COMMENTARY


FIGURE 5


been highlighted on the GAO’s high-risk list for excessive waste and mismanage- ment for the past three decades. Notable programs have failed to deliver capabil- ity and have failed to meet performance, cost and schedule management targets. Te reasons for program failure vary from ill-defined requirements, immature tech- nologies, integration challenges, poor cost and schedule estimating, and the accep- tance of too much development risk.


BEHAVIORAL BIASES


Programs can fail for many reasons—ill-defined requirements, immature technologies, integration challenges, poor cost and schedule estimating, and the acceptance of too much risk. (Graphic by USAASC)


But the effect that the behavioral biases have in poor decision-making may be an even bigger contributor to acquisi- tion program failures—the true root causes. Te better acquisition profession- als understand the effect of these systemic behavioral biases, the better DOD can mitigate the risks of program failures. Te key is a better understanding of the people within big “A” defense acquisition.


establish a formal acquisition program of record at milestone C to enter low-rate initial production. For requirements, the Army initiated the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle program with a general characteristics of need document to avoid the approval of an initial capabil- ity document.


Te exact opposite strategy has been recommended by the GAO for more than three decades for major defense acquisition programs—knowledge- based acquisition strategies with incremental development. Defense acqui- sition programs have routinely rushed to production decisions without well- defined requirements, complete detailed design drawings, fully mature technolo- gies and mature manufacturing processes, and without demonstrating production- representative systems in an operationally relevant environment. Te Optionally


Manned Fighting Vehicle program is attempting to do in a middle tier of acqui- sition rapid prototyping effort what a major defense acquisition program achieves in a formal engineering and manufacturing development effort—a classic “schedule- driven” rush to failure with suboptimal decision-making that appears to be domi- nated by biases similar to those biases that plagued previous attempts to replace and modernize the infantry combat vehicles.


CONCLUSION Te behavioral biases of planning fallacy, overoptimism, recency and trade-offs difficulty have contributed to repeated fail- ures in the Army infantry combat vehicle acquisition programs. Figure 5 summa- rizes the behavioral biases observed in the Future Combat Systems Infantry Carrying Vehicle, the Ground Combat Vehicle and the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle programs. Acquisition management has


ROBERT F. MORTLOCK, Ph.D., Col., USA (Ret.) managed defense systems development and acquisition efforts for the last 15 of his 27 years in the U.S. Army. He is now a professor of the practice and principal investigator


of the Acquisition Research


Program, teaching defense acquisition sciences and program management at the Naval Postgraduate School. He holds a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, an MBA from Webster University, an M.S. in national resource strategy from the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, and a B.S. in chemical engineering from Lehigh University. He holds Level III certifications in program management, test and evaluation, and engineering, as well as the Professional Engineering, Project Management Professional and Program Management


Professional credentials.


His most recent column for Army AL&T appeared in the Summer 2021 issue.


https://asc.ar my.mil 95


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