An Interview with Peter Dombrowski
In Buying Military Transformation Dombrowski and Gholz’s analyze the political relationship between the defense industry and Congress, the bureaucratic relationship between the firms and the military services, and the technical capabilities of different types of businesses. In this interview they address some of the crucial issues discussed in the book. nnQ: The U.S. military is fighting wars in the here and now. How important is military innovation for American national security?Dombrowski and Gholz: It may seem as if we have too many fights on our hands right now to worry about long-term innovation. Over and over again in recent conflicts—in the Gulf War, in Kosovo, in Afghanistan, and in the early days of the Iraq War—we’ve seen that American military technology is already far superior to the weapons fielded by our enemies’ conventional forces. The problems come in later, with the grungier, more workaday tasks like crafting political solutions, rebuilding destroyed societies, and dealing with insurgents. These tasks take more than innovative equipment.nnBut one of America’s best weapons is the ingenuity of our people, both in the military and in the defense industry. Some of the complex problems that our military faces today can be better solved when soldiers have access to more information, and the main thrust of the ongoing effort in military innovation in the United States is to use new computer and communications technology to spread information throughout our forces.nnIt is neither easy to develop the equipment nor cheap to buy enough new gadgets to equip the entire armed forces. Military leaders, elected officials, and defense industry executives have to cooperate so that military innovation can, in fact, contribute to national security. Our book offers lessons for how to manage that difficult process, with practical suggestions for how to work through technical, economic, political, and military challenges. Even while the U.S. military is fighting today, it is spending billions of dollars a year to prepare for the future. That spending is vital, but with that kind of money on the line, we also need to make sure the spending is done right and that the new technologies that we want come to fruition.nnQ: How can we hope for military innovation when defense acquisition is so full of waste, fraud, and abuse?nnDombrowski and Gholz: Large bureaucracies control military investment, and we all know that bureaucracies are rarely efficient even when people follow the rules. But lately, the problems seem worse, because high officials from the Pentagon and private firms and even a Congressman have gone to jail for breaking the rules. Although Americans are absolutely right to ask whether the acquisition system is fundamentally broken by pork barrel incentives and outright malfeasance, they should not lose hope.nnOn the one hand, most defense firms and acquisition officials are honest and patriotic; the scandals that we read about are the most extreme cases. Remember that the U.S. won the Cold War mostly by out-innovating the Soviet Union. It was waste, fraud, and abuse that caused the USSR to go bankrupt. We didn’t. Our book describes certain organizational innovations—like Federally-Funded Research and Development Centers that specialize in systems integration—that explain the U.S. success. We show how that system can be harnessed to produce the next generation of military innovation that we need today.nnOn the other hand, it’s not entirely a bad thing that our defense acquisition process has a political element. Sure, an excess of pork barrel politics might trap the American military with old equipment that’s built in the “right” Congressional districts and doesn’t meet the soldiers’ true needs. But most of the time, we don’t get that excess. In fact, if there were no political benefit to investing in military innovation, Congress wouldn’t spend our tax dollars on the military, and the United States would underinvest in technological opportunities. Another important lesson from our book is that the military and the defense industry need to think carefully about politics as a component of their strategy to implement military transformation.nnQ: Young firms like Google and Cisco seem to dominate commercial information technology. How can we bring America’s entrepreneurial spirit into the defense industry? Is the established military-industrial complex, led by firms like Boeing and Lockheed Martin, a liability?nnDombrowski and Gholz: In recent years, we’ve seen computer hardware and software firms come and go, and the tumult in that industry is a big part of its entrepreneurial dynamism. In most businesses, new firms start with a good idea and then they search for customers who will pay enough for their product so that they can make money. The defense business works a bit differently, but that doesn’t mean that it lacks creative thinkers and potential innovators.nnIn the defense world, the only customer is the U.S. government. We don’t need many small entrepreneurs to go out and find new market niches. In fact, the best route for entrepreneurs to get their ideas into the defense market is generally to partner with an established defense company that understands the customer. The same goes for the big commercial information technology companies: the military isn’t a big enough customer to make it worthwhile for them to customize their products for military needs, but the commercial firms can work as suppliers to the defense industry. Defense companies specialize in understanding how the military will use their products (knowledge that most entrepreneurs lack), and they are relatively efficient at working under the constraints of complex, bureaucratic acquisition regulations that would drive most entrepreneurs mad.nnQ: So where do good ideas for military innovation come from?nnDombrowski and Gholz: It’s actually the customer—the military—that understands national security threats well enough to decide what kind of R&D investment will have the best payoff. The defense market is an extreme case of customer-driven innovation. The good news today is that the defense customer has thought a good deal about how it can use information technology to solve its operational problems. On the other side, the military feels relatively comfortable trusting established firms with its half-baked ideas about the future of warfare—ideas that can flower into viable innovations as the military officers go back-and-forth with company technologists and financial officers. That iterative process has given the U.S. military the best equipment in the world in the past, and it can work for the next generation, too.nnOur book improves a celebrated theory of “disruptive innovation” that Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen created a few years ago. We change the theory to better account for customer-driven innovation, allowing it to account for situations like the modern defense industry. Our book combines clear presentation of the improved framework for analyzing innovation with a wide range of case material on innovative ships, unmanned aerial vehicles, and communications equipment for the military’s future networks. We interviewed scores of military officers, government officials, industry representatives, and defense analysts to acquire the raw data that drives our analysis. The result is a new understanding of military innovation, business-government relations, and the competition in high-tech industries for new ideas and products.nnQ: How might your book influence scholarship on national security affairs?nnDombrowski and Gholz: We extend a long and important tradition in political science, international relations, and history that tries to explain the causes and effects of military innovation. MIT’s Barry Posen and Harvard’s Steve Rosen introduced prominent theories of innovation in military doctrine—the process through which militaries get new ideas about how they want to fight, given a certain level of technology. Our book complements their famous studies by explaining situations in which militaries (especially the American military) try to push the technological envelope to apply an existing idea about how they would like to fight in the future.