In parts 1-13 I detailed the story of the declassification of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO,) how the new NRO building was discovered by congress and led to the firing of Director NRO Jeffrey Harris and Deputy Director (DD) NRO Jimmie D. Hill. I also laid out procurement aspects of the buying and building of the next generation US satellite collection program-the Future Imagery Architecture (FIA,) and how the firing of Jeff Harris might have resulted in unintended consequences with the contract award to Boeing that might never had happened. What I called the “Doc, space time continuum” conundrum he outlined in Back to the Future…
Along the way I’ve detailed and covered myriad government actions and projects in a seemingly baffling or random manner, that I believe go a long way to explaining how the US government-consistently for a very long time-but in the FIA example led by the NRO-bolloxed up a whole bunch of stuff just like this where taxpayers ended up spending nearly 8 times the original contract award by the time things got straightened out with the program.
In the meantime, canceling a number of promising technology programs whose funds were harvested to drag the corpse, eventually paying Boeing a cancelation fee, while awarding the residue of the optical component of FIA to Lockheed Martin (LMC,) where it arguably should have been awarded in the first place. Oh, and by the time that happened in 2005, all the development engineering money Boeing spent from 1999 up through 2005 was reprinted and given to LMC.
It has significantly been twenty-three years since the NRO awarded the FIA contract to Boeing-a firm that had never built a reconnaissance satellite for the US government. Twenty years since the GAP Mitigation Study results were presented to the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) George Tenet and IC leaders, and seventeen years since Director of National Intelligence (DNI) John Negroponte approved in 2005 the cancellation of the FIA optical component that had been awarded to Boeing in 1999, while awarding the completion of the procurement action to Lockheed Martin Corporation (LMC.)
By the time this action was taken the optical component of the contract was at least three years behind schedule and about three times the original cost estimate for the program. Additionally, three major new satellite programs had been canceled, and the funds harvested to buy FIA schedule, even as the optical piece was doing the Paul Simon thing (slip sliding away…)
There were two aspects of these events that were troubling: one was the loss of opportunity and potential represented by the cancelation of the ongoing programs during the heart of our Global War on Terror efforts, which were the fruition of new technology along the conceptual development path of future space capability: that is not to say that these programs would have made it to space, but more speaking to the fact that poor judgement and decisions have serious repercussions in opportunity costs.
The second and far worse aspect is that despite the influx of tremendous amounts of money over and above the original contract value-several additional tranches of money that raised the ceiling or contract cost caps-the government assessment of the probability of accomplishing the contract schedule-according to an evaluation of the completion of near term remaining tasks, the dollars available, margin (slack time (amount of “free” schedule time available in the event of problems,)) was never much above 50%, even with the increased level of funding.
Not to insinuate anyone is slow on the uptake or anything, but I want to repeat that-with an original contract award of ~5B-the addition of money that brought the total to nearly three times that amount only bought a little more than a coin flip odd of success.
In general, I made the case in previous articles that this problem largely stemmed from the firing of NRO Dir Jeff Harris, who I don’t believe would have ever allowed this to happen. A fair question is if Harris was “so smart,” why did he make the decision to recompete the contract in the first place? Even though the government wants to provide opportunities for small business and facilitate competition for procurements, only LMC had the “right stuff” in terms of past experience and the only way for that aspect not to factor into the decision would be for the milestone decision authority (MDA) or procurement selection officials to modify the terms of the proposal weighting or scoring to diminish the importance of that factor: which would be foolhardy for such a procurement.
Why would the NRO-Jeff Harris and the contracting team do such a thing? The obvious answer is to gain leverage in negotiating the ultimate contract award with LMC: but they apparently forgot to explain that to or tell the new leadership team-Keith Hall and David A. Kier.
Were that the strategy-it was an even dumber move from jump street. Even if the procurement and all the acquisition activity that took place cost “only” several hundred million dollars to achieve leverage that would have resulted in a theoretical savings of some 1 Billion dollars by selecting Boeing over LMC, the real ”cost” of that action includes all the government and contract procurement actions from 1994-1999 necessary to conduct the process across the entire IC community-contractors, government, FFRDC and the investigative actions that followed the award, plus the mitigation actions taken, as well as the loss of the investment in the 3 canceled programs.
Plus, the cost to do the re-award to LMC: by the time that happened in 2005 Boeing had been spending six years of contract award money in pursuit of the optical component-and there was no worthwhile residue for LMC to “pick up that weekend” and reuse. If LMC’s original proposal was half the contract value and a billion more than Boeing’s, by 2005 with all the loss of key personnel who were no longer involved in pumping out satellites for the US government, who had retired, left to help Boeing or some startup like the mitigation efforts, it is reasonable to believe that the price went up well beyond LMCs 1999 proposal.
Oh-and there were termination costs associated with the decision and paid to Boeing.
The folly on the part of the government in regard to this decision likely cost some $25-30B or more by the time FIA reached the initial operating capability. There is no accounting for the staggering amount of time all the FIA acquisition activity took, but recall I mentioned early-on the rumor that Boeing and LMC capture teams budgeted nearly 10% or ~100 million on the bid and proposal effort.
That is a shocking result in an effort that potentially glibly pursued a risky cost savings perceived-believed-to be 1B.
To the casual observer and insiders alike, the NRO took a huge hit reputation-wise and program-wise with this action. There was somewhat of a floundering of the NRO over the next half decade or so-under the leadership of Dir Don Kerr and Scott Large-that neither was to blame for as the stigma associated with poor programmatics echoed far and wide throughout the swamp.
Problems like this result in ramifications and repercussions from congress and oversight that in this case seriously adversely impacted the reputation and “swagger” of the entire organization.
This was not a good thing to have happen on the heels of the building surprise from the NRO, particularly since it took NRO leadership a long time to take responsibility and ownership for their role in the FIA debacle.
To somewhat “square the circle,” the NRO “comeback” did not begin in earnest until Gen Bruce Carlson took over in 2009. I already covered how Carlson was eventually done dirty by some combination of the Principal Deputy Director DNI (PDDNI) Stephanie O’Sullivan and reportedly the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s (SSCI) Barbara Murkowski MD and Diane Feinstein CA, who continued the “rape and pillage” approach of NRO technology program’s that had become the “save the FIA program slush fund” activity in the budget/program cycle.
Among best and worst program practices, you would be hard pressed to find a worst practice than being so inept in program execution that you have to sell your seed corn.
Bruce Carlson revived the spirit and the attitude of the NRO. It was palpable-and I’m talking about the before and after he took over-in the building. One of my favorite techniques he employed was a variation of the theme-a la Rosie the Riveter-that reprised the World War II effort to recruit and highlight the contribution of woman in the work force.
In the NRO case everybody was involved in helping build the US space capability by touting what they did, where they worked, and what they were contributing to: launch of satellites and space capability: he turned the organization around quickly.
The US government and the IC owe him a debt of gratitude: but moreso, an apology. He did not need the NRO job when he took it, as he had resolved to spend time with his family and grandchildren. It takes a special person to do what he did to revive not only the swagger and cockiness of a large organization-in this case a good thing, in a place where we need leading edge technology, bold ideas, risk takers, some confidence bordering on cockiness, and energetic, positive people skating to where the puck is going: not timid souls who know the price of everything, and the value of nothing. Or those who are beholden to myriad distractions that detract from exquisite accomplishment and the legacy that makes an organization great.
I personally think the GAO, congress or maybe Rand should study the techniques Gen Carlson used to revive this great organization and to highlight the unprofessional and risky behavior that was pursued by the DNI and congress that resulted in this great man stepping away in outrage and protest.
The start of such a study would be the time period where Don Kerr became the PDDNI, a disastrous time for IC agencies and program managers who were not associated with the CIA. I previously covered where PDDNI Kerr was responsible for a totally arbitrary cut of the Research and Development funds for a program that the DNI never bothered to adjust, change, modify or eliminate any of the program requirements to justify the cuts: like an amateur expectation for the program to do the “best they can” with the money left. The cuts were to a program that had all the approved documentation congress, the DNI and DoD mandate for big programs-including a Cost as an Independent Variable Goup assessment (CAIG,) Cost as an Independent Variable (CAIV,) Independent Cost Estimate, and an Independent Life Cycle Cost Estimate: Kerr’s action just trashed these documents with no guidance, direction or explanation: just an axe blow.
As a bit of a reminder, I previously detailed that the replacement NRO DIR Betty Sapp was told in 2012 that there would be no more big and general cuts to NRO programs: but that was another big ole furry lie by the same actors who drove Gen Carlson away.
A colleague participated in an NSA sponsored NRO IMINT briefing to the National Security Agency (NSA) Advisory Group (NAG) that was headed up by former Assistant Secretary of Defense, Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence (ASDC3I) Art Money. While briefing the NRO master acquisition schedule, Art asked where several programs were. He was totally confused by the information that at least two of the CIA big ticket items were not only not reflected on the acquisition schedule, but they were considered projects-not programs, because they were not funded by the IC/DNI and had been surviving for-in one case-nearly 6 years by the disastrous process I outlined above that chased Gen Carlson out of government. It was not lost on Art that it meant a unique back end to process the mission that neither NGA nor NRO were involved in, but NGA would still be exploiting those data: just astounding in the wake of FIA.
Art Money was a major driver behind the idea of making sure that government programs were funded end to end, in order to ensure that congress understood the “total cost of information” to preclude surprise bills or unplanned for-unprogrammed and unwelcome cost to the services or combatant commands when the systems “hit the field:” he was absolutely dumbstruck that the PDDNI and DNI would allow such a thing to go on for nearly half a decade.
The NSA NAG took a break at that point, and he wanted to know what happened to two other programs that had been impacted by this absolute worst practice, one of which was canceled outright, the other cut some 80% of their R&D dollars as noted above.
I covered earlier how-and why-so many of these programs never made it because of folly. A study effort should look at how many programs died in the concept development phase in favor of funding many of these programs whose dollars and timeframe would indicate they were ready for primetime and initial operational capability, but much like FIA optical, they were poorly managed, poorly executed and never made it.
In part 15 we may just address another half dozen or so (other) huge programs in this category that you may not have heard of because they never made it (never delivered.)
End of part 14.
28 November 2022
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