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Happy Friday!
Our top story is a brilliant essay from The New York Times editor David Leonhardt that dives into the history of federal investment in basic research and long-term projects that have fueled societal advancements and guaranteed national security. He begins with transportation infrastructure as a case study, then segues to his larger argument, which features the prominent role the military and the Navy have played over the past century.
- He articulates how defense contracting completes the American innovation cycle, from funded research to delivered capability: "As soon as an invention was shown to be useful to the largest organization in the country — the military — the federal government could guarantee huge amounts of revenue through military contracts."
- His discussion of how the computer owes its development to the federal government includes mention of Grace Hopper, our favorite Navy mathematician and innovator.
We've excerpted here some of the highlights from the longer essay, with hopes that you'll be motivated to read the full piece.
The essay intersects nicely with the theme for this year's symposium, "resourcing innovation," which is meant to create a wide aperture through which researchers can consider any number of related topics. Deadline is November 29!
Our research section is chock full this week:
- DoD released its annual report on China, noting advancements in nuclear capabilities, alignment between the PLA and the CCP, and continued commitment to Chinese global dominance.
- Commission on Strategic Posture released its assessment of US nuclear capabilities, making the case for substantial modernization and investment.
- GAO released a number of reports: on mergers and acquisitions in the defense industrial base, Naval readiness and sleep deprivation, and how defense management reform is coming along without a CMO.
Yesterday, the HASC Subcommittee on Cyber, Information Technologies, and Innovation held a hearing on DoD's Replicator Program, with testimony from Bryan Clark, Bill Greenwalt, and Paul Scharre. A few takeaways:
- Clark argues the biggest challenge is unified command and control, "integrating unmanned systems together in a way that enables them to communicate with each other, be managed by a command and control system, and operate in a way that creates creative operational concepts for us to pursue and dilemmas for enemies to deal with."
- Greenwalt maintains the greatest challenge for Replicator to overcome is DoD processes and culture, noting that it will need to operate outside of the existing acquisition bureaucracy.
- Scharre considers both the defense industrial base and the DoD bureaucracy. "Replicator is a test of the department's ability to generate the types of systems it needs, in the quantity it needs them, and at the speed required to deter China."
In our acquisition section, the Space Force has finalized its Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve strategy.
Chief of Space Operations argues that the successful Victus Nox launch is a paradigm changer for its ability to radically increase the speed of all the processes necessary to launch a satellite, from contracting to safety checks.
And we have some NPS research to share.
- A student team has created a framework for how to implement bottom-up innovation in the DoD, generating a robust review of literature on innovative organizations in the process.
- And three NPS faculty members published their research on how capacity at military treatment facilities impacts demand for mental health care.
And on that last topic, today is the last day of Buddy Check Week, a new program encouraging veterans to call 10 veteran friends and check in. Connecting with old friends, especially those who served together, is a powerful way to foster mental health. Who can you check in on?
Symposium Call for Proposals Is Now Live!
We are accepting proposals for the 21st Annual Acquisition Research Symposium, to be held May 8-9, 2024.
This year our symposium takes up the theme of “Resourcing Innovation.” We are especially interested in papers that consider challenges and successes in providing the right resources – to include not just funding, but also people, training, acquisition authorities, time, supply chains, etc. – that can generate, transition, and deliver new warfighting capabilities and strategies.
As always, we welcome a wide range of papers sharing research of interest to the larger acquisition community.
Proposals are due by November 29, 2023.
This Week's Top Story
Longer Commutes, Shorter Lives: The Costs of Not Investing in America
David Leonhardt, The New York Times
The Mark, an early computer relied upon by the U.S. Navy during World War II, in its laboratory at Harvard University in 1944.
The United States, for all that we spend as a nation on transportation, has stopped meaningfully investing in it. Investment, in simple terms, involves using today’s resources to make life better in the long term. Historically, the most successful economic growth strategy has revolved around investment. It was true in ancient Rome, with its roads and aqueducts, and in 19th-century Britain, with its railroads. During the 20th century, it was true in the United States as well as Japan and Europe.
During the laissez-faire years leading up to the Great Depression, the United States invested relatively little money in scientific research, and the country fell behind. Europe dominated the Nobel Prizes during this period, and European countries, including Nazi Germany, began World War II with a technological advantage over the United States. The scariest evidence could be seen in the North Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, where German U-boats sank more than 200 ships — sometimes visible from U.S. soil — early in the war and killed 5,000 Americans. Recognizing the threat from this technological gap, a small group of American scientists and government officials began an urgent effort to persuade Franklin Roosevelt to support an investment program larger than anything before. The result, called the National Defense Research Committee, funded research into radar, sonar, planes, ships, vehicles and guns. It included a race to develop an atomic bomb before the Nazis did.
That effort arguably won World War II. American factories learned how to build a ship in less than three weeks, down from eight months at the war’s start. The American military officer overseeing this productive effort was Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower. After becoming president in 1953, Eisenhower recognized that if government did not make vital investments, nobody would.
The Eisenhower investment boom has no peer in U.S. history, at least not outside a major war. Its best-known achievement, the Interstate System, allowed people and goods to move around the country much more quickly than before.
The postwar investment boom fit the historical pattern of successful government investments. First, the government paid for basic scientific research that the private sector was not conducting. Then the government helped create an early market for new products by buying them. Boeing, for example, got its start during World War I selling planes to the Navy. Later, the government paid for research that facilitated jet-airline technology and, by extension, the Boeing 707, the plane that launched transcontinental jet travel.
The development of one of the world's first computers, the Mark, was driven by investment from the federal government and subsequently used by the U.S. Navy during World War II to solve complex military calculations. Despite the role that computers played in winning the war, most of corporate America still did not recognize their importance afterward.
The federal government continued to invest in the technology because it could afford the inevitable setbacks that basic research involved. The federal government could insist that researchers build on one another’s ideas, rather than working in separate laboratories, unaware of related breakthroughs. The government could patiently finance research that was making progress but not yet ready for commercial applications. As soon as an invention was shown to be useful to the largest organization in the country — the military — the federal government could guarantee huge amounts of revenue through military contracts. As late as 1959, federal agencies financed about 85 percent of the country’s electronics research.
In recent years, federal spending on research and development has been less than half as large, relative to the size of the economy, as it was in the mid-1960s.
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