Yesterday, US Air Force leadership released a document called “America’s Air Force: A Call to the Future,” a 30-year plan focused on “strategic agility” according to its authors. Created by the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force and advisors to the Air Force Chief of Staff, the strategy document calls for the Air Force to focus on the ability to quickly adapt to the changing world by using incremental, agile weapons system development instead of budget-busting major programs that aim for giant leaps in capability.

That doesn’t mean that the Air Force is abandoning its present path right away. The more than $1 trillion acquisition of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter—the most expensive fighter aircraft development program in history—continues unabated. But the Air Force, which slashed the size of its force and much of its capability to fund the F-35 and the F-22 Raptor, is now realizing that it has run hard up against a fundamental law of defense procurement: Augustine’s sixteenth law.

The Ferengi rules of defense acquisition

In 1983, Norman Augustine, former CEO and president of Lockheed Martin, published a book through the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics entitled Augustine’s Laws. The “laws” in the book were a collection of observations and aphorisms about business in general with insights on aerospace and the defense industry in particular. Many were tongue-in-cheek jabs (Law XI states, “If the Earth could be made to rotate twice as fast, managers would get twice as much done…If the Earth could be made to rotate 20 times as fast, everyone else would get twice as much done since all the managers would fly off”).

But some of them have held up much in the way Moore’s Law has in computing technology. Chief among these was Augustine’s observation that the cost of military aircraft has continuously risen at an exponential rate over the history of aviation. Augustine predicted in his Law XVI: “In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one aircraft. The aircraft will have to be shared by the Air Force and Navy, 3.5 days each per week except for leap year, when it will be made available to the Marines for the extra day.”

Based on the progression of cost of Defense Department aircraft acquisitions, Augustine’s prediction is not far off from the truth. Over the last 100 years, the cost of each succeeding generation of aircraft has increased by a factor of four every 10 years.

The F-35 has borne the theory out, with the cost of a single aircraft at nearly $100 million (10 times more than the cost per plane of the last version of the F-16, which it replaces). At a time when the Air Force has to drastically trim its budget under sequestration, the cost of the program has been crippling, according to the new strategy document:

We learned from sequestration that our brittle system often leads to suboptimal decisions that are difficult to reverse. Huge, long-term programs limit our options; we are too often left with “all or nothing” outcomes and “double or nothing” budget decisions. We must transform into a more agile enterprise to maintain our edge in the emerging environment and leverage the full innovative potential resident in all our Airmen.

Making the elephant dance

To break itself from its one-plane destiny, the Air Force’s leaders say that the service must change how it develops and acquires new systems, adopting policies and procedures that follow “a path of strategic agility,” Secretary of the Air Force Deborah Lee James wrote in the introduction to the report. “Making every dollar count to ensure a credible and affordable force is… enabled through agility—in the way we acquire and field weapon systems as well as through taking a multi-domain approach to our core missions. The words contained within [the report] do not advocate a 'stay the course' mentality. Rather, they challenge us—all of us—to show the courage to change in the face of uncertainty, all the while strengthening the many advantages we currently enjoy.”

One of the key points of the “strategy of strategic agility” outlined in the plan is to replace the current approach to development with a “system that accommodates more frequent ‘pivot points,'” the authors of the document wrote. “To the extent that our current policies and regulations can be modified to change the paradigm from large, complex programs rife with crippling interdependencies to programs with simple, severable components, open architectures, and more distributed participation, we will enact those changes. For those areas in which external policies, regulations, or laws restrict this effort, we will aggressively advocate and pursue the relief required to enable greater agility.”

As part of the changes, the Air Force’s program management teams will require the “new disciplines…of integrator and synchronizer,” the authors of the strategy wrote. The Air Force, they said, will have to look to commercial industry for strategies as “we increasingly elevate affordability as a key attribute of future acquisitions.” And changes will need to be made to make the Air Force a “leaner, more efficient force,” with a greater emphasis on the role of civilian employees, Air National Guard, and Air Force Reserve members as part of “one Air Force.”

The vision laid out in the report, wrote Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh III, will guide the Air Force’s 20-year Strategic Master Plan. “The Air Force’s ability to continue to adapt and respond faster than our potential adversaries is the greatest challenge we face over the next 30 years," he wrote. "We must pursue a strategically agile force to unlock the innovative potential resident in our Airmen and turn a possible vulnerability into an enduring advantage.”