Air Force Lt Col Dan Ward has another great piece on how to break out of the cycle of acquisition programs that are ever more expensive, ever later, and in many cases, ever more irrelevant. Obviously the first two make the third just that much more likely.

Perhaps to better accommodate the crowd here at Fast Transients, he’s done this one in graphic novel format: The Comic Guide To Improving Defense Acquisitions. (2.9 MB PDF)

Pay close attention starting at around page 8, where he explains how orientation (which calls “values,” as in “things we value”) shapes our decision making. So if, as he writes, we value complexity, perhaps as a sign of sophistication (or — my interpretation — because we can hire more people thereby increasing profit and political pull), then we’ll focus our efforts on justifying the complexity and the additional cost and time it implies rather than trying to make things simpler.

[Check out Mark Thompson’s comment over at Time’s Battleland.]