Does anyone know if Pentagon's procurement process has changed since the days of "The Pentagon Wars" [0]?
I initially jumped into this whole topic because I was terrible at estimating and thought it was a uniquely personal failure. I started reading into it an US Military has a history of projects that are incredibly late and massively over budget:
- The joint strike fighter program, of which F35 [1] is the result. 10 years late and double the cost (projected life time cost of nearly 2 TRILLION, with a T).
- F22 raptor, initially 750 were planned for but only 170 were made [2].
- C5 is known for massive cost overruns ($2 billion) [3]
Burton, the author of the pentagon wars attributes it to the procurement process itself. The process does not incentivize delivery. The contracts goals is to get in with the pentagon by underbidding or not clearly defining the requirements and then having the issues be fixed in "operational testing", basically at the point right before front line troops get the hardware. In developmental tests contractors faked stuff a lot:
> The Air Force’s sensor fuzed weapon concept of the early 1980s was advertised as a new, high-tech antiarmor weapon that would home in on the heat of a Soviet tank engine.
Fourteen tanks had been arranged in a tight circle, nose to tail like a wagon train in an old western movie. The antiarmor weapons were suspended on a tall crane high above the circle of tanks. When dropped from the crane, the weapons could hit a tank even without the high-tech sensors guiding them. To make matters worse, the weapons did not home in on the heat from the tank engines because the tanks did not have their engines running. In fact, the weapons had homed in on electric hot plates that the program manager had placed on top of each tank. The hot plates were heated to a temperature four times the threshold temperature for the infrared sensors in the weapons, thereby guaranteeing success of the test.
and
> The Air Force’s third-generation laser-guided bomb, PAVEWAY III, scored fourteen direct hits out of sixteen launches in developmental tests conducted by the program manager.* During the operational tests, thirty-nine launches yielded only twenty hits and nineteen failures. Operational testing was suspended seven times because the system did not work well enough to run a test. When it worked, it usually hit the target. When it did not work exactly right (which was half the time), the average miss distance was five miles.1 Yet, PAVEWAY III was approved for production largely on the recommendation of the new commander of the Operational Test and Evaluation Command. It was his view that the “bugs had been worked out,” and he expressed this same view after each of the seven interruptions. This may sound strange, but the new commander was General Richard Phillips, whose former position was that of advocate for Air Force weapons systems, including PAVEWAY III.
Finally:
> The secretary’s chief tester continued to be subordinate to and work directly for the chief developer. Under this arrangement, the chief tester’s views on the adequacy of testing and the implications of test results were stifled by the chief developer.
I initially jumped into this whole topic because I was terrible at estimating and thought it was a uniquely personal failure. I started reading into it an US Military has a history of projects that are incredibly late and massively over budget:
- The joint strike fighter program, of which F35 [1] is the result. 10 years late and double the cost (projected life time cost of nearly 2 TRILLION, with a T).
- F22 raptor, initially 750 were planned for but only 170 were made [2].
- C5 is known for massive cost overruns ($2 billion) [3]
Burton, the author of the pentagon wars attributes it to the procurement process itself. The process does not incentivize delivery. The contracts goals is to get in with the pentagon by underbidding or not clearly defining the requirements and then having the issues be fixed in "operational testing", basically at the point right before front line troops get the hardware. In developmental tests contractors faked stuff a lot:
> The Air Force’s sensor fuzed weapon concept of the early 1980s was advertised as a new, high-tech antiarmor weapon that would home in on the heat of a Soviet tank engine. Fourteen tanks had been arranged in a tight circle, nose to tail like a wagon train in an old western movie. The antiarmor weapons were suspended on a tall crane high above the circle of tanks. When dropped from the crane, the weapons could hit a tank even without the high-tech sensors guiding them. To make matters worse, the weapons did not home in on the heat from the tank engines because the tanks did not have their engines running. In fact, the weapons had homed in on electric hot plates that the program manager had placed on top of each tank. The hot plates were heated to a temperature four times the threshold temperature for the infrared sensors in the weapons, thereby guaranteeing success of the test.
and
> The Air Force’s third-generation laser-guided bomb, PAVEWAY III, scored fourteen direct hits out of sixteen launches in developmental tests conducted by the program manager.* During the operational tests, thirty-nine launches yielded only twenty hits and nineteen failures. Operational testing was suspended seven times because the system did not work well enough to run a test. When it worked, it usually hit the target. When it did not work exactly right (which was half the time), the average miss distance was five miles.1 Yet, PAVEWAY III was approved for production largely on the recommendation of the new commander of the Operational Test and Evaluation Command. It was his view that the “bugs had been worked out,” and he expressed this same view after each of the seven interruptions. This may sound strange, but the new commander was General Richard Phillips, whose former position was that of advocate for Air Force weapons systems, including PAVEWAY III.
Finally:
> The secretary’s chief tester continued to be subordinate to and work directly for the chief developer. Under this arrangement, the chief tester’s views on the adequacy of testing and the implications of test results were stifled by the chief developer.
Has this changed at all?
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon_Wars
1: https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a35631305/f-3...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-22_Raptor
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_C-5_Galaxy