Are munitions really “bill payers” for the rest of defense?
One of the lines often heard is that munitions accounts are “bill payers” for other lines, particularly weapons platforms like vehicles, aircraft, and ships. Former […]
Army
Impressive applications of additive manufacturing in defense
I’ve been pretty impressed with the number of application of additive manufacturing in defense. Here are 20 cool things going on from a mostly organic […]
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, […]
Podcast: Injecting tech in today’s weapons with Maj. Gen. John Ferrari (ret.)
I was pleased to have John Ferrari join me on the Acquisition Talk podcast to discuss a wide range of issues facing DoD’s ability to […]
GMU Playbook: Reduce risk with modular contracting
In this week’s blog post on Mason GovCon’s acquisition playbook study, we discuss modular contracting for software-intensive systems. The Federal Acquisition Regulation prefers modular contracting […]
DoD experiments with bots to automate price reasonableness
As part of a pilot project now underway, the service [US Army] is experimenting with bots that can scrape through the bills of materials (BOMs) […]
Army-Air Force spat over long range fires exposes policy failures
The U.S. Air Force general in charge of managing the service’s bomber inventory slammed the Army’s new plan to base long-range missiles in the Pacific, calling […]
DHS, DoD, and revisiting the valley of death
The Army has spent millions of dollars with goTenna, but the service cannot give the company one of the most important things for a small […]
Why the Army ditched its organic design for OMFV
The Army’s decision to not submit its own design bid for the restarted Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle (OMFV) prototype competition was to remove concerns over […]
Moving from opinion-based to evidence-based requirements
Business models for developing technologies for a profit are end-to-end solutions that cannot be adopted by the Army acquisition enterprise for several reasons, not the […]
Problem curation and lean methodology with Pete Newell
Pete Newell joined me on the Acquisition Talk podcast to discuss a range of issues around problem curation and lean methodology. He is the CEO […]
The complexity of squeezing data out of the Army
While the Army has mountains of relevant data, it is not always readily accessible, verified or authoritative. Compounding the matter even further, data is frequently […]