Regulated industries and the divide between Silicon Valley and DC
New bank charters actually were running pretty high up until 2008, and then they dropped to zero. Whatever happened in banking reform and regulation, and […]
Economics
More reasons defense acquisition needs to consider randomness
Discussing Tim Harford’s book Messy, he tells a story of a Jazz musician Keith Jarrett who, upon a major performance was given a poor piano, […]
The need for a mission command mindset in defense acquisition
The very nature of war makes certainty impossible; all actions in war will be based on incomplete, inaccurate, or even contradictory information… While past battlefields […]
Can DoD help shore up, and speed up, the supply chain?
Here’s Chris Power, CEO of Hadrian, on the Venture Stories podcast. Hadrian is a software-defined factory that can quickly spin up new machine tools and […]
Noah Smith on defense spending and diversification
But the next question is, how do we prevent such debacles from happening? Simply slashing defense budgets seems unlikely to do the trick, for the […]
In the economics of acquisition, who is in the best place to make choices?
Economist Arnold Kling recounts an argument from Milton Friedman about whether people make rational decisions on behalf of other people: If you buy a coat […]
Why can’t acquisition embrace military concepts of mission command?
Here’s an excerpt from Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 6, Command and Control: As with decision making, we should decentralize execution planning to the lowest possible […]
How the unique culture of the Israeli military impacts its innovation
Russ Roberts: You and I both now live in a country, Israel, that has a Socialist past, a very strong Socialist past, where the general […]
DoD is failing on the three E’s: experimentation, evaluation, and evolution
Here is the Director of Defense Research & Engineering Harold Brown in 1962, discussing how he has responsibility for all R&E activities in DoD since […]
How will inflation impact military budgets, capabilities? It’s not straight-forward…
Personnel costs accounted for 38% of the Army’s fiscal year 2022 budget request, compared with 27% for the Navy and 21% for the Air Force, […]
Intangible capital is important for the economy and defense acquisition
I think there’s a deep structural shift, which is really important. That is that intangible capital has become more and more important in our economy. The nature […]
Three steps to help defense innovation break free from its shackles
Jerry McGinn and I provide three recommendations for the congressional commission on PPBE reform in a Defense News article: Be bold in vision. The DoD’s industrial-age […]
Inflationary lessons for the Department of Defense
Here’s Friedrich Hayek discussing the negative consequences of economist’s presumption that they can control macroeconomic outcomes — from his 1974 Nobel prize speech The Pretense […]
Stanley McCrystal on risk taking and military leadership
Here’s one of the two factors that Stanley McCrystal finds important in a military leader: … the ability to make a decision with uncertainty. I’ve […]
Does blackboard economics translate to defense decisions?
Here’s an indication of the kind of thinking that predominated the post-WWII world, as expressed by Alain Enthoven who was ASD Systems Analysis in 1966: […]