Nobody puts more money into bleeding edge R&D than the Pentagon. And a surprising number of those studies actually pan out. So why is the military still relying on gear that’s decades old? The problem is crossing the so-called “valley of death” between research projects and “acquisition,” when the Defense Department actually starts to buy stuff in bulk. National Defense magazine offers up some examples.
Last year, the Georgia Tech Research Institute developed a lightweight ceramic armor for a vehicle… The message from military officials was that they needed this technology immediately for troops in Iraq. We prototyped one vehicle and delivered it to Quantico, where the Marine Corps acquisition command is based. We are waiting to hear from the Marine Corps on what the next steps are, Cross says. This is where we all get frustrated We think its a good solution. Theres no technology impediment for moving forward. Its the acquisition process.
The armored vehicle is not likely to go into production any time soon. The Army and the Marine Corps are studying proposed designs from major defense contractors for a new light tactical vehicle that would replace the Humvee. The program is not expected to deliver new vehicles for at least two more years.
Frustrations with the defense bureaucracy also can be found at a California university where Congress created a technology transfer office specifically to expedite the transition of promising concepts from the commercial sector to the military.
The challenge is getting into acquisition programs. That consumes most of our time, says Stu Gordon, director of the Office of Technology Transfer and Commercialization at California State University San Bernardino…
Recent products that, with CSUs help, contractors successfully sold to the Defense Department include biological detectors, radios, batteries and fuel cells.
We have contacts at the office of the secretary of defense, Gordon says. They are very supportive But when we ask them how we get into acquisition programs, frankly, they dont know. This is true for many of the technologies we have.
Getting to the right person who can write a purchase order so someone in the military can buy the product is really a hard thing to do, Gordon says. Some officials at the Defense Department want to help us but they dont know how.
UPDATE 3:40 PM: John Robb has some interesting ideas on how “tinkerers’ networks” should be brought into the R&D process.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Rumsfeld sucks. If there was one area that cried out for ‘reform’ and ‘reinvention’ in the military it was acquisition. And with an honest to goodness actual shooting war on our hands, nothing cried out more. And oh guess what, rumsfeld did squat. acquisition is as screwed up as it ever was and the IG has rated DOD as the 22nd most screwed up federal department out of 23 departments.
rumsfeld sucked.
Good Afternoon Folks,
The problem(s) are politics, mainly Congress. Politicians with legecy defense programs being build in and creating jobs in their districts are going to fight any inovations that will take those josb away.
The poster child of all this is of course the C-130J built now by Lockheed in Atlanta. The Air Force didn’t want anymore C-130′s 20 years ago but the Geogria Congressional deligantion would give up, even though that money could have been spent on other programs the Air Force needed.
Some will come back and say that although no more C-130′s was needed in 1998 they have come in handy in the GWOT. Of course that’s not the point anymore then to say that if the money spent on C-130′s was used to improve out intellegence gathering abilities in the 90′s al Qaeda would have happened.
ALLONS,
Byron Skinner
I wonder if the authors who blame “beltway politics” have actually tried to productionize a “college science project?”
Time and time again, “novel technologies” are essentially unproducible until someone spends time to figure out how to do it. Recall that many university types have virtually no experience in the “real world of manufacturing,” so it should come as no surprise that efforts to rapidly produce these types of things fail miserably.
And fwiw, funding *is* a problem, when you bust your program milestone schedules, your program is “in trouble.” When that happens, someone will move in for the kill and de-fund your program … regardless of its potential.
Seems to me the authors of the studies need to do more work to understand the problems involved.
There are so many problems with the acquisition process I don’t even know where to start. “The Political Economy of National Security” by Ethan Kapstein is a good start on some of its more fundamental economic flaws.
Spiral development and RFI are improvements on the system, but they don’t work for large programs. Just look at FCS, spiral development has had almost no impact its evolution.
I have a few specific ideas for acquisition “game changers” (I hate the simplicity of DOD lingo sometimes):
1. When drafting the FYDP, start with an imaginary top line and force the services to fit their acquisition plans into it. Tell them the era of 1/3-1/3-1/3 is over and the services with the best ideas get their platforms built, regardless of proportionality.
2. Draft a common method of generating acquisition “requirements” and force each service to use it.
3. Publish stripped-down versions of Urgent Need Statements on the Internet. Let intrepid businesses try their hand at coming up a solution.
I’m a free trader, so it goes without saying that I think repealing the Buy American Act would also help significantly.