In the latest chapter of the Air Force’s tanker-procurement saga, the officials in charge laid out an elaborate new plan last month to put the program back on track after a series of embarrassing setbacks. They gave assurances that this time around the acquisition reforms will really work.
You could not blame Joe Q. Public for being skeptical, though. “It’s hard to tell the taxpayer for the 85th time that now we finally got the dots to connect in the right way,” says the Air Force’s former chief procurement executive Sue Payton.
Maybe the tanker program will one day become a poster child for how the Air Force turned things around. But if the Pentagon is serious about change, not just in the tanker effort but across all programs, it can’t afford another “acquisition reform charade,” and must address the root cause of current problems, Payton says in a speech to the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association in Landsdowne, Va.
“We must improve this incredibly inefficient acquisition system we have in the Defense Department,” says Payton. Decades of attempts at reform have added complexity to the regulations and layers of oversight, she notes, but have not achieved cost savings or improvements in how the Pentagon delivers weapons and equipment to military forces.
A case in point is the Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act of 2009. The legislation was hailed as the answer to rampant cost overruns, waste and abuse in military programs. But it may unintentionally end up contributing to the inefficiency by adding more layers to an already dense bureaucracy, Payton says. “When you read the fine print [of the bill], you wonder, could you make this even more difficult?”
The last thing any Pentagon procurement program needs is more complexity, says Payton. The true agents of change must bring simplicity to the equation, she says. “We are so comfortable with the complex systems that have grown up over the decades. How do we make acquisition simpler?”
Payton says she once tried to calculate how many hours it took an unmanned aircraft program manager to schedule a meeting with the undersecretary of defense for acquisitions. Setting up a one-hour meeting took 17 hours. “So many people are involved in acquisition that it has become incredibly inefficient. That program manager had other things he needed to be doing.”
The Pentagon also should do something about the large number of unaccountable administrators who review and slow the acquisition process. “I can’t tell you how many people are checking the checkers who check the checkers. Some of them have never managed a program,” says Payton. “We have got to regain our sanity, have a more streamlined review process.”
She cites another example. The documentation for one communications and information technology acquisition was 350 pages long. After converting from a paper-based review process to an electronic Sharepoint system, Payton’s staff eliminated duplication and reduced the documentation to 128 pages. To her surprise, a faction within the bureaucracy fought back. “Boy, did we get pushback within our own acquisition community. Some people wanted to have their own document they sign off. That’s their identity in life.” Program documents go from one inbox to another and can take 18 months to pass through reviews.
The bigger-is-better mentality that rewards complexity at the expense of common sense. Information systems are the worst offenders, says Payton. “We have a propensity to put the most complex things on the table.” The upshot is that hardly anyone understands how things work, which is a recipe for trouble, she says. “Very few companies have the adequate engineering talent to pull off the complex enterprises we try to stand up.”
Of 127 acquisition programs in the Air Force, 40 are big “mac daddy” projects, says Payton.
“This is a lack of discipline.” She suggests it would be better to execute fewer programs but fund them and carry them to completion.
The failure of acquisition reform initiatives during the past two decades only reaffirm the obvious: That the one sure way to change behaviors in military acquisition is to take away the money, says Gerald Abbott, professor emeritus at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces. He was a member of a 2006 blue-ribbon acquisition reform panel.
After Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced cancellations of major weapon systems earlier this year, military officials frequently were quoted saying it is now time to “curb their appetite” for expensive hardware. But the appetite only was curbed after the programs had been terminated by Gates.
“In the 70s and late 80s we went through that,” says Abbott. “When you have no money, you make different decisions.”
No matter how much oversight and regulations are put in place, the budget is what drives the train. When budgets are up, “They want every conceivable ornament hung on the Christmas tree,” says Abbott. At the Fort McNair campus where he teaches, the sumptuous Marshall Hall is jokingly known as the “last excess of the Cold War.” Next door is Lincoln Hall, which was built with the money from 9/11. “Everyone knows that the sun is only going to shine for a limited amount of time, so you’d better get your requirements in, get your funding because you’re not going to get another building for another 15 years.”