White Elephants

December 22nd, 2016

In Buddhist mythology, Maya – Buddha’s mother – dreamt she was presented a white lotus flower by a white elephant. In Hinduism, Airvata, a white elephant, carries the god Indra, king of the first heaven. Thus, in both Buddhist and Hindu culture, white elephants are sacred.

Unfortunately, white elephants are so sacred they’re not allowed to work. Practically speaking, if you had a white elephant in ancient Asia, you had to care and feed it. But you weren’t allowed to use it.

Consider the US Navy’s three Zumwalt class destroyers. They’re very large (14,000 tons; a Burke class destroyer weighs about 9,000 tons), they have fewer missiles tubes (80 versus 96), and oh, yeah, they’re expensive ($7 billion each, versus $1.7 billion).

And they have problems. The first ship (Zumwalt) broke down in the Panama Canal while en route San Diego, and is – unofficially – a maintenance nightmare.

They do have really neat guns. But, the Navy realized they couldn’t afford the ammunition: $800,000 per round. And they don’t have weapons for fighting other ships. Large, complex, expensive, and they can’t fight another ship. Huh?

The Navy has other problems: the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), originally planned at $200 million per ship, with each ship capable of multiple missions via the interchange of ‘mission modules,’ now costs approximately $400 million each. And they’ve proven to be fragile and difficult to maintain, and the Navy’s taken delivery of few mission modules. Some modules are literally years away from being ready. Most damning, the Pentagon’s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation stated the ship would not survive in combat. A combatant that can’t “combat.” Swell.

And then there’s the F-35 fighter, with cost overruns and production delays that seem to have a life of their own.

The other services have equal problems.

In short, DOD procurement is a mess; it must be fixed.

Can it be?

Sure, but it’ll require some hard steps. To begin, Congress has to recognize that they’re key; after all, they hold the purse strings. But Congress, unfortunately, is too trusting; they believe what DOD tells them. So, actually, it begins one step before that: Congress and the new administration need to know “reality.”

It seems every time someone mentions a price of some weapon there’s a dispute as to the “real” price; everyone has different costs or performance figures. So, the first thing the new administration must do is bring in outside auditors. Give them clearances, and let them look at everything. Let’s find out where the money is; let’s find out how much everything costs. Where it’s not classified, publish it all and let the citizenry (the actual owners) know how all these departments – across the government – are spending their money. 

DOD argues: “we aren’t ready to be audited.” So? Let’s just start the audit. The process of “discovery” will be worth the pain.

Second, procurement is – or should be – a function of two factors: what you’re trying to do (goals), and things that might prevent achieving your goals (the threat). Accordingly, the process of procurement ought to begin with clarity as to our goals, followed by a detailed discussion on plans – constrained both by threats and risks. This conversation should take place with key personnel in Congress, and should be constantly updated as threats and technology change. Both Congress and the Administration must restrain DOD from pursuing technology that is no longer relevant to changing plans or changing threats on one hand, or in sinking money into processes overcome by technology on the other.

Finally, we must avoid the de facto approach of identifying requirements without regard to costs. Such an approach has led, time and again, to pursuit of purely technological solutions to strategic problems, rather than forcing planners to develop real, multi-faceted, affordable strategies.

There are a host of problems with procurement; solving them won’t be easy. But we need to begin with clarity, with a real ‘ground-truth’ on where we stand, followed by equal clarity on our goals and how we think we might achieve them. Failure to do so has resulted in ships, aircraft and weapon systems that are large, complex, very expensive and, in some cases, don’t even perform well.

Now we’re saddled with several white elephants. Let’s use this to learn a lesson and fix our system as we sail forward. It’s Christmas time, time for a new beginning!