Nailing your Theses to the Pentagon Metro's Door

this defines the problem and offers solutions

If you haven’t read it already, stop what you’re doing, put the phone to voicemail, get a fresh cup of coffee, and read The Defense Reformation by Palantir’s CTO, Shyam Sankar, that came out six weeks ago.

It’s not that long, just 19 pages with big fonts, lots of pictures and white-space…but it has intellectual heft. It isn’t just Salamander approved, regular readers will recognize concepts we’ve discussed here for over two decades—condensed and woven together into a powerful tapestry from a person and a venue that will get in front of the right eyes.

2025 is lining up to be a year of great possibility, and this may be one of the foundation stones of it.

Just soak in this airtight opening:

Around 2014, Russia annexed Crimea, China militarized the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, and Iran was allowed to pursue the bomb. A decade later, we have had more than 300 attacks on U.S. bases by Iran, 1,200 people slaughtered in a pogrom in Israel, an estimated 1 million casualties in brutal combat in Ukraine, and an unprecedented tempo of CCP phase zero operations in the Taiwan Straits.

This is a hot Cold War II. The West has empirically lost deterrence. We must respond to this emergency to regain it.

We have a peer adversary: China. “Near-Peer” is a shibboleth, a euphemism to avoid the embarrassment of acknowledging we have peers when we were once peerless. In World War II, America was the best at mass production. Today that distinction belongs to our adversary. America’s national security requires a robust industrial base, or it will lose the next war and plunge the world into darkness under authoritarian regimes. In the current environment, American industries can’t produce a minimum line of ships, subs, munitions, aircraft, and more. It takes a decade or two to deliver new major weapon systems at scale. If we’re in a hot war, we would only have days worth of ammunition and weapons on hand. Even more alarming is our lack of capacity and capability to rapidly repair and regenerate our weapon systems.

Given the vast sums we have spent on defense in these decades of Pax Americana, it would be reasonable to wonder: what went wrong?

This is the hard truth the ministers of happy-talk, both in and out of uniform, had the responsibility to tell Congress and the American people about the last two decades, but didn’t. They failed their nation, their positional responsibility, and ultimately themselves. I am sure they have their reasons, but they are insufficient.

That is on them. We cannot fix the mistakes of the past, but we can learn from them. What is needed now are people who will speak the truth and outline collective action. We have that here.

There are four sections…and you know you’re at the right place when you see the first one. Agent Zero:

• SECTION 1: The Last Supper and Great Schism

• SECTION 2: The Department’s Heresy

• SECTION 3: The 18 Theses of the Defense Reformation

• CONCLUSION: The Resurrection of the American Industrial Base

As I read the opening of Section 1, I wrote in the margins,

In the Cold War, we defeated centralization, communitarianism, and decided that we wanted to be that way too. Again, The Last Supper, like we covered in 2008, was the start of the problem we have at the end of 2024.

Four pages later, Shankar stated the following:

Everyone, including the Russians and the Chinese, have given up on communism except for Cuba and the DOD. The only problem is that we are bad commies.

We run a centrally unplanned process that neither has the supposed advantages of a planned economy nor the (far superior) advantages of a free market. Bill Greenwalt explains the sins of our poor attempts at copying the Communists:

This [ideology and management] approach, now deeply engrained in defense management culture, process, law, and regulation, is based on the concepts of scientific management that were once fashionable in the Soviet Union and at the vanguard of the 1950s U.S. auto industry before it was outcompeted by Japan in the 1970s. Centralized, predictive program budgeting, management, and oversight were then thought to be superior to the trial and error and messiness of time-constrained, decentralized experimentation and the seemingly wastefulness of having multiple sources rapidly prototyping potential solutions.

Bill Greenwalt

…

Reforming the system means renouncing the communist conformity that’s slowing us down and unleashing the charismatic leaders who can drive outcomes — in the boardroom and on the battlefield.

Comforting to hear someone hum with you in harmony.

Here is the results of Perry’s Last Supper:

Did we become more effective? Did we become more efficient?

The most important consequence of the Last Supper wasn’t a reduction in competition in the Defense Industrial Base, but the decoupling of commercial innovation from defense and the rise of the government Monopsony. Consolidation bred conformity and pushed out the crazy Founders and innovative engineers. This was the Great Schism of the American Industrial Base.

No innovation, just bureaucracy. No creative friction, just collaborative conformity…and no small bit of industrial scale rent seeking.

We need a defense Reformation to upend the Monopsony and transform the way the government does business. Here is my treatise on how to get that done.

This is when we get into Sankar’s 18 Theses. My favorites are #1, 4, 5, 7, and 9. I’m going to list all 18 here, even #14 that I think is a miss. #7 that I am about to quote in full, as it is my best-of-the-best. Why?

Remember this critical part of the Salamander Catechism to fix American’s defense dysfunction we’ve revisited for years?

1. Repeal and replace the Cold War era Goldwater-Nichols

2. Root and branch reform of our acquisition system

3. Defenestrate the Cult of the Joint

4. Reimagine the roles and responsibilities of the COCOMS and JCS.

Let’s quote Thesis #7.

Conway’s Law: you ship your org chart.

Conway’s Law reveals the connection between an organization’s internal structure and the results it delivers to end users. The core idea is that the way members of an organization communicate and collaborate will shape the design and character of the systems and projects it produces. The problem with Goldwater Nichols is that it didn’t go far enough. You can’t have a joint Department if Services have monopolies on their Title 10 equipping responsibilities. We need more competition amongst the services or you can say “joint” until you are purple in the face — it won’t make you joint. Conway’s Law leads to the profane conclusion that CJADC2 (Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control, the Department’s vision for machine-to-machine connection across services and allies to close kill chains) isn’t possible inside the Military Departments as currently conceived, with each developing its own set of capabilities for its service, and must be delivered either by the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), the combatant commands (CCMDs), or by all the services competing for COCOM and component adoption of their solution (approximating a market mechanism). This is how we built ICBMs — with Army, Air Force, and Navy all competing. No Joint Program Offices. No Monopoly. Creative, fast, and ultimately cheaper results.

There. Right there. That.

OK, now for all 18. For the details, go to the report linked at the top.

1. Monopsony is the root of what ails us.

2. Cost-plus contracting makes the nation dumber, slower, and poorer.

3. A budget is a plan, and no plan survives first contact.

4. The person is the program: the primacy of people.

5. The only requirement is winning.

6. Put the pebble in the right shoe.

7. Conway’s Law: you ship your org chart.

8. CCMDs need budget to introduce strategic competition.

9. National security is economic prosperity.

10. Make the primes business-worthy.

11. Risk capital, not taxpayer capital.

12. Small business programs should not be welfare.

13. DOD and its proxy forces must stop competing with industry.

14. Productivity is more lethal than weapon stockpiles.

15. Reference architectures can’t be created, they emerge.

16. Rule of law works.

17. Let the people speak to the mission.

18. Warriors fight with guns and git.

I think it would be helpful to end this with one of their graphics that could be a PhD dissertation in itself.

Way too many people in important places in the USA continue to arrogantly dismiss the People’s Republic of China. They are not the ‘pacing threat’, they are lapping us in so many areas. This side-by-side graphic needs to be studied in silence. Contemplated on the Tree or Woe.

Sublime. Read it all.