Cultural Factors in Defence Procurement Reform: Trust, Trouble, and Transparency

Better governance is important. But improving military procurement requires a cultural shift, too.

Canada is currently undertaking a defence procurement review. I’m unclear about its mandate and scope. All I’ve seen is that it’s being led by a dedicated Assistant Deputy Minister at Public Services and Procurement Canada. If I were to guess, I’d say the review is looking at issues such as agile approaches, delegations of authority, and other measures meant to speed up the acquisition system. It may also be an update to the 2014 Defence Procurement Strategy. Who knows?

A lot has been written about improving defence procurement reform over the years. For instance, we’ve seen interest in establishing a single defence procurement agency and heard pleas to depoliticize military acquisitions. I’m not going to rehash these arguments. Instead, I’m going to discuss cultural changes that should be addressed to improve defence procurement in Canada. These cultural changes won’t be sufficient to fix military procurement, but I’d argue that they’re necessary. These changes centre on three Ts: trust, trouble, and transparency.

Trust is a fragile thing in defence procurement. Governments that have been burned by a defence procurement controversy don’t tend to forgive and forget. This is especially true if ministers feel that they were misled or misinformed by the defence department and armed forces. When this occurs, governments are tempted to add more oversight and governance. Unfortunately, heavy oversight and governance are rarely compatible with speed and agility. If we want to accelerate defence procurement, we have to be more trusting. In particular, we need to trust that the officers and officials who are managing and implementing projects know what they’re doing and have the right intentions. That doesn’t mean that nobody checks their work or that due diligence isn’t enforced. But there should be a presumption of good faith and competence.

That’s easy to say, you might be thinking. What happens when projects run into trouble? Then what? The answer isn’t evident, but it involves more trust. Officers and officials need to trust that they can report trouble to higher ups without putting their project at risk. In exchange, higher ups need to trust that officers and officials will report trouble early on, before it snowballs.

Just as importantly, as Ian Mack recently argues in a new CGAI paper, quoting Barack Obama, we must admit and accept that “Hard Things Are Hard.” My own take on this question has been that we need to replace optimism bias in the procurement system with pessimism bias. Mistakes will be made. Costs sometimes go buck wild. Industry will over promise and under deliver. It’s better to accept these possibilities than to over correct when things don’t go smoothly.

Now, I understand why some of you are chuckling. What I’m saying sounds naïve. Aren’t I aware that any hint of trouble will be exploited by opposition parties and the media? And how stupid do I have to be to believe that “we trusted them” will be a good answer when ministers and deputies get grilled before parliamentary committees about a project that went off the rails?

My solution to these challenges is transparency. From 2012-2014, I served on an independent review panel overseeing the evaluation of options to replace the CF-18s. At the time, the deputy ministers committee and secretariat that were set up to manage the evaluation made an interesting choice. They would put as much stuff online as they could about what the evaluation was up to. You might think that reporters, opposition parties, and snooty academics would have had a field day with this, rooting around in all the online material to find faults and shortfalls. Given the controversy that surrounded that F-35 announcement in 2010, that seemed like a real possibility.

But you know what? Nobody cared. Tons of material was made available, and it wasn’t used to cause a ruckus. The reason is simple. There was no scoop. There was no intrigue. It was all there, in plain sight. Transparency quelled the critiques.

I’m not saying this would happen in all cases. But I’m willing to bet that there would be far less hand wringing about procurement projects if the government was far more open about what’s going on, where things are at, and why certain decisions were made.

I get that this is asking a lot of Ottawa. The three Ts I’ve been talking about have one obstacle in common: the Canadian government’s utter aversion to risk. That’s the real challenge to any defence procurement reform. Meaningful reform involves risk and the trusting, admitting trouble, and being transparent are inherently risky propositions. Until we’re ready to accept increased risk, though, the procurement system will remain slow and unwieldy. Reorganizations, regulatory changes, and new strategies are important, but they should be accompanied by a cultural shift, too.