The Army’s latest revision to its acquisition policy expands the responsibilities
of program managers for the logistics and support of weapon systems, and stresses
the importance of training equipment.
The rewrite of the acquisition policy, called Army Regulation 70-1, aims to
help accelerate the development of needed technologies and ensure that units
in the field have adequate logistics support and training devices, said Lawrence
Thurman, a senior analyst at Science Applications International Corp., who works
under contract to the Army Acquisition Policy Office.
In Army regulation 70-1, “we have tried to combine acquisition and logistics,”
he told an industry conference in Arlington, Va., hosted by the Institute for
Defense and Government Advancement.
More than ever before, program managers will be assessed not just based on
their ability to field a system on time and on schedule, but also on their capability
to “support” the system in the field, after it is fielded, said
Thurman. “Supportability is coequal to cost, schedule and performance.”
These changes, he said, are “driven from the top down.” The Army
policy reflects the modifications made to the Defense Department’s 5000-series
acquisition policies.
In the future, he said, “sustainability and performance based logistics
will be incorporated throughout the entire acquisition process.”
To view acquisition program managers as “life cycle managers,”
however, may be unrealistic, given that PMs don’t control the budgets
that fund logistics support.
“The emphasis on life cycle management is refreshing, but we still don’t
have the authority or the money to be the total life cycle managers,”
said Army Col. Nathaniel Sledge, program manager for combat ammunition systems.
“Those things need to be addressed before those responsibilities are
forced upon us,” Sledge said at the conference, following Thurman’s
comments.
Procurement dollars, called PMA funds, continue to be allocated to programs
for one year after they have entered production. After that, PMA funds end and
programs receive OMA dollars, for operations and maintenance.
Thurman acknowledged Sledge’s concern that PMs don’t have OMA dollars.
Senior Army officials are studying the problem, but it is unlikely they will
come up with a solution in the foreseeable future.
He said the Army Acquisition Policy Office is working with the Army Materiel
Command, the deputy chief of staff for logistics and the Army Acquisition Executive
to figure out ways to extend the PMA dollars from one year to three years after
the system goes into production. The idea is to make procurement dollars available
to take care of changes in weapon systems that may be requested by units, after
the systems were deployed.
“That question is being addressed,” said Thurman. “I don’t
see a near term solution … maybe a long term solution. That’s the
reality right now.”
One option being contemplated is to request that the Army Business Initiative
Council propose changes in the regulations. The BIC is a Bush administration
initiative to streamline the management of defense programs.
Dov Zakheim, the Defense Department controller, said he was not familiar with
any attempts to change procurement regulations in order to shift OMA dollars
to acquisition programs.
“I’m not aware of any such direction,” he said in an interview
with defense reporters in Washington, D.C. Zakheim’s comments implied
that he might be opposed to any such move.
“One of the sources of pride for us over the last couple of years is
that fact that we have been able to fence out some kind of Chinese wall between
procurement and O&M,” he said. “It used to be that the O&M
accounts were systematically under-funded and that money would flow out of the
acquisition accounts to fund O&M.”
Asked about the Army’s initiative to make acquisition programs more focused
on life-cycle support, Zakheim said no decisions have been made at his level.
“As we go through the budget, we look at what the O&M requirements
are, and we’ll behave judiciously.”
The AR-70-1 revisions introduce a so-called “balanced fielding policy,”
which emphasizes the need to fund training equipment under each individual program.
“In many cases, we forget about the training equipment,” said Thurman.
“What we are set to do is to put more emphasis on the training equipment.
Let’s make sure that when you field a piece of equipment, all the necessary
training devices are there as well.”
Meanwhile, the high-tech nature of defense equipment today has prompted the
Defense Department to create a new oversight board that will review the “information
technology” content of every program, Thurman said.
The new panel, called the Information Technology Acquisition Board, reports
to the Defense Department Chief Information Officer. The reviews will be comparable
to Defense Acquisition Board scrutiny, but focused on the software, rather than
just the hardware.
Sledge said he worried that Defense Department acquisition policy changes occurred
too frequently, creating confusion for procurement professionals. “The
challenge for PMs is that things change every 18 months,” he said.
Thurman conceded that Sledge made a valid point, but he insisted that this
time around, the Defense Department and the Army are serious about procurement
reform.
“We will no longer change every 12-18 months. We can’t afford to,”
said Thurman. “Technology is moving so fast that we have to move systems
faster to the war fighters. We can’t do that if we keep changing the process.”