In recent years, the private sector has been increasingly tasked to carry out research and engineering work that previously had been assigned to Defense Department laboratories. Now, “there is a growing body of evidence that, rather than faster, better and cheaper, the new approach is actually slower, less effective, and costlier,” says Don J. DeYoung, senior research fellow at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy at the National Defense University. The government’s “scientific and engineering competence, a hallmark of the great successes in the past, has been destroyed or bypassed as a result of the private sector’s ascendant role,” he writes in a recently published NDU paper. “The loss of in-house scientific and engineering expertise impairs good governance, poses risks to national security, and sustains what President Dwight Eisenhower called ‘a disastrous rise of misplaced power.’”
Congress passed legislation to expand the government’s acquisition work force, but although these actions may be necessary, they are not sufficient, DeYoung says. Procurement problems will persist until the Pentagon makes a greater effort to strengthen its in-house laboratories.