A System as the Enemy: A Doctrinal Approach to Defense Force Modernization by Colonel Benjamin A. Drew, Jr., USAF Air War College Maxwell AFB, AL Report Documentation Page Form Approved OMB No. 0704-0188 Public reporting burden for the collection of information is estimated to average 1 hour per response, including the time for reviewing instructions, searching existing data sources, gathering and maintaining the data needed, and completing and reviewing the collection of information. Send comments regarding this burden estimate or any other aspect of this collection of information, including suggestions for reducing this burden, to Washington Headquarters Services, Directorate for Information Operations and Reports, 1215 Jefferson Davis Highway, Suite 1204, Arlington VA 22202-4302. Respondents should be aware that notwithstanding any other provision of law, no person shall be subject to a penalty for failing to comply with a collection of information if it does not display a currently valid OMB control number. 1. REPORT DATE 3. DATES COVERED 2006 2. REPORT TYPE 00-00-2006 to 00-00-2006 4. TITLE AND SUBTITLE 5a. CONTRACT NUMBER A System as the Enemy: A Doctrinal Approach to Defense Force 5b. GRANT NUMBER Modernization 5c. PROGRAM ELEMENT NUMBER 6. AUTHOR(S) 5d. PROJECT NUMBER 5e. TASK NUMBER 5f. WORK UNIT NUMBER 7. PERFORMING ORGANIZATION NAME(S) AND ADDRESS(ES) 8. PERFORMING ORGANIZATION Air University,Air War College,325 Chennault Circle,Maxwell REPORT NUMBER AFB,AL,36112 9. SPONSORING/MONITORING AGENCY NAME(S) AND ADDRESS(ES) 10. SPONSOR/MONITOR’S ACRONYM(S) 11. SPONSOR/MONITOR’S REPORT NUMBER(S) 12. DISTRIBUTION/AVAILABILITY STATEMENT Approved for public release; distribution unlimited 13. SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES 14. ABSTRACT see report 15. SUBJECT TERMS 16. SECURITY CLASSIFICATION OF: 17. LIMITATION OF 18. NUMBER 19a. NAME OF ABSTRACT OF PAGES RESPONSIBLE PERSON a. REPORT b. ABSTRACT c. THIS PAGE Same as 51 unclassified unclassified unclassified Report (SAR) Standard Form 298 (Rev. 8-98) Prescribed by ANSI Std Z39-18 DISCLAIMER The views expressed in this academic research paper are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. government or the Department of Defense. In accordance with Air Force Instruction 51-303, it is not copyrighted, but is the property of the United States government. A System as the Enemy: A Doctrinal Approach to Defense Force Modernization Force modernization is more like a warfighting campaign than an industrial process. Volatil ity, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity inherent in all its key factors and enablers make modernization as much an operational art as a scientific method. Therefore, modernization, like warfare, would operate more effectively and responsively under an authoritative body of doctrine rather than under layers of detailed prescriptive and legally binding regulations. At the core of a body of doctrine is a foundational doctrine document putting forth broad guidance with fundamental principles to guide planning and execution. This study will consider principles, presented below, as candidates for such a document. Principles of Modernization 1. Objective 2. Stable Program Inputs 3. Risk Management 4. Simplicity of Command 5. Economy of Effort 6. Initiative 7. Credibility 8. Synergy 9. Tempo 10. Synchronization Together, these are the fundamental and underlying doctrinal principles for an effective and efficient force modernization program. These principles can guide modernization process im provement efforts as well as modernization programs to shorten program timelines and still de liver a quality product. Force modernization here includes the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development Sys tem (JCIDS), formerly the Requirements Generation System, and the US Department of Defense (DoD) acquisition process. With respect to JCIDS, this paper is concerned only with material solutions feeding into the acquisition system. The analysis does not include doctrine, operations, training, leadership & education, personnel, and facilities solutions to documented needs. The Coming Apoplectics: Shock and Awe for Modernization The DoD acquisition process is currently in its fourth decade and fourth generation of over haul. The policy underpinnings, the DoD 5000-series and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) 3710-series instructions, have been completely rewritten. They focus now on a top-town modernization process and mission needs (now “capabilities”) spawned from mission area Con cepts of Operation (CONOPS) for achieving strategic objectives. Further, force modernization directives now emphasize evolutionary acquisition, system up grades, development spirals, and incremental deployment of new systems’ capabilities. This purports to bring new capabilities to field and fleet sooner—as soon as they become available as subsystems, rather than after the last capability is integrated into an entire end-system. This force modernization is parcel to the overall defense transformation. At the heart of this effort is the concept for networking all the levels of command and all of the warfighting actors in order to achieve shared situational awareness, to overcome barriers to rapid communication, in cluding stovepipes, and to tighten decision (Observe-Orient-Decide-Act [OODA]) loops to re- flex-arc speeds that literally shock an opponent into paralysis through lightning-fast responsive ness. This prescription for warfighters, which DoD’s force modernization process is to deliver, is appropriate medicine for the modernization process itself. Force modernization itself needs to tighten its own decision cycle to keep itself from being shocked into paralysis due to its increas ingly glacial responsiveness to increasingly dynamic warfighter needs. Acquisition Program Timelines: Too Long and Getting Longer In 1986, Packard Commission member and future Secretary of Defense William Perry la mented the unacceptably long times, 10 – 15 years, required to field major defense systems. (45:8) Since then, F-22 development has spanned 24 years (7:4), and the V-22 should achieve Initial Operating Capability (IOC) in 2007, after 27 years of development. (20) The RAH-66 Comanche was cancelled in February 2004, due to mission obsolescence, 21 years after program inception. (21) The Joint Strike Fighter faces a similar timeline of development. With acquisi tion timelines now trending towards 20 – 25 years from identifying mission needs to fielding a proper fix, 10-15 years of development seems optimistic. Dynamic Strategic Environment: Time-to-Need Increasingly Shorter At the same time, the security environment is increasingly dynamic. Weapons coming to the flightline, field, and fleet in this decade were specified to counter threats from the Soviet Union: before the advent of humanitarian operations, before the internet, before stabilization operations, before Al Qaeda, homeland security, or even satellite or cable television. How appropriate will solutions to present-day deficiencies be between 2025 and 2030? Increasingly, DoD future plans documents have shortened their forecast horizons from 25 year looks-ahead to ones looking out 10 – 15 years. Thus, the situation has reversed from the late 1980s, where the forecast included the first 10 – 15 years of a developing system’s existence, to one in which a new system’s IOC happens 10 – 15 years beyond the forecast horizon. Given this, the dominant risk to any program is time itself. A review of exemplary successful historical acquisition programs reveals a common key fac tor among them: they benefited handsomely from stable external factors over their development phases. However, requirements, funding, personnel, and technology become increasingly vola tile influences to programs with developments lasting a quarter-century or more. It’s a vicious cycle that starts with planning for a lengthy program (ironically to avoid developmental risk). Lengthy programs’ performances suffer from unstable influences, and program performance problems cause the program to get stretched out further. The answer to this volatility is not nec essarily to stabilize the process inputs and perturbations (it’s beyond control), but to field solu tions faster than the environment can change. Short programs require agility—speed and flexi- bility—only afforded through having actors with unambiguous goals and latitude-in-action in novel circumstances. This latitude is available under doctrinal guidance in ways not possible with prescriptive regulations. On Modernization: The Case for Doctrinal Principles Warfighting doctrine emphasizes centralized control and decentralized execution. We seem to op erate the acquisition system in direct opposition by implementing decentralized control and cen tralized execution of key macro processes. We manage the requirements and technology processes in a decentralized fashion, while exerting tight and central controlling on program management and budget (particularly for large programs). (11:57) Can disciplined force modernization replace current and future statutory and regulatory di rectives with doctrinal principles? For this to be true, modernization would have to have charac teristics in common with warfighting such that a body of doctrine would be similarly useful. According to historian Martin Van Creveld, applying the logic of industrial processes to war fare is dangerously myopic. Whereas industrial processes are repeatable, that is, the same input yields the same output, warfighting strategy is not, so long as it is a contest among two living wills. While manufacturing endeavors to achieve optimal production efficiency, combat must entail tremendous waste and slack as hedges against overwhelming uncertainty. While industry is the very epitome of determinism, warfare is anything but predictable. (57:311-320) An addi tional consideration is the consequences of failure. Commercial failures end in bankruptcy; fail ures in warfare result in loss of lives and often in the destruction of the losing state. Likewise, any single force modernization failure is a loss of taxpayers’ revenues and warrior capability. But the fate of the Soviet Union is a cautionary example of how inability to keep modernization apace with a rapidly changing security environment can lead to extinction. What happens at the interface of industry and warfare, where determinism meets friction and chance? A process that bridges the battlefield and the assembly line should be subject to princi ples from both environments, and the closer the process operates to one environment, the greater weight that environment’s principles come to bear. Much of top DoD acquisition management comes from industry, and the language and guidance from them has a distinct industrial flavor: streamlined processes, benchmarking, and business models. The requirements generation com munity led by service generals has a distinctly different lexicon: strategy, CONOPS, and cam paigns. Bridging the two force modernization communities requires a construct that includes operational art and industrial science, production line efficiency, and battlefield chaos. A body of doctrine would function to bridge and encompass these disciplines. It would clarify, to moderni- zation’s actors, the context in which they operate. It would give them guidance and latitude in interpreting their location along the process’ continuum, from the laboratory to the battlespace, and in applying governing guidance with due weight. It would guide the novices and liberate the masters of the art to do what’s best to meet their strategic goals. Knowledge management databases, Defense Acquisition University guides, “Best Practices” lists, and statutory and regulatory guidance already capture much of the enduring lessons of force modernization history. What a doctrine document does is to redact that large body of literature into a concise handbook, as an introduction for novices and a ready reference for practitioners. A singular volume of doctrinal guidance is definitive, a source of ground truth, for creating pol icy, interpreting guidance, resolving dilemmas, and generally giving a sense of coherence to the welter of widely disparate simultaneous activities constantly undertaken in the name of force modernization. The force modernization community and its processes are large and complex, facing the same challenges as large military units in the field: volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambi guity, if to a lesser degree. Operational commanders work with the understanding that their in fluence on battlefield events is at best second-order; they cannot control them directly. They give broad guidance (commander’s intent), set boundaries (rules of engagement), and do their best to create conditions for those on the front echelons to succeed. In de-centralized execution, they support those peripheral echelons. Much of acquisition has worked the other way around. The citation below implies that the need for central planning and control (i.e., generating requirements from the top down) was an undesirable aberration. Secretary McNamara was hard pressed to get the Services to write requirements for more con ventional weapons in lieu of nuclear weapons and therefore found himself and his staff in the business of writing requirements for the Services (McNaugher 1989:59). (29:41) Except in rare cases, those in the periphery identify the requirements; and acquisition executives execute centrally, requiring support from the program offices. Thinking of force modernization in its true dual nature – science and art, industrial and martial – would go far to help policymak ers resist the temptation to “drive” the process. [W]e need to return the military service chiefs to the chain of command for acquisition… OSD should not be running things, but overseeing procedures and decisions. (23:74) Hon John Hamre, former Deputy Secretary of Defense By not being prescriptive, doctrinal guidance gives innovative solutions the necessary lati tude in novel situations. Innovators would then only risk having their judgment questioned – not their lawfulness – should they need to break with traditional guidance. And that wiggle room provides just the flexibility and responsiveness necessary to keep decision cycles short. Finally, the common sense that legislators and policy-makers try to capture in modernization policy and instruction better resides in a non-binding doctrine document. This serves to limit the scope of directives and instructions to only the truly mandatory guidance and to better highlight them as legal boundaries. Modernization Principles Evolution: A Brief History of Acquisition Reform A body of doctrinal principles exists – waiting to be explicated. They are the critical aspects of modernization, enduring and frequently repeated, such that these principles emerge as a pat tern over time. The raw data containing those enduring fundamentals reside both in program case histories and in government efforts at acquisition reform. This section mines results from acquisition reform commissions’ findings and recommendations for a list of candidate principles for force modernization. Round One (1969 – 1972): Containing Cost While the history of DoD transformation, reorganizations and reengineering date back to the National Defense Act of 1947, initiatives specifically for reforming acquisition start in 1969 with Congress mandating Selected Acquisition Reports from the Secretary of Defense. Straining un der the costs of the Vietnam War, Great Society social spending, and the Apollo moon landing program, Congress began to question Cold War weapons procurement practices. The result was a series of commissions to investigate inefficiencies in the acquisition process. (29:44) In the first of them, in 1970, Undersecretary of Defense David Packard put forth the list of initiatives in Table 1. (29:45)