You can’t make decisions based on 40,000 pages of paper, McNamara was wrong
MCNEIL: … the budget system got pretty complicated under [Robert] McNamara. It took them years to wake up to the fact that he was not […]
systems analysis
DoD programs are over-analyzed, yet decisions remain superficial and shallow
I drop you into an exchange between Senator Scoop Jackson and Alain Enthoven, ASD Systems Analysis and one of McNamara’s ‘whiz kids,’ in a 1967 […]
Does acquisition depend too much on assumptions, not enough on accountability?
James Roherty’s classic 1970 book, The Decisions of Robert S McNamara has a pair of interesting discussions on the takeover of systems analysis on military […]
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 […]
If Congress doesn’t make multi-billion dollar weapon decisions, who should?
Senator Karl Mundt expressed it in hearings on PPBS conducted in 1967: We used to face the question: “How much should we spend for a […]
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.” […]
DoD processes increase complexity, cost at the expense of reliability
The prospect of technological advances still persuades planners and decisionmakers to seek increased performance, greater precision, added function capability, and thus more complexity, all of […]
Defense management is killing competition
The genius of the capitalist system is that it has no pretensions about prediction: It does not preselect winners and losers but instead facilitates competition […]
Difference between operations research and systems analysis — one is much harder!
Since operations research deals with optimization problems in which criteria, alternatives, and other parameters are given, in a sense, the solution to the problem lies […]
Can we do away with judgment/intuition in systems design?
The judgement inherent in this balancing of programs and systems can no longer be intuitive or rely on past experience alone. The range of choice […]
What do systems engineers wrongly assume?
On of the key mis-assumptions in modern Systems Engineering and Systems Analysis is that the total problem can, and frequently is, decomposed into subproblems, the […]
No more one-horse races for weapon systems
Programs like MBT-70, C-5A, and the F-111 get defended before Congress and the American public-whatever their problems in performance, cost, and schedule slippages-simply because the […]
Podcast: Todd Harrison on the military space reorg. and everything else
Todd Harrison joined me on the Acquisition Talk podcast to discuss a wide range of issues, including how the reorganization of defense space forces is […]
Competitive prototyping and pushing the state of the art
Only when the contractor is taking risks to develop the state-of-the-art and do something better than has ever been done before can there be much […]
The market as a discovery procedure
They had a healthfully vague understanding that the dynamic competition which is always at work in free markets. It continually inspires market movements, movements in […]