Current issues in military program control

There is currently a national furor over the way we manage our large military programs. Some of it is politically or journalistically inspired. But some of it reflects a genuine disagreement over how these programs should be controlled. This paper presents a number of issues involved in this disagreement and develops the thesis that we are polarizing into two diverging camps on their resolution: one focused on resources and the other on products. It then concludes that because there is much merit to the argument presented on both sides of many of these issues, the direction that must be taken in the program-control field is not to attempt to resolve the individual issues directly; rather, it is to deal with root causes that can accommodate both points of view. It then offers a sample of three suggestions in this regard.