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In Buddhist mythology, Maya \u2013 Buddha\u2019s mother \u2013 dreamt she was presented a white lotus flower by a white elephant. In Hinduism, Airvata, a white elephant, carries the god Indra, king of the first heaven. Thus, in both Buddhist and Hindu culture, white elephants are sacred.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, white elephants are so sacred they\u2019re not allowed to work.<\/p>\n
Practically speaking, if you had a white elephant in ancient Asia, you had to care and feed it. But you weren\u2019t allowed to use it.<\/p>\n
Consider the US Navy\u2019s three Zumwalt class destroyers. They\u2019re very large (14,000 tons; a Burke class destroyer weighs about 9,000 tons), they have fewer missiles tubes (80 versus 96), and oh, yeah, they\u2019re expensive ($7 billion each, versus $1.7 billion).
\nAnd they have problems. The first ship (Zumwalt) broke down in the Panama Canal while en route San Diego, and is \u2013 unofficially \u2013 a maintenance nightmare.<\/p>\n
They do have really neat guns. But, the Navy realized they couldn\u2019t afford the ammunition: $800,000 per round. And they don\u2019t have weapons for fighting other ships. Large, complex, expensive, and they can\u2019t fight another ship. Huh?<\/p>\n
The Navy has other problems: the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), originally planned at $200 million per ship, with each ship capable of multiple missions via the interchange of \u2018mission modules,\u2019 now costs approximately $400 million each. And they\u2019ve proven to be fragile and difficult to maintain, and the Navy\u2019s taken delivery of few mission modules. Some modules are literally years away from being ready. Most damning, the Pentagon\u2019s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation stated the ship would not survive in combat. A combatant that can\u2019t \u201ccombat.\u201d Swell.<\/p>\n
And then there\u2019s the F-35 fighter, with cost overruns and production delays that seem to have a life of their own.<\/p>\n
The other services have equal problems.<\/p>\n
In short, DOD procurement is a mess; it must be fixed.<\/p>\n
Can it be?<\/p>\n
Sure, but it\u2019ll require some hard steps. To begin, Congress has to recognize that they\u2019re key; after all, they hold the purse strings. But Congress, unfortunately, is too trusting; they believe what DOD tells them. So, actually, it begins one step before that: Congress and the new administration need to know \u201creality.\u201d<\/p>\n
It seems every time someone mentions a price of some weapon there\u2019s a dispute as to the \u201creal\u201d price; everyone has different costs or performance figures. So, the first thing the new administration must do is bring in outside auditors. Give them clearances, and let them look at everything. Let\u2019s find out where the money is; let\u2019s find out how much everything costs. Where it\u2019s not classified, publish it all and let the citizenry (the actual owners) know how all these departments \u2013 across the government \u2013 are spending their money.<\/p>\n
DOD argues: \u201cwe aren\u2019t ready to be audited.\u201d So? Let\u2019s just start the audit. The process of \u201cdiscovery\u201d will be worth the pain.<\/p>\n
Second, procurement is \u2013 or should be \u2013 a function of two factors: what you\u2019re trying to do (goals), and things that might prevent achieving your goals (the threat). Accordingly, the process of procurement ought to begin with clarity as to our goals, followed by a detailed discussion on plans \u2013 constrained both by threats and risks. This conversation should take place with key personnel in Congress, and should be constantly updated as threats and technology change. Both Congress and the Administration must restrain DOD from pursuing technology that is no longer relevant to changing plans or changing threats on one hand, or in sinking money into processes overcome by technology on the other.<\/p>\n
Finally, we must avoid the de facto approach of identifying requirements without regard to costs. Such an approach has led, time and again, to pursuit of purely technological solutions to strategic problems, rather than forcing planners to develop real, multi-faceted, affordable strategies.<\/p>\n
There are a host of problems with procurement; solving them won\u2019t be easy. But we need to begin with clarity, with a real \u2018ground-truth\u2019 on where we stand, followed by equal clarity on our goals and how we think we might achieve them. Failure to do so has resulted in ships, aircraft and weapon systems that are large, complex, very expensive and, in some cases, don\u2019t even perform well.<\/p>\n
Now we\u2019re saddled with several white elephants. Let\u2019s use this to learn a lesson and fix our system as we sail forward. It\u2019s Christmas time, time for a new beginning!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Buddhist mythology, Maya \u2013 Buddha\u2019s mother \u2013 dreamt she was presented a white lotus flower by a white elephant. In Hinduism, Airvata, a white elephant, carries the god Indra, king of the first heaven. Thus, in both Buddhist and Hindu culture, white elephants are sacred. Unfortunately, white elephants are so sacred they\u2019re not allowed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arrian"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14866"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14866\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14869,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14866\/revisions\/14869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}