Balancing Immediate and Long-Term Defense Investments
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Dissertation Balancing Immediate and Long-Term Defense Investments Jonathan P. Wong This document was submitted as a dissertation in April 2016 in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the doctoral degree in public policy analysis at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. The faculty committee that supervised and approved the dissertation consisted of Christopher G. Pernin (Chair), Igor Mikolic-Torreira, and Matthew W. Lewis. PARDEE RAND GRADUATE SCHOOL For more information on this publication, visit http://www.rand.org/pubs/rgs_dissertations/RGSD378.html Published by the RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, Calif. © Copyright 2016 RAND Corporation R® is a registered trademark Limited Print and Electronic Distribution Rights This document and trademark(s) contained herein are protected by law. This representation of RAND intellectual property is provided for noncommercial use only. Unauthorized posting of this publication online is prohibited. 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Support RAND Make a tax-deductible charitable contribution at www.rand.org/giving/contribute www.rand.org Table of Contents Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One: Exploring Rapid Acquisition Policies ...................................................................... 9 Chapter Two: Immediate Investments in the DoD Procurement Budget ..................................... 27 Chapter Three: Rapid Acquisition in Practice .............................................................................. 50 Chapter Four: Recommendations and Conclusions ...................................................................... 76 Appendix A: Rapid Acquisition Policy Scan ................................................................................ 85 Appendix B: PRC-117G Case Study ............................................................................................ 94 Appendix C: Palantir Case Study ............................................................................................... 103 Appendix D: Predator Case Study .............................................................................................. 110 Appendix E: MRAP Case Study ................................................................................................. 128 Appendix F: CREW Case Report ............................................................................................... 137 Appendix G: ABIS Case Study................................................................................................... 150 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................ 158 iii Acknowledgments This work would not be possible without the contributions of numerous individuals. To my committee members, Dr. Chris Pernin, Dr. Matt Lewis, and Dr. Igor Mikolic- Torreira, and my external reviewer Dr. Matthew Schaffer: Thank you for firmly pushing me towards asking the harder questions, answering them more thoroughly, and ensuring that I did not lose sight of the policies and people in the process. To the numerous and anonymous individuals in the Department of Defense, industry, academia, and the unaffiliated: Thank you for taking the time to answer my cold calls, sit for interviews, review my work, and offer me feedback. Thanks especially to my fellow Marines, upon whom I leaned heavily to provide introductions to otherwise impenetrable organizations. To my funders at Project AIR FORCE, the Arroyo Center, and the National Security Research Division: Thank you for underwriting this endeavor with generous funding. In particular, thank you to Michael Kennedy, Tim Bonds, Bruce Held, Dr. Cynthia Cook, and Dr. Chris Mouton for judging that my research ideas were worth investing in. To the fellows and researchers at Pardee RAND and the RAND Corporation: Thank you for entrusting me with tasks on your projects, helping me with my coursework, lending an ear when needed, and never saying no to a cup of coffee. In particular, thanks to Dr. Ben Connable for introducing me to Pardee RAND and trusting me repeatedly to do critical work on your projects. Lastly, to my wife Jenny: You endured Iraq, Quantico, Los Angeles, and countless work-filled evenings and weekends to support this. Thanks and onward to our next chapter, with our newborn son in tow. v Abstract The US Department of Defense’s (DoD) process for allocating resources for acquiring weapons systems is optimized for long-term investments, guided by the DoD’s forecast of future threats, conflicts, adversaries, and possible US responses to them. This dissertation examines how the DoD acquisition bureaucracy responds to unforeseen conflicts and adversaries by making immediate procurement investments. This dissertation uses the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to examine the DoD’s bureaucratic response. The dissertation analyzes the DoD’s policies for making immediate investments by comparing them to a framework for organizational flexibility. Next, the dissertation examines the DoD’s ability to make the best use of those policies by using examining changes in the DoD’s procurement budget during the wars. This is done using a framework for categorizing the DoD’s procurement investments based on their immediacy. Lastly, the dissertation examines six individual immediate investment cases to understand how DoD policies, bureaucratic behavior, and technological capacity interact to meet these immediate operational demands This dissertation finds that the DoD was developed a surprisingly nimble and risk- tolerant process for making most immediate investments. The DoD did require extensive senior leader intervention to make investments that were previously judged to be unnecessary. The dissertation also found that the DoD’s process relied on the entrepreneurship and organizational savvy of individual program officers to identify funding sources and enlist stakeholder support. This research concludes by recommending marginal changes to DoD policy, including granting greater flexibility to DoD components to spend previously allocated resources, allowing more bottom-up input to the immediate investment process, and anticipating the need for single-purpose task forces to provide senior leader intervention in contentious cases. vii Introduction This dissertation was inspired by the Department of Defense’s (DoD) long odyssey to develop its next generation of tactical radios and the way in which the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan played an unexpected role in moving that process along. When the first American troops crossed the border into Iraq in 2003, each infantry platoon went into battle with a single tactical radio in a backpack, known as a PRC-119. This radio could only monitor one frequency, lacked the ability to talk to aircraft, and could only send and receive audio transmissions. Communications between units in the platoon was accomplished largely through shouting and hand signals. By 2004, troops still carried the PRC-119, supplemented with commercial walkie-talkies with limited range.1 By 2007, however, progress was visible. Platoons now deployed to Iraq boasting five tactical radios, including the handheld PRC-148 that could be dropped into water up to 20 meters deep and could also talk to aircraft. By 2012, platoons frequently carried 12 handheld, solar-rechargeable PRC-152 radios to communicate within the platoon along with the PRC-117G radio, which could be plugged into a laptop computer to form an ad- hoc computer network. Pictures, maps, and other information could be exchanged between platoons and with their parent units. Some platoons even possessed equipment that allowed them to see live aerial surveillance video feeds from the aircraft to which they were talking (although this was less common). Platoons that could only talk on one ground frequency in 2003 could now effectively communicate within their units and across other units and aircraft using voice and data on a variety of frequencies. This improved communication capability enabled ground forces to expand their control over much larger swaths of territory than the areas with which commanders were previously comfortable.2 While one part of the DoD was achieving these steady improvements in capability, another part was spending billions of dollars on another, strikingly similar military communications project. The DoD’s Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS) started in 1997 with an ambitious goal: to develop a universal radio that used software instead of hardware to encrypt, send, and receive information. This would make radios upgradable in ways that old, hardware-defined radios could not be. It would also help the military 1 Sandra I. Erwin, "Army, Marines Buying Loads of Radios," National Defense, September