Black Hole, or Black Art?

[davidgillon]

 
Liam Fox, UK Minister of Defence, has launched an attack on what he labelled a 'culture of optimism' within the Ministry of Defence's equipment procurement  programmes. He claims that the culture tolerates risks that would not be acceptable in normal business.


I worked in defence for 20 years before being kicked out for inconveniencing my management by being disabled. I've had my career destroyed by the defence industry, so there's no reason for me to spring to the defence of the military-industrial complex, but unfortunately Fox's comparison of defence procurement risks with normal business practices simply suggests that he really and truly doesn't get it, and in the country's Minister of Defence that is a wee bit worrying. Robert McNamara famously tried to bring the lessons he had learnt at Ford into US defence procurement, and even 50 years later the screw-ups that resulted are legendary (such as trying to make an Air Force bomber, the F-111, into a Navy carrier-based fighter in the name of efficiency). Worse, McNamara's business concepts probably contributed to the defeat in Vietnam through their focus on trying to apply business metrics to military operations, leading to the shibboboleth of body count as a measure of victory, not whether or not you were actually making a difference on the ground. I find that I'm using the word 'clueless' a lot lately, but when it comes to running a country's national defence infrastructure it really does seem to fit McNamara uncomfortably well.

It's not yet clear whether Fox is another McNamara in the making or not, but the auguries aren't good if he's comparing project risk in military procurement to civilian business. There are problems in defence procurement, requirement creep is an absolutely huge one, and risk analysis could indeed be better, but that comparison to business risk really, truly worries me. It may seem like a reasonable comparison to someone who doesn't have a defence engineering background (Fox is a medical doctor by training), but ultimately he's trying to compare apples and orangutans. There is a complexity and level of technological risk in large defence projects that doesn't exist even in the most complex of civilian engineering programmes. A car manufacturer might decide he's going to bring a new model to market and make a risk assessment, but that assessment is done without the technology involved pushing the edge of the technological envelope. But military designs necessarily push the edge of the technological envelope, because if you don't then the other guy might. So the relevant comparison is not the risk in building a family saloon, but the risk in building a family saloon with the straight-line and cornering performance of a Formula 1 car combined with the ability to compete in and win the Paris-Dakar Rally. Business risk is a false analogy, and anyone who doesn't understand that shouldn't be allowed anywhere near defence procurement.

If we want to look at it in a little more detail then an airliner might seem like a reasonably close comparison to a fighter: big engines, flies, falls out of the sky if it doesn't work, but to the complexity of the airliner, the military then has to add offensive avionics (radar, electo-optical and electronic warfare sensors, fire control system,  weapons release system), defensive avionics (radar and missile detectors, jammers, chaff and flare launchers,  towed decoys), C4I systems that let it operate as part of an integrated military unit rather than a lone berserker (sensor fusion, datalinks), a crew interface that's usable at high-G (HOTAS, voice operation, helmet mounted displays, aural cueing, ejection seats, G-suits and pressure breathing), and ensure the whole ensemble is stealthy and resistant to nuclear blast, no matter that it is screaming through the sky at the tip of red-hot engines while radiating radar, EW and datalink waveforms.  And it may have to do all that while ploughing through the weeds at 30m and Mach 1.5.  That's tough enough, now remember that the last three major civil airliner programmes (Airbus A380, Boeing 787,. 747-I) have all suffered major cost and schedule overruns. And that Airbus, despite being owned by a major defence contractor, just had to admit its first ab-initio military programme, the A400M transport, suffered major overruns because it didn't understand just how different civil and military requirements are.

I'll draw a more personal risk analogy to conclude: I worked on developing the flight controls of the Eurofighter, precisely the sort of development Liam Fox is talking about; if the controls fail in a car then hopefully you just take your foot off the accelerator and it slows to a halt, if they fail in the Eurofighter, the aerodynamics mean the aircraft can potentially tear itself apart within fractions of a second. We tried to think of people working on an equivalently critical situation one day; not just safety-critical -- fail and someone's dead, but 'hard real-time safety-critical', with action-reaction cycles measured in milliseconds and no ability to miss deadlines (that's the 'hard' in 'hard real-time'), we'd had people on other projects measured at the toughest level of safety criticality, tell us that their risks just weren't remotely as critical as ours. Eventually we hit on a comparison that worked, there was another team out there doing work of comparable complexity at comparable levels of risk, they work for NASA and they make the space-shuttle fly.

So, Dr Fox, do you really think business risk is a functional analogy?