A member of the US Army aircrew sits in the rear of a US Army Chinook helicopter during pre-exercise integration training ahead of the NATO-led Exercise Trident Juncture 18 on October 27, 2018 in Norway. (Leon Neal/Getty Images)

In 1950, the United States government needed just one year to launch the development of new military capabilities—but today, the Pentagon requires an average of seven years for the same result. Innovation time cycles, often considered an afterthought by military planners, are now a crucial measure of whether the U.S. can out-innovate adversarial nations that accelerate their efforts with intellectual property theft and unlimited defense spending.

A new Hudson report examines why the Pentagon's 60-year-old resource allocation  system can no longer keep up with the rapid pace of emerging weapons technology and operational concepts.  In Competing in Time: Ensuring Capability Advantage and Mission Success through Adaptable Resource Allocation, Hudson's Dan Patt and AEI's Bill Greenwalt argue that the U.S. must embrace an agile budgeting process to maintain our competitive edge. The authors draw from their respective experiences as DARPA's former Deputy Director of Strategic Technology and the former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Industrial Policy.

Download a copy of the report below, and join us next week as the authors discuss their new research with key officials leading the Pentagon's innovation efforts.

Key Takeaways

Key takeaways from Dan Patt and Bill Greenwalt's new report, Competing in Time: Ensuring Capability Advantage and Mission Success through Adaptable Resource Allocation.

1. The Pentagon does not have the luxury of time:

Since the 1960s, time has been deemphasized as an incentive for defense invention while values such as cost, technology maturity, fairness, and perceived efficiency have been overemphasized. As a result, system development time increased and time-based constraints to innovation were lost, and the U.S. ability to adapt has been damaged. Time became a "schedule issue" that could be measured as an engineering and cost estimation problem, not as the ultimate driver of adaptable innovation.

2. China's rapid technology development warrants closer examination:

China’s resource allocation process merits further investigation, given evidence suggesting their ability to develop and field twenty-five new unmanned aircraft systems from 2010 to 2020, including stealthy carrier-based unmanned systems. The policy and research community should conduct comparative analyses of the bureaucratic research allocation processes between the U.S. and China, especially focusing on the early decision-making processes associated with starting investments in new military capability and strategic priority setting.

3. DoD reform has been too focused on the acquisitions process:

While there have been dozens of acquisition reform efforts, the DoD's budgeting process has been nearly untouched since 1961. The budgeting process, not acquisition, is the keystone of the DoD’s institutional architecture. It governs the DoD’s ability to allocate funding to achieve national security objectives, links together requirements and purchasing, sets the calendar of the department, controls changes to investment priority, and serves as the mechanism for Congress to exercise its constitutionally granted appropriations powers.

4. A pilot program expanding the Pentagon's resource allocation adaptability should be the next step:

Congress and the DoD should cooperate to promptly launch a limited-scope pilot project on an alternative resource allocation process, designed to foster adaptability in capability delivery and aligned around a high-priority national security operational challenge. It will be difficult to create a competitive, adaptable resource allocation scheme without revisiting the PPBE and key decision processes that govern the Pentagon’s ability to make rapid, early investments in new operational capability or concepts.

5. A commission to study changes to the Planning, Programming, Budget, and Execution (PPBE) system is needed:

To ensure the U.S. has a competitive advantage in long-term competition, Congress or the DoD should sponsor a commission to study changes to the PPBE and appropriations process. This commission should include expert members with an understanding of current equities and limitations, and explore emerging concepts potentially including portfolio, organization, mission, and trusted-agent budgeting. This commission may extend its scope to cover critical capability timeline drivers including contracting and early investment decisions that also touch upon adaptability.

Quotes have been edited for length and clarity.

Go Deeper: Competing in Time