Captain Class lessons for project management
Sam Walker’s book, The Captain Class, convincingly argues that the common ingredient to all the best sports teams has not been a great coach, but […]
Blog Posts
Phrases that describe defense acquisition
This ‘realistic’ view which has now dominated politics for so long has hardly produced the results which its advocates desired. Instead of having achieved greater […]
CBO finds Navy could reach Mandated 355 ships by 2034
Only by arbitrarily extending the life of many ships will the Navy reach the mandated 355-ship fleet by 2034. Here’s what the CBO said: • […]
DOD throws money at capital to plug defense supplier gaps
A recent study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that from 2001 to 2015, 17,000 companies ceased to be prime vendors for […]
British and American styles in engine development, pre-WWII
The American system of development at private risk produced a series of engines which at the outbreak of war in 1939 were roughly equal in […]
NG Fraudulent Charges: DOD Scandal of the week
Northrop Grumman will have to pay the U.S. government $30 million as a settlement for falsely billing hours to the Air Force between 2010 and […]
The “Valley of Death” and the PPBS in defense technology transition
DARPA and the service research labs achieve amazing results. Have you heard about electronics that will physically vanish on command to prevent adversaries from copying our […]
Oracle protest upheld and implications for reform
REAN Cloud LLC (REAN) entered into an Other Transaction (OT) Agreement with the Army (facilitated by DIUx) to provide prototype cloud migration services. While the prototype […]
Staats testimony on prototyping and parallel undocumented development
Those in favor of prototyping argue that the military at, times overstate the urgency of programs; urgency in weapons development, they assert, is one of […]
Defense foreign teaming: Political, efficient, or both?
While in the past, foreign bidders were longshots against their American counterparts, the Pentagon has recently picked several overseas designs. Last month, Boeing captured a […]
Remember the days when Congress didn’t earmark defense projects?
His business provided jobs in Dorsey’s district, and jobs were scarce. Pitcairn was delighted when Dorsey introduced a bill to provide $2 million to the […]
Ratchet effect in action: Pentagon edition
Though national defense spending bounded to $700 billion in fiscal 2018 and $716 billion in fiscal 2019 under the Trump administration, Pentagon officials confirmed they have […]
The Bureaucracy Culture and Information Processing
If “bureaucracy” suggests uncompromising adherence to established rules and procedures, a hierarchy of decision-making power, and a tendency to avoid risk (often by delaying action […]
Leap to Disruptive Technologies: One Account of Many for Cost Disease
I recently wrote about the available evidence of cost disease in weapon systems acquisition. How about causes of cost disease? There are many explanations relevant […]
Overpriced coffee mugs, DOD scandal of the week
A Fox News report alleges that the Air Force spent an exorbitant amount of money on specialty coffee mugs for the 60th Aerial Port Squadron at Travis […]