Arthur Herman
There’s growing talk about the urgent need for the Pentagon to embrace innovation as it tries to revive its industrial base and reverse our declining defense posture. There’s also talk about the need to spend more on defense, with one senior senator calling for an annual benchmark of 5 percent of GDP.
But it’s no good spending more if you don’t have a clear idea what it’s being spent on. It’s also no good demanding innovation if the entire budget process slams the door on adopting new technologies in a decisive way.
The latest Government Accountability Office report on Department of Defense weapons systems underlines a similar point. It takes too long to develop and deploy major programs because the Pentagon moves at the speed of government, not the speed of relevance to our strategic defense needs.
One reason is that the DoD process for planning and allocating money for programs, the Planning, Programming, Budgeting and Execution (PPBE) process, was designed in the early 1960s. It reflects an earlier industrial era, not the digital age or the world of software and AI — two major sources of innovation today, both in and out of the military.
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