Cost-per-desired-effect and the F-35 vs F-15EX debate
Let me give you one specific example. The leverage provided by stealth aircraft in the First Gulf War is fully illustrated by this particular attack. […]
Blog Posts
Acquisition headlines (1/10 – 1/16/2021)
DoD releases industrial capabilities report. (DoD) Top 10 largest DoD suppliers $743B in market cap, compared to $778B for Facebook. 17,000 companies ceased being prime […]
Long requirements lead-times aren’t a new problem
The Procurement Commission said the Air Force spent 8 years and $140 million just getting ready to start competition on the B-1. The Aegis case […]
Military capabilities are not well represented by DoD budgets
Here is fellow emergent ventures recipient Alexey Gurzey on the Venture Stories podcast talking about the declining relevance of GDP: If you think about someone […]
Army succeeds in attracting new entrants, is failing to move money to them
Army programs designed to attract non-traditional companies have been met with enthusiasm. According to a senior official, Army Applications Laboratory received 5,500 inquiries in 2020 […]
DoD oversight is intimately linked with appropriations structure
… it is time to modernize the way the DoD is resourced with simpler, responsive and flexible appropriations that meet congressional oversight requirements. The DoD […]
The challenges of funding deep tech, moving from science to products
If you want to move from science to products, you have to live for some time in a super-position of those states before you can […]
Defense acquisition decisions in a low-trust environment
The correct way to respond to a low-trust environment is not to double down on proceduralism, but to commit yourself to the “it does exactly what […]
Acquisition headlines (1/3 – 1/9/2021)
With new cloud policy, Navy moves back to a centralized approach. (Federal News Network) As of March, “… individual commands will, for the most part, […]
DoD processes increase complexity, cost at the expense of reliability
The prospect of technological advances still persuades planners and decisionmakers to seek increased performance, greater precision, added function capability, and thus more complexity, all of […]
Can the DoD and Congress embrace new ways of buying software?
Software collapses the division between design and manufacture. Once a software program is designed through coding, it can be almost instantaneously manufactured through compiling. Freed […]
Defense management is killing competition
The genius of the capitalist system is that it has no pretensions about prediction: It does not preselect winners and losers but instead facilitates competition […]
Space Force harkens back to an old way of organizing for acquisition
Through the end of the 1940s, the Air Materiel Command had assigned two “project officers”—one for development and one for production—to monitor each system’s acquisition. […]
Should the Marines treat equipment like the banks treat your money?
We have too much equipment, and sustaining it consumes enormous volumes of resources. We don’t have enough mechanics in the Fleet to maintain the equipment, […]
The nature vs nurture debate for defense program planning
There is an interesting story about a single crayfish that managed to reproduce asexually creating offspring with the exact same genetics. The offspring, called marmorkrebs, […]