A cautionary tale of trying to leap-frog at expense of proven tech in war
Here are some excerpts from an excellent sci-fi story by Arthur C. Clarke, Superiority, in which a galactic power engaged with an inferior power ultimately […]
Blog Posts
Two issues holding the Pentagon back from commercial “deep tech”
After cashing in from relatively simple internet applications like Facebook, Snapchat and others, entrepreneurs have started tackling harder problems. “Deep tech” requires significant capital and […]
Is poor software design/testing the REAL cause of the USS McCain crash?
A 19-year Navy veteran, Sanchez had watched as technicians replaced the ship’s traditional steering controls a year earlier with the new navigation system. Almost from […]
Podcast: Agents of Innovation with John Kuehn
In this episode of Acquisition Talk, I speak with Dr. John Kuehn. He is a professor of military history at the Army Command and General […]
One of the last vestiges of central planning left on Earth
Here’s a humorous story shared by SecDef Donald Rumsfeld back in 2001: A man and a boy were walking down the street with a donkey […]
Acquisition headlines
How Big is the Space Economy? Probably around $415 billion, 79 percent is commercial. Another breakdown is 58 percent consumer services, 33 percent manufacturing and […]
Who’s in charge of US military strategy?
What’s the role of the services these days compared to World War II? In World War II, George Marshall and Hap Arnold on the Army […]
Zuckerberg wisely advocates big bets on tools and people, not outputs
The government is the largest and most important funder of science, but the grants tend to be very spread out across a lot of people. […]
An excellent argument for the Space Force from Steven Kwast
We get trapped. Here in America, three times in the last 100 years we have failed to optimize the technologies that have come about to […]
Are program managers “little more than an errand boy”? Views from David Packard
Packard said he had seen cases “where the project manager is often little more than an errand boy for all the service officers, both above […]
What is the “water-scrum-fall” method, and is it dangerous?
In a previous post, Nicholas Chaillan brought up the term water-agile-fall, or water-scum-fall. This is a situation where an organization that has traditionally worked with […]
Can the Air Force scale small companies into a program of record?
Remember the dreaded “valley of death” in technology transition? The Air Force plans to bridge the valley by progressively scaling up its pitch days. A […]
Acquisition headlines
Did America Forget How to Make the H-Bomb? “… officials at the National Nuclear Security Administration realized they couldn’t produce an essential material known as […]
How should budget appropriations be reorganized?
Congress should reorganize appropriations titles (the “color of money”) to reflect the kind of life cycle a thing has, not what part of the life […]
How shared equipment dramatically lowers barriers to deep tech R&D
In the same way that AWS dramatically lowered the bar to start a software company, you’re seeing the same thing of multiple labs-as-a-service companies that […]