How the arc of American business history frames defense acquisition
The Pentagon and defense contractors are wrapped up in a broader macroeconomic arc that is crucial for understanding where DoD is today. Rise of the […]
ppbs
The mismatch between acquisition and resourcing, 5000.1 and PPBE
Here’s a slice from “The DSARC and PPBS decision making process within DOD” by Goral, Frank Ivan. Monterey, California. Naval Postgraduate School, Dec 1979. Remember, […]
Anduril releases mission document: Rebooting the Arsenal of Democracy
Here is an interesting slice from Anduril’s mission document: Rebooting the Arsenal of Democracy. In the early 1960s, under the direction of then Secretary of […]
DoD exported PPBE to Eastern Europe after the Cold War. Here’s how it went.
he budgeting method that has come to be known as the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS) – or Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE) […]
How weapons become overoptimized to the point they become brittle
Here is Roland McKean, one of the founders of the DoD’s Planning-Programming-Budgeting system, who later in the 1960s saw the errors of what he helped […]
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: […]
Did the 5000-series lead to longer cycle time for aircraft development?
Mosaic warfare is a concept that evolved over the last 5 or 6 years, both at DARPA but also by folks like Dan Patt and […]
Why have companies opted out of government contracting?
The issue that Jeb and I got started with in puzzling over was the question of Pentagon acquisition and the ways in which Pentagon acquisition […]
Podcast: The political-economy of defense with Russell Rumbaugh
I was pleased to have Russell Rumbaugh join me on the Acquisition Talk podcast to discuss some of the most fundamental issues facing defense management. […]
The false efficiency of systems analysis
The revolutionary manner in which McNamara made his decisions… transformed the “expert” career bureaucrat into the “novice” and the “inexperienced” political appointee into the “professional.” […]
Did neoliberal economics destroy government’s ability to execute programs? Not so fast…
You can either look at this as deterministic history that, once upon a time there were really smart people in government who knew how to […]
Government in-house talent and the Bell Report of 1962
[Budget Director David Bell’s] report of April 1962 recommended continuing a heavy reliance on private contractors. The government, however, needed enough in-house competence so that […]
Appropriations, reprogramming, and the origins of Congressional control
Congress controls the movement of funds between program elements, such as between two space development programs (say, GPS Space Segment and GPS Follow on). For […]
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 […]