A word about "resourcing" -- the article states, "A ruthless rack-and-stack, owned by operational leaders with portfolio acquisition executives forces the investment decisions and acquisition roadmaps that the legacy system avoided." Believe we need more than the expectation that the ruthless rack-in-stack will "force the investment decision." Not my experience working at every level within the Department OSD, Service, JCS, CCMD. The new Requirement and Resourcing Alignment Board (RRAB) seeks to pull resourcing into the decision process earlier which is a critical element to the success of Acquisition Reform. USSOCOM does a pretty good job of an RRAB like process. A favorite saying, "Vision without resources is hallucination." We simply cannot assume the resources will be there -- for even the BEST ideas/capabilities. And for another discussion, the congressional appropriation committees play an important role in this as well. PPBE reform tried to get after that aspect of the challenge...but the tension between "oversight" and "moving quickly" continues.
Mark - Great points. Many factors influence investment decisions, some helpful, others not so much. While some organizations conduct rigorous mission, technical, and budget analysis, others manage through rushed PowerPoint drills. The Department at all echelons can certainly do better at aligning resources with the highest-priority operational needs and emerging opportunities.
PPBE reform has also stalled (a topic for another post). Hopefully, the RRAB at the OSW/JS level will focus on making tough investment trades across the Services rather than validating legacy JCIDS documents. Within the Services, we need greater rigor in identifying, prioritizing, and communicating operational needs, with acquisition and budget communities fully integrated into those decisions. The goal isn't simply better requirements or faster acquisition, but making the hard resource trades needed to deliver the capabilities with the highest mission impact.
I guess I'm the skeptic here. Of course the services want a JCIDS-like process. I had past experience in the DoD CB Defense Program, so my view may be limited here, but I don't know how you can suggest that requirements people don't "work closely with operational forces" and don't "assess adversary threats." Of course they do this. That's the easy part. Industry is ALWAYS there to engage requirements and acquisition officials. They still require an objective analysis of some kind to demonstrate that they did the work of determining the capability shortfall requires a hardware solution instead of a doctrinal or organizational fix. But of course you know that.
If you're suggesting we should just trust the program managers to work with industry and do the right thing, then you're just part of the problem. The acquisition officials don't seem to be motivated by much other than "let's field something quick and get credit for it" whether or not it meets the services' requirements. The JPEO for CBD worked for a decade to get a new protective suit, and despite its failing to meet basic requirements and a significant higher cost, it tried to twist the services' arms to accept it. It was a loser. This isn't the only example. Industry isn't much better, making promises about technical capabilities that it can't deliver or knows aren't true. But hey, with a few million dollars a year and a few more years of R&D, just maybe it can work for them. And let's not pretend that industry isn't out there lobbying the combatant commands with their tech solutions. Of course they are. It's just business.
Experimentation on its face is fine. No one can argue with trying new stuff out, unless it's the acquisition office that is funding industry to do experimentation along a very specific line. Because acquisition's got the money, they can afford to throw hundreds of thousands of dollars at experimentation, we don't have any other funding mechanism available. Meanwhile we have all these service laboratories churning out technologies that the acquisition office ignores. What a great gimmick, to take credit for experimentation when you control the outcome.
Until you empower the requirements offices to make the acquisition people give them what they ask for, instead of the acquisition people saying "take this junk, we know better than you," then you're going to continue to have JCIDS-like processes that are intended to make defense acquisition deliver what they want.
Of course the requirements community engages operational commands and the intelligence community. My point wasn’t that they don’t. We need a professional requirements community with the authority to identify, validate, and prioritize operational needs, not acquisition officials writing their own requirements or telling operators to take what we built.
Where I think we differ is in how that process should work. I don’t think the answer is locking detailed requirements into documents and staffing them through lengthy Pentagon processes. Requirements should define operational outcomes, priorities, constraints, and minimum acceptable performance, while allowing technology, cost, schedule, experimentation, and operational learning to inform trades over time.
There also needs to be a legitimate path for opportunities that don’t begin as validated requirements. If industry or a government lab develops something novel that operators find valuable, there should be a venue to experiment with it, assess the operational value objectively, and bring it into the portfolio if warranted.
Ultimately, requirements and acquisition should check each other. Requirements define and prioritize the operational problem. Acquisition provides realistic options based on technology, cost/budget, schedule, industrial capacity, and risk. Operators continuously inform both, and portfolio leaders make the trades when those factors conflict.
I agree with a lot of what you say here, again , my window into DoD acquisition was limited, but I don’t think the requirements people were as locked into documents and process. They needed a way to put a leash on acquisition, or the PMs would just ignore them. At the same time, I recognize that the requirements people didn’t always appreciate the need for flexible and achievable requirements. In that case, the PMs just shrugged and said “threshold requirements it is.”
Requirements and acquisitions should check each other, in an ideal situation. But if one overwhelms the other, bad results happen.
Replacing JCIDS only matters if the requirements culture changes with it — faster operator feedback, iterative development and a much shorter path from operational need to fielded capability.
Pretty good -- A few items that I believe critical if the enterprise (not just DOD/DOW, but also Congress, and Industry writ large) truly wants change.
1. Getting operational feedback is good for the 'now' and 'near term' requirements. It does little or nothing to solve truly long-term or strategic problems. It needs to be a priority early from a system's perspective, but should become less of a priority/resource draw once a real system is in place.
2. Dumping all the current documents with their requirements will show how you are meeting some of those current requirements -- but will also give you "false positives" in terms of meeting requirements that are not actually validated by M&S or that are themselves "lesser values" based on 'trades' made by PM shops to stay within budgets/timelines.
3. I would frankly demand a "clean slate" approach for any requirements in the 2035 and beyond time horizons. Demand the Joint Staff provide a comprehensive OE w/threats and risks within 6 months (it's doable, and it's hard -- but taking longer makes it useless), and then direct the services to conduct actual analysis using M&S to create service level and core operational unit level Concepts documents within a year. Absent these overarching concept documents there is little or no intellectual grounding for ANY requirements documents; they may solve tactical (platform/system, small unit) problems, but they do not address operational value of formations.
I had hope (small, and unfounded) that the November memos would yield something -- but the "frozen middle" of bureaucrats, aided and abetted by Acquisition elements that believe only they have the answer has once again stymied the defense ecosystem. Might as well blow it up and start from scratch; there is no substantial increase in strategic risk.
A word about "resourcing" -- the article states, "A ruthless rack-and-stack, owned by operational leaders with portfolio acquisition executives forces the investment decisions and acquisition roadmaps that the legacy system avoided." Believe we need more than the expectation that the ruthless rack-in-stack will "force the investment decision." Not my experience working at every level within the Department OSD, Service, JCS, CCMD. The new Requirement and Resourcing Alignment Board (RRAB) seeks to pull resourcing into the decision process earlier which is a critical element to the success of Acquisition Reform. USSOCOM does a pretty good job of an RRAB like process. A favorite saying, "Vision without resources is hallucination." We simply cannot assume the resources will be there -- for even the BEST ideas/capabilities. And for another discussion, the congressional appropriation committees play an important role in this as well. PPBE reform tried to get after that aspect of the challenge...but the tension between "oversight" and "moving quickly" continues.
Mark - Great points. Many factors influence investment decisions, some helpful, others not so much. While some organizations conduct rigorous mission, technical, and budget analysis, others manage through rushed PowerPoint drills. The Department at all echelons can certainly do better at aligning resources with the highest-priority operational needs and emerging opportunities.
PPBE reform has also stalled (a topic for another post). Hopefully, the RRAB at the OSW/JS level will focus on making tough investment trades across the Services rather than validating legacy JCIDS documents. Within the Services, we need greater rigor in identifying, prioritizing, and communicating operational needs, with acquisition and budget communities fully integrated into those decisions. The goal isn't simply better requirements or faster acquisition, but making the hard resource trades needed to deliver the capabilities with the highest mission impact.
I guess I'm the skeptic here. Of course the services want a JCIDS-like process. I had past experience in the DoD CB Defense Program, so my view may be limited here, but I don't know how you can suggest that requirements people don't "work closely with operational forces" and don't "assess adversary threats." Of course they do this. That's the easy part. Industry is ALWAYS there to engage requirements and acquisition officials. They still require an objective analysis of some kind to demonstrate that they did the work of determining the capability shortfall requires a hardware solution instead of a doctrinal or organizational fix. But of course you know that.
If you're suggesting we should just trust the program managers to work with industry and do the right thing, then you're just part of the problem. The acquisition officials don't seem to be motivated by much other than "let's field something quick and get credit for it" whether or not it meets the services' requirements. The JPEO for CBD worked for a decade to get a new protective suit, and despite its failing to meet basic requirements and a significant higher cost, it tried to twist the services' arms to accept it. It was a loser. This isn't the only example. Industry isn't much better, making promises about technical capabilities that it can't deliver or knows aren't true. But hey, with a few million dollars a year and a few more years of R&D, just maybe it can work for them. And let's not pretend that industry isn't out there lobbying the combatant commands with their tech solutions. Of course they are. It's just business.
Experimentation on its face is fine. No one can argue with trying new stuff out, unless it's the acquisition office that is funding industry to do experimentation along a very specific line. Because acquisition's got the money, they can afford to throw hundreds of thousands of dollars at experimentation, we don't have any other funding mechanism available. Meanwhile we have all these service laboratories churning out technologies that the acquisition office ignores. What a great gimmick, to take credit for experimentation when you control the outcome.
Until you empower the requirements offices to make the acquisition people give them what they ask for, instead of the acquisition people saying "take this junk, we know better than you," then you're going to continue to have JCIDS-like processes that are intended to make defense acquisition deliver what they want.
Al, Appreciate your thoughtful comments.
Of course the requirements community engages operational commands and the intelligence community. My point wasn’t that they don’t. We need a professional requirements community with the authority to identify, validate, and prioritize operational needs, not acquisition officials writing their own requirements or telling operators to take what we built.
Where I think we differ is in how that process should work. I don’t think the answer is locking detailed requirements into documents and staffing them through lengthy Pentagon processes. Requirements should define operational outcomes, priorities, constraints, and minimum acceptable performance, while allowing technology, cost, schedule, experimentation, and operational learning to inform trades over time.
There also needs to be a legitimate path for opportunities that don’t begin as validated requirements. If industry or a government lab develops something novel that operators find valuable, there should be a venue to experiment with it, assess the operational value objectively, and bring it into the portfolio if warranted.
Ultimately, requirements and acquisition should check each other. Requirements define and prioritize the operational problem. Acquisition provides realistic options based on technology, cost/budget, schedule, industrial capacity, and risk. Operators continuously inform both, and portfolio leaders make the trades when those factors conflict.
I agree with a lot of what you say here, again , my window into DoD acquisition was limited, but I don’t think the requirements people were as locked into documents and process. They needed a way to put a leash on acquisition, or the PMs would just ignore them. At the same time, I recognize that the requirements people didn’t always appreciate the need for flexible and achievable requirements. In that case, the PMs just shrugged and said “threshold requirements it is.”
Requirements and acquisitions should check each other, in an ideal situation. But if one overwhelms the other, bad results happen.
Excellent point, Pete.
Replacing JCIDS only matters if the requirements culture changes with it — faster operator feedback, iterative development and a much shorter path from operational need to fielded capability.
Of course.
Pretty good -- A few items that I believe critical if the enterprise (not just DOD/DOW, but also Congress, and Industry writ large) truly wants change.
1. Getting operational feedback is good for the 'now' and 'near term' requirements. It does little or nothing to solve truly long-term or strategic problems. It needs to be a priority early from a system's perspective, but should become less of a priority/resource draw once a real system is in place.
2. Dumping all the current documents with their requirements will show how you are meeting some of those current requirements -- but will also give you "false positives" in terms of meeting requirements that are not actually validated by M&S or that are themselves "lesser values" based on 'trades' made by PM shops to stay within budgets/timelines.
3. I would frankly demand a "clean slate" approach for any requirements in the 2035 and beyond time horizons. Demand the Joint Staff provide a comprehensive OE w/threats and risks within 6 months (it's doable, and it's hard -- but taking longer makes it useless), and then direct the services to conduct actual analysis using M&S to create service level and core operational unit level Concepts documents within a year. Absent these overarching concept documents there is little or no intellectual grounding for ANY requirements documents; they may solve tactical (platform/system, small unit) problems, but they do not address operational value of formations.
I had hope (small, and unfounded) that the November memos would yield something -- but the "frozen middle" of bureaucrats, aided and abetted by Acquisition elements that believe only they have the answer has once again stymied the defense ecosystem. Might as well blow it up and start from scratch; there is no substantial increase in strategic risk.