By Luther Ray Abel
Friday, February 10, 2023
War on the Rocks features an excellent piece
examining why military innovation — and public-sector R & D more generally
— has lagged behind private-sector innovation over the last few decades.
The short answer is that software has become more
important than hardware. If one has ever used a military computer system, one
will easily appreciate just how bad the government is at developing and
integrating programs into existing systems. Take, for example, the U.S. Navy in
2015, which paid Microsoft millions of dollars for the firm to
continue its support for Microsoft XP and Office 2003 because the Navy used
legacy applications that depend on these archaic systems. The dreadful Internet
Explorer was the browser of choice — due to compatibility — for many of the
websites that servicemen used to access things such as leave, benefits, and
online learning modules.
Erik Johnson, a former infantry and intel officer for the
U.S. Army and now an engineer working on numerous software and hardware
programs for the military, writes:
Senior leaders at the Pentagon love
their acronyms and buzzwords. The soup du jour is
“innovation,” embodied in various entities such as the Defense Innovation Unit,
Defense Innovation Board, Small Business Innovation Research, Rapid Innovation
Fund (now defunct), Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative
Technologies, National
Security Innovation Network — the list goes on. All are meant to overcome
a perceived problem: The Department of Defense has stopped being good at
creating new things and is terrible at innovating.
The Department of Defense is indeed
struggling to get the right tools into our military’s hands to fight and win
the nation’s wars. Until very recently, its nuclear arsenal ran on floppy disks. Its intelligence systems are so dysfunctional that
warfighters prefer to use Google Maps. Experts estimate that our adversaries adopt new technology roughly five to six times
faster and, in terms of purchasing power parity, spend one U.S. dollar for every 20 from the American
military.
However, describing this as an
“innovation challenge” has made things worse. This approach wastes the time of
senior leaders with watching innovation theater. It strains relations
with a Congress that is rightly skeptical of lavish
spending on futuristic projects with little to show for their taxpayer dollars.
But worst of all, it has obfuscated the true nature of the problem, enabling the
root cause of the U.S. military’s technology woes to go unaddressed.
The Department of Defense does not
actually have an innovation challenge. The real culprit is an acquisition
system that has failed to keep pace in the digital age. The current process
rigidly defines capability requirements in a way that does not account for the
iterative nature of modern technology and alienates us from the companies
building it. The Pentagon should reimagine its requirements process as a series
of defined end states and let the real innovators in America’s private sector
figure out how to get there.
You can read the rest here.
What the piece does especially well is establish that
much of what the military wants already exists — it just needs to be purchased.
An illustration: The acquisition process traditionally starts with the military
announcing its wishes upon entering a store (e.g.: “Hear me, Store. I would
like a pen that’s expensive, has black ink, and can write for at least one mile
continuously but not really — also, I’d prefer that it were made by the blind“). What the
military should do, however, is go to the shelf and take down a box of pens
that already exist and work just fine.
Centrally planned economies don’t work anywhere else;
pretending that the military is an exception is wasteful and reduces our
war-fighting capabilities. Generals and the admiralty love projects with their
names attached to them. I prefer that my tax dollars be spent on something
other than Windows XP and doomed projects of ego.
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