The indispensable man of the Pentagon
Here’s an excerpt from Samuel Huntington’s classic 1959 book, The Soldier and the State: The principal antagonist of the Joint Chiefs within the central defense […]
bureaucracy
Has the bureaucratization of knowledge made government less effective?
Here’s an excerpt from Tyler Cowen’s conversation with Walter Russell Mead on American Foreign Policy. Tyler asks whether the State Department or the CIA understand […]
How Kessel Run was able to survive the bureaucracy’s attempts to squash it
Here’s just one segment from an excellent interview with Will Roper on the Defense Unicorns podcast with Rob Slaughter, who worked on software factory efforts […]
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 […]
PMs spend too much time at briefings where no decisions are made
In the early 1970s, the Army took it upon itself to review its acquisition system. The AMARC report found that the Army was “profoundly affected” […]
The damage to R&D caused by bureaucrats planning the creative process
Here’s a letter from Bill McClean, chief at Navy’s China Lake and led the Sidewinder development, to the deputy chief of Naval Operations: We find […]
The Air Force ‘Internet of Things’ program gets reorganized
According to a memo sent from Roper to the Air Force’s acquisition workforce Tuesday, the chief architect will remain responsible for codifying ABMS [Advanced Battle […]
Senator Sullivan: DoD acquisition is one of our “biggest vulnerabilities… It’s hurting us”
Senator Tim Kaine. It might be productive for the committee to have hits and failures of recent acquisition programs and get the DOD to tell […]
Take-aways from the updated DoD Directive 5000.01
Overall, DoDD 5000.01 went from 10 pages to 16, though two of those are for a table of contents. In terms of word count, it […]
Thiel on how scientific progress became bureaucratized
Thiel argued for enabling riskier research grant-making via institutions such as the NIH, as well as abandoning the scientific staple of the double-blind trial and […]
How to maintain innovation in a large-scale enterprise
An organization like the cavalry in 1935 is an interesting example. You had a bureaucracy that used the horse to do the job. That was […]
The disease of restricting competition isn’t limited to Europe
I have been repeatedly impressed in putting this paper together by how often unexpected and great discoveries and progress came about during or as the […]
Government and the institutional memory of failure
I think that large, established organizations operate according to different incentives than start-ups. Large organizations focus on the downside of new initiatives. In the start-up […]
A bureaucrat to be crushed: the story of Gordon Rule
When the company officials had been asked to leave the room, the admiral in charge of shipbuilding told Warner the contractor’s demand for an extra $10‐million on the spot and $4‐million soon afterward was reasonable and ought to be paid. But then a ruddy, expensively but conservatively dressed civilian interrupted. “Admiral,” he said, “over my dead body will you reform that contract and give them $10‐million. This is the goddamnedest thing I ever heard of, a contractor coming in and throwing a piece of paper on the table and saying that to the Navy.”