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Capitol Hill
Lawmakers Question Defense Strategy for ‘Rapid’ Acquisitions
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by Sandra I. Erwin
The Defense Department, during eight years of war, created at least 20 “rapid acquisition” organizations to handle urgent equipment requests from troops in the field.
But most of the military’s acquisition programs are still governed by the traditional system, which takes years or decades to field new technologies. This is a problem for the military as it tries to prepare for uncertain threats in the future, lawmakers and government officials said at a recent hearing of a defense acquisition reform panel of the House Armed Services Committee.
Panel members questioned whether the Pentagon can permanently change the way it buys equipment so it does not have to create a new agency every time there is an urgent need. Another concern is how Congress would exercise proper oversight in fast-track acquisitions.
More than 7,000 “urgent needs statements” were issued by the Army alone since the current wars started.
“The fundamental issue facing the Defense Department after more than eight years of war is that it still really doesn't have a coherent system for addressing urgent operational needs coming out of the battlefield,” says Dov Zakheim, former undersecretary of defense comptroller and member of the Defense Science Board.
“We have to find a way for the Department of Defense to field militarily useful solutions more quickly because of the nature of the current threat environment,” he says. “We need to have institutional changes in acquisition, in programming, and in budgetary systems.”
This change will not come easy. “The notion of rapid is fundamentally counter cultural to the way the bureaucracy thinks … Their approach is to stick to the rules, to cross every T, to dot every I. The trouble is that if you dot every I and cross every T there are people getting killed out there in the meantime until all the T's got crossed.”
The Defense Science Board concluded in a study that current approaches to achieve rapid response to urgent needs are not sustainable. “You can't have a permanent approach to what looks like a very long-term challenge if everything is ad hoc,” Zakheim says.
To expedite the process, defense buyers have to be aware of what is available in the global marketplace so they are not reinventing the wheel. “We don't do that,” he says. “We need a different work force culture, and we need to incorporate good practices that do exist.”
The DSB study suggests that the Pentagon should set aside the “best and brightest” to deal with urgent needs.
The executive and legislative branches have to create a fund -- something akin to the Small Business Innovation Research program -- to pay for rapid procurements, he says. “We think it ought to be about .5 percent of the defense budget. It should be replenished annually with a cap of about $3 billion. And the funding should not expire.”
Another recommendation in the DSB study is for Defense Secretary Robert Gates to appoint a three-star officer to lead an organization that would report to Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition Ashton Carter. “The mission would be purely and simply to address combatant command needs rapidly with proven and emergent technologies within two to 24 months,” says Zakheim. “If you can't do it within 24 months, it's outside the bounds of what we mean by rapid acquisition.”
This should be a small group, he says. “Small enough to be effective, large enough to carry out its tasks.” Most importantly, that organization has to operate with a different mindset, or it will wind up looking like the original organization, he says. “They'll find a way to cross every ‘T’ and dot every ‘I.’”
Mike Sullivan, director of acquisition and sourcing management at the Government Accountability Office, says GAO supports the reforms proposed by the DSB. But he says the panel failed to account for a key ingredient in rapid acquisitions: access to mature technologies.
The Pentagon should separate technology development from product development, Sullivan says.
“That means not allowing immature technologies into the acquisition process and investing significant time and money in maintaining a vibrant and relevant technology base that can fuel acquisition programs with needed technologies more quickly,” he says.
The current system is dysfunctional in the sense that acquisition programs continually must cope with immature technologies. The Pentagon’s most successful rapid acquisition to date, the MRAP mine-resistant ambush protected truck, did not have to do that. “Investing more upfront and getting knowledge and demonstrated technologies before they have to go on to acquisition programs seems appropriate,” Sullivan says.
The chairman of the acquisition reform panel, Rep. Robert Andrews, D-N.J., suggests that the Pentagon needs a “bullpen” of technologies that could be called upon for rapid acquisition programs.
“One of the observations about the success of MRAP was the use of mature technologies. It's not hard, though, to imagine a situation where the next time there is an urgent need there won't be a mature technology there to meet it,” he says. “In the absence of that mature technology, a rapid acquisition process doesn't make any sense at all.”
Andrews also worries about the integrity of the process of defining what is an urgent requirement.
“How do we avoid the inherent cultural problem around here that potential vendors of these products would have a huge incentive to define everything as urgent? How do we get around that?”
Zakheim says an urgent need should be one that, if left unfulfilled, will seriously endanger personnel or pose a major threat to ongoing or imminent operations.
Andrews is doubtful. “Sadly, in the case of the MRAP the urgency was painfully obvious. We had young men and women dying … I think there are other urgencies that wouldn't be so obvious because the immediate costs would not be so high.”
The air of “self congratulation” that surrounds the MRAP program is troubling, notes Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn. More than 1,600 troops were killed in combat because of the initially slow fielding of MRAPs, he says.
The decision to pursue MRAP took “awhile,” concedes Brig. Gen. Michael Brogan, head of the Marine Corps Systems Command who oversees the MRAP procurement. “Once that decision was made -- I think that's the topic of the success that was achieved,” he says in response to Cooper’s remarks. So far 14,000 trucks have been fielded and the goal is 22,000.
Cooper also blames Congress for throwing up obstacles that slow down acquisitions. "Currently there are no funds in the fiscal 2010 base budget under consideration for a rapid acquisition fund, despite the administration request for $79 million,” he says. “So here I'm faulting Congress … We require the Pentagon to beg, borrow and steal to get the monies from other accounts. It's kind of embarrassing.”
Tom Dee, director of the joint rapid acquisition cell at office of the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, says funding is a “difficult problem.”
Because the Defense Department has such a large budget, people wonder why it can’t just move money where it’s needed, Dee says. “And the reality is that there's a lot of competition in the department for resources because of this conflict between building future capabilities and responding to urgent needs.”
Programs such as MRAP move quickly because they have immediate access to funds. “Without that, you're going to get stuck in the competition for resources within the building, and the reprogramming actions, which all, in and of themselves, take time to do.”
Zakheim cautions against “throwing money” at the problem. “One of the things that I found, when I was comptroller, is that when you go and ask for something like a $3 billion fund -- we actually censor ourselves in the department. And the reason is that we keep hearing from the Hill these kinds of funds are slush funds; and 'you're not going to manage the money right.' And so we're very hesitant to come up with these sorts of requests.”
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