Let's talk real disruption: money. DoD wastes money like you can't believe because they're required to. * Contracting takes forever -- actual times measured in

Let's talk real disruption: money. DoD wastes money like you can't believe because they're required to. * Contracting takes forever -- actual times measured in months to years. We haven't had proper planning and budgeting from congress for almost a decade, so funds that expire are released late, forcing the services to take a bad deal signed quickly over a good deal that would come too late. * No flexibility. Projects are funded as "Programs of Record" (or not at all) and funded for their life-cycle in the budget. Services fight endlessly to keep PoRs no matter how they turn out because it is so damn hard to start new programs. * The system is designed to allow bad deals. It's legal (and not uncommon) for a prime contractor to subcontract work through a middle-man corporation that contracts back to a subsidiary of the prime to perform the work. DoD acquisition contracts include a negotiated profit fee with the prime, but often have no insight into the structure of their lower-level deals, allowing the primes to take a profit straight off the top, then an additional cut at the working level. * All new acquisitions are driven "top-down" by resource sponsors distilling warfighter needs into "requirements" that are then solved with a materiel solution. * We spend a lot of money on this stuff, and we can't make new programs, so we end up supporting things long after their planned EOL. Check out B-52s, A-10s, F/A-18s, weapons, etc. It costs a lot of money to keep supporting this stuff. * PoRs usually require a competitive tech development phase where you pay two prime contractors to build solutions before doing a competitive down-select. So... Make it easier to contract. Easier to spend small amounts of money to test solutions. PoRs should grow out of successful products, not the BS we do now. Be a bully in contract negotiations, and put some teeth in the regulations on contractors playing shell games. We don't see much innovation because the services can't move quickly, and they can't adapt to changing requirements. How bout we disrupt that?