"Doing Less" grabs attention.

Dan Ward's article "Doing Less with More" (Defense AT & L, November-December 2004) rang true for many readers, and we received a record amount of correspondence. A selection follows.

High-dollars Can Hurt Innovation

Hopefully, senior leadership in the acquisition community will take the points that Dan Ward makes to heart. Since we both work in the research lab, we understand the innovation that occurs in a low-cost environment and the struggle to project our current contributions to the Air Force (in the form of officer performance reports) when we who work with only thousands of dollars are compared to officers in the program offices who are managing millions of dollars. In fact, I'm planning a permanent change of assignment to the system program office in April 2005, and that is one of the reasons. Although working in the lab as an engineer is very rewarding, I believe that many young officers feel the need to move away from innovation to management early in their careers to be competitive for promotions later on. Just another thought on how the Air Force focus on high-dollar programs may be hurting innovation by taking more experienced engineers away from developmental engineering jobs where the real innovation occurs.

Lt. Kenneth C. Bradley, USAF

Air Force Research Laboratory/Munitions Directorate

Satisfying a Political Agenda

Good article about overfunding. I also think the political and fiscal culture is a big cost growth driver. It seems sometimes large weapons programs exist to satisfy a political agenda rather than to efficiently meet a military need in the field. (Now there's a controversial article topic!)

Archie B. Clark III

Air Force Operational Test and Evaluation Center 

Heavy Financing, Diminishing Returns 

Dan Ward's article directly applies to software development efforts as well. Currently I am the technical lead for a software development effort that involves a very small team of bright people. As the software has been embraced by the community, I am noticing an unpleasant trend--managers who want to "grow the team" and heavily finance development to the point of diminishing returns.

Our team recently looked at another piece of software that in some ways resembles our own but is already in this heavily financed state. It has a budget of several million dollars and 60 full-time developers. Sadly, their result is less impressive than what our small team of three to four people has achieved. Why? Because the top technical lead no longer develops software. His full-time job is to run around and see what every other team is doing. He manages other "teams" with more "technical leads" whose members have meetings all the time to coordinate development activity. It goes on and on. The law of diminishing returns is in full force.

I don't think our managers understand that too big of a budget can really hurt development. They seem to be enamored with the idea of getting more money for development. It's almost like some kind of strange reward system where what's to be proud of is not what we are doing and producing but how much more money we can get for doing it.

Name withheld by request

Money for Problems not Leadership

Dan Ward's article is, quite simply, brilliant. That said, a counterpoint of innovation during peacetime is the Bunker Buster from Gulf War I. Although we were not fighting the battle just yet, it was developed prior to the kick-off of ops. It went from concept to reality in something like 90 days and was devastating to the enemy. I call it throwing money at problems rather than leadership. The most with the least--that is the Marine Corps mode of operations.

The command I'm with would support Ward's assertion that operators who define their requirements and push the limits of technology are more successful. Conversely, whenever we in the military "blindly" deal with vendors and their concepts, we find more often than not that they try to write our requirements for us and it just does not work. A robust market surveillance program and exchange of information, coupled with well-thought-out, validated requirements by our end-users, does in fact work. By the way, I would definitely consider my unit a low dollar figure "program" that has a high return on its "people-power" investment.

Capt. Brian T. Grana, USMC

Chemical Biological Incident Response Force