What's Wrong With the US Defense R&D Budget?

I've been part of the military-industrial complex for the past ten years. The real waste is not in risky projects that sometimes fail. We need more of that, especially as today's wars wind down and we reset the force to handle a full spectrum of threats and missions, from terrorism to a major conflict with a "near peer" competitor like China or Russia.

The real waste is in the mind-numbing, innovation-stifling bureaucracy. For every person (usually a contractor, despite the bad press) trying to actually *do* something, there are 10 people (government and contractor) worrying about budgets, funding, politics, endless layers of architecture and governance, ineffective security protocols, and, most of all, territorial "rice bowls." Almost every time I've tried to actually *do* something, I would promptly run into someone who claimed that it was their responsibility:

"OK, great! The war fighters I'm supporting need a thing that does exactly that. What do you have?"

"I have this PowerPoint presentation that shows my charter, my org chart, my budget, my made-up timeline, and some hand-waving architectural diagrams that don't even meet the [overwrought] DODAF standards never mind speak to the actual need."

"What about the actual [widget]?"

"It should be done in 2017."

At this point, an actual military officer (not a civilian bureaucrat), usually with boots-on-the-ground combat experience, points out that the present wars will be over in 2017. He already knows that I could build a 70% solution in a few weeks if people would just get out of the way. We depart, shaking our heads in disgust.

But woe be unto us if we try to solve our own problem or find someone else to help us. The bureaucrat, marking time until his retirement in 2016, safely before his project craters in 2017, will raise holy hell: "Hey, it's my job to not do that!"

The lack of technical guidance and leadership is also appalling. Some new initiatives are improving this, but too often there are no concrete guidelines at a hands-on technical level to even follow. The technical leadership role is in the hands of career bureaucrats who know their way around the org chart, but haven't a clue about the tech. Compare this to an environment like Google App Engine or the various Web 2.0/Web services ecosystems around Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and the like where your options are clear, there is tangible guidance on what you can and cannot do, and can often go from zero to an end-to-end proof-of-concept in a few days, if not hours.

I've tried to help, but I can't stomach it anymore and am executing a "strategic re-deployment" to the Internet/mobile consumer and professional market, where innovation and agility is welcomed, nigh demanded, instead of smothered.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/FOvjiC5P9Yw/whats-wrong-with-the-us-defense-rd-budget

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