Show Notes
In this episode of #AcquisitionTalk, we listen in on a Twitter spaces discussion hosted by Andrew Kirima and Pablo Felgueres as part of their series on American industrial dynamism. Check out industrialdynamism.com and @morefactories. Tons of great speakers join, including Liz Stein, Jake Bullock, Jake Chapman, Griffin Barnicutt, John Dulin, AJ Piplica, and Eric Lofgren.
Excerpts:
"I'm pretty sure if the future of defense is AI, the future of AI is also in defense. And so that's why we do a lot of really ambitious AI research at Modern AI."
"You'll often see, tech crunch articles about, name your defense company, and the billion dollar contract they signed because they got an IDIQ. What the article won't tell you is that they're not actually getting a billion dollars and that contract might have 50 people on it."
"Are you a commoditized product, as in another piece of software or a certain parts maker that someone else can 3d print for cheaper? Or are you something that they literally can't replicate, which is hopefully where a lot of this American industrialism and dynamism will end up."
"The reason a program of record as a word is meaningful is there are so many moving pieces in government acquisitions as it's done today... What you're trying to do is cobble together those three people and acquisitions officer, a user, and then a funder together."
"You can raise a seed round with a deck but to get to Series A most of the VCs, and anybody feel free to correct me if you want, but most of them need to see a production contract. It's really hard to get there on the timeline that you could in any other sort of industry."
"A big reason that we encourage our portfolio companies to definitely pursue a commercial product first and find products that are 10x better than what's in the government, 10x cheaper. So frankly, a Herculean task, but that really is sometimes the bar."
"My pessimistic take on this is that if you're relying on the DOD to fundamentally change, how requires technologies in order for what you're building to be successful? I think it's a fool's errand."
"The way that you're going to have to write your proposal will lock you in to a very defined waterfall process that ultimately leads to bad products."
"The entire industry doesn't want to shift to horizontal platforms because that will cause new incumbents to emerge and it will effectively erode the power that these primes have."
"If you look at the new ULA and Amazon partnership, even with satellites, it's give or take a couple of billion dollars. I will put a lot of money that half of it will be subcontracted out and will generally go to startups."
"One of the most beneficial things out of that consortium model is being able to have the conversations with the end users. And that happens so rarely because of fairness in the procurement process."
"A lot of us on the outside have been a little bit weary about getting our hands dirty and playing the game the way it's played. Frankly, that's what's required in order to work within a system that's been entrenched for decades."
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.