it seems you will see a budget request from the Pentagon that was put into concrete somewhere between you know five and eighteen months ago. Congress has the budget authority to determine what is actually going to be bought what are actually going to be the funded priorities of the Department of Defense. You have the ability to readjust that.
I’ve heard this line from Brose many times, including his book The Kill Chain. I won’t quote it at length, but in one section he says, “To prepare America’s military for the future, we must want to change.” It’s as if senior leaders just don’t want change enough, and the folks at the working levels are the worst offenders. If they just had the will-power, then all would be well. Because certainly the right thing to do is obvious and easy to accomplish with the current system.
I simply cannot buy that argument. Rep. Khanna was, in my humble opinion, on the right track. There are structural issues. The most important aspect of American innovation is that it is permissionless. Everything in DoD is permissioned, often multiple years ahead of time.
I won’t belabor the point because I’ve written so much about the PPBE process and its associated requirements process as being the root cause of the valley of death issue. I’ve heard that “a poor craftsman blames his tools,” implying the acquisition process is just fine and the workforce is the problem. But would we say the same of the Soviet Union or North Korea? Oh, those systems work, the leaders and their people just don’t want it enough…
I’ll leave you with this story about how a program of record that, in the normal system, would have taken eight years was accomplished in just a couple months.
The US has learned some really important lessons from the conflict in Ukraine. For example the Ukrainians needed anti-ship cruise missiles to limit Russian naval operations in the Black Sea, but there was no program of record available for land based Harpoon missile launching system. The Ukrainians work with Boeing the Danish Army and the U.S Navy to MacGyver together a launcher system and they did this in two months. But Taiwan was approved for a similar land-based Harpoon system in 2020 and they’ve been told delivery of the new design system will be 2027 or 2028.
If leaders wanted that land-based Harpoon, they would’ve been told “Oh, it’s eight years and a billion dollars.” The reality is that people at the bottom knew they could get it done in two months.
Jim Muccio’s extended review of The Kill Chain (at: https://www.amazon.com/Kill-Chain-Defending-America-High-Tech/dp/B086KQC2H2/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8#customerReviews ) offers more food thought on how another knowledgeable reader has reacted to Mr. Brose’s arguments – both positively and negatively.
My own worm’s-eye-view experience of how things get done in the Pentagon at the working level (on an IPA assignment with the Air Staff in 1998) leads me to think that Mr. Brose is not entirely wrong when he argues that part of the problem is that, at least sometimes, people at the working level oppose change – even when given a reason and opportunity to do so (see Eric Schmidt’s remarks on how the DOD sometimes ends up with a camel rather than a horse at: https://acquisitiontalk.com/2021/02/eric-schmidt-this-is-how-dod-ends-up-with-a-camel-rather-than-a-horse/).
Mr. Brose points out that the Congress is going to get the Department’s FY 2024 budget request in the next month and therefore has time to do some “readjustments” to make FY 2024 execution more innovative and responsive, since that’s what everybody seems to want.
The people in the Pentagon, of course, would have to do two things to make that possible (because the Congress, pace, doesn’t have the gear to sort that out on its own): First the Pentagon would have to offer “options” rather than “THE REQUIREMENT,” (now THAT would be PPBS reform); and second, senior people in the Pentagon would have to be prepared and willing to explain the pros and cons of the options – to give Congress what it must take into account in order to make proper decisions.
The second of those two things is not going to happen – not least because the Congress is paying the Secretary of Defense and everybody else who works in the Pentagon to come up with those answers.
The first thing could happen, but it would have to be accompanied by harder decisions by Pentagon leaders than what the current PPBS process demands.
Great points. Interesting comments on the Kill Chain amazon review also, worth checking out for others. I agree with you that there are no silver bullets. But my general position is we can’t beat up on the workforce and leaders because they have institutional constraints. Once in a while you find a good program or outcome due to personal heroics, but many folks I’ve talked to want to do what Brose implies but can’t see a way of getting there. Decision by consensus basically assures individuals can have little impact. Senior leaders are reminded by lawyers they can’t do a lot either: can’t talk to industry, can’t inject into contract decisions, can’t direct funding without 4 committees. So we should look at the reasons people are opposing change. As the Volcker commission report found, the best leave to early and the worst stay too long. The system tends to filter out the emotionally adaptive.
Of course, the pressure that comes from the reality of actual combat, where the time and quality legs of the Iron Triangle are the only ones that matter, is the real motivator. When there is not such pressurization, the risk acceptance of all levels in the chain is very low.