Is there really a Silicon Valley/Military divide?
We performed an in-depth analysis of all public US federal (sub)contracting data over the last four and a half years to estimate the rankings of tech companies, […]
Blog Posts
The demise of the Pentagon’s Chief Management Officer?
The reality of the last 20 years where the Department has tried to have an independent third-silo be that Chief Management Officer and whatever it […]
Difference between operations research and systems analysis — one is much harder!
Since operations research deals with optimization problems in which criteria, alternatives, and other parameters are given, in a sense, the solution to the problem lies […]
Major defense programs are getting older and more expensive
The current portfolio is smaller yet more expensive that last year’s portfolio. This is the third time in 10 years that a decrease in the […]
Analyzing data on the defense industrial base with Amanda Bresler and Alex Bresler
The sibling team that is Amanda Bresler and Alex Bresler joined me on the Acquisition Talk podcast to discuss their recent analysis on defense contracts, […]
Acquisition headlines (7/19/2020)
Congress skeptical of Navy’s unmanned vessels plans. Navy wants $464 million for unmanned surface vessels, Congress is unimpressed. HASC agreed to just $270 million. SASC […]
Government should prepare domestic industry for black swan events
Covid-19 proved the United States was industrially unprepared for an emergency. Pre-pandemic N95 mask production stood at just 4 percent the peak requirement of 100 […]
How to accelerate artificial intelligence in the Defense Department
… the Defense Department needs a common platform for AI development and application. A development platform will bring data, AI developers, and the military into […]
Will the military aviation industry get nationalized? A battle for the industry’s future
“If our industrial base collapses any more, we’ll have to nationalize advanced aviation and maybe other parts of the Air Force that currently are competitive,” […]
The Pentagon’s first comptroller was against merging the armed forces
In 1972, Jerry Hess interviews Wilfred McNeil, the Department of Defense’s Comptroller for the first five Secretaries of Defense: HESS: What were your views on […]
Palantir’s Stephen Cohen on AI and big data in the 21st century
Potentially in quantum computing there are some answers to why classical computational algorithms might not be able to get certain human reasoning tasks done. Nonetheless, […]
Trump releases info about hypersonic AGM-183A: Perhaps Mach 14, 1K range, and 14 inch CEP?
In a White House news-press, [Trump] said he had spoken with the Joint Chiefs a few days before then about the “super duper” missile that […]
Acquisition headlines
US Air Force ready to test tech for new battle management system. “The vision involves networking every shooter and sensor to a cloud computing environment […]
How McNamara’s top-down structure was flipped, but equally insidious forces prevailed
Taking the place of the Draft Presidential Memorandum was a new document called the Program Objective Memorandum (POM), through which the services could outline their […]
Congress has a bold vision for Navy subsystem prototyping, but here’s what they’re missing
As the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has documented, lead ships in new classes of naval vessels routinely fail to meet expectations… It was not always this […]