Space Acquisition - Air Force Space Command

No doubt, well-funded, powerfully staffed government and
contractor teams can get vital work done.
The organizing paradigm of the early NRO has since
changed. In its early days, the NRO leadership was able to
acquire the best military space system engineers available. The
officers and enlisted personnel assigned to the organization
were given stable, decades-long assignments in Los Angeles,
Washington, DC, or elsewhere, making them a special-class
member of the military. However, the advantages that the NRO
had in hiring the best talent, and through other personnel practices,
have been lost over time. As the US Air Force downsized,
the number of personnel with strong engineering talent entering
and staying in the military decreased, shrinking the available
resource pool; at the same time, the demands for DoD and NRO
space programs increased, leading to a shortage of quality engineering
talent that has impacted both the DoD and NRO space
communities in recent years. These communities currently suffer
from staffing pressures, and there is an unhealthy reliance
on relatively inexperienced, junior officers who are manning
program offices. To complicate the NRO’s problems, its funding
practices are now subject to more stringent and intrusive
management reviews than in the past. Its traditional ability to
employ management reserves to defeat engineering challenges
is also gone.
Not even Battle’s Laws can make up for the lack of smart
and wise acquisitions or systems engineering expertise; without
a good mix of experienced, knowledgeable staff on the NRO
acquisition teams, their programs took hits just like other military,
civil, and commercial programs.
Besides the NRO, other governmental and corporate organizations
attempted to respond to the difficult challenges of efficiently
and effectively acquiring space systems in a resource
scarce environment. During the 1990s, NASA implemented
FBC as a way of ensuring the currency of its engineering community
and responding to significant and draconian budget
pressures that were evident during the Clinton Administration.
NASA reasoned that it could sustain and invigorate the vitality
of its industrial and engineering base by conducting a wide variety
of programs, albeit managed in a high-risk environment. 9
It was hoped that these programs would be worked successfully
with a streamlined management approach. FBC attempted to
“improve performance by being more efficient and innovative.”
10
The real driver behind FBC was that NASA’s culture had
grown to performing only “flagship” class, very expensive,
missions in the 1980’s, like Magellan and Cassini—each costing
$2.5 to $3 billion. At that price, NASA could only afford
one or two missions per decade. The FBC paradigm shift attempted
to accomplish planetary missions at a much lower cost.
It was successfully demonstrated by John Hopkins University’s
Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) with the Near-Earth Asteroid
Rendezvous (NEAR) mission (i.e., the first Discovery mission)
and by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) with the Mars
Pathfinder mission (i.e., the second Discovery mission). NEAR
was built, launched, and landed on an asteroid for $125 million;
the APL even returned money to NASA. With the greater risk
assumed by FBC, failure was more acceptable. Loosing a $150
million mission was deemed acceptable when compared with
loosing a $3 billion flagship system where the guarantee that
the system would work drove up costs. 11
Unfortunately, spectacular failures in the late 1990s, all of
which were tied to simple engineering errors, doomed significant
aspects of the FBC approach. The pendulum had swung
too far toward cutting cost. FBC died because there were two
failures in a row. 12 FBC was a Faustian bargain; and its failures
led to a crisis within NASA.
Author Thomas D. Taverney: One of the wisest assessments
of FBC was kept on the wall of the graphics department at Infotec,
when I worked there. It said: “Faster-Better-Cheaper …
pick two.” Our graphics department always knew you could not
have all three at once when producing documents and briefings.
This clearly is also relevant to acquiring space systems.
Another management philosophy, TSPR, was first adopted
and then discarded by NASA, but then practiced by the US Air
Force during the 1990s. This coincided with DoD’s dramatic
reduction in force and the devastating loss of its engineering
and acquisition talent. The thinking behind TSPR was to give,
as the name implies, total system performance responsibility to
a contractor. It was argued that this would achieve savings and
efficiencies within the total program by reducing the government
acquisition and intrusive monitoring teams. It was hoped
that TSPR would also give the contractor the flexibility to simplify
the integration of all aspects of a program, determine the
best resources to get the job done, and reduce costs by eliminating
redundant management systems. 13
Unfortunately, several space contractors did not effectively
deploy TSPR on significant and very expensive space acquisition
programs. They received the increased TSPR responsibilities
while the DoD was cutting program budgets. They
were given more responsibility and more to do in performing
this responsibility, but—combined with reduced budgets—this
was a prescription for disaster. The bigger issue was that these
programs were improperly baselined from the beginning; they
were basically non-executable from the start. TSPR exacerbated
this by constraining visibility into these pending disasters.
Under TSPR, serious issues were not visible to the US government
and were therefore not addressed.
As noted in a 22 March 2002 article in Defense Daily International,
Mr. E. C. “Pete” Aldridge, the DoD’s former senior
acquisition official, complained, “The problem with the current
TSPR concept … is that the interests of prime contractors—the
need for short-term profit—is fundamentally different from the
needs of the Pentagon that is charged with maintaining longterm
national security, and the preserving means to produce
the sophisticated tools of war.” 14 With TSPR, a government
management team was often unable to effectively intervene
and assist its contractors. The US government’s professional
acquisition and engineering workforce had been eviscerated by
changes in manning strategies. Instead, there was a dependency
on contractors to provide that expertise. The catastrophic
effects of TSPR and associated staffing philosophies were not
limited to the Space-Base Infrared System (SBIRS) and Future
55 High Frontier