Daniel P. Driscoll

So if you were the maker of this part, you actually don't know when we want these parts.

We, the Army, can't commit to you most times in multi-year contracts.

And so because of the way our funding cycle works from Congress, we are basically bound to only commit ourselves to spend money in one given year.

So if you're the manufacturer of things like this, you can't trust me that in a couple of years you're going to make any money for the cast that you make, for the manufacturing line you have to keep up.

And so you have to hedge.

And so you have to wait until I put in an actual order, and then you have to go spit out some number of those that will allow you to make a profit.

And so what has basically occurred is these companies have been forced by us because of our kind of stupid spending models to essentially hedge their bets.

But what that means is when we finally come to them and we say, hey, we need a bunch of these, go fast.

They say, no, no, no, no, no, no.

It's been a long time since you've given us this demand signal.

We're going to have to

turn on the engines and get the people retrained and get you the things you want and need, and we need a bundle of a thousand of them until it's worthwhile for us.

And so they've been losing, we've been losing, and most sinfully, the American soldier has been losing because of these models.

That's the downside of the story.

The upside and why I want people to feel incredibly excited about where their army is and how our soldiers are innovating is we can 3D print this part really quickly.

It's utter, it's offensive.

Like there's no other way.

And this is the thing that I think nobody owned that bad decision.

And so this is what we're trying to change fundamentally is

After leaving that unit yesterday, I was talking to the commander and I said, hey, as an experiment, can you assign each one of those broken pieces of equipment and have an individual soldier own the responsibility of getting it back online?