Good Job Gates. Stick With It.

From our Secretary of Defense, a snippet of a speech delivered to the Economic Club of Washington this past Thursday:

"What is needed is a portfolio of military capabilities with maximum versatility across the widest possible spectrum of conflict. As a result, we must change the way we think and the way we plan – and fundamentally reform – the way the Pentagon does business and buys weapons. It simply will not do to base our strategy solely on continuing to design and buy – as we have for the last 60 years – only the most technologically advanced versions of weapons to keep up with or stay ahead of another superpower adversary – especially one that imploded nearly a generation ago.

To get there we must break the old habit of adding layer upon layer of cost, complexity, and delay to systems that are so expensive and so elaborate that only a small number can be built, and that are then usable only in a narrow range of low-probability scenarios.

We must also get control of what is called “requirements creep” – where more features and capabilities are added to a given piece of equipment, often to the point of absurdity. The most flamboyant example of this phenomenon is the new presidential helicopter – what President Obama referred to as defense procurement “run amok.” Once the analysis and requirements were done, we ended up with choppers that cost nearly half a billion dollars each and enabled the president to, among other things, cook dinner while in flight under nuclear attack.

We also had to take a hard look at a number of weapons programs that were grotesquely over budget, were having major performance problems, were reliant on unproven technology, or were becoming increasingly detached from real world scenarios – as if September 11th and the wars that followed had never happened."

DoD Public Affairs posted the full text of the speech. It's worth a read. In another part of the speech he lashes out, in the measured tone of a bureaucrat, at critics who may try to paint him as a dove.

We in the aerospace and defense establishment have probably grown complacent and forgotten exactly how much we cost our nation. I believe that defense should be the highest priority, and that we probably should spend this much on defense, but I think our Secretary of Defense is right to expect more war fighting capability for these sums on behalf of our taxpayers and especially our service men and women.

I happen to agree with these remarks. Mark this one in the Bark! predictions box: Gates will stay on as SecDef until 2012. He has spent 40 years serving our country as a consumate bureaucrat and not as a politician. I think that for personal sense of patriotism and duty, Gates will stay to try to see these reforms through. Feast your eyes on this beauty of a flow chart. I think that changing this chart will be one of his highest goals. Of course, that's really hard because each box represents physical organizations with lots of people, so you can't just redraw the picture.... (Image from Defense Acquisition University website.)