Drain the Defence Swamp: A Blueprint for Weapons Acquisition Reform - How to FIX every Product Development to be more Affordable, Producible and Problem-Free (Drain the Swamp Series Book 1) by Stewart Gary D

Author:Stewart, Gary D. [Stewart, Gary D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stewart Publishing
Published: 2020-10-12T00:00:00+00:00

8

Why Defence Can't Fix It

"Defence only knows what defence knows - and nothing more."

Sadly, a truism that abounds throughout Defence Acquisition programs across recent decades.

The really big question must be:

Who in Defence has the vision, authority, and especially the cojones (slang) to overhaul Weapons Acquisition?

Why can't Defence fix it?

Simple Answer: Defence does not want to fix it. That is because Defence does not believe that it has a problem.

Logical Answer: This is the way it has been for more than 20 years - so why change it now?

"This is as good as it gets"....

... “What more do you want from us?”

That is, ‘this is as good as it gets’ - and the mediocre mindset behind it - is perfectly acceptable to Defence.

As an ex-Toyota executive, I struggle to understand how such mediocrity of leadership can exist.

But I struggle even more to understand why the military Warfighter leadership side of defence does not declare outright war on the dysfunctional weapons acquisition side of Defence. Because the resultant dysfunction from ‘this is a good as it gets,’ must NEVER be acceptable to the Warfighter.

Thus, if the military war-fighting leadership side of Defence has zero interest in fixing Weapons acquisition failures then no pressure will ever be brought to bear on the weapons acquisition side of defence to fix their problems.

But it does not stop there.

The Defence Weapons Acquisition side of Defence has no defined requirement for the defence prime contractors to do better than ‘this is as good as it gets’ . In turn, these prime contractors have no defined requirement for the firms in their supply chains to be better.

This means that the mediocre ‘this is good as it gets’ mentality permeates every nook and cranny of the entire end-to-end Defence Weapons Acquisition system.

But Why?

Defence Acquisition is a Monopsony. That is, Defence acts as a single Monopoly buyer of Defence Equipment that has total and absolute market power over all sellers in the supply chain.

Meanwhile, due to mergers and acquisitions over the past 30 years, the supply chain itself has today become a very narrow oligopoly of a very small number of Prime Contractors. In some cases, there is now only a single possible supplier.

This means that competitive tendering no longer works at all in Weapons Acquisition Programs.

Defence does not see any problem with being a monopsony, dealing with a small oligopoly of suppliers.

In the commercial world, precisely the same shrinking of supply chains has happened, but the response from the more astute firms is very different. Commercially, firms in a single supplier situation have moved away from using reactive methods towards proactive methods. For a small minority of very astute CEO's this has shifted even further to predictive methods. Because only predictive methods can work in a single or twin supply chain model.

But Defence still lives in the past. What once worked well for them in the past, must surely still work well today?

This is the way of the Monopsony. Arrogance makes them too slow to react to a changing world.

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