Risk mitigation and the question of Chinese anti-stealth radar
Here’s the excellent Chad Millette, the chief learning officer at Space System Command, on LinkedIn: Eric Lofgren, you suggest in reference to the story about […]
Economics
Special economic zones and PPBE reform for the Department of Defense
It is one of history’s great ironies that a major factor in defeating Soviet communism was one of the largest centrally planned economies in the […]
Does efficiency in weapons acquisition equate to the absence of industry profits?
Clearly, efficiency in the conduct of weapons programs is a desirable objective… What do we mean by efficiency in this context? There is a tendency […]
Coordination in the market, science, and acquisition
I am suggesting, in fact, that the co-ordinating functions of the market are but a special case of co-ordination by mutual adjustment. In the case […]
Measuring the impact of unexpected inflation on DoD budgets, and other economic issues
Talking with Eric Torenberg, Noah Smith says “The Fed will not stick to any rules that it officially adopts.” (minute 32) “The Fed will always exercise […]
Putting the scale of DoD acquisition into perspective
In the United States, proposals to centralize acquisition usually translate to combining the present procurement organizations of the military departments and creating an analog to […]
Why DoD needs more uncorrelated experiments
The thing that I will cry from the rooftops is that we just need more uncorrelated experiments. If you spend all the money in the […]
Who spends more? The debate over military budgets in the US and China
In essence, the CIA was using what today we would call PPP to compare the budgets of the two superpowers, a concept that Bill Greenwalt […]
Diversity of funding criteria is key to accelerating S&T
Tyler Cowen: How would you improve error correction mechanisms in the world of science — Western science? David Deutsch: … I think the present system of […]
How formal relational contracts can improve defense outcomes
When Dell originally selected FedEx, in 2005, to handle all aspects of its hardware return-and-repair process, the companies drew up a traditional supplier contract. The 100-page-plus […]
The folly of neglecting resilience for the sake of efficiency
Resilience is something that may be very hard to see, unless you exceed its limits, overwhelm and damage the balancing loops, and the system structure […]
Why monolithic defense programs are inherently fragile
Mother Nature does not like anything too big… Mother Nature does not limit the interactions between entities; it just limits the size of its units. […]
Optionality: A core concept in JADC2 and acquisition
The idea of decision superiority really rests on this sense that optionality is going to be an increasingly important attribute of our future military operations. […]
Seeing like a state, institutional legibility, and the collapse of defense innovation
The book begins with an early example, “scientific” forestry (illustrated in the picture above). The early modern state, Germany in this case, was only interested […]
Defense decision-making beyond neoclassical economics
Well, in the article I caricatured how economists look at preference. So, let me do it in two stages. First, the way economists usually look […]