For some time now I’ve regaled friends, acquaintances, frenemies and strangers alike with a litany-a veritable plethora-of examples of these acquisition problems that I’ve outlined in this series. Half a decade of retirement has not diminished the memory of the idjiotcy of my experiences in working through these issues for four decades: I saw little to no improvement in my time, and if anything, things were getting worse every year as the wrong lessons were implemented!
At this-or any point throughout what has become a series to rival my longest article, you may wonder what-in tarnation-does any of this have to do with cost overruns on FIA? That’s a fair question. My hope (which is not a plan) is that if there is one huge takeaway in this article, it’s the fact that the FIA problem-much like at least 95% of the acquisition and procurement problems I have knowledge of-both the ones I led where we experienced similar, show stopping and costly issues that had to be resolved, as well as those I was not responsible for-but inextricably involved with to varying degrees-were actually cut and dry and preventable.
Due diligence on the part of the government executing procedures, policies and program management 101 governance could have shortstopped these problems early on and saved anywhere from a minimum of at least $5 billion and perhaps as much as $9 billion dollars: and that’s assuming that it was actually about a ~$10B dollar program and not the $4.6 effort envisioned-so adding in about $5.4B, gratis.
Easy for me to say in hindsight, right-and also a bit inconsistent with my message of somewhat-well, okay, total bashing-of process engineers trained in the black art of Defense Acquisition Workforce Improvement Act (DAWIA.) But having been involved in (led) a big program or two, there were clear and obvious signs and evidence that stood out among the plethora of mandatory reporting requirements. Additionally, with the NRO we are talking about specially trained program managers who are among the leading government experts on satellite programs, who were working what may be the most important intelligence community program since the quest to resolve the so-called bomber gap in the 1950s: with near unlimited resources at their disposal.
Most of the major problems involved the FIA optical component, vice the radar or ground architecture, and it was those problems that resulted in most of the cost. The problems started with the proposal evaluation long before contract award, when the government didn’t call BS on the design that depended on a telescope calibration specification that exceeded what was possible to achieve on earth at the time.
The government-the NRO-was responsible for allowing Boeing to get away with an “aspirational” proposal, vice a demonstrable one. Boeing struggled right out of the gate in their attempt to produce systems testing that validated their design to the required specification and likely knew immediately that they needed to renegotiate the issue with the government.
All the cost-delays-wasted time-process-distractions-hand wringing-could have been mitigated to a tremendous degree in that first quarterly status meeting by looking at the emerging test and evaluation data being modeled on the telescope performance.
More importantly the best practice of having an active-and aggressive-Systems Integration (SI) partner with the government who is there to help the contractor but employed by the government-to help the vendor-is the true first line of defense against these problems. Why didn’t the government insist upon using the tried-and-true LMC SI in this regard???
I made the case early in this series that with the tragic death of Security Guard Tina Ricca, the NRO construction project was discovered by congress, which eventually led to the firing of NRO Director Jeff Harris, who was replaced by Keith Hall, who along with Dep Dir NRO Dennis Fitzgerald, oversaw the awarding of the FIA contract to Boeing.
My premise is the FIA award would never have gone to Boeing-a vendor who had never produced a satellite for the US government and proposed an optical component that required a miracle or two to work-were it not for the firing of Harris.
FIA is somewhat the culmination or piece de la resistance of program issues in the Intelligence Community (IC)-the poster child for government acquisition and program related problems for two very big reasons-one is the magnitude of the costs, which ran-by some accounts-5 to 8X over the original contract award: and that’s a “spicy meataball.” The second reason relates to the importance of the FIA program to national security and how close the nation came to suffering a gap in exquisite capability that is at the heart of our intelligence capability as a nation.
The third point I would make is peripheral to FIA, in that my list of problem programs stretches to about forty or so over this time period-only counting the big ones-in excess of a billion dollars-mostly in the IC-but in combination with the cost overruns on FIA it is probably some 150B dollars that mostly went on a flat rock or down a black hole.
My original belief-now conviction-is that 90% of that spending was avoidable through program management diligence and the application of best practices. A corollary to that conviction is we have two very serious problems with the way we budget and fund programs, and we also have a worst practice ongoing with DAWIA, which has shown itself to be all hat and no cattle, as evidenced by all the process, documentation, meetings and decision gates that each of these failed programs conducted-all well executed-none of which made a bit of difference in the final analysis.
I’m going to return to the FIA story here, but my threat is I am going to return to this theme as I cover the Gap effort in a little more detail.
Going through these problem programs in a future, separate article to list and somewhat rank them seems like a worthwhile idea, as well as to pull out some of the details from the myriad and voluminous (the veritable terrible twins when it comes to acquisition problems,) examples in cases like FIA, mainly because-in spite of the length of this series-I haven’t truly done justice to these problems, as I’ve barely “skimmed the top”-desnate (skimming the crème off the top”) of the more serious ones.
Such as when we discovered that Boeing’s telescope design was based on accomplishing unprecedented things that had never been achieved on earth before, primarily, the mirror calibration protocol that would ensure that the proposal-and the contracted specification related to the ground sampling distance-that equates to a National Imagery Interpretability Rating Scale (NIIRS) value-could be accomplished in either mode (e.g., for a point or area target.)
Which is not as complicated as it sounds, as the convention is that you can only get credit for-satisfy-collecting a target-a requirement-that the government collection staff at the NIMA Central Imagery Tasking Office-later NIMA/NGA Source-would check-off or count down as accomplished, if it was collected at the specified NIIRS value and therefore, met the customers need.
I think the above is clear enough but there is an ebb and flow and convention to this process that has eliminated things like, oh, USAF policy in Europe at one point where a flying unit got credit for a mission if the jet started up and taxied to the apron or ramp, but maybe weather at the target area or in the vicinity precluded takeoff: mission accomplished.
And yes, this is one of those “conspiracy theory” myths that Army guys use to bash the DTTFAF with-but at one point I brought this issue up with both the flying squadron, the Wing Commander, and the USAFE inspection team, as that poor smuckatelly in the field doesn’t think very much of the USAF credit scheme.
The national technical means (NTM) ”kissing cousin” to the above USAF Peacetime Aerial Reconnaissance Program “Voodoo” involves collecting the image, but in extreme obliquity at the edge of a frame where the middle of the image is indeed at the specified NIIRS value, but degradation or roll off precludes interpretability at the requested value at the edge of the image.
We could be charitable and give Boeing the benefit of the doubt in this regard about the NIIRS value, requirements, customer needs, etc., that perhaps they were unfamiliar with the convention and had not been savvy enough to clarify that question or detail sufficiently from 1994-1999 throughout the intensive three-phased procurement cycle that some likened to the march of the dead: but that would constitute another strike against them if such were the case.
This bad experience for Boeing may be the reason they later designed a new requirements management system that was not compatible with the community-wide program-and the government not only let them do it, but acted as if it was the right thing to do at a time when costs were being cut all over the IC community to fund “projects” like this that were re-inventing the wheel (and yes, talking about you CIA:) costly arrogance, chutzpah and waste.
The FIA optical was going so bad at the point we discovered the telescope calibration issue that it was considered just another nickel and dime problem. For instance-somewhat of the first big tell on FIA pending, emerging and future problems-that I have yet to mention-was when word spread through the NRO like wildfire that Boeing had to “sixcan” a large batch of sub-contractor parts that arrived in Seal Beach that-although they might have passed factory bench testing-tin was discovered in nearly all of them.
One of the first, fundamental, and inviolate rules in satellite fabrication is “thou shalt not use tin”: period-no debate-any questions-refer to previous. Tin is ordinarily an element that is flexible and has been used in a lot of applications, but space and satellites, no. Tin “weeps” in space, producing what looks like little snail trails or “snot trails” because of the pressure, friction, speed and a variety of factors. This necessitated finding new sub-contractors, redoing the fabrication line, while costing the program considerable time lost that they could ill-afford.
You Don’t tug on Superman’s cape; you don’t spit into the wind; you don’t pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger and you “don’t fabricate with tin.”
How serious was this faux pas? It was cosmic-biblical-evidence of big ole furry problems-a blinking red light on the dashboard of the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor. Speaking of which, kind of like if your virtue signaling choice to pick an aberrant, cross dressing weasel-give them an atomic “Q” clearance-maybe fudge the vetting a bit-or not sufficiently vet them because you don’t really want to know-turns out to have other aberrant, ahem-proclivities-that disqualify them from service, like-I don’t know, maybe stealing suitcases from airports when he had not checked a bag, prancing around in the female clothes that were stolen, etc., but I digress…
What this exemplified and showed to anyone paying attention is that old axiom about contractors and prior experience. You always want “somebody else” to provide the opportunity for such experience for your prospective contractors, particularly when you are procuring national security sensitive hardware, software and firmware: it is a known best practice ever since the catapult was produced and the tin issue was an early and huge tell on the Boeing team.
Many of the factors I covered to this point relate to governance and process. The government had/has a team of experts that likely would have prevented a number of the problems-particularly the big furry showstoppers-cause that is why we have them-and it is a best practice in matters of acquisition and procurement-the leading community subject matter experts on all aspects of satellite manufacturing was LMC and their SI team, but that was taboo and heretical and verboten to have them involved in any aspect of oversight or due diligence on Boeing’s proposal and subsequent work.
It is a worst practice for the government to undertake a procurement action where they deliberately-with malice aforethought-opt out of having the community subject matter experts involved in the procurement: somewhat unprecedented.
How do I know that was a problem? Because most of these LMC SI folks were available for the Gap Study…
The NRO government procurement team-mostly professional DAWIA trained and certified personnel-have often gone the same route on such procurements, and it starts by clearing the competition space of those people and the firms straddling the line between vendors on the one hand, and SME advisors on the other (vendors who sell wares to the govt, and SMEs who advise the govt on matters to include procurement.) I know of a dozen or more times for different procurements where the government pursued the equivalent of painting a bright red line demarking the two different contracted activities within firms.
It seems like a best practice and is easily done within big firms, while being problematic for smaller ones. I’ve seen entire agency efforts fall apart like wet tissue paper through such seemingly “best practices” (but worst results) when key personnel suddenly became free agents for other efforts.
One of the bigger ones in recent history was directed at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) on two separate occasions in a three-year span, resulting in a splitting or bifurcation of the firm roughly along vendor sales and SI functional lines.
I don’t want to spend a lot of time on these details but suffice it to say that it is not unusual in specific-you might say “exquisite”- or non-mainstream acquisitions, but it can be self-defeating to bifurcate or restrict the SI function through such tactics, particularly when the government often relies on these contract elements to augment government expertise that is not on staff. We may not want or need someone with a PhD in space systems propulsion on full-time staff, so we buy the expertise by the pound as needed.
To then turn and force that individual to be put in a different classification and category within the firm to delineate between the selling or vendor part of the firm, as opposed to the SME support side to meet some new or emergent acquisition or procurement requirement-that we just made up-may result in the loss of availability to that expertise-because it will affect every other contract and effort that person is working. These individuals often contribute intellectual property, hold patents in goods and services-often for their parent company-and you’ve just taken an action where you potentially lose access to the domain SME you have relied upon for years who knows the peccadillos of your business much better than the next 50 PhDs who are going to cost you as much-or more-in the wake of this “best practice…”
And worse by far, is that many of these factors and practices that contribute to such actions, with the resultant loss of expertise, linger to today from a governance and process standpoint, albeit in somewhat “mutated” form.
So that is an article for the future. I want to be very clear that in the final analysis, the blame for FIA is solely on the government-the NRO-for their failure of due diligence, their passive observation of red flags on the execution schedule that was not followed through with any apparent action, and both their somewhat willingness to overlook issues-as evidenced by how long these problems played out-blowing past the initial launch date-and their failure to aggressively pursue remedies to identified problems until it became a pending crisis.
The NRO’s actions-and inaction-allowed Boeing’s optical engineering effort to go from challenging, to problematic, to impossible for myriad reasons that I largely covered, but in acquisition terms it was eventually canceled for cost, schedule, and performance issues: like a baseball player who is fired because they can’t hit, field, or run (which leaves looking good in the uniform, the low rung on the talent pool in the military, as well…)
The rest of the FIA procurement was doing very well, including the Boeing Radar component and Raytheon’s ground effort. However, I previously likened that to complimenting the performance of the Titanic’s engines: the centerpiece of FIA was the optical component.
16 December 2022
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