This from Inside Defense’s weekly Insider:
“The Defense Department should — and could — cut in half the time it takes to field major systems, according to an influential group of senior advisers.
“‘Major systems are fielded with obsolete technology and unnecessarily high cost,’ the Defense Science Board says in a just-released report on technology in the 21st century. ‘Delay encourages “requirements creep,” leading to further delay. Opportunities to exploit disruptive and other technologies are missed.’
“Moreover, the authors state, the Pentagon and the defense industry are no longer ‘at the leading edge of most of the militarily relevant technologies, having been displaced by international commercial industries and markets.’”
Well, they’ve never been so insulted. Just for that, no more free calendars …
– Ward
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
There are so many reason why its taking so long for these programs to come to production but first hand experience based 25 years involved in this has made me conclude:
1) Civil servants had largely taken over the project offices compared to 10-12 years ago and with it the drive to deliver a product to the troops has taken a back seat to a diluted set of personal and career sustaining priorities
2) The up-front System Engineering skill in the project offices is on life support. The worse written requirements in the history of modern day system development are being produced and used to procure more complex systems. Contractors are now backing away from pointing out the issues for fear of being labeled as critical and not a team player. The result is when the realities of system development find or cause these latten issues to become unavoidable, ever more costly and difficult changes have to be made thus per unit cost go way up and worse, the schedule is greatly lengthened. Then someone sees the opportunity to add functions and capabilities while the latten errors are fixed without what is sold as
My experiences are hardly unique, but they clearly bear out the DSB’s conclusion. I could compare the JTRS fiasco to the gear used by ham radio operators and wireless providers, or monster systems like the AN/FSC-127 (sysadmin’d by a PC running Windows 3.1) with simple, reliable systems like GD’s AccessNet. When systems eventually come out they’re generally good hardware, but how often are they worth the wait? I don’t doubt one iota of sokala’s post.
I’ve never understood why the whole Land Warrior project couldn’t get the weight down enough to make an effective system. On my person right now are the following: A cell phone that when folded up is only slightly larger than a Zippo, a digital camera that’s the size of a deck of cards, and an 40 gig ipod video. Are you telling me in all honesty that someone couldn’t EMP harden these things and then cast a rubber casing around them? How is it that this system can’t be made to work after so many years and so much money??