<\/a><\/figure>\nAugustine is a poacher turned gamekeeper, at various times being high up in defence industry or in a senior acquisition position inside the Pentagon. He\u2019s an engineer by training, and that shows in his willingness to quantify conclusions and in his implicit devotion to evidence-based policy. As such, the book is full of valuable data that is used to demonstrate principles and trends in an engaging way.<\/p>\n
And defence planners might well benefit from the lessons that he distils from the numbers. Despite the abundant evidence that he presents, the mistakes of history continue to be made anew by new generations of planners. The US Congressional Budget Office has observed that, in many cases, historical data provides a better basis for planning than the estimates made in the early days of projects.<\/p>\n
Unless the next White Paper contains some very big surprises, Australia won\u2019t be buying aircraft carriers any time soon. But we signed up the Joint Strike Fighter before the R&D had begun in earnest, and are now looking at a substantially bigger price tag than expected (of which more next week.) Again, Augustine wouldn\u2019t be surprised. His study of 81 major projects finds that final costs exceed pre-R&D estimates by an average of 52%.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not just costs that routinely overrun\u2014Stephen Gumley commented during his tenure as Chief Executive Officer of the Defence Materiel Organisation that schedule was consistently more troubling to him than budgets. Augustine has a law for that as well. The average schedule performance of a large number of American R&D projects reduces down to the \u2018law of unmitigated optimism\u2019:<\/p>\n
Any task can be completed in only one-third more time than is currently estimated. \n(Law XXIII)<\/p>\n
These aren\u2019t just cheap shots (although there are a few of those sprinkled throughout) but deep truths, and some of the book\u2019s conclusions go well beyond the realm of defence projects. By bringing together diverse data sets from a wide variety of disciplines, Augustine arrives at \u2018laws\u2019 that are general in their applicability, while being specifically relevant to defence planning. One such is the \u2018law of insatiable appetites\u2019:<\/p>\n
The last 10% of the performance sought generates one-third of the cost and two-thirds of the problems. \n(Law VII)<\/p>\n
Another example, and one that might apply to the management of many a government department, concerns the relationship between the number of participants in an activity and the outcomes achieved. The diverse data set includes the number of air to air victories by RAF pilots in WWII, American football rushed touchdowns, academic paper authorship and arrest data for the Washington DC police. The resulting law is all too convincing:<\/p>\n
\n
One tenth of the participants produce at least one third of the output, and increasing the number of participants merely reduces the average output. \n(Law XX)<\/p>\n
Andrew Davies<\/a>\u00a0is senior analyst for defence capability at ASPI and executive editor of\u00a0<\/em>The Strategist.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Over the following weeks, The Strategist is going to pore over its bookshelves to bring to you new and classic books for your essential reading list. The first entry is one of ASPI\u2019s defence researcher\u2019s …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":"*The recommended edition of this book is the enlarged and expanded second edition. That edition is defence centric in its discussion, which works better with Augustine\u2019s source material. Later versions were rewritten with a more general management focus, although the data sets were still mostly defence oriented.\r\n \r\n**Attributed to American baseball legend Lawrence \u2018Yogi\u2019 Berra, this quote appears on the facing page of this book."},"categories":[1],"tags":[32,33,31],"class_list":["post-300","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-book-review","tag-capability","tag-united-states"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
ASPI recommends: Augustine's Laws | The Strategist<\/title>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n