Notes from Will Roper’s talk to students: Tons of great insights!
Here are some notes of mine from watching Air Force acquisition chief Will Roper’s talk given to Steve Blank, Joe Felter, and Raj Shah’s class […]
Blog Posts
The Manhattan Project did not follow so-called “best practices” for management
This characterization of the roots of PM [project management] represents a certain irony: the Manhattan Project did not even remotely correspond to the “standard practice” […]
Air Force contracting chief talks budget reform, Covid-19, and great power competition
This applies to Covid, it applies to emergencies and to great power competition: We have got to figure out a way to let Congress oversee […]
Kill chains vs. kill webs
Software-defined tactics are the key to quickly adding capabilities to different assets that are supposed to work together. It’s kill chain vs kill web for […]
Podcast: Navy shipyards and defense supply chains with Maiya Clark
Researcher Maiya Clark at the Heritage Foundation joined me on the Acquisition Talk podcast to discuss her recent paper on the Navy’s public shipyards as […]
Acquisition headlines (10/11 – 10/17/2020)
U.S. Military Investments in Autonomy and AI .”The FY2021 U.S. defense budget request allocates $1.7 billion to autonomy to enhance “speed of maneuver and lethality […]
China focuses on applied tech much more than the US
Emily … Nate [Picarsic], my colleague, and I had these massive databases of Chinese science and technology resource allocations (i.e., funding) and prizes given out […]
Defense R&D remains constrained to specific requirements
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 […]
The extreme pain of DoD reprogramming
The length of time between the start of budget planning and execution strains any organization’s predictive capabilities. The process effectively asks the individuals and organization […]
There is no spoon: A look into Will Roper’s new digital acquisition reality
As background, we’re all aware U.S. military aviation has been collapsing for nearly 40 years. In the 1950s, over a dozen companies built spiraling supersonic […]
Effectiveness over Efficiency: Preparing the US Industrial Base for Mobilization
Mike Petters, President and CEO of Huntington Ingalls Industries: “Lack of resiliency comes from an overemphasis on efficiency at expense of risk management. I was […]
An innovation culture maximizes variation, a manufacturing culture decreases it
Most companies over-optimize for efficiency. They want to get so good at their current market that they lose flexibility to adjust to the future. And […]
Acquisition headlines (10/4 – 10/10/2020)
DoD developing new ways to fund agile software development. ““What I want to see is tangible output,” she said. “And what I think our new […]
Defense companies lose sight of product due to rules and regulations
Working with government requires understanding the ins and outs of the literally thousands of pages of regulations: intellectual property rules that are unique to government, […]
Can the military’s operating system for war succeed at scale?
Anduril is best known for supplying surveillance towers and software used to watch over the US-Mexico border and some US bases. Now, it is retooling the software […]