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Acquisition Reform
To Meet Urgent Needs, Commanders Bypass Pentagon Acquisition System
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By Sandra I. Erwin
They are perennial requests that the Pentagon receives every year from military commanders deployed around the world: More intelligence-gathering systems, and better information technology so U.S. forces can communicate with allies.
The wish lists are supposed to influence the military services’ buying decisions, but often do not. The defense procurement bureaucracy is too inflexible, and even when commanders’ requests do make it into the services’ budgets, it takes years for the system to deliver equipment.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates frequently says that the U.S. military has been at war for almost a decade, but the procurement bureaucracy never followed. “Particularly since 2001, in the Department of Defense, people have acquired some bad habits. They probably had them before 2001, but I think they’ve gotten worse,” Gates tells reporters in response to questions about how to reform defense programs.
For combatant commanders, this means they typically pursue nontraditional means for getting the equipment they need.
Navy Adm. James Stavridis, supreme allied commander of NATO and head of the U.S. European Command, last year appointed a special assistant for innovation and technology precisely to help find equipment needed for the war in Afghanistan.
Stavridis is seeking “rapid implementation of innovative technology,” says Navy Capt. Jay Chestnut, who is currently the special assistant in charge of this project.
“Adm. Stavridis instinctively knows that ‘big acquisition’ is trying to do the right thing but sometimes you need someone working on the side, looking innovatively,” he says in an interview.
Commanders at war can’t afford to wait for the Pentagon’s acquisition system to produce hardware. “Our system is very risk averse,” says Chestnut. “We work on a 12-month horizon.”
EUCOM looks for new ideas everywhere, he says. “We are agnostic of where we find them. … The boss wants us to find a way to get them out in the field.”
The command does not pay for the new technology. “We use other people’s money,” says Chestnut. “There’s plenty of money out there in labs and other organizations.”
Among the technologies that EUCOM wants are sensors that can detect human presence in hard-to-reach areas and communications systems that are compatible with NATO allies’ radio networks. “It’s a huge requirement in Afghanistan: to be able to seamlessly talk across a single network,” says Chestnut. “We’ve seen our people having to manually copy information on a CD and manually transport it to their national system so forces in the field could get that information.”
The issue of how to expedite technologies to the field has been the subject of umpteen studies and reviews.
“This is one of our most common topics of conversation: How do we rapidly field capabilities when technology advances so quickly,” says Lt. Gen. Robert P. Lennox, Army deputy chief of staff for programs and resources.
Last month, Army Secretary John McHugh launched yet another review that focuses on this very subject.
It is not an easy problem to fix, but it can be done with the proper leadership and willingness to shake up the status quo, says retired Army Col. Nathaniel Sledge Jr., a weapons acquisition expert who managed major weapons programs. He says the Defense Department needs to stop recycling old ideas and bring in fresh thinking. He also recommends that the Pentagon streamline bloated bureaucracies that often do duplicative and unnecessary busywork.
For the Army, particularly, the timing is ripe for reform because a new secretary is taking over. “The proverb ‘strike while the iron is hot’ comes to mind,” says Sledge.
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