The original plan for this series was to cover the story detailing the Gap Mitigation Study (GAP) effort tasked out by the Director (DIR) of Central Intelligence (DCI)-Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) DIR George Tenet-on 8 July 2002.
Earlier this year we hit the 20th anniversary of both the tasking and the subsequent report, originally scheduled for presentation to the DCI, the Community Management Staff led by Joan Dempsey, and intelligence community seniors 11 October 2002, but delayed one week to 18 October 2022.
I wrote an email to commemorate both events, but you can’t do justice to the magnitude of this issue in an email, nor the events that unfolded around it in the government at the time, nor the sequence of events that culminated in both the effort, and the outcome: it was a “long strange trip.”
Doing justice to this effort-in my mind-required 15 articles to this point and along the way I presented myriad exemplars of how GAP was preceded-and followed by-and it continues to this day, malfeasance playing out in many programs across the government. The result of frankly poor program management practices and what in hindsight strikes me as a penchant or misunderstanding where often non-technical people are elevated into positions where they become responsible for procurement actions they are ill-equipped for, skill-wise: our government does a poor job prepping managers for such actions which they somehow think-because they are now in a position where they are a decision-maker-that it comes with the territory (or something.)
In most cases their management skills prove inadequate for the task at hand, and they are exposed. They often confirm or reaffirm that management is not leadership, becoming somewhat of the poster child for the Peter Principle in government.
I’m reminded of the commercial where a person opens a door, and there are maybe 50 people on the floor on their backs. He asks what is going on-and he is told they are “ideating” solutions. The natural question is “How is it going?” and the response was, “I don’t know, we haven’t come up with anything yet:” exactly.
One of the poor management practices that predominated during my time in civil service was the “meeting game,” the last bastion of a poor manager who would love to be a leader and thinks you can get there by having meetings that prove you are in charge and that you care. The net result is rarely progress, but often lower morale, a loss of faith and trust in management or leadership, poor program execution and high turnover rates: familiarity still often breeds contempt.
The government has taken to doing Employee Climate Surveys (ECS) on an annual basis. These are often touted by Human Development, but rarely decomposed and analyzed into trends, root causes of discontent and-more rarely and importantly-plans of action and milestones to address issues.
My favorite result from an agency survey happened with one of the above-described managers who was leading the aforementioned Research and Development arm at NGA who lacked a technical or scientific bone in their body and was an acknowledged poor manager who believed the difference between leadership and management was a “myth.” The ECS results came in and Human Development (HD) arranged to have one of their PhDs working with the Ombudsman’s office meet with them and they’re staff to discuss results and to work on remediation plans.
The HD representative was astounded when-in response to a dozen or so of 30 areas of concern-the reply was, “Sometimes people have to suck it up: I’m not running the love boat over here you know!” Well, exactly.
I did two emails to commemorate the GAP Study anniversary: one was a brief one on GAP itself-the process, the project, the people, the tasks, the pace and the results in brief. The second email was somewhat of a framing or context email that walked through what I have described as the “space-time continuum” issues that happened along the way from 1955 onward-when congress first looked into the construct of an Office of the Director of Nation Intelligence (ODNI) to split out the management of the intelligence community.
The second email reminded me of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” a not quite loose affiliation of causal and causality of events that in the aggregate express the fact or idea expressed in the term “SNAFU,” and a laundry list of actions and events that undermined-well-a lot of big actions and programs over this time.
The result I sought to achieve was to demonstrate through examples that a lot of programs during this time period struggled and didn’t make it; with the context that troubled programs were more the norm than unusual during this time. Which is why we have 15 articles to this point.
I thought I would provide dear reader somewhat of a break by summarizing where we have arrived at in space and time through articles 1-14, culminating in 15 that explained how-and why-Boeing was struggling mightily with the optical component of the FIA contract.
The somewhat tongue in cheek observation I made from the very beginning was that the murder of security guard Tina F. Ricca in 1994 set in motion a series of actions that disrupted the space-time continuum, resulting in an alternative path that ultimately changed the course of events in a disastrous way.
The construct is-albeit-somewhat of a stretch or a bit hokey, as the NRO building was not something that would remain a secret for very long once it was completed. However, I think it is indisputable that her murder led to congress finding out about the construction much earlier than perhaps the soft-landing envisioned by then NRO DIR Harris: he is a smart guy, but whoever set this in motion without seeking approval from congress was “way out there in Kramer territory:” in fact Seinfeld-like.
Picture the House or Senate budget or intelligence committee coming out to Westfields for the first time, and the congressional liaison (Ben Cimini) opens with “What do you think of the new building?” “Er, very nice-but where and how did you get it?”
NRO DIR Harris was fired for technically being unable to account for some $2B in unaccounted funds, not because he built the building: but any savvy, connected politician worth their salt would have been visiting congress immediately if they discovered during their in-brief that there was a little matter of a building to deal with-eventually-with congress, and that might be a problematic discussion.
Along the way of telling this story I outlined at least a half dozen or so acquisition and program foibles or follies in support of my story title-not the least of which is obviously FIA as centerpiece-in support of my not-so-subtle point that over the 42 years I’ve been involved in aspects of the intelligence business, it is my experience that these preventable disasters happen all the time: the only thing differentiating FIA from all these other exemplars is the magnitude of the frivolity or folly. FIA is somewhat the “King Tut” or “Kong” of these problem programs.
Now you may be sitting there thinking that I covered a lot-maybe all of the problem programs-in my run down of examples and flawed acquisition projects and procurements: lord knows it seemed like a lot. But you likely have not heard about some of the other big ones. The sad and tragic part is I didn’t cover anywhere near the totality of the disastrous program’s list, and I will name another dozen or so that are big, furry exemplars of wasted time and money-maybe in a series focused on that topic alone-just for grins and giggles-to reinforce my point or to convince you of the fact that we-our government-sucks at this job: and this job is really thinking through, planning, developing and delivering the future work and production environment from a technology and mission accomplishment standpoint as the generation of government workers turn over and a new cadre emerges to take the helm.
I’m not a budget guy, although I was in a meeting or two over this timeframe where dollars were discussed (like every meeting.) My final dollar accounting for FIA is in the broad, rounded numbers category-both to avoid any classification issues, but mainly because I don’t think anyone knows the true cost or magnitude or total cost of the program except maybe bean counters at the USDI, DNI and congress.
Particularly in consideration of the original FIA ground and satellite procurement/contract cost (~5B or 9B-depending on who you believe,) the overruns for the optical portion (~16 or 12B,) the termination costs for Boeing (1/2 to 3/4th of a B,) the subsequent award to LMC (~3-5B,) the cost of mitigation efforts (~5-7B,) any modifications to any of it to deal with the new design emerging from LMC in 2005 (mere rounding errors at that point.) Plus, the cancelation of three programs (~3-7B,) the harvesting of research and development dollars for several others (~2-4B) and the waste of time by all involved (free taxpayer funded time-all of it.)
I don’t know about you Vern, but I got ~33B-46B or so-not counting the money needed by NGA, the services, the COCOMS and agencies to deal with “all of it.”
Additionally, government-taxpayer-investment dollars that might have gone to the fledgling US commercial market were instead consumed by a select-small number-of firms with the “right stuff” at the time for US government belt and suspender actions undertaken to mitigate the potential “Gap.”
If you think that is a shame-then consider-this is our government spending taxpayer dollars like a rich drunken Army guy and-like a dog-on a bone: and it is still going on today (NRO announces commercial imagery contracts with MAXAR, Blacksky Global and Planet: the original mitigation option, a firm with former NRO civilians, and a good persistence option for release to coalition partners.)
The lesson learned is damning of the process and the people if you believe that the NRO selected Boeing to save a billion dollars over the LMC proposal: let that sink in for a few, as my CAS3 small group leader LTC Ralph Brooks used to say, “Like a ham simmering in its own chuices.”
If you started out on the Boeing or LMC-or any of the capture teams or the government procurement team-there was the potential to spend your entire career working FIA, encompassing the study and analysis phases in the early 1990s, to the procurement effort through 1999 that awarded the contract to Boeing, to 2005 when the award to LMC took place, and well into the 21st century as the program delivered and eventually reached the objective state where replacement satellites were planned and executed right up to present.
The government-and vendors-learned a lot of valuable lessons along the way, with one of the unfortunate ones being the faux lesson that you have to guard against “requirements creep” and that a capability-based procurement is the best metric to guide decisions.
Requirements creep had nothing to do with Boeing’s problem on FIA: nothing, while a capability-based view ignores the reality that America’s first line of defense facing the world are the COCOMS and their indications and warning (I&W) processes that depend upon national technical means collection and reporting to feed and inform the process-when necessary-but mainly to monitor activity to get as early a jump on problems as possible. While a blinding flash of the obvious, the majority of these I&W requirements reside in areas we are not collecting with airborne resources.
What is the real difference between these two-is it a true choice-or is it blather? Think of a system I mentioned before-the KH-8-that was exceptional at doing point targets at exquisite resolution and quality compared to the KH-9, which was an area collector. The latter worked well for tens of thousands of COCOM requirements that had a nominative quality specification of the middle of the road, average National Imagery Interpretability Rating Scale (NIIRS) value of a ~5 and could cover large quantities of area: but was not useable for the average KH-8 collection requirement. Which was no accident, but the result of the design objective of the different systems.
A closer to home, simpler example is you won’t find me towing my horses around with my Accura MDX, while my GMC 3500 “dually” will do that all day: 4000 pounds versus 16,000 pounds.
If you were to decompose the collection requirements “deck” into categories like size requirements, geographic distribution around the world, quality aspects, priorities, and “stuff,” you would find it to be the case that some ~40% or more-maybe as many as 60%-are COCOM requirements tied to their operational war plans.
The importance of the I&W portion of the above is best viewed in the case of a place like Korea. United States Forces Korea (USFK) Operations Plan (5027) has Flexible Deterrent Options to augment the force with Low Density, High Demand resources that begin to flow into theater (as part of the larger Time Phased Force Deployment List) at a certain level where I&W reporting tripped and has activated or triggered the response.
The sheer volume of collection required to meet the COCOM I&W demand around the world is a staggering amount of collection: but we’ve been executing against those requirements for decades and much like any other best practice, we’ve gotten very good at it over time.
The above collection deck characterization is done routinely and frequently and constitutes the aforementioned collection requirements that we use to evaluate candidate system capability.
But with tremendous turnover-total-in all the key positions and so many people involved at so many different levels over those years, it is not surprising that many of the true, enduring lessons of FIA have faded into the background.
I’m reminded of what happened to Texas in February 2021 when the weather was terribly bad and their wildly optimistic “green” plans for energy production proved wanting to the situation they encountered.
Those charged with dealing with such matters do well to consider not only the best-and worst-case scenario, but also the possibility of having a plan for the 100-500- and one-thousand-year scenario. Nobody can afford these rare occurrences but planning for the worst is a best practice.
In the final analysis of the FIA Procurement-it remains unresolved to me-and strikes me as germane to my premise-that Harris was sincerely committed to a recompete of the existing NRO satellite contract. By staging the procurement in a manner that would neck down the qualified candidates via an A, B, and C or final stage, the NRO achieved the objective-whether more theoretical than real or not-to provide an incentive for LMC to feel somewhat of the “heat” of competition that would result in better proposal pricing than would otherwise be the case for a sole-source procurement.
The NRO could have proceeded to award at any point at which they became convinced that LMC was still the best choice going forward.
I made the case of how unusual it is for the government to pick a vendor with basically no previous demonstrated experience on such an important project. Building these types of satellites for the government for such a huge and important effort that would define and represent the US government satellite reconnaissance capability well into the 21st century seems to qualify for caution, prudence and circumspection on the part of the FIA selection team.
With the firing of Harris and Hill, Keith Hall-a former Army Intelligence Officer and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Security and Intelligence from 1991-1995-somewhat of the precursor position for the later Undersecretary of Defense for Security and Intelligence (USDI)-became the DIR and Dep DIR NRO. David A. Kier-who worked for NASA as an engineer and had been in and around satellite launch business for years, was later named Dep DIR NRO.
Albert Einstein provided the theory-and theorem, but Doc actually described the time space continuum problem best in Back to the Future. The rest is history at this point until we can go back in time and fix things….
End of Part 16
24 November 2022
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