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, AcquisitionTalk.com.
In this third episode, we look at the 1950s debates over how weapons development should proceed. The listener will find strong parallels to the modern debates over waterfall vs. agile development practices. Weapons development in the 1940s and 50s followed an agile method of iterative and incremental decisions made by small, empowered teams. Yet this practice became supplanted by the belief that iteration and competitive developments revealed a failure to plan, and that planning could relieve all uncertainties in weapons development.
As you listen to the story, consider how weapons today are expected to proceed linearly from science, to prototyping, to full scale development, production, then operations and sustainment. There is little or no room for feedback mechanisms and learning.
However, another important aspect of software today is not just agile development, but continuous development and deployment of capability in what is called devops. The lines between development and production are not as clear today as they were presented in the hardware-oriented world of the 1950s.
Listen in on our third chapter of the Programmed to Fail story, this time focusing of the emerging religion of systems analysis, a religion which continues to pervade the defense acquisition system 70 years later.
This podcast was produced by Eric Lofgren. You can follow me on Twitter @AcqTalk and find more information at 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.