GET OUT
Te first solution was, ‘Oh, why don’t we use remote drones to drop fuel to these bases?’ Yes, but once you understand the deeper problems, well, can we eliminate most of the fuel we need and just do away with half of the resupply requirements? Oh, well, gee, I was kind of excited about the drones, because that is a neat thing for a prime to build.
“Once you really understood the problem, you realized, ‘Oh, what we ought to have is remote power sources run by solar cells and more efficient generators while also finding ways to recycle water.’ Because everything you could save out there actually saves part of that whole supply chain.”
Not everything, Blank acknowledges, needs to be lean. “I am not an expert in government requirements and acquisition, but it is even clear to me that there are some things that can be speci- fied and contracted, just like we’re doing. Not everything needs to be agile. We need to ask ourselves: ‘Are we going for the 100 percent quality and perfection, and time and cost are not issues?’ If so, let’s use standard contracts. We know what a new pistol looks like—I need a pistol that spits out bullets. Tat is not an unknown thing. For God’s sake, let’s just spec this thing. And by the way, it shouldn’t take 300 pages just to say give me more of the last stuff I just had. Tat’s fine. And there are a ton of things that works on.”
But the current defense acquisition model is broken, Blank said,
“which people have been talking about, I think, since Wash- ington got his boats on the Delaware.” Te problem lies at the beginning, with requirements that stifle innovation, and at the end, with prime contractors, he said.
“What is really broken is requirements. … Te methodology for problem understanding is just fundamentally flawed. DOD is over-optimized for perfect performance at the expense of providing timely capabilities to the warfighter.
“And that’s the part that we [Lean Startup] have gotten right: Tere are no facts inside the building, so get outside, and do that with speed and urgency. … And that changes our 20th- century philosophy … that we’ll build things with every possible feature and we’ll spend a decade doing it because our primes want to make the most money. And that runs into the prime problem.”
PRIMED FOR CHANGE Te bulk of the current acquisition system, Blank said, is built around a waterfall requirements and acquisition process—a
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sequential process, with little iteration or learning. Instead, development flows steadily downward (like a waterfall)—rather than an agile system that promotes innovation.
“So how do things get built when they get built by contractors? … Te word ‘contract’ implicitly or explicitly says we will specify all the features up front because we are going to do a great job on requirements, and you will develop it in a waterfall process and you will deliver the product,” he said.
Under such a system, “it is in the contractor’s interest to make the contract last as long as possible,” Blank said. “… Tat is the antithesis of lean. It’s as far from lean as you could get. Lean says no, no, no. We have a series of hypotheses on day one, but when we get out of the building … it’s the notion of, we don’t really know what problem we’re solving. We think we do, so let’s get started. But we can’t spec every possible feature. So instead of waterfall engineering, we need to learn how to write contracts for agile engineering.”
Until something happens to encourage defense prime contrac- tors to focus on speed of delivery, continuous adaptation and frequent modular upgrades, Blank said, “you are not going to fix the problem.”
DOD’s innovation pipeline—the process from which an idea is turned into a battlefield capability—has been shrinking for decades, Blank said, while tech innovation in the private sector has grown exponentially. “Venture capital is funding AI [artifi- cial intelligence], robotics, drones and the startup ecosystem at $70 billion a year. And very little of it is pointed to the DOD. So the question is, how can you build a wider innovation funnel that captures more than just the primes? (See “Innovation Pipe- line for Success,” Page 133) And most military organizations make it incredibly difficult to work with civilians not just on the contracting side, but on the security side—almost impossible.
“In the 20th century, DOD used to own all of the innovation technology. Everything that was important was owned by DOD and the intel community. So the biggest thing that’s happened to the military is that all of these technologies that used to be owned and controlled and budgeted by DOD and the primes got away. For example, NSA [the National Security Agency] used to own crypto hardware. It turns out not only did crypto go commercial, you don’t need hardware anymore. You can do crypto in software. Well, we built this entire expertise about hardware. Oops.
Army AL&T Magazine
April - June 2018
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