The Pentagon has launched an extensive evaluation of military acquisition and contracting personnel in order to gauge their skills and competence.
A precipitous upsurge in defense spending during the past five years, accompanied by a significant rise in the number of procurement projects, has prompted questions about the ability of the Defense Department to properly manage that workload.
The Pentagon this year will buy more than $300 billion worth of products and services.
Following a streak of embarrassing disclosures about multibillion-dollar cost overruns in major military programs, critics on Capitol Hill and watchdog groups have called on the Pentagon to tighten its oversight of procurement programs.
“If you want to know why programs are going south … It’s management, inexperienced staff, mostly on the government side, sometimes on the industry side,” said Mark D. Schaeffer, Defense Department director of systems and software engineering. Problems range from gross underestimations of what weapons systems will cost, to inaccurate assessments of the maturity of technologies, Schaeffer said at an industry conference.
Later this year, the Pentagon will begin a wide-ranging study to assess the technical skills and overall proficiency of the acquisition workforce, said Shay Assad, director of procurement policy at the office of the secretary of defense.
“We will evaluate each individual and their skills,” Assad said in an interview. The study will encompass 26,000 procurement and contracting workers across the military services and the Defense Department.
During the past several months, Assad’s office has designed a “competency model” that will serve as the basis for the evaluation of each worker. “We are looking at the skills necessary to effectively contract for different systems and services,” Assad said.
The review — scheduled to get under way in June — will pay special attention to skills such as cost estimating. Many of the programs that have experienced cost overruns, Pentagon officials have argued, started out with unrealistically low cost estimates. After the skills evaluation is completed in mid-2008, it is expected that many acquisition managers will be required to get additional training in cost estimating and pricing, Assad said.
While some critics have contended that the Pentagon needs a larger procurement workforce, Assad insists that it’s not a question of quantity but rather of quality. “Maybe we need more people … But before we can address whether the workforce size is adequate we have to understand what our workforce is capable of doing.”
A skill that is expected to score poorly in the review is management of service contracts. Of the Pentagon’s $300 billion procurement outlays, half is for service contracts, Assad said. They cover the gamut from maintenance of weapons systems to lawn mowing at military bases.
The Defense Department has come under fire for its methods of awarding service contracts. These contracts often do not follow standard guidelines for pricing and cost estimates, and some are not competed as required by law.
“We want to set ‘best practices’ for everyone to apply,” Assad said. “We need to ensure there’s competition. Sometimes we do and sometimes we don’t have competition.”
Service contracts typically are awarded for an extended period, such as three to five years, but sometimes get renewed without opening them up to other competitors. That practice has to stop, Assad said.
After decades of so-called procurement reforms, the Defense Department has amassed at least 120 studies that contain recommended remedies for its acquisition woes. Pentagon officials have told lawmakers that they do not believe they need further reforms but rather they must begin applying those that already exist.
“Our view of acquisition reform is that we don’t really need change. But we need to execute,” Assad said. “You won’t be seeing a lot of reform from us.”
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