How do we create military resilience?

Today's quote is from page 76 of Donella Meadow's Thinking In Systems:

 "Resilience arises from a rich structure of many feedback loops that can work in different ways to restore a system even after a large perturbation. A single balancing loop brings a system stock back to its desired state. Resilience is provided by several such loops, operating through different mechanisms, at different time scales, and with redundancy – one kicking in if another one fails.”

I wonder if we are fostering resilience where it is needed most: military systems. I wonder if putting all our eggs into the F-35 basket provides resilience? How about GPS technologies, the CVN-78 aircraft carrier, the LCS, and so forth? Do we have several operating mechanisms providing feedback loops, or are we looking for the single best platform to fulfill as many missions as possible?

If resilience is achieved through redundancy, and if resilience is a good thing, then an acquisition process built on 19th century ideas of straight-line bureaucracies with zero duplication or overlap may be suboptimal.

Technology readiness and the F-35

The Straus Military Reform Project has a new set of podcasts taking the name of their nice 2011 book, The Pentagon Labyrinth. One episode by Dan Grazier, "The F-35 continues to stumble," provides a good exposition of the F-35's current status. There are so many points, but here is one representative example:

"The cannon in the F-35A sits behind a small door on the side of the aircraft that opens quickly an instant before the cannon is fired—a characteristic intended to keep the aircraft stealthy. Test flights have shown that this door catches the air flowing across the surface of the aircraft, pulling the F-35’s nose off the aimpoint resulting in errors “that exceed accuracy specifications.”"

Read the whole article if you don't listen to the podcast. I won't go on here about well documented troubles of the F-35. But the gun issue reminded me of another matter.

I had recently been reading about what people said about the F-35 program back when it was going through milestone B in 2002. The hot topic of the day was "knowledge-based acquisition," where information on technological readiness drives the progression of program phases. The Technology Readiness Level (TRL) was developed as an industry best practice for measuring knowledge achieved. For example, programs should not enter full scale development (pass Milestone B) until critical technologies reach a TRL of at least 6, where system/subsystems have been modeled or prototyped in a realistic environment.

What's the point? Certainly no one was debating the technical readiness of the F-35 gun, and even if they did, it would be at the highest level of 9. But was anyone thinking about interactions between technologies, and how they would operate in their actual environment? Time and again it is not until a system or subsystem is put to the test that critical problems are exposed, and all our supposed knowledge implied by the TRL means little or nothing.

Cost Growth, a brief interpretation

Today’s quote is from page 273 of the Second Hoover Commission Hearings (1957):

“Mr. Brown. [The Department of Defense] seldom get anything for the price tag originally put on it…

“Mr. McNeil. That was certainly true some years ago… For about 4 years now, most estimates are on the beam. And it was always possible.”

It is hard to believe that between 1953 and 1957 defense cost estimates had been “on the beam,” particularly when Martin Peck and Frederic Scherer found substantial cost growth in the 1950s in their classic The Weapons Acquisition Process: An Economic Analysis. Maybe they were just better than the estimates developed during the Korean War crisis.

Cost estimation continues to be a major problem today. In fact, it is widely agreed that cost growth has come down relative to the 1950s period. I doubt any informed observer would say we have contained cost growth, or that we are doing better today than in the 1950s, despite the fact that the AT&L’s “Performance of the Defense Acquisition System” repeatedly trumpets cost containment.

It may not take a searching review to understand that cost growth need not have any relationship with program outcomes. As Robert Devons wrote, cost growth studies “showed that most of the so called cost growth was the direct result of low initial cost estimates.”

So, as Donald Srull said, “One could not after all, buy the new Cadillac automobile for $5,000. When it turned out to cost $25,000 it was not “cost growth”—it was an unrealistic, poor initial underestimate!” (Srull was the first chairman of the Cost Analysis Improvement Group, or CAIG.)

Our problem today is that in a decision maker’s mind, a higher cost estimate is a more “realistic” one. If a realistic cost estimate for a $25,000 Cadillac comes out to be $40,000, anything other than large cost underruns signal escalating backend prices. Unfortunately, “should cost” initiatives cannot deliver the required information. We only know a $25,000 Cadillac doesn’t cost $40,000 because there is a market for Cadillacs which is embedded in an even broader market framework. You cannot just add up the labor and materials required to produce technological innovation.

The problem more pernicious than cost growth is simply high costs (similar to the “cost disease” inflicting the commanding heights of education and healthcare). It might be stunning to some that the Bruce Harmon of the Institute for Defense Analysis found that the fighter aircraft industry experiences price escalation at nearly twice the rate seen in the economy at large. (In other words, for a constant quality fighter aircraft our “buying power” is falling by about 2%-3% per year—every couple decades we can only afford half as much with the same inflation-adjusted dollars.)

Harmon’s conclusion… the F-35 is an average performing program and it experienced “cost growth” because of its artificially low Milestone B cost estimate that did not assume fast enough price growth in line with experience! If the F-35 is not really a cost growth problem, then cost growth is not the problem we should be looking at.

Long Range Strike Bomber Driven by Industrial Concerns

The Pentagon is seeking to add a new bomber to the current fleet consisting of B-52, B-1, and B-2 aircraft. This "Long Range Strike Bomber," or LRSB, will be the next big Air Force acquisition after the Lockheed's F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and Boeing's KC-46A Air Refueling Tanker. The future of the U.S.A.F. is increasingly being dominated by these three manned aircraft, and these aircraft alone.

The initial price-tag for the LRSB is expected to be $550M per copy. As Mark Thompson writes, that doesn't provide the whole story:

"Like any bureaucracy dedicated to expansion, the $550 million sum is the lowest figure the Air Force number can say with a straight face [and] represents what is known inside the military as the “APUC,” or average procurement unit cost. What’s important about that figure isn’t what it includes, but what it leaves out.

Northrop Grumman LRSB Concept Drawing

First of all, the $550 million price tag is based on buying between 80 and 100 of the bombers. Driving the price per plane down to $550 million requires economies of scale that only come over such long production runs. Early aircraft off the assembly line are very expensive, as the radar-eluding B-2 “stealth” bomber made clear. “Cost of Stealth Bombers Soars to $450 Million Each,” the Washington Post reported breathlessly on its front page nearly 30 years ago, in May 1988. Few believed at the time that a bomber could cost so much. But that was for a planned buy of 132 planes. The Air Force ended up buying only 21. The B-2’s ultimate price: $2.1 billion each.

Second, the $550 million doesn’t include the research and development needed to actually build the plane. Without the R&D, the plane would truly be stealthy—because it wouldn’t exist. Experts inside and outside the Pentagon estimate the new bomber’s development will add between $20 billion and $25 billion to the Pentagon’s projected $55 billion procurement price tag for 100 planes.

Third, the $550 million price is based on the value of a 2010 dollar. That’s 12 years before the first pair of bombers is slated to be delivered. Accounting for inflation since has already driven the cost per plane close to $600 million, and that number will keep rising in the future. Delays in the plane’s production schedule will push it even higher.
Finally, the $550 million estimate doesn’t include anything for the all-but-certain cost overruns a weapons program like this will experience. No one can say how much unanticipated costs will add to the bomber’s ultimate price, but one can declare with certainty that it won’t be zero.

Todd Harrison of the independent Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments think tank estimates the bomber program’s true cost—assuming 100 planes and no cost overruns—at $90 billion. That’s $900 million a copy."

That is all certainly correct and truly astonishing. I will not debate the utility of the LRSB, though I am a skeptic of its strategic importance. Rather, I will rather talk to the industrial concerns.

The competition for the LRSB contract is between Northrop Grumman (who went so far as to advertise during the Super Bowl where 99.9999% of viewers held no sway at all) and a teaming between Lockheed Martin and Boeing.

Let's consider who will win.

As stated earlier, Lockheed has the F-35 which will assure hundreds of billions in revenue over the next several decades. After heated competition and scandles, Boeing won the KC-46, which, despite being more than $1B over budget in R&D, kept the 767 line in production and assures a significant business base. Northrop produced the B-2, but currently has no new manned aircraft contracts (though they are a big player in unmanned aerial systems, or UASs).

So, an unavoidable consideration is whether the government wants to keep Northrop in the airframing business or not. Does the U.S. need three attack aircraft manufacturers, or just two?

If Northrop loses, they're pretty much out. If Lockheed/Boeing loses, then Boeing could also be out of that space. Boeing only has some light production in the F/A-18 left, but there's no chance they are out of airframing all-together.

Lot's of speculation surround the outcome. Here's my take:

There are a lot of moving parts, but the result probably depends on how Pentagon leadership "feels." If they are highly uncertain about future budgets, they will probably assume that everyone will benefit from further consolidation and economies of scale by awarding Lockheed the contract. If they are unhappy with the F-35 and seek to curtail the program, Lockheed will also win the LRSB as payoff. If they believe there is enough dough to spread around for all, then Northrop will win.

Defense market competition is really nothing of the sort, more of a trading of contracts to keep the status quo. Despite past experience with the B-2, and unsavory recent performance from Lockheed, Northrop will probably lose. The consolation prize will be assured massive subcontracts to Northrop in their core competencies (C4ISR and cyber). Northrop's website doesn't even include aerospace as a major business unit!

What other major considerations are there? One would hope engineering design and production feasibility would be the overriding concern...

F-35 and Risk Management

F-35A Assembly at Lockheed Ft. Worth

It has been no secret that the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the air-superiority aircraft intended replace numerous legacy counterparts, has had its fair share of difficulties. Acquisition costs have ballooned to $400bn and another $1tn (yes, trillion) in operating and support costs are expected. The Air Force even had to repaint their refueling trucks from green to white because the former color absorbed too much heat and the resulting fuel temperature was inoperable with the F-35B short-take off, vertical landing (STOVL) variant. A fascinating article from David Axe sheds light on what we are really buying through one of the government’s largest and most important programs. An unnamed test pilot wrote a scathing unclassified briefing after a dogfight test with an F-16D.

"The stealth fighter proved too sluggish to reliably defeat the F-16, even with the F-16 lugging extra fuel tanks. ‘Even with the limited F-16 target configuration, the F-35A remained at a distinct energy disadvantage for every engagement,’ the pilot reported.

‘Insufficient pitch rate.’ ‘Energy deficit to the bandit would increase over time.’ ‘The flying qualities in the blended region (20–26 degrees AoA) were not intuitive or favorable.’

The F-35 jockey tried to target the F-16 with the stealth jet’s 25-millimeter cannon, but the smaller F-16 easily dodged. ‘Instead of catching the bandit off-guard by rapidly pull aft to achieve lead, the nose rate was slow, allowing him to easily time his jink prior to a gun solution,’ the JSF pilot complained.

And when the pilot of the F-16 turned the tables on the F-35, maneuvering to put the stealth plane in his own gunsight, the JSF jockey found he couldn’t maneuver out of the way, owing to a ‘lack of nose rate.’

The F-35 pilot came right out and said it — if you’re flying a JSF, there’s no point in trying to get into a sustained, close turning battle with another fighter. ‘There were not compelling reasons to fight in this region.’ God help you if the enemy surprises you and you have no choice but to turn.

[….]In the end, the F-35 — the only new fighter jet that America and most of its allies are developing — is demonstrably inferior in a dogfight with the F-16, which the U.S. Air Force first acquired in the late 1970s.”

This process of testing  your system against handicapped opponents or unrealistic situations is rife. The Ballistics Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) would put a infrared beacon or radar reflector on the target missile in order to make the test intercept easier.

As Axe explained in another article, the F-35’s design was compromised to fulfill the needs of the Marine Corps who insisted on the STOVL. In order to get the lift-fan mechanism to work, it was decided to dump 11 pounds of worth of valves and fuses making the plane 25% more likely to get destroyed by enemy fire. The Chinese, who likely hacked and stole engineering data from Lockheed, have quickly built an F-35 replica without the complexity stemming from the STOVL requirements.

Here is my take on the subject, which comes down to risk management. Even if there is a slight chance of total ruin, the precautionary principle applies. Climate change is an often used case of this logic. Even if the chances that humans are causing climate change are miniscule, the potential effects are so great that the burden of proof must be on those who wish to do nothing. Nissim Talebhas applied the precautionary principle to GMOs because an unintended blight could destroy the entire ecosystem.

The precautionary principle can be applied in defense acquisitions as well. The F-35 has monopoly in its sphere and we are led to believe that there is at least a reasonable chance that it will be completely outclassed by competitors. If air superiority turns out to be a decisive factor in the next war, I would argue that diversification is a sound choice. 

Interestingly enough, enacting the precautionary principle usually comes at a cost of "higher returns" (e.g. emissions regulations dampen economic growth), but the case here is that we are paying more for accepting this risk because of the nature of massive acquisition programs (more on this discussed later). 

The strengths of the F-16 were born in a reaction to the complexities of the F-15, and has proved itself simple, effective, and enduring. The F-35 is also intended to replace the A-10, whose strengths come from features that stand in stark contrast to the F-16. 

I don’t see an easy resolution to the F-35 problem. The primary impediment to change is how insular the program is from the public eye (aided and abetted by poor media coverage).