COTS

October 4, 2015 2:04 PM

Can the Pentagon do business with Silicon Valley?
posted by the man of twists and turns (45 comments total)

"LAST YEAR, the Pentagon put out a call for papers on which emerging technologies might have the greatest utility in the next couple of decades."

I want to see people working on new technologies that will help us prevent future wars instead of arming us better for them.
posted by mareli at 2:38 PM on October 4, 2015 [2 favorites]

Can the Pentagon do business with Silicon Valley?

Does money talk?
posted by Going To Maine at 2:52 PM on October 4, 2015 [3 favorites]

While "move fast and break things" sounds apt for the Department of Defense, the culture of frequent failure the startup scene embraces seems a bad match for tech where life and death are on the line. It calls for different processes, different tech stacks, different culture.
posted by idiopath at 2:53 PM on October 4, 2015 [6 favorites]

The Pentagon created Silicon Valley. The Pentagon owns Silicon Valley.
posted by bukvich at 2:56 PM on October 4, 2015 [9 favorites]

???? Silicon Valley is created by the military-industrial complex. Those satellites by Mountain View are artifacts from that age. Also the Marin Headlands.

The Pentagon Spent $2.7 Billion on an Intelligence System That Doesn't Work
How to Get Start-Ups in the Military Industrial Complex
posted by yueliang at 2:59 PM on October 4, 2015 [3 favorites]

Can the Pentagon do business with Silicon Valley? Who wants to spend time, money and energy to grab a $20b slice of a $600b pie when you can make $70b in a quarter selling iPhones?
posted by Talez at 3:01 PM on October 4, 2015

Idiopath, when developing truly new things, the two choices available are often "fail fast" or "fail slow". And much DoD contracting today takes the latter path... both because the culture calls for it (to the point of codifying it in bidding practices), and because its often more lucrative for the parties involved.
posted by zeypher at 3:01 PM on October 4, 2015 [2 favorites]

I've thought about it a bit more and what I think the Pentagon wants from Silicon Valley is not so much pure innovation but Silicon Valley's almost supernatural ability to commoditize almost anything in very short periods of time and get it in users hands. Tablets properly started up as a market in 2010. Today you can get a passable Android tablet for $50 from Amazon, they'll give you one for free if you buy five and have it in your hands in two days for free with an Amazon Prime account!

That seems to be what the Pentagon wants more than anything. If the Pentagon wanted a standard tablet Lockheed would want four years to scope everything out and charge $50K a unit for obsolete in the year they got the customer specifications.
posted by Talez at 3:12 PM on October 4, 2015 [6 favorites]

The Pentagon does plenty of business with Palantir, so I really don't know what these people are going on about.
posted by schmod at 3:20 PM on October 4, 2015 [9 favorites]

Short answer: Yes; next question.

Long answer: Clearly they can if the NSA can spy on us all via the internet and other technology.
posted by marienbad at 3:38 PM on October 4, 2015

But the military did not stay connected to the venture capital–fueled tech industry that emerged in Silicon Valley in the 1980s. Until recently, the Pentagon didn’t see this as a liability: The United States enjoyed unmatched technological superiority on the battlefield. That advantage, though, is now dissipating. China and Russia have invested heavily in new systems. ISIS is using hobby-style drones for reconnaissance. Rebels in Syria are using iPads to aim mortars. Equipment like this was once prohibitively expensive. Now you can get a lot of what you need off the shelf.

This seems less about whether the Pentagon can do business with "Silicon Valley" and more about whether the Pentagon can straighten out their procurement policies and procedures to buy COTS products from Amazon, Best Buy, or New Egg.
posted by ImproviseOrDie at 3:39 PM on October 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

"Hobby-style drones" is not far off from what the Pentagon currently uses for small, fixed wing drones. Except they cost 100x as much per unit. Probably the only difference is the cost and sophistication of the onboard electronics.
posted by indubitable at 3:52 PM on October 4, 2015

We had some COTS stuff on the submarine. We also had the milspec gear. Everyone loved the COTS stuff because it was user-friendly and had a lot of nifty features. I'll tell you what though, the COTS stuff did not like to be treated like military equipment can. We blew up or otherwise made fail countless racks of equipment running drills that dropped electrical busses, caused power brownouts, may have resulted in seawater being sprayed where it shouldn't, etc.

One of the advantages of COTS is you can just buy another one, but there aren't many West Marine stores X hundred feet below the pacific.

If it fixes our primitive, user-hostile software, though, I'm totally down for COTS.
posted by ctmf at 4:04 PM on October 4, 2015 [11 favorites]

This seems less about whether the Pentagon can do business with "Silicon Valley" and more about whether the Pentagon can straighten out their procurement policies and procedures to buy COTS products from Amazon, Best Buy, or New Egg.

Really? Can I buy EMP/HERF hardened TEMPEST spec equipment at those places? No? So I have to continue to buy that gear from military surplus folks (who sell outdated hardware).
posted by el io at 4:08 PM on October 4, 2015 [2 favorites]

It won't happen. All the business would go to California. California votes Democratic. Unless these companies are willing to spend millions in red states, it simply won't happen.
posted by eriko at 4:09 PM on October 4, 2015

Or maybe the businesses would do what Boeing and Lockheed Martin do and open up small officies in every state and then lobby at the state level that their current go-nowhere project creates so many local jobs?
posted by mccarty.tim at 4:25 PM on October 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

The article misses the most important point. It's well and good for the Pentagon and Intelligence Community to buy off the shelf stuff and adapt it, but the vast majority of Silicon Valley companies can't enter into the serious R&D or procurement world due to having almost no one with security clearances and large swaths of key staff being ineligible for clearances.
posted by MattD at 4:37 PM on October 4, 2015 [7 favorites]

large swaths of key staff being ineligible for clearances.

Don't forget about the urine tests.
posted by octothorpe at 4:45 PM on October 4, 2015 [3 favorites]

The military loves to say that they want to use COTS parts, but It still needs to work at -40C and be EMI resistant, and meet this arbitrarily high spec driven by this arbitrary requirement. The shear number of requirements and the unwillingness to budge on them in the face of what COTS can actually do dooms any real attempt at using it.
posted by TheJoven at 4:50 PM on October 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

but It still needs to work at -40C

You might need to invade Winnipeg someday.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 5:07 PM on October 4, 2015 [2 favorites]

What MattD said.

Any article or discussion on this topic that doesn't mention the DoDs hard on for security clearances and the inability of a large % of west coast tech talent to get one is kinda useless.
posted by MjrMjr at 5:36 PM on October 4, 2015 [4 favorites]

Reuters did a series of in-depth reports on Pentagon spending, noting that the military suffers from a "chronic failure to keep track of its money; how much it has, how much it pays out and how much is wasted or stolen." The Pentagon has not been audited, despite a 1996 federal law that requires an annual audit for every government agency. Since that date, taxpayers have given the Pentagon over $8.5 trillion.

Christ on a crutch.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 5:42 PM on October 4, 2015 [6 favorites]

That's what it takes to Keep America Safe... well, their version of America, that is.
posted by oneswellfoop at 5:45 PM on October 4, 2015

By comparison, that would have covered Canada's entire Federal budget for slightly less than the same time period.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 5:50 PM on October 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

What's the problem with clearances? The FBI interviews your old employers and your Burning Man camp mates, and the rest is just paperwork.
posted by thelonius at 5:52 PM on October 4, 2015

Yeah, clearances are more about someone using your past to blackmail you, rather than anything that actually happened in your past.
posted by sideshow at 5:58 PM on October 4, 2015

The pentagon really wants to use our SaaS. It would be a huge contract for us. The problem is their review of our software demands, for no particularly good reason, that we change our web framework. That's basically impossible after the seven or so years of work we've put into our product with the framework we use now. It would also require a completely separate crew of developers who would be able to get clearances, since neither myself nor my coworkers have a prayer of successfully navigating that process, even if we were willing to do so. I'm certainly not.
posted by double block and bleed at 6:16 PM on October 4, 2015 [2 favorites]

The issue with clearances is drugs.

Maybe I'm overestimating the % of people in that locale/sector who currently use, or have recently used drugs. I don't think so tho.
posted by MjrMjr at 6:19 PM on October 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

MjrMjr: "The issue with clearances is drugs.

Maybe I'm overestimating the % of people in that locale/sector who currently use, or have recently used drugs. I don't think so tho."

I don't use drugs. My issue with getting a security clearance is that I've hailed Edward Snowden as a hero and a patriot in several places on the public web.
posted by double block and bleed at 6:24 PM on October 4, 2015 [5 favorites]

Tech compaines also have a lot of people who are not US citizens.
posted by a dangerous ruin at 6:32 PM on October 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

See In-Q-Tel, a government funded "non-profit" that invests in things the Intelligence Community might conceivably want to purchase assuming a startup can get it to actually work. If the company succeeds, IQT makes a bunch of money they get to keep. If the company fails IQT asks for more money from three letter agencies.

It combines the worst features of government and venture capital while providing a no-risk path to wealth for a lucky and connected few. I could go on, but won't because it makes me too sad.
posted by Across the pale parabola of joy at 6:38 PM on October 4, 2015 [2 favorites]

It also funded Facebook and the multitouch technology used by the iPhone and is a CIA front biz
posted by aydeejones at 6:40 PM on October 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

Holy shit. In-Q-Tel is terrible. what. Really.
posted by Annika Cicada at 6:45 PM on October 4, 2015

My understanding is that In-Q-Tel specifically funds startups that it sees as being useful strategically in the long term, whether or not the company is going to make much profit. I.e. the CIA saw where mobile computing devices were going and helped pay for the research that developed multi-touch. Realistically I suspect they saw it more useful in the minority report giant interface way that multitouch originally debuted but it sounds ominous to suggest they were forward looking enough to see people sharing HUMINT through easily captured SIGINT on a massive scale such that they helped get Facebook and the iPhone off the ground.
posted by aydeejones at 6:45 PM on October 4, 2015

I've done software development for a defense contractor and I'd never do that again. There are at least a dozen reasons why I quit but the main one was that they were giving me about eight hours of work a week. I've never been more bored at a job in my life.
posted by octothorpe at 6:54 PM on October 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

Tech compaines also have a lot of people who are not US citizens.

Yeah, this would be the bigger problem I would think. And even those who do have citizenship, if they're not "natural born" so their family are foreign nationals living in their home country, isn't that an issue too?
posted by anonymisc at 6:57 PM on October 4, 2015

Since that date, taxpayers have given the Pentagon over $8.5 trillion.

Not too far removed from what it would realistically take to have permanent settlements on both the Moon AND Mars. And probably a spare trillion for a Stanford Torus or three.

But the Middle East is so completely swarming with rapidly secularizing modern democracies that they have become huge immigration magnets, so I guess that's a good trade. Right?
posted by chimaera at 6:59 PM on October 4, 2015 [4 favorites]

My understanding is that In-Q-Tel specifically funds startups that it sees as being useful strategically in the long term, whether or not the company is going to make much profit.

Ostensibly they are not motivated by profit, but they take a share of ownership when they invest and they have an active interest in the company's success.

I'm outside their usual domain, but had some interaction with them when I as a fed was evaluating a product from one of their companies. It was disheartening on many levels.
posted by Across the pale parabola of joy at 7:07 PM on October 4, 2015

a) the clearances will be an issue
b) the total aversion to OSS will be an issue (see framework rejection)
c) no agile, waterfall. requirements matrices. 3-yr ms project schedules. big upfront design.

not gonna happen.
posted by j_curiouser at 7:13 PM on October 4, 2015

>>but It still needs to work at -40C

>You might need to invade Winnipeg someday.

Or maybe you just want to ship your stuff via cargo plane?
posted by sneebler at 7:32 PM on October 4, 2015 [3 favorites]

The military has spent decades configuring itself to work with defense contractors to build complicated systems that take years to produce, like fighter jets and aircraft carriers. With its cumbersome rules and processes, the Department of Defense is not set up to race alongside small, agile companies.

This narrative really pisses me off. There is a discipline called 'program management'. It has become fairly standardized in industry at this point. It was established to give a standardized process for managing large programs.

Where did it come from? Well, the U.S. government got screwed over too many times by contractors not managing the work they contracted very well. The government came up with a framework for contractors to follow. You know what? This framework worked pretty well, and non-defense contractors decided to adopt it. Read any program management textbook aimed at industry. It will acknowledge the role that government played in developing ways to manage large programs.

But say you don't like that example.

Let's take the example of managing safety in large systems. The government contracted the development of weapon systems, but had a problem with the way those contractors were managing the way safety was managed on those systems. Thus the discipline of 'systems safety' was born. Again, it is a new area of study, begun by the U.S. government, adopted by industry, and now used outside of government contracts.

Time and time again, these "cumbersome rules and processes" that the government comes up with get adopted by industry. Then some revisionist history comes in to say that industry came up with program management or systems safety policies on their own outside of government intervention.

It didn't happen that way. Many industry 'best practices' originated in the U.S. government. Just read some history. It's not hard to find a systems safety or program management textbook. They all have pretty much the same introduction that lays it all out.

This 'private companies are always more efficient than government' bullshit needs to die. There are so many examples of industry following governments lead it is not even funny.
posted by Quonab at 8:12 PM on October 4, 2015 [22 favorites]

Quonab: "'private companies are always more efficient than government' bullshit "

Obviously whom ever came up with that has never worked in Advertising or Marketing.
posted by wcfields at 8:21 PM on October 4, 2015

This 'private companies are always more efficient than government' bullshit needs to die. There are so many examples of industry following governments lead it is not even funny.

That narrative will never die as long as the Republican party exists in its current form.
posted by IAmUnaware at 8:49 PM on October 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

"'private companies are always more efficient than government'"

I always like to point that most of the work done by the government is outsourced to private companies. That's where a lot of the inefficiency comes from. Then there's the bureaucracy, the overlapping jurisdiction issues, etc.
posted by I-baLL at 1:28 AM on October 5, 2015 [2 favorites]

Small government.
Efficient government.

Pick one.
posted by schmod at 7:15 AM on October 5, 2015