Author: Lou

The Washington Post had a great little piece over the weekend on the number of reports required by the Congress this year.  The article, “Unrequired Reading” states that the Congress is expecting  no less than 4291 reports from 466 Federal agencies and non-profits this year.  Of course one wonders who the heck reads those reports and more importantly, what gets done about them. As far as who reads them, my guess is that even the people who write them don’t bother to read the whole report, so that means probably one of the 18,000 employees on Capitol Hill (638 of whom owe $9.3M in back taxes, by the way) finally reads each individual report.  Perhaps the 638 who owe back taxes are so busy reading reports that they don’t have time to fill out an income tax return.  The Post article leaves the impression that basically nothing gets done with the reports.

That’s not entirely true.  I know that last year I was on a panel that produced such a report ( NAPA Review of the STOCK Act) and within weeks of issuing the report, the Congress passed legislation recommended by the report.   Occasionally something does get done, but keep in mind that this particular report directly impacted each and every member of Congress, so there was undue interest in this particular item.  Back to the subject:  Reports are merely Congress’ way of doing something while doing nothing.  If they don’t want to take on a tough issues, it’s all too easy to request a report so that when their constituents ask what is being done, members can respond with,”I’m glad you asked.  As you know, Dog and Cat Fur is a very complex issue, requiring carefully consideration of all aspects of perhaps the number one problem facing the American people today. That’s why my colleagues and I have asked the Department of Homeland Security to produce an annual report on Dog and Cat Fur Protection.”(This is some web site,  huh?  Where else could one find copies of the STOCK Act and Cat and Dog Protection reports to Congress in one article??) One  wonders how much those 4291 reports cost to produce?

That brings me to the title of this article.  There’s another report that comes out every two years that might fall into the category of “So What.”  I attended an event last week which highlighted the GAO High Risk List and how to get off (Not a high priority at DoD as you will see).  The GAO began compiling the list in 1990 as a means to highlight the agencies and program areas that are high risk due to their vulnerabilities to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement or are most in need of broad reform.  There are currently 30 items on the list.  Here’s a link to the current list, and I’ve singled out those owned by the Defense Department below:

DoD High Risk Areas from GAO and year placed on the list

• DOD Approach to Business Transformation (2005)
• DOD Support Infrastructure Management (1997)
• DOD Supply Chain Management (1990)
• DOD Financial Management (1995)
• DOD Weapon Systems Acquisition (1990)
• Ensuring the Effective Protection of Technologies Critical to U.S. National Security Interests (2007)
• DOD Contract Management (1992)

That’s quite the list that DoD has managed to accumulate with a cumulative time on the list of 115 years!  To be fair, DoD has managed to remove an item from the list, DoD Personnel Security Clearance Program in 2011 after six years on the list (and now that appears to be gooned up again).

You might ask, “What’s the penalty for being on the list?”  Answer: Nada.  There are no consequences as far as I can tell.  In fact, in the twisted DoD budget world, being on the list is a good thing! Why you ask?  Well, you can go over to the Hill and ask for more money to get off the list (although past performance would indicate that we are in little danger of having any items removed).  It makes a great budget exhibit to show how much money is needed to get off the list.  Congress wants you off the list, so you get money.  It seems like a Seinfeld stand-up routine (Congress in italics):  I need money! Are you on the list? Yes, I’m on the list!  Then you get money!  or the alternative; I need money! Are you on the list? No, I’m not on the list.  No money for you!

Who wouldn’t want to be on the list?  In fact, DoD is soooo on the list, they need lots more money!

To be sure, there is value in highlighting problems in the management of Federal agencies, but if it is going to be worth the effort of putting together and maintaining the list, there should be penalties for being on the list, and even more penalties for not getting off the list.  If the current crop can’t fix it, bring in a new group.  Or perhaps the greater penalty would be that one can’t leave until it’s fixed.  In the case of DoD that might provide a greater incentive.

So I guess the point of today’s philippic is that if there’s going to be a report, someone has to read it.  If there’s going to be a “Bad Boy” list, there has to be a penalty for staying on it.  The management lesson to be learned is that if you have someone producing reports, it’s not a bid idea to periodically evaluate who’s reading them, and more importantly, what’s being done as a result.  If the answer is no one or nothing, stop doing it.  And if you are going to go to the trouble of producing some sort of “Dink List”, make people accountable.

For a complete copy of the 2013 update to the GAO High Risk List, click here.

I was recently asked to do an interview on Federal News Radio on the subject of the Secretary of Defense’s decision to terminate the LCS buy at 32, instead of the 52 on the Navy’s FY15 Shipbuilding Plan. Here is the audio:

It was on my watch as the chief requirements and resources officer for the Navy (N8) that the requirement for the number of LCS’s was determined.  At the time, the Navy was looking towards a more sophisticated engagement policy with the navies of developing and emerging littoral countries.  The idea was to have a ship which could access shallow water ports and operate in the “brown” water environment.  Its defining attributes were speed and maneuverability.  Some limited self-defense capability was built in, chiefly rapid firing, larger caliber guns to combat the swarming boat threat (then a big concern) and an aircraft point-defense capability.  The number was based on what we thought was needed to execute the “From the Sea” maritime strategy in a variety of littoral interest areas.  Another attribute of the LCS was the inclusion of mission modules, specially developed, mission-focused packages of sensors and aircraft (helos, manned and unmanned) with limited weapons capability.  The modular approach was chosen for affordability since large, multi-mission ships (like DDG-51 class) are very expensive to build.  We carefully crafted a ship inventory to ensure that our carrier battle groups and amphibious ready groups were protected and that our ISR requirements were met before looking at how many LCS’s were needed.  Said another way, LCS’s were not planned to be a front-line battle force protecting carriers and amphibious assault ships.  The three modules we envisioned were mine warfare, surface warfare and submarine warfare.  In each of the appropriate warfare areas, the LCS’s were meant to augment forces by providing extra eyes and ears.

Now Secretary Hagel wants a smaller, more capable and lethal ship to be built to take the place of the LCS.  But we can’t afford the Navy we want to build now.  Adding a more capable, lethal ship (Frigate style) is going to cost more that the LCS it will replace and will lead to even smaller quantities of ships at a time when the vision is to expand the Navy’s reach in the Asian-Pacific region.  Where’s the reality check? By the way, it’s not like the current US Navy frigates are bristling with armament….a Point-Defense CIWS, 76mm gun, a few torpedoes, maybe a towed sonar and a helo.  Virtually the same  as the ASW module equipped LCS.  So I submit using current frigates as a model for the capable, more lethal vessel is probably not a good idea.
A Congressional Budget Office analysis of the Navy’s 2014 Thirty Year ShipbuildingPlan has some startling data in it.  It notes that the most optimistic case is that the FY14 plan was going to cost at least $18 Billion a year for the next 30 years and that a more realistic figure is probably closer to $20 Billion.  The report also notes that the historical average in the Navy’s ship procurement budget from 1984 to 2013 is about $14 Billion…..that’s a deficit of $4-6 Billion a year!  Keep in mind in the FY15 request the Navy is putting 11 Aegis Class cruisers on the bench, seriously considering not refueling the carrier USS George Washington and delaying the procurement of the amphibious docking ship replacement by a year.  There’s a fairly reliable benchmark used by shipbuilders to determine the cost of a ship… the DDG-51 Class costs about $167,000 per ton to build and the frigate exported by the French (probably about the size and capability that SecDef wants) costs about $122,000 per ton to build.  The LCS is costing about $350 Million right now, so the Big Guy wants to replace that with something that’s going to cost about $500-600 Million to build.  The current frigates “lack multi-mission capability necessary for modern surface combatants” (that’s a quote from the US Navy web site) so whatever frigate the new LCS Study Group comes up with will have to be more capable than what we have now……and that, my friends, will cost a lot of money the Navy does not have.

So I’m really interested to see what the Study Group comes up with….a deadlier, more capable ship than either the LCS’s or the FFG’s currently in service. And in order to afford them the Navy will have to come up with an additional $400 Million or so in the shipbuilding budget each year.  Where’s the money coming from?  I guess we just print more.  Why not?  It’s not much different to be $4 Billion under the requirement as it is to be $$4.4 Billion.  What’s a few hundred million among friends?

Today’s title is a fairly common term used when referring to an organization that appears to have no other purpose other than sustaining the survival of the organization itself.  It’s like an Organizational “Black Hole” (OBH) which sucks up activity and productivity, only to have nothing of value produced in return.  It’s a phenomenon I’ve observed in both government and the private sector so neither world has a corner on the market.  Organizations that one might classify as a “bureaucracy” may exhibit the characteristics of an OBH, but not necessarily.  There are plenty of bureaucracies in government producing useful things, perhaps not at the speed or efficiency we would like, but that issue is a different matter from the OBH.  I  suggest as a leader that you should periodically take a look at your organization to ensure you remain well outside the influence of the OBH.  OBH’s have the following items in common:

1. They tend to form when an entity reorganizes frequently
2. There is excessive focus  on development of strategy
3. There is too little focus on execution of strategy
4. Their mission and/or desired results are not clear
5. They have highly organized and complicated structures
6. They have difficulty in articulating what they do in plain terms (excessive “buzz word” use)
7. They are always in meetings

I think that will do for now.  I’m not going to comment on all of these factors in this posting, but I will chat for a moment on what I consider to be the most significant problem, the balance between strategy and execution.  My experience has been that most successful and growing organizations have a healthy balance between the two.  If there is too much focus on strategy, companies are constantly conducting strategic off-sites because they never feel like the previous strategy is accomplishing the desired results.  This is not surprising since if there is little focus on execution, metrics are rarely established and responsibility rarely assigned for elements of the strategy.  Therefore, no one really knows if the strategy is being effective or not.  If a company focuses too much on execution, it never achieves its growth targets because of Crenshaw’s Anti-Multiplicative Rule, “ You can’t double revenue by doing twice as much of the same thing.”  I’ve noticed that many OBH’s have very sophisticated organizational structures and have multiple interconnected relationships.  The organization has spent so much time organizing and admiring itself, it has forgotten to produce product. The leadership feels very comfortable with this complex organizational structure because it gives the outside observer the illusion of operational excellence and it looks great in Power Point.   I firmly believe it’s possible to organize yourself right out of business.

The dilemma leaders face is that as companies and organizations grow, they require more structure.  But structure tends to inhibit agility and entrepreneurship, thus limiting growth.  Good leaders know how to put just enough structure in place to allow for growth without adversely impacting agility and entrepreneurship.

So beware the Organizational Black Hole syndrome.  Be highly suspicious of briefings pregnant with elegant organization charts, explained with a healthy dose of “buzz words” like stovepipes, barriers, synergistic effects,  vis-a vis, etc.  Make sure the focus is not so much on structure but more on execution and results.  I believe that an organization that is focused on execution excellence will do well with just about any strategy but an organization focused on strategy will never quite hit the mark.  There’s a quote I like from Stephen Covey….”The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”  Make your main thing execution and you can’t go wrong.

I’ve often thought of my Grandfather and the changes he saw in his 95 years.  Once he plowed fields with a mule (~1 HP) , but switched to plowing with a turbocharged International Harvester tractor (~300 HP) in his later years. As a young man on a farm in Alabama he got the news of what happened last week by horseback, but in his later years he got the news as it happened from the television.  He even went from watching the man in the moon from the back porch to watching a man walk on the moon.  At the turn of the century he saddled his horse and rode four hours to town and just before he died , he hopped on a plane and was in Las Vegas in four hours.  And he saw the horse-drawn wagon turned into a horseless carriage.  I suspect he wondered what possible benefit could come from getting rid of the reliable horse and replacing the Old Grey Mare with an unreliable, noisy and complicated gasoline engine.  In fact, I bet he would still saddle his horse to go to town, even when he could have taken the Ford and I’m sure he wasn’t the only one.  As I was looking at an MQ-9 Reaper, Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) doing touch-and-go’s at Creech AFB near Las Vegas this morning,  I thought once again about my grandfather and the parallels in our lives.  I’ve gone from giving the Operator the phone number to having my iPhone give me the number.  I’ve moved up from the Atari 800 (with the 32K memory module) to the MacBook Air….heck, I even have a three terabyte server sitting in my basement (at significantly less cost than the 32K Atari I might add).  My fleet airplane, the A-6 Intruder, had a computer with a memory made up of 32,000 little round ceramic magnets woven together, operating at a speed of 8 Hertz (32 Hertz in Attack).  Watching the JSF flying this morning I can’t even imagine how much memory it has, although I suspect it’s in the Giga’s.  And my guess is the speed of its computer is in the Giga range as well.  Wow!

So think about the early attempts to field a pilotless airplane or what was called a drone.  I remember the Navy’s attempt at pilotless aircraft as a midshipman looking at the DASH helicopter operating from the deck of a destroyer.  You never see them in museums because they all were last seen flying over the horizon, never to return.  We made several other attempts before arriving with Fire Scout.  We are now on the dawn of deploying a fixed-wing, pilotless, tactical aircraft on aircraft carriers with the X-47B and long-range Global Hawks operating from our Naval Air Stations.  The Air Force is conducting routine combat patrols with MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Raptors and contributing to our war efforts in Afghanistan daily.  The Air Force pilots who remotely fly these aircraft are quick to point out that they are not flying drones, but rather Remotely Piloted Aircraft.  Just like at the turn of the century when people thought of automobiles as “horseless carriages.” Because of that narrow view they had no concept of what the automobile might become.  I submit the same is true in the RPA world.  Even now,  I suspect that many of the “Old Salts” are questioning the value of a carrier-based RPA because they see it a merely an A-7 or A-4 flying around with no pilot inside.  We have no idea how the addition of the X-47B to carrier air wings will change the way the Navy flies and fights.  But the sooner we get out of the “horseless carriage” mindset and look at the X-47B not as an airplane without a pilot, but as a radically new way of projecting power, the better off we will be.