Clean sheet approach to weapons modernization creates space to dream anew

Imagine you are given the latitude to take a long-established and evolved process and told to start from scratch, throwing out previous notions of how most everything is done and allowing yourself the space to dream anew. Where would you start? What would you eliminate in the process to make the work more efficient and effective? Would you have the courage to pick up your eraser and clear the chalkboard?

For more than a year, Nate Brannon has been the Sandia lead on an enterprise-wide team doing just that. The Enhanced Mission Delivery Initiative Stockpile Modernization Working Group Clean Sheet Sub-Team has representatives from all labs, plants and sites who are experienced in delivering systems and tasked with determining a single goal: What would it take to deliver a weapon system in less than five years from beginning to end, or rather, from the point that the DOD documents a letter of intent to rate production?

And they only had six months to make their case to the NNSA Deputy Administrator for Defense Programs.

“What has been unique about our approach is that we were tasked with imagining nothing is in place,” Nate said. “If you had the task of delivering a system, what would you put in place that is essential? What are the core elements of a process? What would you do differently from before? And what would you exclude?”

In other words, where do you begin when your notebook is empty?

Better, faster — and maybe even cheaper

It began with a report.

In September 2022, the NNSA Enhanced Mission Delivery Initiative team released a report titled “Evolving the Nuclear Security Enterprise” that caused reverberations throughout the DOE complex. Through six findings and 21 recommendations, the team laid out urgent calls to action to “aid the Enterprise in changing its direction.”

In response, the team created the Stockpile Modernization Working Group to improve efficiency and effectiveness in the enterprise. Scott Handy, former deputy director of the stockpile modernization portfolio at NNSA, defined the focus of the group as simply trying to “do things better, faster — and maybe even cheaper.”

Rob McKay, director of the NNSA Office of Stockpile Modernization, called the working group an extremely timely and important initiative, adding that “Given today’s changing and ever-increasing nuclear security threats, we can’t continue with business as usual.”

And due to the scope of the effort, multiple subteams were created to compartmentalize specific issues, including the Earned Value Management System, the Product Realization Process, scheduling and integration, and a “clean sheet” approach to weapon development.

This “clean sheet” approach is where Nate and the enterprise team are lending their talents.

Making it happen again

In the 22 years since Nate began at Sandia, the global threat landscape has changed dramatically. At that time, the nation was in a phase of stockpile stewardship with less time pressure to deliver. The deterrent was being reconfigured with Sandia’s purpose and mission, and the ability to anticipate threats 10-15 years into the future was an assumption woven into the fabric of weapons programs.

“But we have systems from before my time that were fielded in 18 months,” Nate said. “So, we know we can do it.” Early in the effort, Nate and his team members even engaged individuals across Sandia who worked on and lived through those fast-paced programs to ask them how they did it and what the enabling factors were.

“It is a different era today. We have different tools and resources, and we have different requirements and constraints,” he said, “but it’s worth underlining that because we’ve fielded a system in a shortened timeline before, we know it can be done.”

“But if it takes 10-15 years to deliver a system, you are assuming that you understand the threat that will be there 10-15 years from now — and the world is not that linear,” Nate said. “This is a new time — a new threat landscape — where we need what is essentially a tiered weapon realization process.”

The time for new and bold ideas is now, and a “clean sheet” approach is a particularly exciting form of innovation in an industry built on rules set over a long history.

“This exercise has been educational for the team because it’s turning on different thoughts,” Nate said. “You’re starting to construct things instead of modifying what is in place now. And ironically, half of what we recommended is what we used to apply.”

How to reset

Last April, the Clean Sheet Sub-Team provided actionable, substantive recommendations to Marv Adams, NNSA’s deputy administrator for Defense Programs, with the goal of identifying big areas in need of a deep dive and defining specific areas of focus for careful consideration.

And since then, the focus has been on transitioning these recommendations into practice, most notably within the framework of the Sea-Launched Cruise Missile-Nuclear program.

“A major objective for us,” Nate said,” was to define a way for our effort to transition to actual programs coming down the pike and exercise these concepts.” The Sea-Launched Cruise Missile-Nuclear program was recently established and is of vital interest to our nation’s continued nuclear deterrence posture, positioning it as the best candidate for implementing these ideas.

Beyond the practical implications of the Clean Sheet team’s recommendations, there are less tangible effects as well. Laura McGill, deputy Labs director for Nuclear Deterrence and chief technology officer, called the working group “a culture change more than anything. It’s not just about the specific mechanics of what we are able to change — that’s really important — but it’s really about how we change the way we think about our roles and how we work together to deliver capability.”

Nate agrees that the effort hinges on thinking differently as a culture. “In most large organizations, it is easier to grow and accumulate — ‘we’ll add this, we’ll add that’ — and there are rare times where you have an opportunity to do a more comprehensive reset of how you do things,” Nate said. “That is motivating, because I sense this is that time where people are asking with sincerity ‘How should we reset?’”

The appetite for change

Solving the nation’s most complex and urgent problems is what Sandia does best, and sometimes that means taking a step back and questioning everything all at once. But while Nate noted that some outputs from the effort are already being put in place for an existing weapons program, he also conceded that it may take time to realize some of the recommendations due to complexities within the DOE complex.

“A major positive result from the Clean Sheet Sub-Team is that we have shined a light on what I like to call ‘Gordian knots’ within the NNSA,” Nate said, using a metaphor of solving a difficult problem with bold action. He added, “There are people actively trying to untie them, but we are hoping to help slice the knots in half in order to map to a fundamental and substantial change.”

While there have always been programs at Sandia that have gone fast, there is now a playbook in place to guide the work.

“There are broad principles like ‘get production involved early,’ and nobody is going to disagree with that, but the devil is in the details.” The team sought to avoid vague recommendations and platitudes. “We are focused on the process — not so much on project management or changing law, but the process and going through phases like concept design, production engineering and manufacturing, then detailing what is required, the assumptions and really trying to generate actionable information.”

In the near-term, the Clean Sheet Sub-Team is developing a tailored process to identify efficiencies that can be gained within the current Phase 6.X process of weapon modernization. As with all of his team’s recommendations, there are some along the way who have shown skepticism, but Nate is optimistic for the future.

“The biggest challenge in this project has been understanding the appetite to make the changes that we are recommending. We’re talking about large organizations making potentially fundamental changes, likely at the policy level.

“And I believe it is there,” Nate said. “I believe we do have an appetite for change.”