The latest issue of the Defense Acquisitions Review Journal has an intriguing article by Jan P. Muczyk On the Road Toward Confirming Augustine’s Predictions and How to Reverse Course [PDF]

Norm Augustine’s tongue-in-cheek laws have been a staple of program management and defense acquisitions culture for decades (as indicated by the multiple editions of his most famous book). One of his more famous satirical calculations was that, based on linear extrapolations of procurement trends:

In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one aircraft. This aircraft will have to be shared by the Air Force and Navy 3- 1/2 days each per week except for leap year, when it will be made available to the Marines for the extra day.

One can spend too much time indulging the cynicism and defeatism that often accompanies references to Augustine’s Laws. There is enough wrong with DoD acquisitions that one can make an entire career pointing out the flaws, provided one is intelligent enough to season his or her criticisms with some fresh historical analogies and novel examples. Actually making a difference, however, takes some meta-analysis of what the most important problems are and what should be done about them.

For Muczyk’s part, he concludes his article with the following:

The belief by our civilian and military leaders that technology will negate numerical superiority has led to a reliance on transformational technology which, in turn, has resulted in staggering product development costs and unprecedented product development life cycles. This approach perforce mandated small quantities of weapon systems at outlandish unit costs. Unless this situation is reversed, the military will bankrupt itself with little in return, since these systems lend little to asymmetric warfare such as fighting terrorists and waging counterinsurgency conflicts- today’s contemporary and near-term threats. According to some estimates, the U.S defense budget exceeds the defense budgets of all of our allies combined and some of our adversaries. Critics maintain that such a situation cannot be sustained indefinitely, especially if a serious attempt is made to balance the federal budget.

Short product development cycles are the key to large numbers of affordable weapon systems. Toward that end, recommendations have been proffered to redress the problem of long product development cycles by relying on the development of weapon systems from low- hanging fruit and off-the-shelf commercial components instead of military specifications.

…For this evolutionary approach to be viable, the United States must continuously grow a robust technological fruit tree by adequately funding the research and development community, and relying on technology developed by our allies through joint ventures and other mutual defense-industry partnerships.

Nothing particularly wrong with that; then again, all of this has been pointed out before and hasn’t seemed to have changed anything, so…

Incidentally, there is a school of thought that cost overruns and the plague of extra requirements is simply an inescapable part of large acquisitions projects, whether in the private sector or public. A common example is that the USS Constitution’s final cost of $303,000 was more than double the $115,000 originally budgeted for the ship.