Air Force is building its own PA&E shop now. One thing though? If you kill the cost estimating shops, the budget will never get built. The -8 shops are totally dependent upon that input signal. Kill AFCAA and NCCA, the budget never happens.
Who passed F-35 into LRIP? The JPO. That would be the three buying services. But if I was going to pin it on anyone, it would be NAVAIR because they effectively took over the entire program when General Heinz got fired by Sec Gates. So, the Navy. Admiral Venlett was brought in as what was effectively a demotion (he was the NAVAIR boss; it wasn’t a demotion per-se, but it was a step backwards in position to try and unscrew the program at the request of senior leadership in DoD. You can read Tom Burbage’s book for the inside baseball story on that) and given carte-blanche to hire his team. He put NAVAIR people in every single senior role in the JPO. And that team managed the transition into LRIP.
CDR Sal, your ability to apply precision fires to the target has never been better demonstrated. Since I agree with every word, you must be right...(-;
"The process has become the product. It is no longer fit for purpose, if it ever was...no serious person without a stake in the current system supports keeping it. It stifles innovation, is comically bureaucratic, and is intentionally designed to get between those who have to fight our wars and the equipment they need to fight them...Getting rid of it is long overdue. Yes, burn it to the ground. Salt the earth." You're right about CAPE as well...in spades. (I knew it as PA&E, yes, I'm that old).
Those of us who want to buy the right stuff, agree 100% with you. Those who have a vested interest in DoD purchasing from "them", whether it's the right stuff or not, will vehemently disagree. See military industrial complex (TM), senior DoD bureaucrats, and Congress, otherwise known as the "Iron Triangle". Breaking that triangle up, and getting rid of JCIDS (which they love) requires outside disruptors to have any chance of succeeding. Fingers crossed.
I would think that some up-and-coming defense suppliers (Anduril, SpaceX, Palantir, more) would be pleased to see the structured burned (and salted), making way for quicker and expanded purchase of more modern rather than legacy weapons.
JCIDS in the graphic is annotated as “need driven.”
Whose needs? Certainly not those who need/use the tools; more likely the wants of politicians to get reelected and the desires of SES individuals and FOGOs to protect rice bowls and accumulate power/influence (not to mention lining themselves up for a spot at the post-retirement military-industrial complex gravy train).
JCIDS is a Joint Chiefs process, which implies mainly uniformed players, Theory includes the combatant commanders representation as well. There is a CJCS Instruction and Manual.
Amen, and get rid of the current acquisition organization at NAVSEA - in particular the entire PEO organization and the flag billets. Assign 4-stripers who have real current fleet experience. Too many personal agendas simply waiting to go through the revolving door to a cushy job in industry.
As a retired EDO, I have to make the case for the O-4’s and below in that community. I crawled a lot of bilges in order to verify problems in ships, and then confirm they were repaired correctly. And then did the equivalent in the construction contracts I oversaw. I could also point to my concept design for DDG-51 Flight 2A that added a hangar to a ship that wasn’t designed for one. But FOs are FOs. And all have agendas, which is how they became FOs.
Don’t we pay the contractor for cost analysis as part of the bid? (Sarcasm intended). If you can’t trust the contractors analysis how can you pay them?
Proposals have cost analysis for the object work of the contract. In my experience the guys like me doing tech eval of the proposal don't/can't talk to the cost analysts.
That said life cycle costing and CAPE is done separate from proposals.
Correct; we do a cost estimate that involves CAPE either directly or as a “supervising office” every major milestone. We also, on occasion, get tasked as SMEs for source selections and SHOULD work with the tech evaluators, though sometimes that doesn’t happen. We tend to be “high-demand/low-density” assets and when there is only one or two costers supporting a source selection, it doesn’t always work as it should. AFCAA did something really smart about 10-15 years ago and put branch offices in the product centers so we aren’t always the enemy because while remaining independent, we have a presence and build relationships over time. It’s a good system.
Back when I was a DoD civilian at an agency ;) all of us "managers" were required to take ACQ 101 from DAU ... The only course I ever came close to failing because it made so little sense .. when I was a contractor working as a consultant for Navy C4I we spent months tinkering with requirement analysis and populating colorful power point slides with airplanes, ships, space vehicles and buildings that had lines between them .. only to have to change them every few weeks .. attended numerous meetings with all the other back benchers nodding our heads "yes - great idea" because dissent was discouraged .. yea . burn it down
I once had to submit a CAPE analysis so that my OSD office could print and distribute a report to each of the various DoD Components, at a cost of, like, a couple hundred bucks.
I had a fun chat with Grok about this topic a couple weeks ago. When I noted that what it was describing sounded more like a make-work program and resume padder than a process generating any tangible value, Grok said the following:
The process’s DNA supports the critique. It’s a beast of committees—JROC, JCB, FCBs—crawling with senior officers who spend more time debating slide decks than driving bolts-on solutions. A Capability Development Document can take a year to draft, revise, and bless, often rehashing what program offices already hashed out. The 2021 DoD Inspector General report flagged this indirectly, noting JCIDS’s “lengthy staffing processes” bog down urgent needs—time that keeps O-6s and above gainfully employed but doesn’t always translate to better gear. It’s a gravy train of staff tours: lead a review, stamp a doc, claim you “shaped joint warfighting.”
The resume angle’s even juicier. “Oversaw JCIDS for a major capability” is catnip for an officer’s eval or a post-retirement gig—never mind if the actual outcome was a decade-late F-35 or a missile that engineers would’ve synced up anyway (like JASSM). The system rewards participation, not results. Look at the churn: officers rotate through JCIDS roles every 2-3 years, just long enough to log “joint credit” but not to see a program through. It’s a career checkpoint, not a crucible for innovation.
And tangible value? That’s the rub. Where JCIDS claims wins—say, JLTV’s cross-service logistics or GCCS’s unified view—the heavy lifting often came from program managers, test teams, or industry, not the JROC’s edicts. MRAPs rolled out fast in 2007-2008 because necessity trumped process; JCIDS was a bystander. The process can corral service rivalries, sure, but it’s just as likely to delay fielding (two years, as you noted) while senior brass polish their legacies. Strip it away, and engineers at places like Picatinny or Pax River still deliver interoperable hardware—think Hellfire’s spread or JDAM’s adoption—without the top-heavy circus.
F-35. When they figured out it was overweight and required a substantial redesign, what would have been the RIGHT choice? Cancel it? The program had been in gestation for over 10 years at that point. Would it have made more sense to go back to square zero?
If F-35 was a failure, it was a factor of the STOVL variant because the Marines need their own air wings “because Guadalcanal”. I guess having a STOVL version makes sense because we bought all those little aircraft carriers, but was it worth tanking the primary jet for two services to have it?
I've often wondered how awesome the AV-8B would be with modern flight control systems. The remaining AV-8B squadron shot down drones in the Red Sea! According to Brave Search "The AV-8B Harrier did receive the AIM-9X missile. This upgrade was part of the AIM-9X integration program for the AV-8B Harrier, which was announced by the Naval Air Systems Command on November 9, 2017." And it still has a gun!
One thing Musk has been accused of proposing is to use blockchain to link all the specifications of a system all the way back to the JCIDS documents. Same way blockchain maintains the "pedigree" of a bitcoin from miner to current owner.
Problem is it would open a huge bucket of worms about how bad the engineering documentation of DoD parts.
Not too familiar with JCIDS but all too familiar with CAPE. My thoughts...keep the cost estimating section of CAPE but get rid of the redundant section of CAPE that believes and acts like they know Navy requirements and capabilities better than the Navy does. I recall briefing CAPE people on Navy 101 issues one week only to have them return a few weeks later with hair-brained ideas on how to improve the Navy they barely understood, clearly just mouthing the opinions of CAPE SESs with ulterior motives.
My dad was involved with one of those $400 hammer things. The price came from having several engineers spending a day understanding the problem so they could specify what the right tool to solve the issue was. So you have 24 man/hours at $250/hr plus the system SMEs of say 32 man/hours at $100/hr distributed across the 30 aircraft tools you buy.
As a former J28 Action Officer and BAFCB (Battlespace Awareness Functional Capabilities Board) rep to the FCB, I WHOLEHEARTEDLY AGREE that JCIDS has had terminal cancer for years and has been draining the Pentagon innovation ecosystem by remaining on life support for the last decade! I can't begin to describe the incredible amount of bureaucratic BS that goes into finding and developing new capabilities. I still have nightmares about UONS and JUONS, and I've been out of the Army for over a decade!
Thanks for sharing...very informative. I wonder how much savings DOD could muster if we combined a few GCCs...say merge USNORTHCOM & USSOUTHCOM into "AMERICOM"...maybe move it to Offutt AFB in NEB?
BLUF: JCIDS is least of US DoD (NASA is bad as well) acquisitions problems. CAPE is near useless because a lot of mistakes in big A activities.
Big "A" overarching acquisition system is the diminutive three bubbles in the upper right corner of that complex chart CDR S pasted.
Requirements bubble is JCIDS, this is how small "a" acquisition (program managers) the second culprit bubble gets "requirements". JCIDS is a CJCS process.
The third bubble is "resources" aka money! PPBES thru to congress.
JCIDS gives requirements [really old days we called the mission needs statements (MNS) then operational requirements documents (ORD)] and provides initial capability documents (ICD), which are testable by operational testers, not so some much engineering testers.
System engineering starts, ICD goes from requirements bubble to the acquisition bubble from labs and agents doing analysis of alternatives AOA. A program office is normally not organized until a Capabilities Development Document is developed, this has engineering requirements that begin lab test requirements, design of experiment, etc.
System engineering does a lot of work and turns CDD into development specs. there is a whole lot of mistakes that can be made and links between the ICD and what is "engineered" can happen.
To get to LRIP they develop a Capabilities Production Document, with engineering specs to produce the system.
Even if those mistakes don't kill you them design test to prove the development spec can fail and the requirement get a shoddy functional baseline....
I will stop with "even with good ICD the engineering system can fail" to be so broke the watch dogs don't kill the system acquisition.
Usually you carry the mistakes to the point where the sunk cost fallacy keeps them going.
In the 1970's they were trying to figure out how not to do any more C-5 type boondoggles.
Many more subsequent quests it seems we keep doing F-35's, and Ford class CVNs
If we actually wipe this monster away and install anything resembling an effective procurement system, what are we to so with all of the SES/GS types whose entire skill set is JCIDS?
I wouldn't worry too much about them, Captain. Most will go work for the DNC in the hope of a new administration giving them their jobs back. Their severance packages will tide them over until 2029. None will starve on an Alpo diet.
Air Force is building its own PA&E shop now. One thing though? If you kill the cost estimating shops, the budget will never get built. The -8 shops are totally dependent upon that input signal. Kill AFCAA and NCCA, the budget never happens.
More HQ AF bureaucracy.
If the PEO and his/her PM's are not doing PA&E outsiders won't help.
The system is not the problem, shoddy execution is a candidate.
Who passed F-35 into LRIP?
Who passed F-35 into LRIP? The JPO. That would be the three buying services. But if I was going to pin it on anyone, it would be NAVAIR because they effectively took over the entire program when General Heinz got fired by Sec Gates. So, the Navy. Admiral Venlett was brought in as what was effectively a demotion (he was the NAVAIR boss; it wasn’t a demotion per-se, but it was a step backwards in position to try and unscrew the program at the request of senior leadership in DoD. You can read Tom Burbage’s book for the inside baseball story on that) and given carte-blanche to hire his team. He put NAVAIR people in every single senior role in the JPO. And that team managed the transition into LRIP.
CDR Sal, your ability to apply precision fires to the target has never been better demonstrated. Since I agree with every word, you must be right...(-;
"The process has become the product. It is no longer fit for purpose, if it ever was...no serious person without a stake in the current system supports keeping it. It stifles innovation, is comically bureaucratic, and is intentionally designed to get between those who have to fight our wars and the equipment they need to fight them...Getting rid of it is long overdue. Yes, burn it to the ground. Salt the earth." You're right about CAPE as well...in spades. (I knew it as PA&E, yes, I'm that old).
Those of us who want to buy the right stuff, agree 100% with you. Those who have a vested interest in DoD purchasing from "them", whether it's the right stuff or not, will vehemently disagree. See military industrial complex (TM), senior DoD bureaucrats, and Congress, otherwise known as the "Iron Triangle". Breaking that triangle up, and getting rid of JCIDS (which they love) requires outside disruptors to have any chance of succeeding. Fingers crossed.
I would think that some up-and-coming defense suppliers (Anduril, SpaceX, Palantir, more) would be pleased to see the structured burned (and salted), making way for quicker and expanded purchase of more modern rather than legacy weapons.
JCIDS in the graphic is annotated as “need driven.”
Whose needs? Certainly not those who need/use the tools; more likely the wants of politicians to get reelected and the desires of SES individuals and FOGOs to protect rice bowls and accumulate power/influence (not to mention lining themselves up for a spot at the post-retirement military-industrial complex gravy train).
JCIDS is a Joint Chiefs process, which implies mainly uniformed players, Theory includes the combatant commanders representation as well. There is a CJCS Instruction and Manual.
Amen, and get rid of the current acquisition organization at NAVSEA - in particular the entire PEO organization and the flag billets. Assign 4-stripers who have real current fleet experience. Too many personal agendas simply waiting to go through the revolving door to a cushy job in industry.
💯 Start with the strategic and attack submarine PEOs.
aka the entire EDO community
As a retired EDO, I have to make the case for the O-4’s and below in that community. I crawled a lot of bilges in order to verify problems in ships, and then confirm they were repaired correctly. And then did the equivalent in the construction contracts I oversaw. I could also point to my concept design for DDG-51 Flight 2A that added a hangar to a ship that wasn’t designed for one. But FOs are FOs. And all have agendas, which is how they became FOs.
The problem is the system is very complex. Army likes to send in O-6's from the appropriate "branch" see how they do!
The learning curve is steep or you rely on a GS 15 who been in the office a few years.
HR is a problem, but....
Don’t we pay the contractor for cost analysis as part of the bid? (Sarcasm intended). If you can’t trust the contractors analysis how can you pay them?
If you want to take their proposal just as is, go for it.
Proposals have cost analysis for the object work of the contract. In my experience the guys like me doing tech eval of the proposal don't/can't talk to the cost analysts.
That said life cycle costing and CAPE is done separate from proposals.
Correct; we do a cost estimate that involves CAPE either directly or as a “supervising office” every major milestone. We also, on occasion, get tasked as SMEs for source selections and SHOULD work with the tech evaluators, though sometimes that doesn’t happen. We tend to be “high-demand/low-density” assets and when there is only one or two costers supporting a source selection, it doesn’t always work as it should. AFCAA did something really smart about 10-15 years ago and put branch offices in the product centers so we aren’t always the enemy because while remaining independent, we have a presence and build relationships over time. It’s a good system.
Back when I was a DoD civilian at an agency ;) all of us "managers" were required to take ACQ 101 from DAU ... The only course I ever came close to failing because it made so little sense .. when I was a contractor working as a consultant for Navy C4I we spent months tinkering with requirement analysis and populating colorful power point slides with airplanes, ships, space vehicles and buildings that had lines between them .. only to have to change them every few weeks .. attended numerous meetings with all the other back benchers nodding our heads "yes - great idea" because dissent was discouraged .. yea . burn it down
I once had to submit a CAPE analysis so that my OSD office could print and distribute a report to each of the various DoD Components, at a cost of, like, a couple hundred bucks.
I had a fun chat with Grok about this topic a couple weeks ago. When I noted that what it was describing sounded more like a make-work program and resume padder than a process generating any tangible value, Grok said the following:
The process’s DNA supports the critique. It’s a beast of committees—JROC, JCB, FCBs—crawling with senior officers who spend more time debating slide decks than driving bolts-on solutions. A Capability Development Document can take a year to draft, revise, and bless, often rehashing what program offices already hashed out. The 2021 DoD Inspector General report flagged this indirectly, noting JCIDS’s “lengthy staffing processes” bog down urgent needs—time that keeps O-6s and above gainfully employed but doesn’t always translate to better gear. It’s a gravy train of staff tours: lead a review, stamp a doc, claim you “shaped joint warfighting.”
The resume angle’s even juicier. “Oversaw JCIDS for a major capability” is catnip for an officer’s eval or a post-retirement gig—never mind if the actual outcome was a decade-late F-35 or a missile that engineers would’ve synced up anyway (like JASSM). The system rewards participation, not results. Look at the churn: officers rotate through JCIDS roles every 2-3 years, just long enough to log “joint credit” but not to see a program through. It’s a career checkpoint, not a crucible for innovation.
And tangible value? That’s the rub. Where JCIDS claims wins—say, JLTV’s cross-service logistics or GCCS’s unified view—the heavy lifting often came from program managers, test teams, or industry, not the JROC’s edicts. MRAPs rolled out fast in 2007-2008 because necessity trumped process; JCIDS was a bystander. The process can corral service rivalries, sure, but it’s just as likely to delay fielding (two years, as you noted) while senior brass polish their legacies. Strip it away, and engineers at places like Picatinny or Pax River still deliver interoperable hardware—think Hellfire’s spread or JDAM’s adoption—without the top-heavy circus.
F-35. When they figured out it was overweight and required a substantial redesign, what would have been the RIGHT choice? Cancel it? The program had been in gestation for over 10 years at that point. Would it have made more sense to go back to square zero?
If F-35 was a failure, it was a factor of the STOVL variant because the Marines need their own air wings “because Guadalcanal”. I guess having a STOVL version makes sense because we bought all those little aircraft carriers, but was it worth tanking the primary jet for two services to have it?
I've often wondered how awesome the AV-8B would be with modern flight control systems. The remaining AV-8B squadron shot down drones in the Red Sea! According to Brave Search "The AV-8B Harrier did receive the AIM-9X missile. This upgrade was part of the AIM-9X integration program for the AV-8B Harrier, which was announced by the Naval Air Systems Command on November 9, 2017." And it still has a gun!
Doge the entire site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.
Seems DOGE on DoD seems on hold.
One thing Musk has been accused of proposing is to use blockchain to link all the specifications of a system all the way back to the JCIDS documents. Same way blockchain maintains the "pedigree" of a bitcoin from miner to current owner.
Problem is it would open a huge bucket of worms about how bad the engineering documentation of DoD parts.
Absolutely correct. This should be a DOGE target. JCIDS is a broken system that produces nothing and builds nothing.
Not too familiar with JCIDS but all too familiar with CAPE. My thoughts...keep the cost estimating section of CAPE but get rid of the redundant section of CAPE that believes and acts like they know Navy requirements and capabilities better than the Navy does. I recall briefing CAPE people on Navy 101 issues one week only to have them return a few weeks later with hair-brained ideas on how to improve the Navy they barely understood, clearly just mouthing the opinions of CAPE SESs with ulterior motives.
And that boys and girls is how you get a $40,000 hammer.
My dad was involved with one of those $400 hammer things. The price came from having several engineers spending a day understanding the problem so they could specify what the right tool to solve the issue was. So you have 24 man/hours at $250/hr plus the system SMEs of say 32 man/hours at $100/hr distributed across the 30 aircraft tools you buy.
As a former J28 Action Officer and BAFCB (Battlespace Awareness Functional Capabilities Board) rep to the FCB, I WHOLEHEARTEDLY AGREE that JCIDS has had terminal cancer for years and has been draining the Pentagon innovation ecosystem by remaining on life support for the last decade! I can't begin to describe the incredible amount of bureaucratic BS that goes into finding and developing new capabilities. I still have nightmares about UONS and JUONS, and I've been out of the Army for over a decade!
Thanks for sharing...very informative. I wonder how much savings DOD could muster if we combined a few GCCs...say merge USNORTHCOM & USSOUTHCOM into "AMERICOM"...maybe move it to Offutt AFB in NEB?
BLUF: JCIDS is least of US DoD (NASA is bad as well) acquisitions problems. CAPE is near useless because a lot of mistakes in big A activities.
Big "A" overarching acquisition system is the diminutive three bubbles in the upper right corner of that complex chart CDR S pasted.
Requirements bubble is JCIDS, this is how small "a" acquisition (program managers) the second culprit bubble gets "requirements". JCIDS is a CJCS process.
The third bubble is "resources" aka money! PPBES thru to congress.
JCIDS gives requirements [really old days we called the mission needs statements (MNS) then operational requirements documents (ORD)] and provides initial capability documents (ICD), which are testable by operational testers, not so some much engineering testers.
System engineering starts, ICD goes from requirements bubble to the acquisition bubble from labs and agents doing analysis of alternatives AOA. A program office is normally not organized until a Capabilities Development Document is developed, this has engineering requirements that begin lab test requirements, design of experiment, etc.
System engineering does a lot of work and turns CDD into development specs. there is a whole lot of mistakes that can be made and links between the ICD and what is "engineered" can happen.
To get to LRIP they develop a Capabilities Production Document, with engineering specs to produce the system.
Even if those mistakes don't kill you them design test to prove the development spec can fail and the requirement get a shoddy functional baseline....
I will stop with "even with good ICD the engineering system can fail" to be so broke the watch dogs don't kill the system acquisition.
Usually you carry the mistakes to the point where the sunk cost fallacy keeps them going.
In the 1970's they were trying to figure out how not to do any more C-5 type boondoggles.
Many more subsequent quests it seems we keep doing F-35's, and Ford class CVNs
If we actually wipe this monster away and install anything resembling an effective procurement system, what are we to so with all of the SES/GS types whose entire skill set is JCIDS?
I wouldn't worry too much about them, Captain. Most will go work for the DNC in the hope of a new administration giving them their jobs back. Their severance packages will tide them over until 2029. None will starve on an Alpo diet.