Making the Wrong things Go Faster at The Department of War

This article previously appeared in Defense Scoop

The Department of War (DoW) senior Acquisition leadership (the people who decide what and how the DoW buys equipment and services) now is headed by people from private capital (venture capital and private equity.)

• Deputy Secretary of War Steven Feinberg ran Cerebus Capital

• Secretary of the Army Daniel Driscoll was a former VC and investment banker

• Secretary of the Navy John Phelan ran MSD capital.

• Deputy Secretary of the Army Michael Obadal was a senior director at Anduril

The Department of War is in the midst of once-in-a-lifetime changes of how it acquires weapons, software and systems. The new Warfighting Acquisition System rewards speed and timely delivery of things that matter to the Warfighter. But this new system is at risk of making the wrong things go faster.

Here’s why and what they should do.

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What Now?

Acquisition in the DoW is being reorganized how a Private Equity would reorganize a large company. They bring in (or empower) a new operating team, swap executives, change incentives, kill things not core to their mission, cut costs, invest for growth, and restructure to find additional financing.

That’s being played out at the Department of War right now. The announcement of the consolidation of individual weapons systems (each of which had their own silos of Requirements, Test/Evaluation, Budgeting, and Acquisition) into a unified Portfolio Acquisition Executive, is a classic Private Equity strategy. Instead of 100s of programs operating with separate budgets, across different Program Executive Offices, the intent of the Portfolio Acquisition Executives is to consolidate overlapping programs, eliminate the redundant ones, pick winners, kill losers, get rid of processes that kill speed, and focus on rapid deployment.

What’s Missing?

Organizing by Portfolio Acquisition Executives is a great start, but simply consolidating the parts of the defense Acquisition system that were broken under one umbrella organization won’t make it better. Making bad ideas go faster should not be the goal. However, we’re at risk of doing just that. (Pete Newell at BMNT has been reminding me of this for years.)

For example, many of these new Portfolio executives are managing their programs by holding monthly reviews of proposed investments and current portfolio performance (just like private investors.) Here they’ll decide which programs get funded, which get more funding, and which should stop. (Actually having a regular process to kill programs early is sorely needed.) These are great ideas. However, if the meetings start by reviewing progress of prototypes to show that the technology works or that warfighters want it, and funds progress on those metrics, it misses the changes needed in an effective acquisition system.

The result will be building a faster version of a weapons requirements process that starts with a top-down list of features, or worse, shiny tech products (e.g. “I need drones.”) This “requirements first” process is what will drive the “bad ideas faster” problem.

A more productive approach – one that delivers truly decisive capabilities – would be to build a different process upfront – a rigorous problem identification and validation phase on the front-end of every acquisition program.

This process would start with a wide funnel of problems, ideas, technology, each with a 10-line problem summary that describes the specific challenge to address; why it can’t be solved currently; what it will take to solve it; and how a solution will be funded and deployed in the field.

The goal would be to 1) consolidate problems that may be different descriptions of the same core problem, and/or 2) discover if the problems are a symptom of something more complex.

Then each problem would go through an iterative process of problem and technical discovery. This will help define what a minimum deployable product and its minimum constraints (security, policy, reliability) should be, such as how long the solution would take to deploy, the source of funding for scale and who needs to buy-in.

This exercise will keep the focus where it needs to be — not on reforming a system but on delivering things to warfighters with speed and urgency so we can actually deter or win a war.

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