I worked in USAF accounting and finance in the mid-1980's at a missile base. I'd review payment requests, compare them to the contracts, terms, ensure performance criteria was met. For large dollar progress payments on massive construction projects, tens of millions of dollars at a time. And for small sundry payments.
I remember in some reviews I spotted items that defied logic. Like boxes of nuts and bolts under a contract for base housing fencing. A box of 500 nuts and bolts for thousands of dollars each...for fencing. A box would go for maybe $30 at the hardware store in town.
I went back to the original base housing development contract and found the description for those nuts and bolts. And found an extremely detailed description of the precise metallurgical criteria they needed to be made from, with exacting tolerances for precision, torque capability, etc. For base housing fencing.
If it had been for missile components or something else that demanded that metallurgical, precision, performance criteria that would be one thing. But for a fence? In housing? Not even base perimeter fencing, regular, ordinary fences between homes.
I figured it was either a black expenditure for missile components or something that demanded that criteria. Or that the contracting officer and vendor had collaborated to secure the bid by describing a specific nut and bolt design that no other vendor made and guarantee the top dollar for them, shady backroom dealmaking in the contracting process.
When stories about $500 toilet seats came out my only surprise was at how inexpensive they were. Yes. There's a lot of fraud and waste. And/or a lot of hiding black op expenses inside ordinary contracts. Deceit either way.
The same thing drives the primary two reasons a country, any country, dominates in the world. Reason number 1 is the economy. Reason number 2 is the military.
Reason number 2 contributes to reason number 1
But the underlying cause of both is entrepreneurial innovation.
Not just tech, or innovation, but entrepreneurship inherent in that.
We see this proven out in other countries where they have prolific government funding for tech, and that results in research and invention, but those countries, without an Entrepreneurial economy, can't put 1 and 2 together to exceed the U.S.
China and Russia are great examples of having the resources, education, and human capital, that they should be able to do it, but their culture and government policies prevent entrepreneurial innovation; the can't maintain it, can't scale it, and can't drive universal adoption.
Most of Europe has more of the culture for innovation but it lacks the culture of entrepreneusiahip; again, further evidence that it's BOTH, found in the U.S. that matters.
The new administration seems to understand this so we'll see how it plays out. Personally, I'd like to get in place a Foundation focused on this distinction; not tech, small businesses, nor even startups or innovation, but the culture, values, public policy, and curriculum that ensures our cities are capably fueling what keeps this country exceptional.
A different way to say the same thing is that as a constitutional representative republic enjoying constitutionally protected freedoms, the United States has more addressable talent including innovation and a more fertile environment in which to grow and fund that talent.
In addition, all of the world's talent is coming to the US to be educated and want to stay. We should allow any foreigner who completes a STEM degree to stay and after 5 years qualify for a permanent green card and a road to citizenship.
Despotisms by their very nature do not address the talent of their people because they are not free. Free people will not work for despots.
The Chinese rely upon industrial espionage to steal tech and thereby to close the innovation gap. One has only to look at their navy that has been unable to organically advance their submarine and aircraft carrier technology.
The Russians have decent weapons tech, but they cannot make it at scale. Their top tank and top multi-mission aircraft -- they have only produced 50 of the tanks and 25 of the airplanes.
While on paper their gear is good, the experience in Ukraine shows it is not particularly effective even when deployed. The Russians today are scraping the bottom of the barrel of stored armor that is from the 1950s and 1960s. They are almost out of that ancient gear.
I worked in the Defense industry in the 90’s when it was being consolidated and in the tech world thereafter. These new developments are music to my ears. I’m so proud of the tech patriots that are going to make the U.S. military great again. Thank you. Susan F.
We need an open forum to showcase new hardware technologies; Survivor for Tech. Give developers a location and time to show off their best new technology for the military. Here are the tests and judging criteria, may the best tech win.
The second issue is production. I'm a hardware startup co-founder, I understand there is a risk choosing the startup over the established prime; and, startups often don't want to be gobbled up by a prime. It is reasonable to ask, can this technology be made by this company? If not, what is needed to get it produced? The current process is too long and rewards process over product. If the tests and production requirements are reasonable and related to the technology, the barriers to entry can be managed.
As a veteran for whom tradition and honor about such things matter military medals are *awarded*, not won. Winning implies a competition was held. Besting a group of competitors. This is not how military medals are awarded. They are earned by demonstrated proficiency, by acts of bravery, etc. Even a marksmanship medal is awarded for demonstrated proficiency, not "won" by the best marksman in a competition.
Congressional Medal of Honor recipients do not "win" their medals. They demonstrate uncommon and extraordinary courage in horrific situations that they do not set out to "win" medals for. They do what needs to be done. Most are awarded posthumously. Is that "winning?"
McCormick was awarded his Bronze Star, it wasn't "won." A meaningful distinction for military members, veterans for whom honor and tradition about such things matter.
Procurement is not a warfighting talent. It is a waste of talent to try to put the uniformed military in the procurement business using its organic officer corps.
There is only one branch of the military that is good at procuring things -- the US Army Corps of Engineers is an incredibly capable builder as witnessed by their 3-day conversion of the Jacob Javitts Convention Center in NYC to a 3000 bed hospital at the height of the Pandemic.
There is a lot of procurement that is not justified by its result. The replacement of the M1911A1 by the Beretta M9 (1985 - 2017) is such an example. The Beretta is a damn good pistol, but other than a bigger magazine didn't really have any mission critical improvement.
There is a new skill emerging from the Ukraine war, the ability to rapidly adapt existing civilian systems and components to make inexpensive weapons such as cardboard kamikazi drones that are easy to construct, composed of existing systems/components, highly cost effective ($3K at scale), and highly adaptable.
The S Korean Papydrone-800 and the Australian SYPAQ are examples of such weapons systems.
You can destroy a Russian armored vehicle for the price of 2-3 such cardboard kamikaze drones. That is a great exchange rate.
The problem with US major platform procurement is new everything. When the US develops a new weapons system platform, like the F-35 or the Zumwalt destroyer, the US develops a new platform with new propulsion, new electronics and, in the Navy's case, a new gun as well. (The new gun famously didn't work out.) This makes the new platform very hard to debug, because everything new is a source of possible failure, and all of the interactions are sources of failure as well. The debug time becomes very lengthy. It leads to guaranteed cost overruns. In many cases, like the F-22, the platform gets cancelled before we can buy enough of them to do the job. It also almost guarantees scope creep. Everybody gets to add just one more requirement, since everything is new.
If we want to shorten development cycles, we should develop fewer new features in each new platform. For example, World War II airplanes often used existing engines in new airframes, then substituted new engines later. The new airframes were initially available in months, instead of years.
Platforms, electronics and software all have lifecycles of different lengths. Platforms last for 30 years or more, weapons 15-20, electronics 10 -15 at most, and software for 3-5 years. When the US develops a new platform, it should develop only the platform itself. Everything else, including electronics and software, should be off the shelf as much as possible, to limit development risk. Once the platform is up, and procured in sufficient quantity, then new electronics, software, missiles and guns can be added in a planned upgrade phase, several years down the road. See, for example, the B-52, which has been modernized a couple of times.
The whole point of standardized parts is that manufacturing in volume is cheaper than custom made parts. Managing inventories is also easier with fewer unique parts. If that's still the case, why is the US still developing customized weapons platforms in small volumes, each with customized unique parts?
Even though it looks like the upgrade phase would be more expensive than installing everything at the same time, it's really a false economy. The extended debug phase is much more expensive than a short debug of the new platform, followed by the upgrade with another short debug.
Please also notice that initial combat readiness for a new platform is far earlier than with the new everything approach. We get deployable platforms much earlier, a quicker return on our investment. Congress sees early success, so there’s less chance they will cancel the program.
This feeds into specialized platforms with smaller footprints. Do we really need nuclear carriers, or will jeep carriers do in many cases? Do we really need specialized hulls, or more standardized hulls and power plants that can be adapted and built for new weapons systems and as drone launching platforms as they are developed? Are commercial vessels or airplanes good enough platforms for some tasks, like tending and launching drones and unmanned surface vessels and submarines?
I was a USAF Computer Systems Analyst Officer from 1972 to 1976, with a Meritorious Service Medal in 1976. I had a 45 year career in IT, including cyber security.
In new innovative areas, it might pay to be really loose about procurement. In Ukraine, for example, individual units are allowed to mail order drones, and the bomb casings they will drop, by mail order. The explosives and fuses are aded by the receiving units. This procurement model led to fast innovation in drones and bomb bodies. After some maturity was reached in the technologies, the government chose some of the best models for mass production, while still allowing units to buy form independents if they wanted. This unit level procurement has lead to extreme competition in drones.
I was the pricing analyst on a sub tier component of one of our missile systems in the early 90s. We inadvertently became part of an A-B test when our prime was swapped. The first prime kept us in the dark and flowed detailed requirements in a stifling slow process. The lead engineer for the replacement prime probably overstepped his clearances and described to us broad mission objectives. And voila, our engineers got to do what they do best--solve constrained optimization problems. Cost forecasts fell. The whole assembly character changed. And it was a wild success.
A corollary: engineers solve constrained optimization problems all day. They have amazing CAD tools to analyze things like mass and torque. They have terrible tools to analyze cost. This could be an amazing application of AI.
For as long as anyone can remember, persistent delays and cost overruns have plagued defence equipment programmes, which would explain why defence contractors have never been able to deliver equipment to the armed forces that is fit for purpose, adequately sustained in-service and constitutes value for money through-life.
The problem is that contractors have no incentive whatsoever to do the right thing because they have no skin in the game, that is to say, they stand to lose absolutely nothing if they perform badly on defence equipment programmes. Worse still, procurement officials at UK MoD haven’t got a clue about how to go about incentivising contractors because they have no idea of how the market in goods and services works – despite knowing full well that the only way to elicit improved performance is by changing their behaviour.
The inescapable fact behind this thoroughly despicable behaviour is that contractors couldn’t care less because defence equipment contracts, and the lucrative profits that go with them, are funded exclusively by taxpayers.
Indeed, the only way to ensure that contractors embark upon the long journey to improve their performance is by compelling them to stake their own (or third-party funds) on defence equipment programmes – the market-based incentive mechanism of the profit motive is simply not working anymore.
This state of affairs cannot be described as anything other than government-backed market failure, which has distorted economic incentives in a way no one had foreseen.
It is as well to remember that there is a reason why it is called the private sector – so that it can use private sector funds, not public sector subsidy to innovate, grow, create jobs and make a profit. Notwithstanding this fact to be self-evidently true, there is no evidence that MoD’s longstanding policy of securing input of private sector capital into defence equipment programmes is being applied, which means that they continue to be funded exclusively by the taxpayer.
Defence contractors have long claimed that they are investing their own funds in defence equipment programmes, but no one has been able to provide any evidence to prove this assertion, including the Secretary of State for Defence – and yet, he is the one who owns the procurement process and initiates it at a time of his own choosing, to seek out the preferred prime contractor. And because he hasn’t bothered to ask contractors (formally, in the requirements documentation) the amount they are willing to contribute, he is unable to tell the UK Parliament exactly how much money contractors are putting in to complement taxpayer funds.
One cannot deny that the single biggest factor that forces contractors to invest their own money to advance the developmental status of the starting-points for the technical solution from its existing condition, to a point where they will satisfy the qualitative and quantitative parameters desired by the military user is exposure to the full rigours of the free market, that is to say, making them ‘feel the heat’ of competitive market forces.
Competition is the essence of enterprise and free market capitalism. For an economic system that relies on voluntary exchange between buyers and sellers and seeks to deliver goods and services to everyone at a price they are willing to pay, vigorous competition among vendors on the basis of a level playing field is absolutely essential.
This philosophy is as true for the market in defence equipment as it is for the market in consumer goods and services.
The best way to get contractors to commit their own money in future-proofing activity like innovation, product research & development, creating intellectual property and upskilling employees is by selecting the single, preferred prime contractor from a choice of industry teams by running a multiple-phase, winner-takes-all competition on the basis of a level playing field genuinely open to all-comers, including non-domiciled suppliers.*
Normal commercial pressures and market forces inherent within the context of the winner-takes-all competition will, in themselves, compel bidders to produce and deliver competitively priced, fully compliant ITT responses – not because the government says so, as some people in the pay of the State with inflated egos seem to think, but because of the omnipresent threat from the Competition!
Additionally, the policy of Progressive Elimination – removing bidders one-by-one during the winner-takes-all competition requires that a bidder who scores worst against the selection criteria should be eliminated immediately after MoD has taken receipt of ITT responses and another, who has performed least well, at the end of each contract performance phase.
What’s more, it will also have the effect of weeding out bidders who have been touting the so-called, minimal development solution – a commonly used ploy advanced to con procurement officials into believing that they have a nearly-ready technical solution on offer, when in reality, they probably have something in hand which is closer to starting from a ‘blank sheet of paper’.
So, the intense desire shown by contractors to participate in the market will in itself compel them to abide by its rules, which means that they will have no choice but to divert funds from earned profits earmarked for share buybacks to defence equipment programmes, which will also serve to ease the burden on the public purse.** Incredibly, it will not even require procurement officials to spend any of their valuable time cajoling and persuading contractors to do the right thing!
Now, continued poor performance risks losing everything – forfeiture of the initial stake, potentially losing extant contracts, profits and with it, reputational standing.
@JagPatel3
* Written submission to the Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons, Inquiry into Defence Capability and the Equipment Plan 2019-29, published 29 May 2020, pp3-10. https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/5413/pdf/
Agreed. The fact that the Pentagon cannot select a new pistol within 10 years is utterly ridiculous. Pistols are about as off-the-shelf as military weapons get! Consumers can make a wise choice in 30 minutes…
I would also add that the military needs to figure out how defense contractors can radically scale up production during times of war. Now defense manufacturing has very little surge capacity.
I listened to Hegseth on the Shawn Ryan podcast…unfortunately he is focused on fighting the last war. Hegseth first became a TV personality defending the Bush administration on cable TV shows. So on the most important military issue of the last 50 years he was very wrong. However, now he understands the Iraq War was a mistake…and in July 2021 he expressed support for Trump’s surrender to the Taliban which was also the right call. So, unlike Liz Cheney and John Bolton and McMaster, Hegseth has adopted reality and that should leader to better decision making in this Trump administration than in the last in which officials were invested in the legacy of Bush.
Hegseth seems to be having difficulty grappling with his initial strong support for the Iraq War and his current understanding that it was a mistake. So on the Shawn Ryan podcast his initial example of the “war on warriors” were rules of engagement expressed by a JAG officer in 2005. So 2005 was long before the “woke mind virus” that Republicans believe has infected the military and is undermining our warriors. So Hegseth is trying to rationalize how we lost the Iraq War by blaming it on something that now Republicans have identified as an internal threat to America—American progressives that believe men can transition into women and that climate change is a bigger threat than China.
We lost the Iraq War because we should never have invaded Iraq in the first place and so the civilian leadership is to blame for that loss and not the warriors that performed their duty. In fact the only warriors I would put some blame on for losing Iraq are the soldiers stationed at Abu Ghraib that torture prisoners. Those soldiers have given some interviews and they are literally the least woke people on the planet!! Essentially Hegseth will be engaging in therapy for his support of the most asinine military action in American history…so therapy that will end up costing hundreds of billions of dollars!!
You are off on your comment and it bears no relationship to reality.
Geo W Bush was POTUS during 2001-9 whilst Hegseth started as a pretty face at Fox News beginning in 2015.
Rules of Engagement have been a problem since their inception in Vietnam. They were enacted with good intention to avoid civilian casualties, a very difficult task when fighting the VC (guerrillas) in the villages and not so much when fighting the NVA (regular army of N Vietnam).
Having served in that era, I can tell you it was the officer corps that enforced them alongside the nonsense of the "body count." It was dishonest crap.
When the draftee Army of the Vietnam War Era ended and was replaced by the Volunteer Army is really when the social experimentation began in the Army. The absence of the draft was also the beginning of the Army's recruiting issues. Simultaneoursly there was a huge contraction in the force from a 3MM man Vietnam War Era Army to the 440K of today -- woefully inadequate to meet our actual global challenges.
"Don't Ask, Don't Tell" was initiated in 1993 and rejected in 2011, but not reversed, just codified by the Obama admin. The social petri dish has been around for more than 30 years.
While it is easy to track specific ills and bad practices directly to the Obama regime (2009-17) -- a time that overlaps with Hegseth's overseas combat service and his beginning at Fox -- it was the officers elevated to the top of the food chain under the Obama admin who began to institutionalize what are now failed social experiments such as women in combat, women graduating from Ranger School, and racial quotas.
These political officers promoted junior officers in reflection of the ill-advised beliefs they had used to attain high rank. This is how some of this nonsense became institutionalized.
The Army kicked out the equivalent of 3 infantry divisions over the issue of the vaccine and ended up with a Chief of Staff who wanted to have every soldier learn about "white rage," a particularly specious bit of nonsense. BTW, the Army has a higher percentage of black soldiers and black NCOs than the percentage of black persons in the US population, sol much of the racial quota business is pure nonsense.
Focus on this -- the US Army was 11MM men at the end of WWII and had 13 4-5 star generals. Today, the Army is 440K men and has 44 4-star generals.
This is evidence of grade creep, a highly top heavy leadership, and a self-perpetuating culture.
There are only two criteria that should ever be applied to the Army:
1. Does this increase the lethality of the force?
2. Does this increase the safety of the warriors?
I think Hegseth is capable of returning the focus to warfighting, but I think he is woefully unqualified to run a 3MM person outfit with a $900B budget.
We shall see.
The Army needs to add 10 divisions and the Marines need to add 3. We need to return to some form of national service wherein the burden of military service is more fairly shouldered.
I worked in USAF accounting and finance in the mid-1980's at a missile base. I'd review payment requests, compare them to the contracts, terms, ensure performance criteria was met. For large dollar progress payments on massive construction projects, tens of millions of dollars at a time. And for small sundry payments.
I remember in some reviews I spotted items that defied logic. Like boxes of nuts and bolts under a contract for base housing fencing. A box of 500 nuts and bolts for thousands of dollars each...for fencing. A box would go for maybe $30 at the hardware store in town.
I went back to the original base housing development contract and found the description for those nuts and bolts. And found an extremely detailed description of the precise metallurgical criteria they needed to be made from, with exacting tolerances for precision, torque capability, etc. For base housing fencing.
If it had been for missile components or something else that demanded that metallurgical, precision, performance criteria that would be one thing. But for a fence? In housing? Not even base perimeter fencing, regular, ordinary fences between homes.
I figured it was either a black expenditure for missile components or something that demanded that criteria. Or that the contracting officer and vendor had collaborated to secure the bid by describing a specific nut and bolt design that no other vendor made and guarantee the top dollar for them, shady backroom dealmaking in the contracting process.
When stories about $500 toilet seats came out my only surprise was at how inexpensive they were. Yes. There's a lot of fraud and waste. And/or a lot of hiding black op expenses inside ordinary contracts. Deceit either way.
The same thing drives the primary two reasons a country, any country, dominates in the world. Reason number 1 is the economy. Reason number 2 is the military.
Reason number 2 contributes to reason number 1
But the underlying cause of both is entrepreneurial innovation.
Not just tech, or innovation, but entrepreneurship inherent in that.
We see this proven out in other countries where they have prolific government funding for tech, and that results in research and invention, but those countries, without an Entrepreneurial economy, can't put 1 and 2 together to exceed the U.S.
China and Russia are great examples of having the resources, education, and human capital, that they should be able to do it, but their culture and government policies prevent entrepreneurial innovation; the can't maintain it, can't scale it, and can't drive universal adoption.
Most of Europe has more of the culture for innovation but it lacks the culture of entrepreneusiahip; again, further evidence that it's BOTH, found in the U.S. that matters.
The new administration seems to understand this so we'll see how it plays out. Personally, I'd like to get in place a Foundation focused on this distinction; not tech, small businesses, nor even startups or innovation, but the culture, values, public policy, and curriculum that ensures our cities are capably fueling what keeps this country exceptional.
A different way to say the same thing is that as a constitutional representative republic enjoying constitutionally protected freedoms, the United States has more addressable talent including innovation and a more fertile environment in which to grow and fund that talent.
In addition, all of the world's talent is coming to the US to be educated and want to stay. We should allow any foreigner who completes a STEM degree to stay and after 5 years qualify for a permanent green card and a road to citizenship.
Despotisms by their very nature do not address the talent of their people because they are not free. Free people will not work for despots.
The Chinese rely upon industrial espionage to steal tech and thereby to close the innovation gap. One has only to look at their navy that has been unable to organically advance their submarine and aircraft carrier technology.
The Russians have decent weapons tech, but they cannot make it at scale. Their top tank and top multi-mission aircraft -- they have only produced 50 of the tanks and 25 of the airplanes.
While on paper their gear is good, the experience in Ukraine shows it is not particularly effective even when deployed. The Russians today are scraping the bottom of the barrel of stored armor that is from the 1950s and 1960s. They are almost out of that ancient gear.
JLM
www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com
I worked in the Defense industry in the 90’s when it was being consolidated and in the tech world thereafter. These new developments are music to my ears. I’m so proud of the tech patriots that are going to make the U.S. military great again. Thank you. Susan F.
We need an open forum to showcase new hardware technologies; Survivor for Tech. Give developers a location and time to show off their best new technology for the military. Here are the tests and judging criteria, may the best tech win.
The second issue is production. I'm a hardware startup co-founder, I understand there is a risk choosing the startup over the established prime; and, startups often don't want to be gobbled up by a prime. It is reasonable to ask, can this technology be made by this company? If not, what is needed to get it produced? The current process is too long and rewards process over product. If the tests and production requirements are reasonable and related to the technology, the barriers to entry can be managed.
re: McCormick "Who won the bronze star."
As a veteran for whom tradition and honor about such things matter military medals are *awarded*, not won. Winning implies a competition was held. Besting a group of competitors. This is not how military medals are awarded. They are earned by demonstrated proficiency, by acts of bravery, etc. Even a marksmanship medal is awarded for demonstrated proficiency, not "won" by the best marksman in a competition.
Congressional Medal of Honor recipients do not "win" their medals. They demonstrate uncommon and extraordinary courage in horrific situations that they do not set out to "win" medals for. They do what needs to be done. Most are awarded posthumously. Is that "winning?"
McCormick was awarded his Bronze Star, it wasn't "won." A meaningful distinction for military members, veterans for whom honor and tradition about such things matter.
What is an elephant?
A mouse built to military specs.
Procurement is not a warfighting talent. It is a waste of talent to try to put the uniformed military in the procurement business using its organic officer corps.
There is only one branch of the military that is good at procuring things -- the US Army Corps of Engineers is an incredibly capable builder as witnessed by their 3-day conversion of the Jacob Javitts Convention Center in NYC to a 3000 bed hospital at the height of the Pandemic.
There is a lot of procurement that is not justified by its result. The replacement of the M1911A1 by the Beretta M9 (1985 - 2017) is such an example. The Beretta is a damn good pistol, but other than a bigger magazine didn't really have any mission critical improvement.
There is a new skill emerging from the Ukraine war, the ability to rapidly adapt existing civilian systems and components to make inexpensive weapons such as cardboard kamikazi drones that are easy to construct, composed of existing systems/components, highly cost effective ($3K at scale), and highly adaptable.
The S Korean Papydrone-800 and the Australian SYPAQ are examples of such weapons systems.
You can destroy a Russian armored vehicle for the price of 2-3 such cardboard kamikaze drones. That is a great exchange rate.
JLM
www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com
Joe I'm a USAF officer in engineering and acquisitions, how can I get in touch with these folks to directly serve them and better serve my country?
The problem with US major platform procurement is new everything. When the US develops a new weapons system platform, like the F-35 or the Zumwalt destroyer, the US develops a new platform with new propulsion, new electronics and, in the Navy's case, a new gun as well. (The new gun famously didn't work out.) This makes the new platform very hard to debug, because everything new is a source of possible failure, and all of the interactions are sources of failure as well. The debug time becomes very lengthy. It leads to guaranteed cost overruns. In many cases, like the F-22, the platform gets cancelled before we can buy enough of them to do the job. It also almost guarantees scope creep. Everybody gets to add just one more requirement, since everything is new.
If we want to shorten development cycles, we should develop fewer new features in each new platform. For example, World War II airplanes often used existing engines in new airframes, then substituted new engines later. The new airframes were initially available in months, instead of years.
Platforms, electronics and software all have lifecycles of different lengths. Platforms last for 30 years or more, weapons 15-20, electronics 10 -15 at most, and software for 3-5 years. When the US develops a new platform, it should develop only the platform itself. Everything else, including electronics and software, should be off the shelf as much as possible, to limit development risk. Once the platform is up, and procured in sufficient quantity, then new electronics, software, missiles and guns can be added in a planned upgrade phase, several years down the road. See, for example, the B-52, which has been modernized a couple of times.
The whole point of standardized parts is that manufacturing in volume is cheaper than custom made parts. Managing inventories is also easier with fewer unique parts. If that's still the case, why is the US still developing customized weapons platforms in small volumes, each with customized unique parts?
Even though it looks like the upgrade phase would be more expensive than installing everything at the same time, it's really a false economy. The extended debug phase is much more expensive than a short debug of the new platform, followed by the upgrade with another short debug.
Please also notice that initial combat readiness for a new platform is far earlier than with the new everything approach. We get deployable platforms much earlier, a quicker return on our investment. Congress sees early success, so there’s less chance they will cancel the program.
This feeds into specialized platforms with smaller footprints. Do we really need nuclear carriers, or will jeep carriers do in many cases? Do we really need specialized hulls, or more standardized hulls and power plants that can be adapted and built for new weapons systems and as drone launching platforms as they are developed? Are commercial vessels or airplanes good enough platforms for some tasks, like tending and launching drones and unmanned surface vessels and submarines?
I was a USAF Computer Systems Analyst Officer from 1972 to 1976, with a Meritorious Service Medal in 1976. I had a 45 year career in IT, including cyber security.
In new innovative areas, it might pay to be really loose about procurement. In Ukraine, for example, individual units are allowed to mail order drones, and the bomb casings they will drop, by mail order. The explosives and fuses are aded by the receiving units. This procurement model led to fast innovation in drones and bomb bodies. After some maturity was reached in the technologies, the government chose some of the best models for mass production, while still allowing units to buy form independents if they wanted. This unit level procurement has lead to extreme competition in drones.
I was the pricing analyst on a sub tier component of one of our missile systems in the early 90s. We inadvertently became part of an A-B test when our prime was swapped. The first prime kept us in the dark and flowed detailed requirements in a stifling slow process. The lead engineer for the replacement prime probably overstepped his clearances and described to us broad mission objectives. And voila, our engineers got to do what they do best--solve constrained optimization problems. Cost forecasts fell. The whole assembly character changed. And it was a wild success.
A corollary: engineers solve constrained optimization problems all day. They have amazing CAD tools to analyze things like mass and torque. They have terrible tools to analyze cost. This could be an amazing application of AI.
For as long as anyone can remember, persistent delays and cost overruns have plagued defence equipment programmes, which would explain why defence contractors have never been able to deliver equipment to the armed forces that is fit for purpose, adequately sustained in-service and constitutes value for money through-life.
The problem is that contractors have no incentive whatsoever to do the right thing because they have no skin in the game, that is to say, they stand to lose absolutely nothing if they perform badly on defence equipment programmes. Worse still, procurement officials at UK MoD haven’t got a clue about how to go about incentivising contractors because they have no idea of how the market in goods and services works – despite knowing full well that the only way to elicit improved performance is by changing their behaviour.
The inescapable fact behind this thoroughly despicable behaviour is that contractors couldn’t care less because defence equipment contracts, and the lucrative profits that go with them, are funded exclusively by taxpayers.
Indeed, the only way to ensure that contractors embark upon the long journey to improve their performance is by compelling them to stake their own (or third-party funds) on defence equipment programmes – the market-based incentive mechanism of the profit motive is simply not working anymore.
This state of affairs cannot be described as anything other than government-backed market failure, which has distorted economic incentives in a way no one had foreseen.
It is as well to remember that there is a reason why it is called the private sector – so that it can use private sector funds, not public sector subsidy to innovate, grow, create jobs and make a profit. Notwithstanding this fact to be self-evidently true, there is no evidence that MoD’s longstanding policy of securing input of private sector capital into defence equipment programmes is being applied, which means that they continue to be funded exclusively by the taxpayer.
Defence contractors have long claimed that they are investing their own funds in defence equipment programmes, but no one has been able to provide any evidence to prove this assertion, including the Secretary of State for Defence – and yet, he is the one who owns the procurement process and initiates it at a time of his own choosing, to seek out the preferred prime contractor. And because he hasn’t bothered to ask contractors (formally, in the requirements documentation) the amount they are willing to contribute, he is unable to tell the UK Parliament exactly how much money contractors are putting in to complement taxpayer funds.
One cannot deny that the single biggest factor that forces contractors to invest their own money to advance the developmental status of the starting-points for the technical solution from its existing condition, to a point where they will satisfy the qualitative and quantitative parameters desired by the military user is exposure to the full rigours of the free market, that is to say, making them ‘feel the heat’ of competitive market forces.
Competition is the essence of enterprise and free market capitalism. For an economic system that relies on voluntary exchange between buyers and sellers and seeks to deliver goods and services to everyone at a price they are willing to pay, vigorous competition among vendors on the basis of a level playing field is absolutely essential.
This philosophy is as true for the market in defence equipment as it is for the market in consumer goods and services.
The best way to get contractors to commit their own money in future-proofing activity like innovation, product research & development, creating intellectual property and upskilling employees is by selecting the single, preferred prime contractor from a choice of industry teams by running a multiple-phase, winner-takes-all competition on the basis of a level playing field genuinely open to all-comers, including non-domiciled suppliers.*
Normal commercial pressures and market forces inherent within the context of the winner-takes-all competition will, in themselves, compel bidders to produce and deliver competitively priced, fully compliant ITT responses – not because the government says so, as some people in the pay of the State with inflated egos seem to think, but because of the omnipresent threat from the Competition!
Additionally, the policy of Progressive Elimination – removing bidders one-by-one during the winner-takes-all competition requires that a bidder who scores worst against the selection criteria should be eliminated immediately after MoD has taken receipt of ITT responses and another, who has performed least well, at the end of each contract performance phase.
What’s more, it will also have the effect of weeding out bidders who have been touting the so-called, minimal development solution – a commonly used ploy advanced to con procurement officials into believing that they have a nearly-ready technical solution on offer, when in reality, they probably have something in hand which is closer to starting from a ‘blank sheet of paper’.
So, the intense desire shown by contractors to participate in the market will in itself compel them to abide by its rules, which means that they will have no choice but to divert funds from earned profits earmarked for share buybacks to defence equipment programmes, which will also serve to ease the burden on the public purse.** Incredibly, it will not even require procurement officials to spend any of their valuable time cajoling and persuading contractors to do the right thing!
Now, continued poor performance risks losing everything – forfeiture of the initial stake, potentially losing extant contracts, profits and with it, reputational standing.
@JagPatel3
* Written submission to the Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons, Inquiry into Defence Capability and the Equipment Plan 2019-29, published 29 May 2020, pp3-10. https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/5413/pdf/
** ibid., pp.15-19.
Great article!
good stuff. I left my comments on X
Agreed. The fact that the Pentagon cannot select a new pistol within 10 years is utterly ridiculous. Pistols are about as off-the-shelf as military weapons get! Consumers can make a wise choice in 30 minutes…
I would also add that the military needs to figure out how defense contractors can radically scale up production during times of war. Now defense manufacturing has very little surge capacity.
I listened to Hegseth on the Shawn Ryan podcast…unfortunately he is focused on fighting the last war. Hegseth first became a TV personality defending the Bush administration on cable TV shows. So on the most important military issue of the last 50 years he was very wrong. However, now he understands the Iraq War was a mistake…and in July 2021 he expressed support for Trump’s surrender to the Taliban which was also the right call. So, unlike Liz Cheney and John Bolton and McMaster, Hegseth has adopted reality and that should leader to better decision making in this Trump administration than in the last in which officials were invested in the legacy of Bush.
Hegseth seems to be having difficulty grappling with his initial strong support for the Iraq War and his current understanding that it was a mistake. So on the Shawn Ryan podcast his initial example of the “war on warriors” were rules of engagement expressed by a JAG officer in 2005. So 2005 was long before the “woke mind virus” that Republicans believe has infected the military and is undermining our warriors. So Hegseth is trying to rationalize how we lost the Iraq War by blaming it on something that now Republicans have identified as an internal threat to America—American progressives that believe men can transition into women and that climate change is a bigger threat than China.
We lost the Iraq War because we should never have invaded Iraq in the first place and so the civilian leadership is to blame for that loss and not the warriors that performed their duty. In fact the only warriors I would put some blame on for losing Iraq are the soldiers stationed at Abu Ghraib that torture prisoners. Those soldiers have given some interviews and they are literally the least woke people on the planet!! Essentially Hegseth will be engaging in therapy for his support of the most asinine military action in American history…so therapy that will end up costing hundreds of billions of dollars!!
You are off on your comment and it bears no relationship to reality.
Geo W Bush was POTUS during 2001-9 whilst Hegseth started as a pretty face at Fox News beginning in 2015.
Rules of Engagement have been a problem since their inception in Vietnam. They were enacted with good intention to avoid civilian casualties, a very difficult task when fighting the VC (guerrillas) in the villages and not so much when fighting the NVA (regular army of N Vietnam).
Having served in that era, I can tell you it was the officer corps that enforced them alongside the nonsense of the "body count." It was dishonest crap.
When the draftee Army of the Vietnam War Era ended and was replaced by the Volunteer Army is really when the social experimentation began in the Army. The absence of the draft was also the beginning of the Army's recruiting issues. Simultaneoursly there was a huge contraction in the force from a 3MM man Vietnam War Era Army to the 440K of today -- woefully inadequate to meet our actual global challenges.
"Don't Ask, Don't Tell" was initiated in 1993 and rejected in 2011, but not reversed, just codified by the Obama admin. The social petri dish has been around for more than 30 years.
While it is easy to track specific ills and bad practices directly to the Obama regime (2009-17) -- a time that overlaps with Hegseth's overseas combat service and his beginning at Fox -- it was the officers elevated to the top of the food chain under the Obama admin who began to institutionalize what are now failed social experiments such as women in combat, women graduating from Ranger School, and racial quotas.
These political officers promoted junior officers in reflection of the ill-advised beliefs they had used to attain high rank. This is how some of this nonsense became institutionalized.
The Army kicked out the equivalent of 3 infantry divisions over the issue of the vaccine and ended up with a Chief of Staff who wanted to have every soldier learn about "white rage," a particularly specious bit of nonsense. BTW, the Army has a higher percentage of black soldiers and black NCOs than the percentage of black persons in the US population, sol much of the racial quota business is pure nonsense.
Focus on this -- the US Army was 11MM men at the end of WWII and had 13 4-5 star generals. Today, the Army is 440K men and has 44 4-star generals.
This is evidence of grade creep, a highly top heavy leadership, and a self-perpetuating culture.
There are only two criteria that should ever be applied to the Army:
1. Does this increase the lethality of the force?
2. Does this increase the safety of the warriors?
I think Hegseth is capable of returning the focus to warfighting, but I think he is woefully unqualified to run a 3MM person outfit with a $900B budget.
We shall see.
The Army needs to add 10 divisions and the Marines need to add 3. We need to return to some form of national service wherein the burden of military service is more fairly shouldered.
Cheers.
JLM
www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com
I publish a blog called Paradigms and Demographics
http://paradigmsanddemographics.blogspot.com/
I would like your permission to publish this piece.
Rich Kozlovich
elkoz@juno.com