The Culture and Foundations for Research at Pakistan Aeronautical Complex

Author Profile: Syed Aseem Ul Islam is PhD candidate at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA, specializing in adaptive and model-predictive flight control systems. He received his bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from the Institute of Space Technology, Islamabad, and his master’s degree in flight dynamics and control from the University of Michigan.

Organizations are defined by their culture and values, and research organizations are certainly no exception. Research and development (R&D) is intricately related to the people doing it. Unlike industrial manufacturing, where the main assets are the machines making the product, in R&D, the researcher is the main asset and therefore, the organization must carefully manage them.

Unfortunately, the entities under Pakistan’s Strategic Plans Division (SPD) provide many examples of what not to do in R&D organizations. Therefore, a quick study of the practices of the SPD’s organizations is extremely helpful in charting a future path for Pakistan Aeronautical Complex’s (PAC) Aviation Research, Indigenization & Development (AvRID) directorate.

For PAC to succeed with AvRID, it will need to avoid replicating SPD’s institutional practices.

Firstly, since SPD organizations work under a thick veil of secrecy, any R&D they do is extremely limited in application and not shared, even across other SPD organizations.

This is obviously a very wasteful use of resources for R&D where duplication of effort is the norm. This compartmentalization may be effective for secrecy, but iti s terrible for promoting rapid and efficient R&D.

Researchers need to be able communicate with other researchers in their domain. They need to be able to publish some part of their work and integrate with the international scientific community so as to keep up with the latest technologies and processes.

It is foolish to assume a small group of isolated engineers working in secrecy will develop everything on their own. This is not a ground-breaking idea since research scientists in secretive government labs all over the world regularly publish work and collaborate and are well-known internationally.

Offices at AvRID should, therefore, be allowed to and encourage collaboration with university researchers in Pakistan and overseas. They should be encouraged to publish parts of their research in internationally reputed journals, which will bring the added benefit of building individual and national pride.

Another bottleneck to good R&D in SPD organizations is the incentive structure. The government officers employed by these organizations are on almost guaranteed and stable career paths with regular promotions based on time served and thus, there is little or no incentive to “rock the boat” or think freely.

A successful career is made by following all orders, however uninformed, agreeing with your bosses and making them happy, and waiting for your next scheduled promotion, which can only hindered by annual evaluations that are mostly based on personal relationships.

This is a stark antithesis of R&D, which is the intentional and constant reform of the established pattern, where free-thinking is the norm, and success is measured by the amount of technological disruption caused. In contrast, in a private organization, the profit-based bottom-line incentivizes efficiency, and in turn, employees must elevate the quality of their research output to advance in their careers. Therefore, officers at AvRID must be incentivized with promotions and bonuses based on actual research, and not the favor they may curry with their superiors by being “yes-men”.

A related issue is the “parachuting of top management” and the resulting style of management. Ideally, officers should be incentivized to do well in R&D so that one day they can head the organization they have worked in for many years.

However, if high-ranking military officers are “parachuted in” to lead these organizations, poor management is inevitable. This is not a judgement on these parachuted officers, but merely a result of their disconnect with organization that they are made to lead and the culture of R&D.

These imported heads have not spent their lives in the organizations they are asked to lead, and do not appreciate the nuances of R&D or the needs of the people they lead. Military officers who have spent their entire lives commanding military formations and organizations bring with them the same military style of management.

It should be no surprise that R&D organizations do not do well when they are managed like military units where they issue granular orders, and in turn, expect dogmatic word-for-word.

Again, the military concept of ‘orders’ and their absolute compliance is antithetical to R&D. R&D requires a much less structured approach where individual researchers must be given room to think laterally and innovate. Researchers work best when they are assigned broadly defined goals and are expected to figure out how to achieve them on their own.

This assures that the entire organization is not just implementing the vision of the person at the top, but utilizing the massive human resource available institutionally in the shape of talented researchers to find the best solution to a problem.

As AvRID is a new organization run by the PAF, it is expected that it will be headed by high-ranking military officers for a start, with but it should be made a matter of policy that most positions that open up as people retire should be filled by officers (both civilian and military) from within the organization.

Additionally, a civilian officer who has spent their entire life working in AvRID should have the same chance of heading AvRID one day as any military officer who has done the same, otherwise the incentive to do one’s best is muddied. Furthermore, promotions and bonuses should be used to incentivize innovation and hard work. It should be possible for an officer to not get promoted if they do not add value to the organization.

Academia Industry Collaboration Office (AICO)

According to PAC’s website this office has been created, “for optimum utilization of resources available within academia and industry of the country and abroad.”

It is certainly a positive sign that the importance of collaborating with the massive pool of university researchers is known to the planners at AvRID. It is vital that this office replicates successful military organizations that fund university research like the United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) and the United States Office of Naval Research Science and Technology (ONR).

In particular, AICO should have the funding and mandate to invite proposals from university professors for grants and project funding.

According to the author’s rough calculations it should be possible to support a single graduate student for a year for a little less than 1 million PKR. Therefore, grant proposals should be invited for 5 million PKR to 18 million PKR, which are estimates for 2 students for 3 years and 4 students for 5 years, respectively.

In terms of spending this is a small amount as the upper bound of 18 million PKR is equal to 110,000 USD. For perspective, an AIM-9 Sidewinder air-to-air missile costs 472,000 USD in 2019 to the country that makes it. It should be completely reasonable to expect that AICO to spend at least 500 million PKR (3 million USD) over a period of 5 years. To ensure progress under these grants the funds should be released to universities annually subject to annual performance reviews.

This will support research towards AvRID’s goals in universities for a much smaller cost than if AvRID was to do this research on its own. This cost saving is achieved since the universities already have infrastructure and human resources and graduate students are much cheaper and more motivated than permanent government employees.

This program will also give much needed life to the domain of university research in Pakistan, which is currently starved of funding, and yet expected to produce quality research. University research needs stable funding over many years to produce research and PhD’s. Unfortunately, “academia-industry collaboration” in Pakistan has meant pointless meetings where universities are asked to solve the industries’ problems from the goodness of their hearts and at the expense of their primary teaching commitments. It is no surprise that no academia-industry collaboration has worked in Pakistan.

Hopefully, AICO will be the exception to the rule.

The benefits of funding such research to AvRID are obvious. Firstly, AvRID gets access to a highly skilled work force of professors and graduate students for a very small cost, which allows cutting-edge research to directly feed the R&D being done at AvRID. Secondly, and more importantly, AICO funding will be training the future workforce for AvRID. The projects that the graduate students work on in universities can be advanced even more if they are enticed to join AvRID as PhDs to continue their work. This will provide a seamless transition from research to application at AvRID.

Encouragement of the Private Sector

One of the stated goals of the office of DG AvRID is to “pursue an active engagement with the public and private sector for expanding the industrial base of the country to meet aviation requirements of Pakistan,” which is an excellent goal and frankly, the need of the hour.

However, to understand the actual requirements of this goal, AvRID planners must understand the shortfalls of the status-quo. A private sector military industry cannot exist when there are no government orders for it to fulfill since most, if not all, military orders are from the government.

Furthermore, industries take years to set up, so it is foolish to expect a private investor to sink millions of dollars into R&D when there is no guarantee that the government will buy the product. Companies like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon exist because they have a reliable supply of government funding and orders to keep their wheels turning.

Due to the nature of PAC Kamra, and the tasks it has been given, there is a surprising amount of vertical integration, the kind only seen in the largest of international mega-corporations.

That is, PAC manufactures absolutely everything it can in-house. This would be great if PAC was a for-profit private organization manufacturing a few products that was reducing costs by eliminating the middle-man, and not a government organization manufacturing a plethora of products with the stated goal of expanding the industrial base of the country to meet aviation requirements of Pakistan.

A striking example of bad vertical integration, and a great place for PAC to start roping in the private sector, is the manufacture of nuts and bolts. Yes, PAC manufactures its own nuts and bolts from scratch.

There is an entire section of machines and machinists dedicated to manufacturing different kinds of nuts, bolts, and other fasteners. Since PAC is not a nuts and bolt manufacturer, this section of machines and machinists have very long down-times, which results in massive inefficiencies and needless spending of tax-payer rupees.

It does not take an expert to see how PAC can choose to buy nuts and bolts from a private company, which will do it more efficiently, cheaply, and at the same time, promote a local industry. Furthermore, there is no security risk in the manufacture of nuts and bolts outside PAC. Similar arguments can be made for many other things that PAC currently chooses to manufacture internally, like LED aircraft lights, electrical harnesses, jigs and other such low- and mid-level inputs to aircraft manufacturing.

As more and more items are manufactured by the private sector, a reliable and cheap supply chain will be set up for PAC. For the private sector organizations taking part, they will get a reliable customer and they will invest some part of their profits back into R&D to increase their profits.

Slowly, but surely, these private organizations will be able to take on progressively complex tasks and, someday, manufacture and sell entire products to the Pakistani military and militaries abroad.

However, for this dream to be realized, a clear policy must be announced by PAC and the Ministry of Defence Production where concrete commitments to buying locally made inputs and products are made. Investor confidence is key and to expect private investors to deal with all the risk is ridiculous. The private investor will need guarantees that the government will buy their product and buy it in sufficient quantities to justify their investment.

Conclusions

As Project Azm is an unprecedented endeavor, unprecedented changes need to happen in the way PAC does things.

Firstly, the researchers at AvRID need to have a personal stake in AvRID’s success: they need to know that one day they can lead the organization they helped build, and they need to be rewarded for doing their jobs well.

Secondly, these researchers need to be able to publish their work and interact with the outside world to advance their work.

Thirdly, Academia Industry Collaboration Office at AvRID needs to reliably fund long-term university research projects. Finally, PAC needs to outsource more and more of its basic production tasks to private sector industries to facilitate the development of the military industries private sector.