I have been out of “acquisition” since retiring in 2019, but just last night was reminiscing about the data interfaces for JSTARS were different than for AWACS….
I can’t remember if the linked to both systems A/C and ground command posts had two “terminals”.
Yes, agree. This is the downside on this. There must be some limit centralization on this if we are going to have a coordinated fight with the enemy with compatible equipment. Think C2ISR, etc.
The key goodness is that JCIDS being eliminated will streamline the review/approval process. Same crap at State Dept BTW, which Rubio is trying to change as well.
I will take a weapon in the hands of Sailors today that is not “compatible” with an Army brigade 1,500 nm inland, over a fully joint weapon that never leave the PPT for 15 years. Next slide.
I'm sure it doesn't help that the PMs rotate out in 2-3 years (less?). Continuity has to suck...even if you rely on your civilian employees to maintain it.
My experience on the civilian side in the medical business is that getting an essentially existing product labeled for a customer took at least a year for all but the smallest of companies (and there's a lot of those). Two years is closer to normal and five is not unheard of. Can't imagine what changing the main players in middle of that would do.
I buy your extreme example, but I spent 15 yrs, pre- GN in the Army. The services were running amok in that period and we had planes in the air that could not talk to one another and support aircraft that could not talk to people on the ground. Seems to me that there has to be a better option than all or nothing.
The system is (and has been for decades) a terrible one aimed at not making mistakes rather than aiming to deliver needed capability on cost and on time. The biggest change will be turning the various gatekeepers into facilitators of success. To do that, they must have skin in the game. They get rewarded for helping programs succeed, not for stopping them.
My view of the process is that help provided by the various organizational "approval" chains is that such help is generally in the form of "Do this or you can't go forward." Do they think they're helping? Sure. Are they? With no responsibility for the success of the program, no. It's less risky to say no than to say yes and have problems.
For the record, I deployed five times. I was a major PM for two separate programs totaling 6.5 years, and worked on the USD(AT&L) staff as a Senior Military Advisor to the PDUSD. So, I'll boldly assert that my opinions have some basis. I am not saying that your guy didn't aim to help, just that such is not my experience and I was and remain friends with a lot of those folks.
BTW, when I worked for (then) Captain Bill Newman in the Navy HARM program office, Bill enforced a "one configuration only" policy for HARM. The USAF wanted to make changes to their missiles' configuration and Bill said, "NO!" His USAF deputy (a COL) stood by that a forfeited a star, but that's what's needed.
It's downright amazing to see that kind of integrity when it comes to career & promotion. Seniors like to talk about Core Values. They're all about Core Values, making sacrifices, and doing what's right--as long as it's other people doing the sacrificing and not getting promoted. 99.9999% of the time, when it comes to a make-or-break decision on their career, integrity goes straight in the sh!tcan. I applaud that guy.
JCIDS had the potential to influence the “system” and “interface” specs, the foundation to system engineering to solve a mission need for which a capacity cannot be found…
There are a lot of potential sources of system engineering failure.
If you don’t system and interfaces right you have no foundation.
All the poor specs…. why DoD can’t pass an audit gets stronger.
Before JCIDS the were Defense Acquisition Boards (DAB) and service acquisition review council (SARC).
Deleting JCIDS will not improves establishing best solutions at affordable life cycle cost.
Back when there were only 2 Ranger battalions (no Regiment / JSOC interference - I mean supervision) each battalion had significant latitude about supporting their logistical requirements directly. "Those were the days." Both unit S4's could shop the domestic / foreign markets to procure the most appropriate items to ensure mission success. Since the amounts of the purchases were relatively low - they were understandable and had to be justified to the Colonel (who was personally on the hook). We had decent comms with other US Army/USAF units (less so with the Marines/Navy but that wasn't unusual at the time). The unit could support smash and grab ops on short time frames easily enough, with the understanding that they were expendable if the mission went sideways. That allowed the individual unit to be fine tuned for a specific mission where success was more important than interoperability or redundancy. Just food for thought.
JCIDS has a well-earned bad reputation. It is, as noted, almost comically inefficient. However, as someone who worked the "kill chain" at the digital interoperability level (JTAC, PGM comms) for a lot of years...we literally sucked at getting the services to comply with the "standards" such as they were. JCIDS failed at that, whatever mechanism we use going forward to ensure a USMC JTAC can pass coordinates and terminally guide a USAF JDAM (if required) has to work. Has. To. Work. Otherwise, the "tip of the spear" will be...blunt.
Thanks, Sal. From your lips to the ears of the Sane Procurement Gods.
Off topic except that you're speaking of nomenklatura, rent seekers, and rice bowls, I'd like to read your take on this USNI Proceedings piece regarding the NWC and jointedness:
I particularly cringed at this dismissive paragraph: "Others complain war colleges do not focus enough on war, recalling the 1930s, when wargaming at the Naval War College (NWC) was critical to preparing the Navy for war and developing plans such as War Plan Orange.2 Today, such plans are developed by combatant commands with significant direction from the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and the Joint Staff, none of which existed in the years leading up to World War II. Given these changes, war colleges have less influence in planning wars and instead educate leaders who do the planning at OSD, the Joint Staff, and the combatant commands. In other words, the shift away from war planning was driven by changes in law and organization, not college-level decisions."
Interoperability has its place but should not be at the expense of capabilities. Perhaps DoD could proactively limit what should or could have interoperability requirements. Services go down the path of doing their own thing rapidly.
There is also something in having platforms with 70% commonality so that it is easier to maintain spares and reduce the logistics burden on services.
CDR Salamander, may I introduce my son, Captain USAF C-17 Pilot, recently tasked with Supplies, Logistics, Payments for such needs the Squadron has.
He’s just getting his feet wet, so to speak, and you, sir, have had twenty plus years of experience!
I’m always thrilled when I read recommendations such as yours, perhaps finally taking shape.
So yes, CDR Salamander, let’s teach those who follow us “Older Salts”, a better way. Nurse Jane smiles at our great teams working to improve purchasing for what’s needed.
Stepping away just a bit, CDR Salamander did you read the German need? The men responsible for the sabotage of Nord Stream Pipelines have been charged! Read tonight’s TASS for the details. Have a beautiful night!
I do not wish to be a fan of JCIDS. I have done battle with that system for far too long. It is a system designed to slow down decision making to increase the probability of making the right decision. It indeed succeeds in that quest.
What is forgotten by attempting to reach efficiency in identifying requirements is the goal of developing effective requirements. I find the LCS program to be a poster child for this conundrum.
However, leaving the services to manage their own requirements is not the solution. How do we know this? Look at our military requirements before PPBS (which indirectly is to blame for JCIDS and its predecessors). Most of you young-uns were not around when GEN Thomas Powers was asked by the Senate Armed Services Committee to please spell out how many warheads was the requirement for the US to successfully engage the Soviet Union. His answer was more always was better. Recall this is the era of the Century series fighters - F-100, f-101, f-102, F104, F-105, F-106; planes that could go fast, but not maneuver very well. Thus, the Soviets focused on their MiG-21 (FISHBED) which was a maneuverable monster. We lost a lot of good pilots to that bird. Equally revealing was the Army's efforts to build an effective MBT and IFV. Because of the battlefield success of the Abrams MBT, we forget its failed predecessors - which we can get a clue about by considering that after the introduction of the M-60 series in the late 1950s, the next number used to identify tank class was the M1. As for the IFV, that was meant to replace the old M-113. Its history is best told in a movie, "Pentagon Wars." A lot of fiction in that movie, but a great deal of truth.
Let us not forget the Navy here. This was the era of competing Navy requirements, between the CNOs and ADM Rickover, who governed the nuclear world. This also was the time for naval aviators to invest in wills because the profession became so deadly with the likes of the F8U Cutlass, and the f-8 Crusader. It took a long time and lots of lives to get to the F-4, which initially was built for the USAF.
Rickover wanted a nuclear navy, and he had Congressional backing to at least start it up. We had nuclear destroyers, cruisers, of course carriers, and submarines. Fine but extraordinarily expensive in both construction and maintenance. In the wake of Vietnam, CNO Zumwalt faced downsizing and modernization (capitalization) for the Navy. He tried to compromise with Rickover on the so-called Hi-Lo mix of forces. Rickover wanted no compromise. Instead, the Navy had an official requirement and a nuclear requirement, leaving Congress to decide what got built.
My point here is that the before times weren't any better than these times. The services themselves canceled each other out at the SECDEF and Congressional levels of decisions.
The first time JCIDS was explained to me I said, “So now there are requirements to tailor proposals to, to get what you wanted in the first place”. Nothing really changed with JCIDS: it’s a process. The users of any process are the issue. One comment said the Navy shouldn’t care if a weapon is compatible with an Army unit 1,500nm inland. See? It is the user who is the problem. All Services compete in every POM process. Fix that, SECDEF, and maybe the users will have changed values thus changed actions.
Ok, Sal, I will take your word for it. Who do I complain to when Services “need”
Gear that is not compatible w other services or duplicates others’ gear? Joe Collins
I have been out of “acquisition” since retiring in 2019, but just last night was reminiscing about the data interfaces for JSTARS were different than for AWACS….
I can’t remember if the linked to both systems A/C and ground command posts had two “terminals”.
Yes, agree. This is the downside on this. There must be some limit centralization on this if we are going to have a coordinated fight with the enemy with compatible equipment. Think C2ISR, etc.
The key goodness is that JCIDS being eliminated will streamline the review/approval process. Same crap at State Dept BTW, which Rubio is trying to change as well.
I will take a weapon in the hands of Sailors today that is not “compatible” with an Army brigade 1,500 nm inland, over a fully joint weapon that never leave the PPT for 15 years. Next slide.
I'm sure it doesn't help that the PMs rotate out in 2-3 years (less?). Continuity has to suck...even if you rely on your civilian employees to maintain it.
My experience on the civilian side in the medical business is that getting an essentially existing product labeled for a customer took at least a year for all but the smallest of companies (and there's a lot of those). Two years is closer to normal and five is not unheard of. Can't imagine what changing the main players in middle of that would do.
I buy your extreme example, but I spent 15 yrs, pre- GN in the Army. The services were running amok in that period and we had planes in the air that could not talk to one another and support aircraft that could not talk to people on the ground. Seems to me that there has to be a better option than all or nothing.
Why the f#ck can’t I like this more than once!!!!
It sounds like this was one of the top three processes in need of drastic change: Goldwater-Nichols and Combatant Command being the other two.
The system is (and has been for decades) a terrible one aimed at not making mistakes rather than aiming to deliver needed capability on cost and on time. The biggest change will be turning the various gatekeepers into facilitators of success. To do that, they must have skin in the game. They get rewarded for helping programs succeed, not for stopping them.
Not my view of the programs I worked at DAB-level. The guy I dealt with was there to help.
One OSD AT&L staffer related how he viewed the services that came in for approval
Army; dumb
AF; deceitful
Navy; disdainful
That said the Defense Acquisition Workforce Improvement Act has failed.
My view of the process is that help provided by the various organizational "approval" chains is that such help is generally in the form of "Do this or you can't go forward." Do they think they're helping? Sure. Are they? With no responsibility for the success of the program, no. It's less risky to say no than to say yes and have problems.
For the record, I deployed five times. I was a major PM for two separate programs totaling 6.5 years, and worked on the USD(AT&L) staff as a Senior Military Advisor to the PDUSD. So, I'll boldly assert that my opinions have some basis. I am not saying that your guy didn't aim to help, just that such is not my experience and I was and remain friends with a lot of those folks.
Thanks.
I do not recall a situation where the OSD staffer or DAB prep got in the way of program "success".
BTW, when I worked for (then) Captain Bill Newman in the Navy HARM program office, Bill enforced a "one configuration only" policy for HARM. The USAF wanted to make changes to their missiles' configuration and Bill said, "NO!" His USAF deputy (a COL) stood by that a forfeited a star, but that's what's needed.
It's downright amazing to see that kind of integrity when it comes to career & promotion. Seniors like to talk about Core Values. They're all about Core Values, making sacrifices, and doing what's right--as long as it's other people doing the sacrificing and not getting promoted. 99.9999% of the time, when it comes to a make-or-break decision on their career, integrity goes straight in the sh!tcan. I applaud that guy.
JCIDS had the potential to influence the “system” and “interface” specs, the foundation to system engineering to solve a mission need for which a capacity cannot be found…
There are a lot of potential sources of system engineering failure.
If you don’t system and interfaces right you have no foundation.
All the poor specs…. why DoD can’t pass an audit gets stronger.
Before JCIDS the were Defense Acquisition Boards (DAB) and service acquisition review council (SARC).
Deleting JCIDS will not improves establishing best solutions at affordable life cycle cost.
It may reduce overhead for train wrecks.
Back when there were only 2 Ranger battalions (no Regiment / JSOC interference - I mean supervision) each battalion had significant latitude about supporting their logistical requirements directly. "Those were the days." Both unit S4's could shop the domestic / foreign markets to procure the most appropriate items to ensure mission success. Since the amounts of the purchases were relatively low - they were understandable and had to be justified to the Colonel (who was personally on the hook). We had decent comms with other US Army/USAF units (less so with the Marines/Navy but that wasn't unusual at the time). The unit could support smash and grab ops on short time frames easily enough, with the understanding that they were expendable if the mission went sideways. That allowed the individual unit to be fine tuned for a specific mission where success was more important than interoperability or redundancy. Just food for thought.
They still do have a lot more latitude and funds to use that latitude than other units outside the 160th and SMUs.
For a while I was in an "acquisition" that had absolutely nothing to do with acquisition and had to do regular DAC training. What an awful system...
JCIDS has a well-earned bad reputation. It is, as noted, almost comically inefficient. However, as someone who worked the "kill chain" at the digital interoperability level (JTAC, PGM comms) for a lot of years...we literally sucked at getting the services to comply with the "standards" such as they were. JCIDS failed at that, whatever mechanism we use going forward to ensure a USMC JTAC can pass coordinates and terminally guide a USAF JDAM (if required) has to work. Has. To. Work. Otherwise, the "tip of the spear" will be...blunt.
Thanks, Sal. From your lips to the ears of the Sane Procurement Gods.
Off topic except that you're speaking of nomenklatura, rent seekers, and rice bowls, I'd like to read your take on this USNI Proceedings piece regarding the NWC and jointedness:
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2025/august/value-joint-professional-military-education
I particularly cringed at this dismissive paragraph: "Others complain war colleges do not focus enough on war, recalling the 1930s, when wargaming at the Naval War College (NWC) was critical to preparing the Navy for war and developing plans such as War Plan Orange.2 Today, such plans are developed by combatant commands with significant direction from the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and the Joint Staff, none of which existed in the years leading up to World War II. Given these changes, war colleges have less influence in planning wars and instead educate leaders who do the planning at OSD, the Joint Staff, and the combatant commands. In other words, the shift away from war planning was driven by changes in law and organization, not college-level decisions."
In other news, tobacco farmers oppose bans on indoor smoking. Film at 11.
Command structure USN 1944: King>Nimitz>Halsey/Spruance
Outcome: Decisive American victory
"No sane person can defend this." But there will be plenty of the not sane who will.
Job 38:3 and Judges 15:16.
Oh, you meant a figurative defenestration of the nomenklatura and rent seekers. A fellow can dream, can't he?
Interoperability has its place but should not be at the expense of capabilities. Perhaps DoD could proactively limit what should or could have interoperability requirements. Services go down the path of doing their own thing rapidly.
There is also something in having platforms with 70% commonality so that it is easier to maintain spares and reduce the logistics burden on services.
CDR Salamander, may I introduce my son, Captain USAF C-17 Pilot, recently tasked with Supplies, Logistics, Payments for such needs the Squadron has.
He’s just getting his feet wet, so to speak, and you, sir, have had twenty plus years of experience!
I’m always thrilled when I read recommendations such as yours, perhaps finally taking shape.
So yes, CDR Salamander, let’s teach those who follow us “Older Salts”, a better way. Nurse Jane smiles at our great teams working to improve purchasing for what’s needed.
Stepping away just a bit, CDR Salamander did you read the German need? The men responsible for the sabotage of Nord Stream Pipelines have been charged! Read tonight’s TASS for the details. Have a beautiful night!
“Own the f-ing interface dammit”
Seems like that was always Navsea’s take on it. Cost us trillions.
I do not wish to be a fan of JCIDS. I have done battle with that system for far too long. It is a system designed to slow down decision making to increase the probability of making the right decision. It indeed succeeds in that quest.
What is forgotten by attempting to reach efficiency in identifying requirements is the goal of developing effective requirements. I find the LCS program to be a poster child for this conundrum.
However, leaving the services to manage their own requirements is not the solution. How do we know this? Look at our military requirements before PPBS (which indirectly is to blame for JCIDS and its predecessors). Most of you young-uns were not around when GEN Thomas Powers was asked by the Senate Armed Services Committee to please spell out how many warheads was the requirement for the US to successfully engage the Soviet Union. His answer was more always was better. Recall this is the era of the Century series fighters - F-100, f-101, f-102, F104, F-105, F-106; planes that could go fast, but not maneuver very well. Thus, the Soviets focused on their MiG-21 (FISHBED) which was a maneuverable monster. We lost a lot of good pilots to that bird. Equally revealing was the Army's efforts to build an effective MBT and IFV. Because of the battlefield success of the Abrams MBT, we forget its failed predecessors - which we can get a clue about by considering that after the introduction of the M-60 series in the late 1950s, the next number used to identify tank class was the M1. As for the IFV, that was meant to replace the old M-113. Its history is best told in a movie, "Pentagon Wars." A lot of fiction in that movie, but a great deal of truth.
Let us not forget the Navy here. This was the era of competing Navy requirements, between the CNOs and ADM Rickover, who governed the nuclear world. This also was the time for naval aviators to invest in wills because the profession became so deadly with the likes of the F8U Cutlass, and the f-8 Crusader. It took a long time and lots of lives to get to the F-4, which initially was built for the USAF.
Rickover wanted a nuclear navy, and he had Congressional backing to at least start it up. We had nuclear destroyers, cruisers, of course carriers, and submarines. Fine but extraordinarily expensive in both construction and maintenance. In the wake of Vietnam, CNO Zumwalt faced downsizing and modernization (capitalization) for the Navy. He tried to compromise with Rickover on the so-called Hi-Lo mix of forces. Rickover wanted no compromise. Instead, the Navy had an official requirement and a nuclear requirement, leaving Congress to decide what got built.
My point here is that the before times weren't any better than these times. The services themselves canceled each other out at the SECDEF and Congressional levels of decisions.
The first time JCIDS was explained to me I said, “So now there are requirements to tailor proposals to, to get what you wanted in the first place”. Nothing really changed with JCIDS: it’s a process. The users of any process are the issue. One comment said the Navy shouldn’t care if a weapon is compatible with an Army unit 1,500nm inland. See? It is the user who is the problem. All Services compete in every POM process. Fix that, SECDEF, and maybe the users will have changed values thus changed actions.