After almost three decades of slowly diminishing American influence and a rising Chinese Communist Party (CCP) waging a new kind of 21st century “Silent War,” I have seen the spark of Renaissance lit once more!

The Renaissance, or rebirth, during the 15th and 16th centuries marked the end of the Middle Ages; a fractured, parochial, and regressive millennium that began with the fall of Ancient Rome in the year 476 A.D.  

An explosion of thought, culture, science, art, architecture, engineering, and philosophy transcending borders and traditional political powers emerged. The Renaissance displayed the curiosity, skill, and achievements of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and others. Driven by mission and undaunted by past expectations or pragmatism, the Renaissance masters would not shut up and refused to be defined, silenced, or bullied into staying in their lane. They were pioneers of multiple crafts, disciplines, and mediums. They changed the world forever.

Consider the simplicity of the spark that launched the Renaissance. The prominence of the Medici family in Florence brought stability and peace across Italy through influence alone. That influence opened space for a series of significant financial “bets” on the arts, the revival of lost knowledge (research and development) from Ancient Greece, and even a failed, yet paradigm-shifting attempt to bring the Catholic Church together with the Orthodox Church. 

This ferment provided the impetus for the great spark that blossomed and then exploded across Europe to dominate the next two centuries. It was a groundswell long in the making that needed a reason, a vision, and a catalyst to start. To continue to flourish, however, it needed much more…an entire anatomy to change the trajectory of mankind and close the books on 1,000 years of the brutal Middle Ages.

The New Middle Ages and the Impetus for Change

Lost Levers of National Security 

The 20th century brought industrial scale to suffering and war – a sort of condensed and accelerated Middle Ages in the modern world. It was marked by the Spanish Flu pandemic, wars large and small, and the tyranny of multiple despotic rulers who used the unlimited power of government to oppress, imprison, and murder millions of people. In the end, however, the United States and the allies of freedom emerged victorious and reestablished the international system to favor the sovereignty of nations, the rule of law, monetary transparency, individual rights, and a rejection of the bankrupt “utopian ideal” of Marxist-Leninist socialism. 

As the century waned during the 1990s the Berlin Wall fell, Germany reunified, and military spending gave way to the peace dividend. America took a vacation from history. We regressed from the days of World War II and the Cold War in our ability to integrate all four instruments of national power – diplomacy, information, military, and economics to advance vital national, and international security interests. We ceded our unique leadership role in the international institutions we established to prevent a return to world war. 

This decline was accompanied by other hallmarks of a modern Middle Ages when it comes to resourcing and acquiring a strong military deterrent: 

• Micromanaged resources under the 1961 Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE) process still in use today.
• Defense industrial base consolidation and calcification of the large defense contractor business model, stretching program life cycles.
• Acquisition bureaucracy resulting from the unnecessarily complex, frequently changing, and risk-averse Cold War resourcing and contracting system we have inherited.

The Silent War

Now, some 30 years after the Cold War, America’s lost economic and information influence has been assumed by new, more sophisticated despots whose ambitions are to return the world to the “utopia” of Marxist-Leninist socialism and the subjugation of populations required to keep its dictators in power. 

In 1999, two colonels in China’s Peoples’ Liberation Army wrote an academic thought piece called Unrestricted Warfare. It describes how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) can use the four instruments of national power holistically to defeat America without ever having to face military-on-military conflict. It is chilling to see how we have walked right into the hunter’s snare. Our quarrel is not with the long-subjugated people of China. It is with the evil of the CCP and its lust for control over the populations of the world. Now on its 14th 5-year plan, the CCP is well on its way to achieving what a wise military philosopher, Sun Tzu, called the “Acme of Skill”—to-win without fighting. 

Although this new 21st century Silent War doesn't appear as urgent as the invasions of the 20th century, it is no less existential in its outcomes. It is being fought continuously through dependence-building international debt programs, investment in U.S. technology startups, intellectual property theft, seeding our colleges with CCP-controlled students, legally compelling foreign companies in China to cooperate with CCP intelligence services, taking over other countries’ territories unopposed, and more. (See sidebar on page 23.) 

Rekindling the Spark

In the face of diminishing American influence at the end of the 20th century and the Silent War of the 21st, I have seen the spark of Renaissance lit once more in the unlikeliest of places. Bold bets are being placed on creative pioneers. Research and development capability lost by the government to the private sector is being regained through wagers on emerging dual-use technology and co-investment with venture capitalists drawn by patriotism and the chance to solve big problems. Where is this rebirth occurring? Ironically, in the much-maligned contracting community.

In fact, the Renaissance in contracting is well under way. Five years ago I witnessed embers sparking into fire within Air Force contracting. I remember attending the first Air Force Pitch Day on March 2019 in New York’s Times Square. Pitch Day was enabled by a contracting and payment process reengineered by a nationwide team led by a creative and tenacious young contracting ninja, then-Maj Sarah Lark. My visionary boss, Will Roper, then-Air Force Assistant Secretary for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, was speaking about the charge he gave us. 

I was sitting next to General Seve Wilson, a fantastic leader and the Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force. I leaned over and answered a question he had asked me in his office months before: “How do we lead our contracting force to be more innovative?” There in Times Square, with the venture capital community observing, my boss described the process that delivered contract awards to winning entrepreneurs in three minutes from pitch to single-page contract, and made initial payments in the wisp of a credit card swipe. I said to Gen. Wilson, “This is how sir: We let them into the mission, we let them create, and we have their backs.” The Pitch Days Team won a DoD Packard Award,1 the first of two. Pitch Days caught on like wildfire, and very soon my office did not need to be involved at all, except for gracious invites for me to serve as a judge here or there. 

One of my first conversations with Will Roper kindled what became Air Force Pitch Days, but it also started something deeper. He asked me, “Cameron, can we award a contract and pay someone in a single day?” “Sure,” I answered. Incredulous, he asked, “Are you a contracting guy?” 

“Oh yes sir, I assure you I have spent most of my adult life as an Air Force contracting officer,” I responded. “But in the 1.5 seconds between the time you asked me that, and the time I answered, I figured out a way to do it.” The one-page contract, I admit, was just us showing off. Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson had mentioned the idea of a one-page contract in a speech that year and got an audible gasp from the crowd as if it were a death-defying stunt. The only regulation I had to waive was the use of government forms—a credit to Maj. Lark and her team of contracting ninjas nationwide. 

We were catching and executing everything Will Roper threw at us and then some. When the pandemic broke he asked me to lead the Air Force COVID-19 Task Force. We stood it up in 48 hours and ran it for the next 18 months before turning it over to Air Force Materiel Command, quietly but quickly shoring up threatened parts of the Defense Industrial Base (DIB), and re-shoring the medical manufacturing needed to support the Department of Health and Human Services. It was a fantastic early graduation exercise for mission-focused business leaders across the Air and Space forces.

Redefining Contracting for the Future

For the contracting Renaissance to ignite and drive lasting impact, everything must change to support a broader role for contracting as the “business leader” for the mission. Pay, training, authority, tools, and business acumen must be enhanced. The business leaders of the future must not stay in their lane and must never shut up. Once fully trained, they must feel comfortable with everything from contract types and methods to discussing proxy-statement aligned incentives and balance sheet management with chief financial officers. They must also learn firsthand what “right” looks like for the supported mission.

From Contracting Professionals to Business Leaders

The education, training, and experience needs of future contracting professionals will demand a broader role and greater competence as we face sophisticated economic and information coercion from the CCP. As the American National Standards Institute-certified standard setter, NCMA must collaborate with the Defense Acquisition University, federal contracting agencies, industry partners, and others to develop a common language across federal, state, and local government and eventually commercial contracting. That language should be based on the NCMA Contract Management Standard (CMS) and the NCMA Contract Management Body of Knowledge (CMBOK). 

The contracting community must coalesce around a common set of competencies to assess early and continuing education, professional development, and experience in the open job market. I would propose the following Air Force-developed mission-focused business leader competencies as the professional development standard for all contracting business leaders – clearly defined in every job description, government or industry.

▸ Technical Skills (Contracting and Pricing)
▸ Mission Focus
▸ Leadership
▸ Relationship Management
▸ Critical Thinking
▸ Business Acumen

From Compliance Focus to Mission Focus

The Washington, DC, recrimination culture is alive and well, and some senior officials fear embarrassment or career consequences more than they fear the CCP. We all must check our parochial motivations at the door – including, and perhaps especially, members of Congress. Resourcing oversight can be strong, but it must be modernized. The Silent War demands we abandon micromanagement.

We must unify as Americans around the mission we face in this Silent War. We must insist that oversight functions keep “do no harm” front of mind. We face a sophisticated adversary. We must be free to innovate, learn, make honest mistakes, and make up new contracting methods as encouraged by Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) Part 1.2

My favorite part of the FAR always has been Part 54.3 Look it up, you’ll love it. Senior leaders must use their rank and position to lead by example and stand behind everything except ethical problems – honest mistakes and ill-fated innovation attempts included.

From Linear to Systemic Thinking

Contracting business leaders of the future must be free to think through whole problems, not just the pieces they own. We cannot be constrained to linear, serial processes in acquisition. Do not over specify requirements for individual platforms. To create attract the best American technologists, move to performance-based solutions for entire concept-of-operation-level requirements comprising multiple platforms with both material and non-material solutions as fair game. For critical, disruptive deterrent capabilities, let go of the side of the pool and stop insisting every technology be at Technology Readiness Level 6 before starting a program. 

We cannot afford absolute cost and schedule certainty when it comes to outpacing China. We must put the “hail Mary” back in the playbook, even if that means senior leaders must stand up and take the heat (along with a resume hit) if cost and schedule must bend for performance and strategic overmatch to win. There is no reason to wait for a fully developed requirement, adequate funding, and a clear mandate before putting in place all the contracts and agreements necessary to move quickly as the requirement and money materialize. 

Operational contracting does it all the time, and the same tools that work on the battlefield will work just fine in a major weapon systems office. Our mission partners must accept that they do not have experience with the full range of contracting tools for solving acquisition problems, yet Program Executive Officers must also be free to optimize spend across their portfolio of programs during execution year according to the current situation – without prior notification of Congress. We are all too slow! Companies must stop relying on Congress to put their company name on appropriations by using their program names. “Best athletes” get the revenue; emerging technology can bypass the old.

From Bureaucratic to Entrepreneurial

We must push authority, tools, training, and data to the tactical edge. The doctrine of centralized control and decentralized execution works as much for the employment of air power across an entire Joint Operating Area as across an entire acquisition portfolio. 

Our people will rise to the occasion. We have young, enlisted troops making life and death choices on the battlefield every day. We can trust our contracting ninjas to make good judgments or intelligent mistakes and then iterate rapidly.

We must teach business to all unlimited warrant holders. These business leaders must be freed to align the financial incentives of corporations with the cost, schedule, performance, and robustness-of-design needs of next-generation capabilities. Let’s flip the business model from “winner take all” shifting profit earlier in a “speed to market” model like commercial technologies.

Successfully developing and beginning production of cutting-edge military technology must hold the potential for very high profits even in a cost-plus contracting environment. Our exquisite-capability industry partners need financial incentives to lobby Congress to divest old weapon systems instead of keeping them. If our business leaders align these incentives, we could roll out the Next Generation Air Dominance Fighter for the first time for all to see, then buzz the crowd with the prototype of its replacement. That is a business problem every bit as much as a technical one – and America can do it.

From Defense to Offense

Business leaders of the future will yawn when reporting required contracting metrics to Congress because none of them matter to the mission. In the future, business leaders will measure savings via total acquisition lead time and system-wide aggregate lead time instead of meaningless procurement acquisition lead time or closeouts due. Business leaders will work with Congress to derive strong, positive incentives to optimize spend – save money and rapidly reinvest in emerging technologies or the “best athlete” weapons or readiness solutions inside the execution year. We will move money to thwart predatory capital and intellectual property theft by the CCP, and we will assist the industrial base in lowering exposure to Chinese markets.

But Who Will Get Credit?

Who cares?!? In Washington, DC, egos can bump into each other and get in the way. It’s better that we just address that issue head-on. It is not a terrible thing, as it does imply pride and caring. However, we must all be vigilant to check our motives for innovating and accelerating or for not doing so. If your resume or legacy or electability next cycle is more important to you than preserving our children’s freedom from tyranny, then you need to step down!

Parochialism must be sacrificed, and the voices of division set aside. We must not cede the rest of this century or the next to the CCP’s “Communities of Common Destiny,” its new international ambition marked not by territorial gain or vanquished lands but by assured loyalty to the CCP. That loyalty already exists in more places than you or I realize.

The motto of America is not e Pluribus Pluribus, and although many would never suggest that outwardly, their actions tell a story of division and separation. The power and true genius of America is found in e Pluribus Unum. Business and contracting leaders of the future can play a pivotal role in bringing the best of American ingenuity together to respond to the Silent War and win.

In a recent Contract Management Magazine article,4 Will Roper said, “The most important extension of any government or national strategy will be through contracting professionals. Period.” 

“This is contracting’s moment, and its professionals are primed,” he added. “I think they have been waiting to be viewed as innovators, as mavericks, as ninjas.” 

That’s certainly my experience. We are the masters of an unnecessarily complex and antiquated Cold War acquisition and contracting system, yet we also are the leaders who can hack that system and accelerate literally everything.

The 21st century Medicis have placed their bets. Let’s get to work! CM

ENDNOTES
1 The David Packard Excellence in Acquisition Award, https://asc.army.mil/web/acquisition-awards/davidp/
2 https://www.acquisition.gov/far/part-1 
3 https://www.acquisition.gov/far/part-52 
4 “Supersonic Contracting,” May 2022

BOX 1:

Weapons in the Chinese Communist Party’s Silent War on America

The Chinese military philosopher, Sun Tzu,1 called winning a war without fighting the “Acme of Skill.” A 1999 academic thought piece called Unrestricted Warfare2 describes how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) can use the four instruments of national power – diplomacy, information, military and economics – to holistically defeat America without military-on-military conflict. CCP weapons of silent war include:

▸ Belt and Road Initiative (BRI): Indebts nations worldwide, including Central and South America, Africa, and Eu-rope. Erodes U.S. diplomatic power. Builds deep-water ports to support CCP control of the global commons. Mutes public criticism of the CCP. However, it also appears to be over-extending the CCP as recent news demonstrates.3
▸ Civil-Military Fusion Initiative: Steals intellectual property and subsidizes industries for dual-use technologies to catch, then surpass, Western technology. This is not an ethical dilemma for the CCP.
▸ Thousand Talents Initiative: Technology and talent transfer to support the CCP. U.S. universities admit large numbers of well-funded Chinese nationals, squeezing out capacity for U.S. students. Many Chinese students are, or will be, engaged in what amounts to espionage required by the CCP. The Canadian government invited Chinese soldiers to train with its sol-diers. Retired U.K. Royal Air Force pilots have been paid to train Chinese pilots. We need to wise up!
▸ CCP Lawfare: CCP law requires all businesses inside China (including U.S. companies) to cooperate with CCP national se-curity and intelligence services, and efforts to steal foreign technology. The CCP ignores international law by annexing reefs or islands of other nations, then invokes the same law to claim sovereignty over them.
▸ Predatory Capital Practices: The CCP recognizes it can be cheaper to buy intellectual property than to steal it. To over-come high barriers to entry to the U.S. defense market, U.S. entrepreneurs with game-changing technology may seek CCP investment without even knowing. Some U.S. investment companies actively support CCP investment but claim firewalls separate their U.S. business base from operations serving Chinese investors. Patriotic venture capitalists and organizations, like the Defense Investor Network (DIN)4 are fighting back by helping companies unwind their exposure to the CCP.

ENDNOTES
1 Ota, Fumio, “Sun Tzu in Contemporary Chinese Strategy,” Joint Forces Quarterly 73, https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Media/News/Article/577507/sun-tzu-in-contemporary-chinese-strategy/
2 https://www.c4i.org/unrestricted.pdf
3 Wei, Lingling, “China Reins In Its Belt and Road Program, $1 Trillion Later,” Wall Street Journal, September 26, 2022, https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-belt-road-debt-11663961638
4 Dorfman, Zach, “In Silicon Valley, a new breed of investors is seeking closer ties to America’s military and spy agencies,” November 4, 2021, Yahoo News, https://news.yahoo.com/in-silicon-valley-a-new-breed-of-investors-is-seeking-closer-ties-to-americas-military-and-spy-agencies-090041615.html

BOX 2: 

Hallmarks of This Resurgent Middle Ages

The 20th century brought a condensed and accelerated new Middle Ages in the modern world. As the century waned during the 1990s after the Berlin Wall fell and Germany reunified, America took a vacation from history. We regressed from the days of World War II and the Cold War in our ability to integrate the instruments of national power. To avoid a continued descent along this path, the United States must address the other hallmarks of the modern Middle Ages.

Micromanaged Resources 

The business cycle for the acquisition of U.S. combat capabilities of all kinds lengthened, slowed, and became increasingly complex and expensive under the Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE) process introduced in 1961. 

PPBE and the congressional oversight mechanisms and incentives derived from it remain largely unchanged. It is calendar-driven, takes enormous effort at all levels all year, and requires three separate budgets to be managed simultaneously. The PPBE fosters parochial micromanagement of hyper-detailed, narrow program elements. Congress decides, in some cases years in advance, which specific company (since the majority of programs are sole source) will get how much taxpayer money. There is no reason to get this detailed in the budget.

Once an account is labeled by appropriators, it is against the law to spend that money on any other purpose, no matter how smart a decision that may be. If a Program Executive Officer (PEO) requests even a single change through a process called an “Above Threshold Reprogramming,” all four congressional oversight committees must approve it. That takes at least four to six months, and it can become tied up for unrelated political reasons. A PEO cannot by law optimize spend across programs, or even across the phases within a program, during execution year. 

If a new technology becomes available in an execution year that was not known during years prior when the budget was initiated, the PEO cannot say yes! Almost all investment funds are micromanaged, and any new start must be approved by Congress. The incentive for execution is to spend all the money as fast as possible (to beat obligation/expenditure goals), but only within the narrow program elements in statute. Improving the spend or delaying the spend, even for good reasons, will result in the loss of that money to other congressional priorities. 

Industry Consolidation and Calcified Business Model 

The defense industrial base (DIB) experienced several rounds of consolidation resulting in greatly reduced competition as the DoD budget fell as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) from 9% in 1962 to 3.2% today. It is projected to fall again in 2023. 

Now-perennial continuing resolutions generate more waste and abuse than any other single cause I have seen, closely followed by the practice of annual expiring funds. PPBE reform must include modernizing congressional oversight processes and replacing perverse fiscal execution incentives with authority to optimize spending across programs and companies to create competition for revenue, save money, rapidly reinvest within guidelines, and prevent wasteful spending due to arbitrary expiration of funds.

The winner-take-all business model of large defense firms results from backward fiscal incentives. Often, only two or three companies can compete for any new generation of weapon system. Defense companies have a strong incentive to underbid for development and early production to win the once-in-a-generation business. 

The government cheers the power of competition to save money, when in reality, that loss of money by the successful offeror will result in much higher lifecycle costs and a guarantee that the company and its trade organization lobbyists will market that program directly to Congress for decades to come. Thus, replacing the program with a new generation becomes politically unpalatable, leaving adversaries free to beat the United States in acquiring it. 

Intellectual property (IP) vendor lock has become the largest single factor for DIB sustained profitability and competitive advantage. After losing money up front, a company must find ways to lock up that business until they have made 10x to 20x that amount in future years. 

More than any other factor, this business model is why the average age of our equipment continues to rise despite efforts to modernize. In the much faster and unprotected commercial technology marketplace, the IP vendor lock strategy has been supplanted by speed to market. The most money can be made in development and early production (not service life extensions) and the firm that gets to market soonest gets more market share while the prices are the highest. 

Acquisition and Contracting Bureaucracy

Go to any operational installation in July and you will find a single Mom on base working nights and weekends, missing her kids’ soccer games, so the base mission does not suffer the loss of funds in end-of-fiscal-year lunacy. Even trainees know this is crazy. The Cold War acquisition and contracting system we have inherited is unnecessarily complex, changes frequently, and encourages risk-aversion and micromanagement.

Acquisition and contracting statutes and thousands of pages of regulations implementing them exploded from the 1980s to today, creating massive barriers to entry that deter America’s most successful commercial technology companies. It is far easier and more profitable for many of them to do business with the CCP than with the DoD. Congress passes reams of acquisition and contracting laws every year, but legislators rarely repeal any.

Most members of Congress don’t have any idea how much of the problem the law really is. When I left my last job as the Air Force Deputy Assistant Secretary (Contracting), I noted there were 63 new Defense Acquisition Regulation (DAR) cases in progress with Congress pushing to get them done faster. 

▸ Is it time to move from the standard of “full and open competition” to one of “effective competition,” recognizing that the government is no longer the buyer in most markets but simply a buyer? 
▸ Should a contracting officer be able to simply pick the top two or three best companies to compete, and then, after the award, document the decision and reasons for picking those competitors?
▸ Is it OK to insist that a company market itself to the buyer, rather than to Congress, when competing for revenue? Would that increase the incentive to perform well or prevent “buying in” behaviors?
▸ Is it time to exempt defense from large portions of the social agenda that Congress implemented via the Federal Acquisition Regulation?
▸ Is it time to finally implement the Section 809 Panel recommendations,1 including broadening authority of program acquisition executives (PAEs) by funding their entire portfolios and giving them strong incentives to optimize spending?

We must make thoughtful but fast decisions at the point of best quality data – in most cases, the point of mission need. Micromanagement imposes the risk of time. The Air Force contracting “No Process Before the Process” policy allowed senior contracting decision-makers only one review prior to a decision meeting, regardless of the number of command chain layers in the organization. It forced all stakeholders into the room to make the best, fastest decision possible, reducing time to decision from an average of 14 weeks to two to three days. 

ENDNOTE
1 Advisory Panel on Streamlining and Codifying Acquisition Regulations, https://discover.dtic.mil/section-809-panel/