South Africa's COIN war in SWA/Namibia/Angola

[Pete]

The topic of DoD and Army policy for research and development is far removed from South African Army operations and the study of military history. It deserves its own thread rather than being here. Therefore I'll try to be brief.

When I began working in U.S. Army medical materiel development in 1986 I began reading the various directives and regulations that govern it. The impression I got is that all this policy guidance grew during the 1950s and 1960s in an effort to prevent various SNAFUs -- cost overruns, scandals, and failed weapons systems -- from ever happening again. In effect it was the bureaucratic equivalent of slamming the barn door shut after the horse had escaped.

Though all these regulations, directives and management procedures were implemented with the best of intentions by well-meaning officers, one step at a time DoD and the military services managed to create an impenetrable thicket of policy guidance and a veritable bureaucratic maze, the American equivalent of the Soviet Five Year Plans for the management of their economy. Piles and piles of paperwork were created, to the extent that only 10 percent of those in DoD R&D are doers who make things happen. The other 90 percent are staff weenies and their Highway Helpers who review the documents and sharpshoot from the sidelines. It's consulting firms who write most of those piles of DoD documentation, billing by the hour, like I once did.

About 20 years ago DoD standardized its systems development policy with its "DoD 5000" series of directives. It superceded the service-unique regulations and policies. Now we have standard life cycle names, terminology and acronyms. But the big-bureaucracy thing in military R&D endures.

[Pete]

One aspect of this systems development thing is a subject that Ken White has harped upon eloquently over the years, the personnel system. In the Army the hard-chargers are selected for the command and operations track at the major or lieutenant colonel level. Those non-selected for battalion command have to find a new way to earn a living in their alternate specialty so they can do the big two-zero.

(That is not to say that all of the guys on the command list should have been there, or that all of the non-selected ones shouldn't have been there. I crashed and burned as a captain so with all of these broken windows in my house I'm reluctant to be the one to throw stones.)

In any event, in the Army at the rank of major you often have to find a new niche -- it may be personnel, logistics, contract management, or perhaps systems development.

In DoD systems development the only programs that exist are those being conducted under an approved requirements document by a military service and that have the required funding, which usually takes at least four years to obtain by going through the POM/PPBES process. Everything else, including ideas from those in the field with mud or dust on their boots, is neither here nor there. I'm not trying to justify or make excuses for these basic facts of life, I'm just trying to explain them to those who have not been there.