| 摘要 | An assessment of trends in the U.S. defense industry and international industrial base collaboration rests on the future direction of DOD industrial base policy and acquisition reform. Ultimately, political leadership needs to address the ideal industrial structure to meet national security needs and the acquisition rules required to incentivize the creation of that structure. A globally integrated commercial-defense industrial base should provide the U.S. with maximum innovation at minimum cost. Politically, this has been and will continue to be a difficult and challenging objective to achieve.
Historically, the U.S. emulated other nations’ industrial policy and for security of supply reasons advocated self-sufficiency in meeting its defense needs. This was also seen as good politics by spending defense dollars at home. Protectionist legislation beginning with the Buy American Act of 1933 and the Berry Amendment in 1941 solidified this goal. Compounding this desire for autarky with a monopsony buyer, oftentimes divorced from the realities of the marketplace, has led to costly and inefficient defense-unique acquisition and business processes (to include technology transfer and control). These processes have resulted in an insular, defense-unique industrial base — essentially a privatized defense arsenal system — whose comparative advantage is found in procedural compliance.
From this basis, U.S. defense industrial policy tends to gravitate to an analysis of how to maintain capabilities or competition in areas within the defense unique industrial base that are in danger of reliance on sole-source suppliers. While a sector and tiered industrial policy analytical approach is necessary in this restricted market space, it does not take into account the long term, strategic level market assessments that need to occur.
Defense industrial policy should be no less than how best to focus the economic capacity of a nation (and its allies) on the ability to conduct war, or in peacetime maintain the capabilities to be able to quickly conduct required military operations. At such a strategic level, the underlying economic and financial strength of a nation is critical – i.e., can the underlying economy support the expenditures required to fund an adequate defense, but also what are the capabilities present in the civilian sector that can support defense?
Theoretically, while the economic strength of the U.S. to support defense spending should not be in doubt, the political choice of how to spend one’s resources is another matter. Rising debt levels and a desire to spend more on a welfare state has crowded out the ability to afford the current defense arsenal system. As there seems to be little political desire or agreement to address entitlements, there is little relief in sight for defense beyond major increases in underlying economic growth or adding to the national debt. Absent these increases, another model for maintaining defense capabilities has to be found or current and future military readiness will dramatically decline.
While the civilian economy is and will continue to be important to DOD as a source of general funds through taxation, it has also been seen as a source of surge production and raw material inputs. The authorities of the Defense Production Act of 1950 are designed to allocate and ensure domestic sources of supply for defense purposes and are based on the World War II experience of the conversion of the civilian industry for defense. Reciprocal defense agreements with U.S. allies ultimately serve this same purpose. This is obligatory civil-military integration of the industrial base at the central planning level, but there is a much broader and more significant civil military integration at the commercial market level that needs to occur. This integration is key to an ideal industrial policy and strikes at the heart of the nature of innovation and productivity to support national security.
If ideally encouraged, or at a minimum not constrained, there is a technological push-pull mechanism that operates across the threshold of the defense and civilian industrial bases. Military R&D and knowledge can flow to the civilian sector and vice versa. In the civilian sector more so than in defense, market incentives and R&D expenditures morph derivative knowledge into new products or services that reduce cost or enhance productivity far beyond anything the DOD could create on its own. The development of the IT industry from its Pentagon roots in the 1950s and the reincorporation of civilian advances in this technology back into defense in the 1990s is perhaps the greatest example of this type of civil military integration, but there are many others. With the right acquisition polices and incentives this type of innovation can be encouraged to develop and continuously adapted into the defense enterprise.
Despite these advances, there is a history of resistance at DOD to the incorporation of civilian technology and business methods. The Pentagon’s business processes seem impervious to reform unless there is a crisis and as long as the US maintains technological dominance and expansive budgets there is little reason to change. Thus, two factors (declining budgets and technological surprise) combined with senior leadership advocacy will be the drivers behind any business transformation. This leadership is required to not only overcome risk-averse behavior within the DOD bureaucracy but also build a coalition in Congress to support the right enabling policies.
For example, it was the Packard Commission’s assessment in the mid-1980s that DOD was at risk of falling behind if it did not embrace commercial R&D trends, particularly in IT. Technological surprise came not from the Soviet Union or a new near-peer but the commercial marketplace. Still, reform did not happen until budgets were drastically reduced at the end of the Cold War and even then readiness and modernization were first allowed to suffer. Finally, needed leadership was amply provided by Secretary of Defense Bill Perry (who had experience in both the commercial and defense industries) and then was actively supported by the Congress. This resulted in legislation in 1994 that removed some requirements for defense unique business and oversight practices that were no longer affordable and served as barriers to incorporating commercial innovation.
The next round of reform (only partially implemented) came from the realizations that the commercial supply chain was undergoing massive globalization and that to maintain competition in the defense unique industrial base foreign participation was needed. By the late 1990s, the movement to break down the barriers to commercial and globalized solutions reaching the defense market was in full swing. However, with the increase in the defense budget in the aftermath of 9/11 the impetus for reform was largely forgotten. Rapid acquisition authorities passed in the early 2000s (used to access commercial and global solutions to meet DOD needs during the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan) can be seen as the last vestiges of the acquisition reform movement.
The foundation for the development of a global civil-military industrial base structure has not been eliminated, but it has been rolled back in the last five years as DOD has begun to revert back to the autarkic, centrally-planned model. In one sense this model never went away but had an emerging commercial/international acquisition alternative overlaid on top of it. Without leadership to sustain it, the antibodies in the Pentagon began to reject this alternative. Commercial solutions are now increasingly suspect due to pricing and security reasons. Old arguments about security of supply are beginning to be raised and while there is less open public protectionist debate then there was when the House of Representatives proposed new Buy American legislation almost 10 years ago, there appears to be an increase in more subtle de facto protectionism.
Unfortunately, what has been advertised as acquisition reform in the current Administration (to include the Better Buying Power (BBP) initiative) has been a near-term focus on cost transparency, low price, and eliminating “excess” profits at the expense of quality, innovation and long term cost reduction and performance. It remains to be seen if the third round of BBP to be announced this week will focus on the necessary incentives to enable innovation and take a different approach to acquisition reform.
Despite these trends, the underlying environment could provide an opportunity for positive change. As in the Post Cold War period, resource constraints are a motivating factor to begin a discussion on the fundamental policy choices that will need to be made to reconcile budgetary reality with long-term defense needs. The factors in those choices now are similar to before, but accentuated.
Technological surprise is perhaps the most compelling factor for change. Senior leadership from the Secretary of Defense down has recently expressed concerns about the U.S. losing its technological edge. DOD officials have stated that the U.S. has lost the electromagnetic spectrum and lamented the impact of cheap commercial jammers and technologies. Other countries (including China and Israel) and non-state entities are learning the value of civil-military integration of the industrial base just when the U.S. is erecting new barriers to achieving this integration.
What will it take for the leadership in the Pentagon and Congress to aim for the high ground of the national defense and security interest and reinstate the reforms of the 1990s that allowed for civil military integration and greater international collaboration? Will senior Pentagon leadership address the compelling need for the right acquisition and business policies to take advantage of global trends in technology and manufacturing?
One should hope it does not take something like the loss of U.S. advantages in stealth and undersea warfare or defeat in electronic warfare or cyberspace to get policymakers to think radically different about how defense business is done. It would be better if technological surprise came from within or from our allies through their own civil-military integration efforts rather than a potential adversary. Ultimately, a new potential threat combined with budgetary constraints and a vocal leadership may be the only path forward that will be able to overcome the entrenched bureaucracy, business as usual mentality and collusion of local interests embedded in defense spending that serves to prop up current industrial and acquisition policy in the United States. A difficult but necessary debate lies ahead in the coming years and there is no guarantee that the right approach will be chosen. |
