The breathless hype over the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter’s soaring costs and schedule slips clouds a much bigger acquisition predicament for the Pentagon: How to stop more programs from ending up like JSF.
The Defense Department and Congress this past year unleashed an avalanche of new reforms that would fix what earlier reforms could not. But all these attempts at overhauling a broken system continue to conveniently ignore a fatal flaw in the weapons acquisition process: It is hopelessly slow and unresponsive to the military’s rapidly changing needs.
Because it takes years or even decades to bring a weapon system to fruition, it gets redesigned so much that invariably it results in sticker shock. Every change, no matter how small, runs up a huge tab. When a program spans 10 to 12 years, and hundreds of modifications are made, as has been the case with the F-35, it is no surprise that costs spin out of control.
The pattern will repeat itself in other programs. Most of the Pentagon’s largest and most expensive systems still operate under rules that make it virtually impossible to deliver new hardware in less than a decade.
“We have an acquisition system which still has Cold War vestiges. … It was designed to prepare for a future war, rather than to conduct a current war,” said Ashton Carter, the Pentagon’s chief procurement official.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq fueled the creation of many “rapid acquisition” organizations that sprouted all over the Defense Department, the military services and the joint staff.
Secretary Robert Gates had to personally oversee the procurement of some equipment — such as armored trucks and unmanned aircraft — that was urgently needed for the wars.
Eight years into these conflicts, the acquisition landscape is more confusing than ever. It is littered with rapid-response outfits, while the bulk of the money and personnel are tied to lumbering big-ticket weapons programs.
Today’s huge military budgets and overwhelming U.S. dominance give the Pentagon cover to stick with the status quo. But internal rifts within the Defense Department already are surfacing about how the armed services should go about modernizing their forces without setting themselves up for more wasteful spending and boondoggles.
“We have to change the processes and the organizations that were born in the industrial age of warfare,” said a senior Air Force official who asked to not be quoted by name. The Pentagon and Congress keep re-regulating and re-legislating but, fundamentally, the culture and methods that govern weapons acquisitions have not yet adjusted to the information age, the official lamented.
The Air Force, for instance, wants to begin designing a next-generation unmanned aircraft that would share many of the same high-performance features of fifth-generation fighter jets. It would fly autonomously, not by remote control; and it would operate in “contested air space” where it would have to defend itself from surface-to-air missiles and from enemy aircraft. If the Air Force were to follow step by step the current acquisition process, a new aircraft would enter service no earlier than 2022.
A 12-year cycle may be acceptable for some niche far-out technologies, but not for mainstream weapons. The odds are high that by 2022, that unmanned aircraft will not meet the needs of the force, or it will be made obsolete by future U.S. enemies’ own advances in high-tech weaponry.
It also is fairly certain that, no matter how much acquisition reform is rammed down the throat of the bureaucracy, the Pentagon will continue to spend billions of dollars on irrelevant or unnecessary weapons. “We’ll be dealing with the same issues as long as we have the same JCIDS process,” the official said, referring to the evaluation of future weapons requirements, also known as the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System.
JCIDS deliberately emphasizes analysis and risk avoidance at the expense of speed, said Col. Timothy Chyma, a member of the Army acquisition corps. JCIDS normally takes five to nine years — depending on the complexity — from the time a new system is requested until a solution is delivered. After the studies are completed, it takes another year at best to have the requirement approved, and then a system has to compete for funding within an intricate budget-planning process, which could take another three years.
By comparison, the Army’s “rapid equipping force,” or REF, can turn out systems in seven to 15 months, Chyma said at a Brookings Institution seminar. REF can do this because it is small, has access to funding within the same year it wants to make a purchase and, most importantly, it interacts directly with the units in the field so it understands their needs far better than the traditional procurement administrator.
The biggest advantage of REF is that all the functional areas are under one organization: requirements, technical expertise, program management and contracting. REF only buys small quantities and selects relatively mature technology, so the financial risk is low. “This is something the Army should embrace” in long-term modernization programs, Chyma said.
U.S. Special Operations Command also is often cited as a case study of responsive and low-risk buying. Contractors say they like working with SOCOM because there is less red tape. The command demands the latest technologies and pushes contractors to innovate, an industry official said.
One piece of advice the Pentagon may heed from SOCOM Commander Adm. Eric Olson: “We pursue technologies. They are not necessarily the most advanced, but the most useful.”