Show Notes
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.
This series traces the rise of the modern system for acquiring weapons between 1945 and 1975. It documents how pluralistic methods of market-like competition were replaced by industrial era concepts of top-down control. Technology developments became treated like reproducible goods moving down an assembly line. More decisions were consumed by an overly centralized bureaucracy obsessed with perfection on paper rather than experimentation and rapid scaling of what works.
This series argues that failure is built into modern defense acquisition. Attempts to detail financial plans by program output has corrupted the decision-making process. Hundreds of requirements are levied from all corners of the bureaucracy. Dozens of approvals are required to authorize funds. Years pass before the program can proceed, and once it does, plans become locked-in for five, ten, or twenty years into the future. The programming aspect of the budget is the ultimate source of rigidity in acquisition. Hence, the series title 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
More from Acquisition Talk
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.