Looking at Joint Defense Requirements

Understand what is broke and not broke

I’ve been particularly annoyed by the frequent assertion that the joint requirements process is the reason why our warfighters do not get the equipment that they need and as quickly as they should. One of the more recent diatribes came out about a month ago, calling the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS) “a bureaucratic priesthood fixated on formatting, enthralled by committees, and divorced from tangible warfighting needs.” In the article, the authors castigate the system for not getting programs out the door. You know, like what program managers are supposed to do.

The fundamental flaw lies in JCIDS’s delusion of perfect planning. The system imagines an immaculate cascade from high-level needs to engineering specifications, all knowable years in advance. But reality intrudes: Technical constraints, shifting threats, and budget realities collide with these neat theoretical cascades. When they do, instead of adapting, the system demands costly acrobatics to preserve the illusion of perfection.

But here’s the cruel irony: After climbing this bureaucratic mountain, these documents accomplish nothing. They don’t align money. They don’t identify program managers for urgent joint needs. They simply accumulate in an ever-expanding pile of validated requirements that don’t get published, don’t get culled, just accumulate.

Wow. So that’s not been my experience while working around the DoD CB Defense Program for 30 years. I didn’t realize that there was a utopian world in which the defense acquisition community worked perfectly in synch with a user community that anticipated cost growths, technology immaturity, and budget fluctuations. I didn’t realize that “validated requirements” from the user community were supposed to align budgets but were really just roadblocks to creating cutting edge, affordable, and lethal weapon systems that the combatant commands needed.

JCIDS has been refined several times over my career. I see that the current CJCSI 5123.01 is on version I, which means it’s been modified at least 10 times. It’s a constant work in progress, but the general form and function of the Joint Staff’s sheepherding the services through the process has not changed. Oh, by the way, if you hate JCIDS, blame former SecDef Donald Rumsfeld. It was his idea that the services were wasting funds by insisting on service-unique requirements and that, for efficiency’s sake, the requirements process had to be a top-down capability-driven process. Don’t get me wrong, Rumsfeld was a bastard and absolute poison to working counter-WMD policy issues, but he had something here that took hold 20+ years ago.

I don’t intend on getting into a full-voiced debate over the need to reform JCIDS or the Defense Acquisition System. Yes, JCIDS should be easier, but half the problem is that the user community is stubbornly resistant as to the cost-benefits discussion that project/program managers implicitly understand. If you have mid-level action officers who insist that the next defense widget has to have significantly advanced capabilities, while being affordable enough to buy in large quantities and be useable in every environment by people with a high-school level degree, then you’re going to wait for that widget for a very long time. That’s part one. Part two is, we are plagued by program managers and OSD leaders who insist they are smarter than the services’ requirements offices and who insist on “revolutionary” improvements that end up crashing because the technology was never really achievable, and lacking service endorsements, no one wanted these gold-plated fantasies.

I often wonder, have these critics somehow missed the multiple defense acquisition reviews that Congress routinely ignores? Let’s compare the two systems side by side.

Sure, everyone knows this chart and despises its complexity. But compare the thickness of the JCIDS bar at the top and the DAS bar in the middle. And wow, I do not have the time to talk about the DoD budget process and how screwed up that is. Where do you think the complexity and challenges arise? Now tell me that it’s the JCIDS process that is failing the warfighters.

But I digress. I wanted to look at how the Joint Program Executive Office (JPEO) for CBRN Defense has taken the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) requirements as a special interest item over the last few years. Even though USSOCOM is a combatant command, it has “service-like” acquisition responsibilities that enabled its representatives to make the case that it ought to be able to get its SOF-unique CB-defense requirements addressed under this program. In general, these requirements have not been too demanding or costly, and so were accommodated within the budget. Recently, the JPEO created an office for this customer to ensure that they get their special gear.¹

The video doesn’t explain much, other than USSOCOM needs “critical CBRN defense equipment needed for mission success.” This is where I will start, in that no one really knows (or is allowed to say) what the USSOCOM requirements are for CBRN defense or countering WMD. I’ve looked for a long time to find any unclassified discussion of USSOCOM’s counterproliferation or countering WMD terrorism mission, and short of a single slide with some simple slogans on it, it’s pretty bare. I understand the short of it, that USSOCOM expects to track and interdict terrorists who may be moving WMD-related program material or technology around the globe, and occasionally they may be busting into a foreign production factory to see if there are WMD-related program stuff there. But there are no details as to what they do in those missions or what they need in terms of CB defense gear.²

Now the USSOCOM has been a part of the DoD CB Defense Program for a long time, at least 24-25 years or so. When I was more engaged in the DoD CBDP, I did have the opportunity to see many SOCOM requests, and many of them were not winners. I’m not going to elaborate other than to say that they often involved jury-rigging existing commercial and government off-the-shelf equipment (COTS/GOTS) into capabilities for their special missions, because that’s how they roll. That hasn’t changed a whole lot, other than they seem to have gotten smarter about the process by which they can request and spend the CBDP’s money. They need stuff, they write a short justification, and get money for a short-term project that releases special gear. Easy.

The JPEO’s capabilities catalogue has a number of special projects for U.S. SOCOM.³

• Critical Equipment Decon System (CEDS) - used to be called Service Equipment Decon System (SEDS), a long-time desire to have the operational capability to decon critical equipment to “pre-contamination conditions” - extremely hard to achieve, considering the lethality and persistence of certain nerve agents and biological agents and user desired end state. Planned to be a seven-year effort, but SOCOM will get their version in four years (this year).⁴

• Forward Area Mobility Spray (FAMS) system - scalable and mobile decon system for cleaning the exterior of aircraft, helicopters, vehicles, or support system to the extent that a user can operate without protective gear. Again, everyone in the military wants this, but technically it’s very difficult to achieve. Funded FY21-25.

• Far-Forward Biological Sequencing (FFBS) - gives the operators a handheld biological sequencing device to give non-technical operators a lab-level confirmatory capability to identify biohazards in the field. Planned to be a four to five-year effort to full operational capability in FY27.

• Special Purpose Unit Rapid Capability Development and Deployment (SPU RCDD) - open-ended R&D program to rapidly prototype and test COTS/GOTS systems, to include protective masks, detectors, hydration systems, sensor integration, and “augmented training.” Whatever SOCOM has an itch for.

• Tactical Advanced Threat Protective Ensemble (TATPE) - a modified Level-B protective suit that includes explosives protection for missions that involve “non-traditional and advanced threat agents.” Includes micro-cooling for your greater comfort. A quick three-year effort fielded in FY22.

• Wearable All-Hazard Remote Monitoring Program (WARP) - designing chem-bio detection systems that can be attached to a soldier’s ensemble and provide “real-time physiological and environmental monitoring” during missions. Because it was largely COTS gear, it was supposedly a two-year R&D program and it’s being fielded this year.⁵

The point I will make here is that USSOCOM has found a way to leverage defense R&D to quickly get specialized gear for chem-bio defense, largely due to loopholes around the traditional requirements process. There is a sole user (instead of three or four services) who want a small amount of high-tech, very expensive piece of gear using OTA funds channeled through a low-rate initial production effort. It’s all legal, but harder to do for traditional service requirements. My point being, the system has evolved to allow for rapid development of defense gear when it’s seen as urgent. However, the services still require specialized CB defense gear that is affordable in large quantities, sustainable over the long term, and (importantly) tested to meet their requirements. SOCOM can ignore all that, because they’re willing to take a vendor’s claims at face value and spend the money to see if it works. Not everyone can do that.

Joint requirements can be challenging if the Army, Air Force, Marines, and Navy don’t all agree on a set of threshold and objective standards of performance and agree on the cost and schedule aspects of a program. That’s the complication. It’s not a process issue; it’s more the unwillingness of mid-level action officers to understand that they need to be a little more open to the give and take of high requirements versus affordability versus when you want it fielded. A quick example, the Air Force civil engineers want chemical and biological detectors that reliably warn operators of very low levels of agent exposure - below what we might call “operationally relevant.” The Army and Marines just want something to alarm before they become incapacitated. The Navy cares less about detector levels, but it has to be mounted on a ship. They argue about acceptable requirements and sustainment costs while the JPEO calmly spends its money every year looking at industry prototypes and asking “how about this?” In many circumstances, the services will just resign themselves to whatever the JPEO program managers think is the best solution.

I’m going to give you my bottom line about the joint requirements process. The services’ user communities have to be in charge because they have to train operators for the equipment, they have to pay the sustainment costs for all that equipment, and they have to be able to use the equipment in a dirty wartime environment. That’s why they get to write the requirement documents, not the combatant commands. They get a lot of help from the Joint Staff and contractors. The combatant commands have a fast-track process but they’re even less informed on the defense acquisition system than those service action officers who deal with it every day. You do not want to see the “great ideas” that the combatant command staffs come up with.

The user community is far from perfect. Sure, sometimes they decide to ask for gear that has poorly defined concepts of operations (in particular, biological detectors and medical countermeasures). There can be requirements creep, in which they keep adding new details to requirements documents like a Christmas tree. If people are unwilling to change or delete old requirements based on outdated concepts, then that’s on them. This all adds to the cost and schedule. Many action officers are not familiar with the technologies being pushed by the JPEO and don’t understand how the test and evaluation community will limit their approval based on the high threshold of those requirement documents. But we’ve been doing this dance for decades. CBRN defense has not significantly changed since World War II.⁶ It’s a people issue, not a process issue. You get back what you invest into your people.

I would love to get into how the JPEO and OSD leaders will push their desired projects over the services’ validated priorities and to what extent that reduces the ability for the services to get the gear that they asked for because of vanity projects. That’s not the point (for today). But the requirements process in and of itself is not broken. It moves slowly and has lots of documentation because the people involved have disagreements over the end product and these disagreements have to be resolved and documented. It still remains true that the overwhelming majority of defense R&D cost and schedule is due to the laborious development and testing of highly complex equipment that is the defense acquisition system.

1. As an aside, this is not an endorsement of the SOCOM requirements process. Rather, their operators are looking for a specific capability and even if the technology falls short in some respects, they are willing to accept a very expensive and temporary fix for the short term. The services don’t have that same mindset and for a good reason, since they have to think about long-term maintenance and budget implications that SOCOM does not.

2. I’ll offer that many missions that the SOCOM operators do relative to countering WMD is not CB defense per say, but they can use the protective gear, detectors, and decon gear in executing offensive counterproliferation missions. I’ll argue that there is a difference, in that SOCOM could spend their own money for technical gear not intended for CB defense missions, but this is a nuanced argument and at worst a rabbit hole that I won’t enter.

3. Information is supplemented by the CBDP Budget Estimates for FY24, available here

4. Much longer discussion here on the very difficult task about getting previously contaminated gear to a state of “pre-contamination” so that it can be returned to the United States. Ideally you want to clean military gear to the point of using it without protective ensembles and without any health effects. This is incredibly difficult depending on the standard one sets and often the solution is to just throw away the contaminated gear, because the cost and time to accomplish this high standard isn’t worth it. So either this gear is incredibly expensive or they lowballed the requirements.

5. I have a lot of skepticism about “wearable” chem-bio detectors and their reliability, particularly to identify low-level hazards and more than a few agents. FitBits for chem-bio? I can’t find any open-source information about this kit, though. The contractor Advanced Technology International looks like a deal-broker and not a tech firm.

6. Look at the gear, we’re still using rubber gas masks, carbon-embedded cloth protective suits, the same medical countermeasures, caustic decon solutions, air filtration systems for collective protection. The soldier who had CB defense gear in the Korean conflict looks very similar to the soldier who had CB defense gear in the Gulf wars. This isn’t esoteric “Star Wars” technology. Just because we have some manned and unmanned reconnaissance vehicles today doesn’t change the basic concept of use.