Rapid Fire Pencil

James Hasik is asking the right questions about DoD’s procurement and technology programs and the incredible lead times required for each new platform:

Has the Defense Department given up before starting? Has all this recent talk about faster innovation been just that, because no one wants to admit to some inexorable barrier standing in the way? Administrative problems are frequently discussed, but fundamental technological challenges may prove more ominous.

He goes on to cite Tyler Cowen’s “Great Stagnation” as a potential explanation for the decline in the pace of innovation. Perhaps DoD really has exhausted its supply of low-hanging fruit and from now on every advance and innovation will require exponentially more time and effort.

But then Hasik dismisses his claim with a curious supposed counterexample:

But looking around at the explosion of new products and services, I call perceptions of slowing economic growth a measurement problem: the awesomeness of each “insanely great” new product from Apple, for example, never gets meaningfully captured in GDP figures.

This is, indeed, not the most apt example - nor one that we should want to follow - as it in fact reinforces the earlier point. The great revolutionary leaps of technology - the iPhone, the iPad, etc. - only happen once, and despite the breathless media adulation of anything that Apple produces (thankfully, somewhat diminished since Steve Jobs’s death) subsequent iPhones have instead been evolutionary. Iterative upgrades of existing technology. Changing dimensions, literally tinkering around the edges.

Which isn’t to say there aren’t advances. But it is really hard to come up with brand new concepts, much less to do so quickly. What low-hanging fruit might remain is, as Hasik suggests, to “end…the pursuit of increasingly grands projets with investments in ‘big science’ that lead to great leaps forward,” and rather to combine existing capabilities in ways that create new, composite capability. The Sum of All Parts, if you will.

But I do hope that we won’t end our investments in big science - instead, that we’ll stop tying weapons system procurement to breakthroughs. We can build a really good, modernized variant of the F/A-18 and work on next-generation technologies. But the fighting force of today should not be sacrificed on the altar of possible innovation tomorrow.