On military procurement...

V-22 Osprey

Recently I have been listening to the audio book “The Dream Machine: The Untold History of the Notorious V-22 Osprey”.  It’s an exhaustive history of the V-22 tilt-rotor program over the decades, and it got me thinking about my own time working procurements in the Army. 

Procurement in the DoD is a nasty business.  To illustrate, let us use a theoretical example of a “joint” project, meant to save the DoD money by fielding one common system to all branches; Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. 

First, someone at the Pentagon briefs a long PowerPoint show on the money spent on cutlery in DoD dining facilities, and how things can be done better and cheaper if we can all just agree on a common solution which will take us through the next four decades.  Some four star agrees, funding is slipped into a bill in congress under the radar, and the Joint Spork Office is formed and staffed at some installation, somewhere. 

Theoretical "Joint Spork"

The services all go on a long TDY somewhere, to whatever location has better hotels, to have a week’s worth of day-long meetings to determine their requirements for the new spork.  The Marines are angry that they don’t get to go because the Navy gets to represent their interests at the meeting. 

The Army wants the spork to be capable of digging a fighting position, and the field artillerymen want to be able to quickly convert it for use as a flechette in case a dining facility is overrun. 

The Navy needs a marinized version in order to use the spork while underway at sea, and to shoot it out of torpedo tubes. 

The Air Force needs it to be able to survive an ejection at 60,000 feet, and be able to cut through an aircraft fuselage for airfield rescue. 

The Marines really need the spork to have a bayonet lug, so that they might attach it to their rifles when the battle is going very badly. 

After spending all week dining out but not agreeing on much of anything, the services retire to their respective installations, fire off lots of emails, and control of the project disappears deep into their separate bureaucracies, each with wildly different priorities and processes.  Months go by between meetings, years go by before the project gets any traction.  Somehow, soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines make do with legacy edition cutlery, although some cut themselves and nearly starve due to the inherent inadequacies of the low-tech fork, knife, and spoon. 

Other DoD-level bureaucracies lobby to test the new spork, shooting it, electrifying it, blowing it up, or whatever they need to do to justify the existence of their individual testing organizations, which forces unforeseen design changes and cost overruns.  More years drag by.  The spork design becomes heavier and more costly, and hardly fit to eat with. 

By and by, the Air Force goes out on their own and procures their own spork, in defiance of DoD policy and federal law, but at least they are the first to field a spork, while the joint spork languishes in the two year long operational testing phase. 

Eight years later, the joint spork is ready for production, meeting 80% of the specified requirements, and costing in the neighborhood of $150 per unit.  Meanwhile, mil-spec copies can be found on eBay for $12.  While this is meant to be a humorous example, this is exactly how we get to the legendary $600 toilet seat of DoD procurement lore. 

There are other reasons for cost overruns besides “jointness”.  Let us examine a few of them. 

Particularly in the case of high-tech and leap-ahead technologies like the V-22 (read: technologies that have not been designed yet), it is impossible to know at the outset of the project how much per airplane you are going to pay.  Aircraft invariably gain weight and lose capabilities during development as the project transitions from fanciful requirements and marketing promises to what is actually achievable in reality with a fixed budget. 

By the time it is apparent that an aircraft will not meet both its target costs nor its performance goals, enough time and money has been invested (and the contract cancellation costs are so high) that it is not financially feasible to bail out of the project.  This brings to mind the DoD truism that there are two phases of any procurement project… too early to tell, and too late to stop. 

Another procurement truism simply states: good, fast, cheap… pick two. 

If you want high quality, you can have it fast, or cheap… but not both. 

If you want it fast, you can have quality, or low cost… but not both. 

And if you want it cheap, you can do it right, or it’ll take much longer. 

Not to say that any of this is correct, but it IS the way that the DoD does business! 

Lastly, the requirements, budgets, and “want lists” of the services constantly change with the political winds, competing priorities for limited defense dollars, etc. etc.  This is where you sometimes feel sorry for the contractors.  Originally told that they will be building 2000 aircraft for three branches of service, two services will drop the aircraft completely over the decades-long development cycle, the sole remaining service will change the amount that they want to buy six times, money will too tight to fund all of the original requirements, and other requirements will be worked around and dropped at the behest of the service in order to stay somewhat on budget. 

When the final bills come in and only 400 aircraft are ordered of the original 2000, every newspaper on the beltway will report how badly the project is over budget and what a piece of junk the aircraft is, and the specter of the “military industrial complex” will ride again, for a short time. 

As ugly as the process is, it is ultimately important that we suffer through this charade and fund leap-ahead technologies to maintain our military’s technological overmatch against potential enemies, because we always roll into battle with what’s on the shelf, and not what we really need.  An example from Iraq:

During the initial invasion, I know soldiers who spent seventeen months in Sadr City, working out of light HMMWV vehicles, with NO armor, and only fabric doors.  This is unforgivable in 2003, as the light armor of the HMMWV vehicles had proven to be inadequate for combat in Somalia in 1993 and even in Bosnia in the late 1990s against the land mine threat… with nobody shooting.

HMMWV without armor

By the time I arrived there for the first time in 2005 with a ground unit, IEDs were taking a heavy toll on American troops, and there was a major push to armor ALL Army ground vehicles, first with torch cut plate steel doors, and later with bolt-on armor kits.  Casualties continued to mount from IEDs, as bombs can be built faster than armored vehicles can be designed and fielded.

HMMWV with armor kit

Beginning in 2007, the MRAP family of mine-resistant vehicles began to replace armored HMMWVs, and after six years and thousands of US casualties, the US Armed Forces had a solution that was NEARLY adequate to meet the threat on the ground. 

MRAP

Why did the US not have MRAPs earlier?  They WERE in Iraq, at least since 2005.  Not with the US, but in the service of some foreign armies.  Since the first MRAP designs were of South African manufacture, and symbolic of the apartheid era in that region, most Western armies wanted nothing to do with them and would not purchase them from South Africa, regardless of operational necessity. 

And those kind of decisions, along with unbridled spending cuts, get troops KILLED.  

Buffalo MRAP in Iraq, circa 2005