2020. “Pricing innovation — century old cost-basing doesn’t work.” NCMA Magazine. 12/01/2020.
2020. The Next Frontier of Acquisition Reform: The Budget Process. GMU white paper based on a Naval Postgraduate School Symposium paper.
2018. Cost and Competition in US Defense Acquisition. Presented to International Cost Estimating and Analysis Association (ICEAA). Winner: Best Paper Overall.
The price of a good or service is a measure of value. While prices in a market economy are determined by competitive forces of supply and demand, a very different process of price formulation takes place in the United States defense acquisition system. The basis for pricing major defense systems is the marginal cost of production, or the dollar outlays consumed when producing an incremental unit of output… It will be argued that notions of perfect competition and marginal cost, inherent to neoclassical economics, only provide a framework for understanding prices under an assumption of static technology where markets include numerous buyers and sellers. However, central to defense acquisition is the problem of generating technological progress in a non-market environment dominated by a handful of sellers and only one buyer.
2018. Processes of Weapon Systems Innovation. Presented to ICEAA.
2017. A History of Thought in Defense Acquisition. Presented to ICEAA. Winner: Best Paper in Category, Policy & Operations.
… The proliferation of before-the-fact controls in Army operations has been more than matched in the defense acquisition system. For example, a program manager must execute a tightly defined program within a particular cost and schedule target, cannot make major decisions without support from over fifty separate offices, must abide by a deluge of regulations, and has no formal control over contracting officers or plant representatives. An overflow of rules and regulations quickly erodes the professional ethics that provide a basis for interpersonal trust. If resource allocations and innovation can be strictly calculated from the data, then before-the-fact controls make sense because the optimal course of action is already known. But when no individual can have but a small piece of the total knowledge, progress requires after-the-fact controls that emphasize norms and duty as they emerge from the complex operations in which they are performed. Diversity, optionality, redundancy, self-organization, self-affinity, resilience, decentralization, decision rights, responsibility, individualism, and exchange are all words describing different aspects of the same social system that nurtures complexity and adaptation. The program budget is not consistent with such a system because it embodies nineteenth century concepts of scientific management. If leadership finds value in delegating broad acquisition authority and accepting failure as a precondition to success, then rethinking the budget process is the first and most important place to start.
2017. (Primary Author). Inflation and Escalation Best Practices for Cost Analysis: Analyst Handbook. Written for OSD CAPE.
2017. Trust, but Verify: An Improved Estimating Technique Using the Integrated Master Schedule (IMS). Measurable News, College of Performance Management. 2017.04.
2016. Putting Schedule Quality Checks to the Test. ICEAA. Winner: Best Paper in Category, Management, EVM, and Scheduling.
2015. Hyperbolic Discounting and Defense Acquisition. ICEAA.
2013. ODASA-CE Software Growth Research. ICEAA. Winner: Best Paper in Category, Information Technology.