US Government Procurement Changes: Like Silicon Valley, Really? I Mean For Sure?
November 12, 2025
Another short essay from a real and still-alive dinobaby. If you see an image, we used AI. The dinobaby is not an artist like Grandma Moses.
I learned about the US Department of War overhaul of its procurement processes by reading “The Department of War Just Shot the Accountants and Opted for Speed.” Rumblings of procurement hassles have been reaching me for years. The cherished methods of capture planning, statement of work consulting, proposal writing, and evaluating bids consumes many billable hours by consultants. The processes involve thousands of government professionals: Lawyers, financial analysts, technical specialists, administrative professionals, and consultants. I can’t omit the consultants.
According to the essay written by Steve Blank (a person unfamiliar to me):
Last week the Department of War finally killed the last vestiges of Robert McNamara’s 1962 Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS). The DoW has pivoted from optimizing cost and performance to delivering advanced weapons at speed.
The write up provides some of the history of the procurement process enshrined in such documents as FAR or the Federal Acquisition Regulations. If you want the details, Mr. Blank provides I urge you to read his essay in full.
I want to highlight what I think is an important point to the recent changes. Mr. Bloom writes:
The war in Ukraine showed that even a small country could produce millions of drones a year while continually iterating on their design to match changes on the battlefield. (Something we couldn’t do.) Meanwhile, commercial technology from startups and scaleups (fueled by an immense pool of private capital) has created off-the-shelf products, many unmatched by our federal research development centers or primes, that can be delivered at a fraction of the cost/time. But the DoW acquisition system was impenetrable to startups. Our Acquisition system was paralyzed by our own impossible risk thresholds, its focus on process not outcomes, and became risk averse and immoveable.
Based on my experience, much of it working as a consultant on different US government projects, the horrific “special operation” delivered a number of important lessons about modern warfare. Reading between the lines of the passage cited above, two important items of information emerged from what I view as an illegal international event:
- Under certain conditions human creativity can blossom and then grow into major business operations. I would suggest that Ukraine’s innovations in the use of drones, how the drones are deployed in battle conditions, and how the basic “drone idea” reduce the effectiveness of certain traditional methods of warfare
- Despite disruptions to transportation and certain third-party products, Ukraine demonstrated that just-in-time production facilities can be made operational in weeks, sometimes days.
- The combination of innovative ideas, battlefield testing, and right-sized manufacturing demonstrated that a relatively small country can become a world-class leader in modern warfighting equipment, software, and systems.
Russia, with its ponderous planning and procurement process, has become the fall guy to a president who was a stand up comedian. Who is laughing now? It is not the perpetrators of the “special operation.” The joke, as some might say, is on individuals who created the “special operation.”
Mr. Blank states about the new procurement system:
To cut through the individual acquisition silos, the services are creating Portfolio Acquisition Executives (PAEs). Each Portfolio Acquisition Executive (PAE) is responsible for the entire end-to-process of the different Acquisition functions: Capability Gaps/Requirements, System Centers, Programming, Acquisition, Testing, Contracting and Sustainment. PAEs are empowered to take calculated risks in pursuit of rapidly delivering innovative solutions.
My view of this type of streamlining is that it will become less flexible over time. I am not sure when the ossification will commence, but bureaucratic systems, no matter how well designed, morph and become traditional bureaucratic systems. I am not going to trot out the academic studies about the impact of process, auditing, and legal oversight on any efficient process. I will plainly state that the bureaucracies to which I have been exposed in the US, Europe, and Asia are fundamentally the same.
Can the smart software helping enable the Silicon Valley approach to procurement handle the load and keep the humanoids happy? Thanks, Venice.ai. Good enough.
Ukraine is an outlier when it comes to the organization of its warfighting technology. Perhaps other countries if subjected to a similar type of “special operation” would behave as the Ukraine has. Whether I was giving lectures for the Japanese government or dealing with issues related to materials science for an entity on Clarendon Terrace, the approach, rules, regulations, special considerations, etc. were generally the same.
The question becomes, “Can a new procurement system in an environment not at risk of extinction demonstrate the speed, creativity, agility, and productivity of the Ukrainian model?”
My answer is, “No.”
Mr. Blank writes before he digs into the new organizational structure:
The DoW is being redesigned to now operate at the speed of Silicon Valley, delivering more, better, and faster. Our warfighters will benefit from the innovation and lower cost of commercial technology, and the nation will once again get a military second to none.
This is an important phrase: Silicon Valley. It is the model for making the US Department of War into a more flexible and speedy entity, particularly with regard to procurement, the use of smart software (artificial intelligence), and management methods honed since Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard sparked the garage myth.
Silicon Valley has been an model for many organizations and countries. However, who thinks much about the Silicon Fen? I sure don’t. I would wager a slice of cheese that many readers of this blog post have never, ever heard of Sophia Antipolis. Everyone wants to be a Silicon Valley and high-technology, move fast and break things outfit.
But we have but one Silicon Valley. Now the question is, “Will the US government be a successful Silicon Valley, or will it fizzle out?” Based on my experience, I want to go out on a very narrow limb and suggest:
- Cronyism was important to Silicon Valley, particularly for funding and lawyering. The “new” approach to Department of War procurement is going to follow a similar path.
- As the stakes go up, growth becomes more important than fiscal considerations. As a result, the cost of becoming bigger, faster, cheaper spikes. Costs for the majority of Silicon Valley companies kill off most start ups. The failure rate is high, and it is exacerbated by the need of the winners to continue to win.
- Silicon Valley management styles produce some negative consequences. Often overlooked are such modern management methods as [a] a lack of common sense, [b] decisions based on entitlement or short term gains, and [c] a general indifference to the social consequences of an innovation, a product, or a service.
If I look forward based on my deeply flawed understanding of this Silicon Valley revolution I see monopolistic behavior emerging. Bureaucracies will emerge because people working for other people create rules, procedures, and processes to minimize the craziness of doing the go fast and break things activities. Workers create bureaucracies to deal with chaos, not cause chaos.
Mr. Blank’s essay strikes me as generally supportive of this reinvention of the Federal procurement process. He concludes with:
Let’s hope these changes stick.
My personal view is that they won’t. Ukraine’s created a wartime Silicon Valley in a real-time, shoot-and-survive conflict. The urgency is not parked in a giant building in Washington, DC, or a Silicon Valley dream world. A more pragmatic approach is to partition procurement methods. Apply Silicon Valley thinking in certain classes of procurement; modify the FAR to streamline certain processes; and leave some of the procedures unchanged.
AI is a go fast and break things technology. It also hallucinates. Drones from Silicon Valley companies don’t work in Ukraine. I know because someone with first hand information told me. What will the new methods of procurement deliver? Answer: Drones that won’t work in a modern asymmetric conflict. With decisions involving AI, I sure don’t want to find myself in a situation about which smart software makes stuff up or operates on digital mushrooms.
Stephen E Arnold, November 12, 2025
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