Great article from Todd Harrison in Foreign Affairs in which he lays out the near-term vs long-term choices facing DoD in a constrained environment.
And, I especially like the Rolling Stones quote at the end. Jagger left the London School of Economics to pursue music!
It seems that DoD is having a hard time measuring the cost of doing business in IT operations as well.
The goal is to understand how much military services and agencies spend on people, technology and processes, and then use that information to improve decision making and to become more efficient.
Are you surprised that DoD doesn't know how its spending translates into performance?
The Air Force isn't the only service procuring major weapon systems without a clear idea of the long term cost of ownership.
... the Navy may go into a critical decision in 2015 about whether to contract for up to 28 more Littoral Combat Ships without enough understanding of the long-term costs, the evolving concepts to sustain the vessels, or even whether they have enough bandwidth to exchange maintenance data with support facilities ashore.
From the Washington Post:
Today, there is one camouflage pattern just for Marines in the desert. There is another just for Navy personnel in the desert. The Army has its own “universal” camouflage pattern, which is designed to work anywhere. It also has another one just for Afghanistan, where the first one doesn’t work.
Even the Air Force has its own unique camouflage, used in a new Airman Battle Uniform. But it has flaws. So in Afghanistan, airmen are told not to wear it in battle.
One of the reasons that the services may elect to have different uniforms is that it helps with branding. When Congressional delegations (CODELs) visit, it is important for each service to showcase its contributions as this may translate into higher appropriations.
An article on DoD Buzz about the Air Force's next-generation aircraft states:
Meantime, the operational costs of the F-35 are unlikely to affect how many of the aircraft the service intends to buy, Donley said.
The cost of flying the F-35 “will be slightly higher than the F-16, there’s no doubt about that in my mind,” he said. “I don’t think there’s a link there between projected operational costs and how many we’re going to buy.”
How can there not be a link between what an aircraft costs to operate and the quantity that the Air Force will purchase? Isn't the cost of ownership a key component of fleet composition and size?