Defense Department’s planning still upside-down

OPINION:

At the National Security Innovation Base Summit this March, Pentagon modernization received a D. The consensus, which was correct, was that America would not be able to keep up with peer adversaries.

The proposed solution: Shorten the procurement cycle. Just move faster.

Paradoxically, this would be a mistake. Because the Pentagon will never be able to move fast enough, per se, to provide U.S. warfighters with the competitive advantage they need.

Why? Because the Defense Department’s planning process is upside-down.

As Chinese leader Xi Jinping has often stated, technology exploitation is the foundation of a country’s strength in all competitive environments, including economic and military. China has proved this by becoming a superpower faster than any other country in history.

However, the two superpowers today take radically different approaches to military technology. China’s defense planning places technology exploitation on the front end as the dynamic foundation of military advantage, while America places it at the back end as a way of satisfying rigid requirements.

As a result, no matter how rapidly the Defense Department satisfies its own requirements or how rapidly those requirements evolve, China will retain the initiative. The U.S. will be left playing catch-up at best and be outclassed at worst.

The Defense Department’s planning starts by identifying likely adversaries and anticipating their military strategies. It attempts to predict what technologies, with what levels of capability, they will possess. Based on this, it develops countering U.S. military strategies.

The Defense Department then attempts to determine what technologies, with what levels of capability, will be required to carry out these strategies. This information is provided to our military and commercial R&D communities as development requirements for future weapon systems.

The sluggishness, cost and inefficiency of this process disappoint even those who regard it as the correct process.

By contrast, Chinese planning starts with development of a technology strategy, which drives the rest of the process. Chinese military planners thus develop their military strategies knowing what competitive advantages their warfighters will have, in what competitive environments and at what future points in time.

When China’s technology strategy increases China’s competitive advantages, China’s military strategy evolves. This is one reason Beijing’s geopolitical ambitions have relentlessly expanded.

China addresses technology exploitation holistically and worldwide, not just in terms of individual adversaries’ capabilities. Thus it is today outmaneuvering, in a coherent, unified manner, both offensively and defensively, the military technological plans of the U.S. and its allies.

Merely speeding up America’s technology development process cannot change this. What is needed is a whole different approach. Thankfully, the precedent for a solution exists.

The Pentagon once cherished the kind of proactive, tech-forward strategy that China today employs. During the 1980s, the Defense Intelligence Agency and CIA jointly created a sophisticated, computerized technology analysis platform called Project Socrates. I was its founding director.

Socrates was deliberately designed to largely automate the creation of precisely the kinds of proactive technology strategies that we need today. The system vindicated itself with its contributions to stealth technology, the Strategic Defense Initiative and other key military innovations.

The system systematized technology strategy as a concrete, reproducible, teachable methodology, with consistent rules derived from the underlying science. It enabled the connections between successful moves in the space of technological possibilities and the resulting competitive advantages, to be known up-front precisely and accurately.

President Reagan’s undersecretary of defense for acquisition, Robert Costello, had a directive drafted mandating that Socrates become a foundational tool for all Defense Department planning. Unfortunately, President George H.W. Bush abolished the program to appease foreign allies who feared its implications for U.S. competitiveness against them in the civilian economic arena.

If Socrates, or something like it, is revived, this would put America squarely on the road to exploiting technology with the speed, efficiency and agility needed to match China. The Defense Department would be able to use technology strategy as the first step of a planning process that would enable it to seize and maintain the initiative, not cede it to our adversary by default. The U.S. could develop military strategies knowing precisely and accurately what competitive advantages U.S. warfighters will have.

The alternative, merely trying to move faster, will just accelerate a process that is not working, cannot work and will put America onto an endless treadmill of increasing costs that will fail to deliver battlefield superiority.

• Michael Sekora was the founding director of President Reagan’s Socrates Project. He has continued its mission by working with America’s key allies and has taught technology strategy at the University of Texas at Austin and elsewhere.