Acquisition headlines
Air Force moving project maven into advanced battle management system portfolio. That’s nearly doubling ABMS’s FY21 request, with Maven’s Algorithmic Warfare Cross Functional Team at […]
Blog Posts
DoD should control R&D programs incrementally, not through lifecycle controls predicted up-front
Policy is not made once and for all; it is made and re-made endlessly. Policy-making is a process of successive approximation to some desired objectives […]
Design thinking and how to think about agility
Agility is like healthy. Every time you hear that in your head, think someone is trying to understand how to become healthy. Scrum is like […]
Is AI/ML data too unique for the DoD to stick into one centralized data repository?
Not only is the data dirty, but it’s unique. The satellite derived data that NGA [National Geo-spatial Intelligence Agency] is using is, while it might […]
More on the slowdown in science and technology
The number of transistors you can pack onto a chip has been roughly doubling every two years, and that was coined as Moore’s Law and […]
Special event: The Next Frontier of Acquisition Reform
Please join me in a special Mason GovCon webinar event on the future of budget reform on Wednesday, Aug. 19 at 2:30pm EST. Why the […]
Podcast: OTAs and everything else with Ben McMartin
In a special webinar event of the Acquisition Talk podcast, I spoke with the excellent Ben McMartin. He is a managing partner at the Public […]
Acquisition headlines
An Air Force pilot will battle AI in a virtual F-16 dogfight next week. You can watch it live. “We envision a future in which […]
Role of competition in the economy and in government
In the private economy other competing firms can duplicate or take different points of view about the nature of desirable products. But there are not […]
What’s holding DIU back from scaling technologies?
“We’re not moving in government at an agile pace that reflects the nature of the competition. It’s about speed,” the DIU director said. “When we […]
Radical uncertainty + cost-benefit analysis = danger
Most big decisions that we take are unique. They’re one-offs. And that means you really do need to think through yourself what is happening now. […]
Beyond budgeting — breaking a 100 year industrial model
… budgeting takes a lot of time. Ford Motor Company once estimated that its planning and budgeting process cost around $1.2 billion a year. And […]
Is SpaceX 50x more productive than usual government programs?
Here’s an example: five years ago, Elon Musk was working on his reusable rocket, the one that can take off and then land on the […]
How long are lead times to surge military materiel?
New manufacturing facilities are certainly one of the keys to increasing production. Today, it takes a company 3 to 5 years to build a new […]
Acquisition headlines
Tinker units collaborate, produce first 3-D printed engine component. “We haven’t had a 3D printed metal component in Air Force engines before, but in the […]