Acquisition Talk Eric Lofgren

In this final episode of Programmed to Fail, we explore the true importance of reforming the Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution process in the Department of Defense. Some may say that it is only a poor craftsman who blames his tools, that it is deficiencies in the workforce rather than problems of the acquisition and budgeting systems that are holding weapons innovation back. But certainly, it is not the lack of quality and drive in the people that has held North Korea back relative to their neighbors in South Korea, or that has stymied the growth of nations in the former Soviet Union. It was the ideologies of the political economy thrust upon the people that so devastated their culture.

The PPBE is a similarly radical break from American values and traditions that has left good people burdened by a bad process. No longer can the defense acquisition workforce take joy in their hefty responsibility. No longer can the workforce see themselves in their work. They are tossed about in a system too large for them to affect, and the workforce is expected to be like a caretaker driving a train down pre-set tracks, rather than an explorer, a creator, and a builder with intrinsic value. Fulfilling individual desires to contribute to national security will more rapidly accelerate our common security than any top-down optimization and 30-year lifecycle plan. The problem is how large groups of people can be coordinated to achieve an end that is beyond the comprehension of any small group or plan. That is what we will explore in this final chapter of Programmed to Fail.

This podcast was produced by Eric Lofgren. You can follow me on Twitter @AcqTalk and find more information at https://AcquisitionTalk.com

In this episode of Programmed to Fail, we explore how accounting costs do not reveal the value being generated in the production process and cannot be used, on their own, as a guide for specific choices. Cost is not an objective reality, particularly to those who know the vagaries of cost accounting. Instead, our view of cost depends on subjective use value and is related to the term opportunity cost, or the next-best choice foregone. This chapter reveals that for defense acquisition to truly understand weapons value and leverage the power of commercial markets, it needs to shift away from its obsession with financial metrics.

This podcast was produced by Eric Lofgren. You can follow me on Twitter @AcqTalk and find more information at https://AcquisitionTalk.com

In this episode of the Acquisition Talk podcast, Dorothy Engelhart joins me to discuss unmanned surface and underwater vessel development in the United States Navy. Dorothy is the Director of Unmanned Systems in the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy for ships, and she has been in this role since 2015. Before that, she was a senior acquisition manager for Marine Corps MDAPs, and had over 20 years of experience in NAVAIR as well as experience on the Hill.

1:04 - Rundown of the unmanned portfolio
2:40 - Enabling technologies vs. Program of Record
4:45 - Timeline to fielding USVs and UUVs
7:00 - Owning the data for autonomy
11:10 - Capability over time curves and USV requirements
15:00 - USV Concept of operations
19:30 - Industry's readiness for USV production
27:40 - Agile funding and acquisition authorities
35:00 - Speed of adoption in Turkey and other nations
37:30 - "As a service" business model
41:50 - Navy's autonomy roadmap
45:00 - Total cost of ownership
49:40 - The Disruptor newsletter

This podcast was produced by Eric Lofgren. You can follow me on Twitter @AcqTalk and find more information at https://AcquisitionTalk.com

In this episode of Programmed to Fail, we discuss the integral role of rivalrous competition in the discovery of knowledge and the growth of technology. It finds that policy maker's dreams about single best plans and pre-coordinating service behavior to avoid duplication, competition, and overlap is a false economy, one that stamps out the true creative potential of the American people and harms national security.

Competition not only regulates incentives by prospect of punishment and reward. Just as importantly, the competitive process solves critical problems of knowledge. In fact, competition is most important under the presence of uncertainty. Planners cannot know what is optimal outside the process in which alternative courses of action are developed, brought into competition, and evaluated. Friedrich Hayek described how “In sporting events, examinations, the awarding of government contracts, or the bestowal of prizes for poems, not to mention science, it would be patently absurd to sponsor a contest if we knew in advance who the winner would be.” The information on which sports team performs better, or which project plan provides the most value, is only discovered in the process of competition. Otherwise, the rivalry is wasteful if one could reliably pre-determine the winner.

Dynamic competition results in the emergence of complex patterns of economic behavior, and consequently, technological growth. It is very different from the type of competition taught in economic textbooks or practiced in defense management. In economics, we are told about “perfect” competition, a concept which relies on bizarre assumptions of complete information and product homogeneity. In defense, we are told that contracts are awarded “competitively,” even when solutions are pre-specified and the contractors who buy-in get bailed-out.

While officials in the Department of Defense have often talked about the benefits of competition, the policies they’ve pursued continually run counter to the one real condition necessary for competitive forces to occur: free entry. Contrary to traditional wisdom, the history of defense acquisition has shown that the advertisement and open bid process does not provide assurance of free entry. When government is the only buyer, free entry requires an organization designed for pluralism.

This podcast was produced by Eric Lofgren. You can follow me on Twitter @AcqTalk and find more information at https://AcquisitionTalk.com

Welcome to a special series on the acquisition talk podcast that gives you an audiobook tour of my research project titled, Programmed to Fail: The Rise of Central Planning in Defense Acquisition 1945 to 1975. I’m Eric Lofgren of the Baroni Center for Government Contracting at George Mason University. You can find this book for free and over 1,300 blog posts on my website, https://AcquisitionTalk.com.

In this chapter of Programmed to Fail, we dive into how complex order in the real world emerges from simple and iterative systems of nonlinear interactions. The umbrella term of complex adaptive systems is used to describe self-organizing systems of emergent order that adapt to an uncertain environment. While these properties are not in general desirable for weapon systems that humans use in the field, they are certainly desirable properties for the defense acquisition system as much as they are for market economies.

In this chapter, we trace John Boyd’s work from weapon systems design into complexity theory that leverages Godel’s incompleteness theorem, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and the second law of thermodynamics. We find that the only realistic way to generate a system that exhibits complex behaviors beyond the foresight of any individual is to build from the bottom-up according to simple rules. Tacit coordination based on local conditions can then give rise to emergent order, a process not appreciated by advocates of top-down planning and built into the foundations of the Planning-Programming-Budgeting System. While complexity theories have started to penetrate the philosophy of military operations, we are still at the early stages of appreciating these ideas in the world of defense acquisition.

This podcast was produced by Eric Lofgren. You can follow me on Twitter @AcqTalk and find more information at https://AcquisitionTalk.com

In this episode, we take a look at the history of the the defense innovation process and compare it to processes in Western Europe and the Soviet Union. It also discusses the origins of the 5000-series regulations for acquisition and the stage-gate theory of development. It includes a case study on the Lightweight Fighter program which provided DoD the F-16 and F-18 fighter aircraft, and traces how their success was an unlikely outcome that required the dogged intervention of John Boyd and the fighter mafia, demonstrating how difficult non-consensual innovation can be in the Department of Defense.

This podcast was produced by Eric Lofgren. You can follow me on Twitter @AcqTalk and find more information at AcquisitionTalk.com