a competitive fly/shoot/drive/steam off trial of prototypes and then run competitive bids to build the selected design -- as I've been saying for over 40 years -- not that anyone listened...
That negates a requirement for excessive technical detail in specifications, the factor that increases the cost and the difficulty in spec writing.
I agree, but that only works when one is building prototypes with mature technology. You couldn't, for example, have a bunch of contractors build a complete FCS prototype for competition - it would bankrupt them.
This points to what is, IMO, the biggest problem with procurement - that it is joined to the hip with R&D. We essentially sign-on to buy capabilities that have yet to be invented and then are shocked to discover inventing those capabilities takes orders-of-magnitude more time and money than originally estimated, nevermind the that the services like to constantly amend requirements, further driving up the cost.
Naturally the contractors and the services (and Congress) are happy to underestimate the costs and difficulty of creating technology from scratch for one program. So ISTM the best thing we could do is put a wall between R&D and procurement so that procurement money is only spend on mature technology and R&D money is only spent on R&D. This would also allow our R&D effort to be more efficient and effective since it won't be tied to one program.
I'm not very optimistic that such changes will ever happen, but ever since my wife agreed to marry me I'm of the mind that anything is possible
I will however, forego commenting on FCS.
The idea will not work for techno leaps, however, DARPA unconstrained by DoD bureaucracy and service parochiality seems to do that pretty well...I resemble that remark...I'm not very optimistic that such changes will ever happen, but ever since my wife agreed to marry me I'm of the mind that anything is possible
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