3.5 ACQUISITION OF THE WAR MACHINE
The method of systems analysis and its various quantitative techniques have shaped the American acquisition process for a long time. Against the background of the Cold War planning scenario, the Pentagon developed a process for controlling command technology by guiding its productive energies towards those particular technologies that would lead to the highest increase in mission effectiveness at the smallest cost, and by helping us decide the minimum number of weapon systems incorporating those technologies at which we could safely stop. One did not simply acquire the technology that technologists wanted, but the technology that best served a planning scenario that reflected the security aims of the nation and which were largely independent of that technology. Command technology had to fit into a preexisting framework and was therefore not free to pursue its inner developmental urges. Equally, one did not simply acquire the number of weapon systems that industry wanted us to buy, but the number corresponding to the available funding. The national security goals of the nation served therefore as limits to what, and how much, command technology was allowed to produce.
Under this process, the acquisition of technology starts with a statement of military need. This requirement document lays out the military rationale for the eventual creation of a given capability. The next step in the process is to identify a set of technologies that could provide the needed capability. Some of these may already be available; some may only be theoretical ideas requiring further development. In any event, the candidate technologies must reach the point at which one can demonstrate the feasibility of actually producing a weapon system based on them. That done, one must choose between these alternative technological solutions to the capability shortfall. Routinely, the choice is made on the basis of an analysis of alternatives, which compares the various candidate technologies amongst themselves in terms of their contribution to the successful execution of the planning scenario and the corresponding costs. The choice is typically the technology that appears to be the most cost-effective, although there may be circumstances under which a lesser solution is chosen to avoid high developmental risk.
The chosen alternative is then transferred to the next stage in the acquisition process where a full engineering model of the weapon system employing the technology is produced. Finally, upon thus successfully demonstrating one’s ability to produce the weapon system, the decision to begin full production is made and a schedule fitting the available funding is created. Acquisition stops when the desired number of systems corresponding to the available funding have been purchased and deployed.
Depending upon the requirement under the consideration, the planning scenario will make itself known either as a mission or as a campaign. If the desired weapon system only affected a particular mission within the planning scenario, a restricted version of that scenario, focusing on the execution of that mission, may suffice. Otherwise, a full campaign would be required. By restricting consideration of the war to a mission, one runs the risk that the relevance of that mission to the conduct of the war will never be explicit and, therefore, one may end-up buying a particular technology because it optimized a particular mission despite the fact that acquisition of another technology which would optimize another mission altogether might have led to a much better war outcome. By expanding the field of view to an entire campaign, however, one runs the risk that the campaign outcome gets polluted by the influence of a large number of considerations foreign to the issue at hand.
In both cases, the risks can be controlled by recalling that systems analysis has never been intended to provide the answer to any technology question; rather, it was designed to understand relationships, to identify trends, and to discover strengths and weaknesses in our military posture. Thus, appropriate understanding of relationships would mitigate the artificial isolation between mission and the war, while appropriate focus upon strength and weaknesses rather than point estimates of campaign outcomes, would mitigate the influence of unimportant considerations. As we have pointed out before in this chapter, systems analysis requires for its proper employment a certain degree of art.