don't intellectually battle-short ourselves

Fear of Risk is not the Problem; Lack of Respect for Risk is the Problem

There is a mentality – one that would not be tolerated very long in the business world – that through sheer force of will and enough of other people’s money, we can force away risk. Why have we yet to come to terms with this failing?

We have seen on a regular basis going back the TQL days of the mid-90s and reaching its zenith at the Transformationalist flood-tide in the early ’00s, our military and Navy chasing the latest B-school trend like a cat after a laser dot.

Never taking time to focus, never catching anything – but wasting a lot of time and resources after something that really wasn’t there anyway.

From TQL to the newest offset PPT and Silicon Valley fever dreams, we’ve seen the cycle again and again … and yet, we go nowhere.

As our Flight-1 of our only CG are chipped up, where is our CG(X)?

The pocket battleship sized white elephant DD that was to be the surface ship of the future, is now just a 3-ship experiment.

Over a decade after the commissioning of LCS-1, we are just on the cusp of being PMC in a warfare area or two – but still have little to show.

If you fell in to a coma during a TQL PPT in 1996 and just now woke up at the end of the second decade of the 21st Century … what would you see? Cold War Era DDG still under production, NIMITZ CVN, airwings of F-18s, E-2, and other things you recognize. That V-22 you first read about in the late 1980s is there, a 737 replaced the P-3, and the stealth fighter toe is just in the door, but that is about it. The new SSN you heard would get funded in a few years, the VIRGINIA Class, is doing fine. We have a LPD with the Tiffany price tag that worked through issues with more seabags of money and Sailor sweat, but besides that doesn’t seem to have much “there” there from ’96 to ’19 – especially compared to what was seen from the preceeding 23-yr period of ’73-96.

Why? Well, we threw away fundamentals … and as an institution that used to “build a little, test a little, learn a lot” instead thought it could leap generations. Well, it tried to make a leap, but fell short and in to the drink in a lost decade of failure.

Have we learned these lessons? Some parts of our hive-mind have, but as an institution, I don’t think so.

We still think we can dismiss risk. I’m sorry, that doesn’t work.

Now we think we can leap again by benchmarking the “start-up” mentality of Silicon Valley.

No. We should first have yet to prove, again, that we have learned our lessons and have mastered the fundamentals.

The military should not have a “start-up” mentality. The assumption here is that “start-ups” have a great record of success – but they don’t. There is an exceptionally high chance in a start-up that you will fail and go bankrupt. We unquestionably do not need to look to the tech industry innovation culture either.

To Trae Stephens, a partner at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Founders Fund and the chairman of tech company Anduril Industries, risk-averse leaders at the Pentagon — for sticking to their “go slow” approach — are like “dumb gamblers.”

“You bet on the Patriots in 2007 and, by gosh, in 2037 you’re still going to bet on the Patriots. And eventually you just go bankrupt, you lose all your money,” Stephens, a past critic of Pentagon innovation efforts, said at a Defense News-hosted roundtable in November.

“The reality is that the decisions that we’re making today … are actually the riskiest possible decisions. It’s not that we’re doing the safe things,” he added. “It’s actually less risky to take the more contrarian positions.”

Has no one been paying attention to the cavalier approach to risk during the Transformationalist Era? Almost all the problems we have had in bringing in modern system were because we assumed away too much risk. It isn’t that we were too cautious, it was that we were reckless towards compound technology risk and program risk.

We turned a blind eye to the processes that brought about rapid cruiser advances in the 1920-30s and missile development from the 1950-90s. Instead, we intellectually battle-shorted ourselves like the USS SOUTH DAKOTA (BB 57) at the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal.

National Defense Industrial Association CEO Hawk Carlisle, a former Air Force general, says Congress’ emphasis on accountability in its oversight of Pentagon acquisitions has been well-intentioned, but it’s also created a disincentive for taking risks.

Siobhan McFeeney, vice president for transformation at tech firm Pivotal, says there is a middle-ground option to present high-level decision-makers to make them more comfortable with speedy innovation: “fast with brakes.” In other words, implement test-driven development or continuous integration techniques.

“When we talk about fast but with brakes, you can pivot, and you can control it, their level of stress goes way, way down,” she said.

Another route identifies and groups leaders. Shah said what he’s seen work is teamwork among a senior leader, like a defense secretary who “gets it,” a staff director or chair of one of the congressional Appropriations committees, and the “young Turks” in an organization who can do the actual work.

“I think, again, you can’t change everything all at once — and, again, it’s if the department says they want to do it, and we can find one or two leaders in Congress that want to step up [and] say: ‘This is the thing that I want to make real,’ ” Shah said. “Those conversations have been had. … It’s just putting it together on a specific, actionable thing.”

Here we stumble in to the real issue where we need effort and focus – fixing our encrusted, accretion-encumbered acquisition system. To fix it, we need Congress to act. A worry I have, is they are looking in the wrong place;

Texas Republican Rep. Mac Thornberry, the former House Armed Services Committee chairman, said his annual acquisition reform legislation over each of the last four years has received near-unanimous support. As ranking member this year, he was optimistic HASC would do more.

“We’ve started a number of things that have not been implemented, and last year we initiated a complete rewrite of the acquisition code, which needs to take the next step this year,” he told reporters at the Capitol on Jan. 8.

“One of the things I did last fall was take visits to Boston, Austin, Silicon Valley, focused on how the high-tech industries have challenges doing business with the Department of Defense,” Thornberry said. “I think there is a lot that can still be accomplished on the innovation side of acquisition, as well as simplifying, streamlining and other things we’ve done so far.”

The Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit has been pressing Congress to build on some of the flexible acquisition authorities lawmakers have granted the Pentagon in recent years, and provide new budget flexibility so that investment can keep pace with innovation. There’s a question of whether lawmakers, without tons of technical know-how, can make leaps of faith.

“It does not require rule changes, it just requires a different mindset and comfort levels,” said Raj Shah, the DIU’s former managing director. “How’s technology built, right? If you know [what] software looks like at the start of it, you’ve already got it wrong.”

Everyone should have stopped at “…simplifying, streamlining …” before we start getting starry-eyed fanboi-like towards the tech industry.

We should look towards our own successful programs from previous decades first. How did they/we succeed where we now continue to fail? Why do the Danes, Dutch, Italian and French navies continue to produce more modern and inventive designs? Why is the Chinese Navy producing scores of workman-like warships while our Transformationalist static displays sit in their homeports waiting for … well … the pixie dust to work?

What we don’t need is to compound the error of ignoring risk by letting the tech start-up culture sink too far in.

What is the failure rate for tech start-ups? Well, according to Neil Patel over at Forbes;

Nine out of ten startups will fail. This is a hard and bleak truth, but one that you’d do well to meditate on. Entrepreneurs may even want to write their failure post-mortem before they launch their business.

That is no big deal; you will simply go down the street and try again with another idea the next year. That works fine in civilian industry – but that isn’t an option for a nation’s military.

Though speaking about why businesses fail, Patel’s outline of institutional failure should sound familiar to those who watched what the Transformationalists did at the dawn of this century;

A careful survey of failed startups determined that 42% of them identified the “lack of a market need for their product” as the single biggest reason for their failure.

After their company folded, Dijiwan’s leaders wrote this:
A good product idea and a strong technical team are not a guarantee of a sustainable business. One should not ignore the business process and issues of a company because it is not their job. It can eventually deprive them from any future in that company.

An under-the-hood look at Dijiwan makes it clear. They overlooked key aspects of business process and the “boring stuff.” The CEO thinks, “It’s my job to lead.” The CMO thinks, “It’s my job to market.” The lead developer thinks, “It’s my job to code.”

But a startup can’t segment its responsibilities like that. Things are far more organic in a startup, meaning that roles and responsibilities will overlap. Small things can turn into large things. Some of the most important components of a startup are those pesky issues of business process, business model, and scalability.

Startup teams must possess the ability to change products, adjust to different compensation plans, take up a new marketing approach, shift industries, rebrand the business, or even tear down a business and start all over again.

It’s all about recovering from blows. Teams that are able to recover together, also possess the unique trait of harmoniously working together through tough times.

Reform? Yes – but smart reform.

No more chasing B-school dreams. We’ve tried that and failed. We’ve watched us take on that mirage twice in the last quarter century, and it failed us. No more.

Stop. Look at what we did when we did it right. Look at other nations who are doing it right today. Get the right people in Congress who understand that you master the fundamentals first, then you can experiment on the edges.

Here’s a thought; let’s get FFG(X) right. Let’s then get our Large Surface Combatant right next. Let’s get a replacement for the Super Hornet right as well.

That is the near term. We need this sooner more than later; we are still wallowing in the ditch we fell in last decade from trying to leap to far – and winter is coming.

From weapons to engineering, let’s shoot for the evolutionary; not revolutionary. Engineer and design some space for the future when the future is ready; but don’t assume it will get here exactly like you think.

We have enough Carter Era Harpoon launchers welded on the never-was-has-been NLOS void fiasco as it is. No more.

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