Instead, Pentagon acquisition officials too often have violated the regulation's intent by approving "low-balled" estimates of the costs and time required to deliver new capabilities, and ignoring independent assessments that were often available and more realistic.
Time and again, early-on funding for building and testing prototypes to better understand technical and operational issues has gone by the wayside. A powerful - overwhelming - factor in the making of these slipshod decisions is the competition for dollars inside the bureaucracy: approve the money now, lest it be grabbed by another program.
A typical hardware program will involve three to five administrations and ten, or more, congresses. By the time the technical and cost issues finally become known in the current system, few, if any, of those involved initially are still around, and those who are refuse to admit they had been wrong, to cut their losses before the problems worsen, or to discipline the system by making an example of program officials and their contractors who have sold the department and the taxpayers a bill of goods.
There isn't much that knowledgeable observers of, and participants in, this process haven't already identified as problems and have proposed solutions for. They all appear in existing acquisition directives and instructions. Implementing them, rather than exercising their loopholes, is the starting point for fixing the process. With the current national fiscal environment and the lack of significant threats projected for the foreseeable future, waivers of the procedures and criteria for success that the regulations were designed to uphold should be few and far between, if they occur at all.
In addition, they should be escalated to the Secretary of Defense for major, and even some lesser, programs. Finally, the Defense Department should not proceed with any program with waived requirements until the Congress and its independent arm, the GAO, have evaluated the rationale for the requested waivers, and the appropriate Congressional committees give explicit, statutory approval to proceed.
There is no rationale for not taking the necessary time for scrupulous analyses to determine whether we should embark on a new program, and the responsibility and accountability must be clearly established and accepted at the top of the system. Hard-nosed discipline on the part of decision-makers at the front end of the process is crucial to reining in the appetite of the requirements community and precluding ill-informed development decisions based on immature technologies and optimistic projections of system costs, schedule, and performance.
Upfront realistic cost estimates and technical risk assessments, developed by independent organizations outside the chain of command for major programs, should inform Defense Acquisition Executives.
The requirement for those assessments to be independent, not performed by organizations already controlled by the existing self-interested sections of the bureaucracy - as is the case now, even after WSARA - is essential.
The existing process has heartily approved presumed quantum leaps in claimed capability that are reflected in high-risk, often unattainable, technical and operational requirements. Many of these system performance goals have resulted from the salesmanship of the DOD research and development communities, combined with industry lobbying, in successfully convincing the user and the rest of the acquisition community that the hypothetical advanced capabilities could be delivered rapidly and cheaply.
This is nothing more than a "buy-in" to "get the camel's nose under the tent. The MV is a good example of a major program that encountered technical and cost problems after entering EMD in , yet was approved to enter low-rate initial production LRIP. In , the urgency of replacing aging CHs drove decisions to severely reduce development testing before its completion, to enter operational testing prematurely and to gain approval LRIP. In April , an MV crashed during an operational test resulting in the deaths of 19 Marines.
The official investigation into this tragic accident reported that the Flight Control System Development and Flying Qualities Demonstration FCSDFQD Test Plan investigating the phenomenon known as power settling was reduced from test flight conditions to 49, of which only 33 were actually flight-tested with particularly critical test points not flown at all.
This series of events, culminating in the April accident and another crash in December of that year, brought the program to halt, nearly resulting in termination. However despite these setbacks, the program continued in low-rate production while Pentagon leadership debated whether to continue the program. In the end, the MV program recovered, executed the full range of technical testing that should have been done previously, and was introduced into Marine Corps medium-lift forces in , nearly 25 years after the decision to initiate the program.
In the meantime, some 70 or more MVs had been procured, many of which required expensive modifications to correct deficiencies discovered in testing. There is, however, little evidence that the "reformed" process has made any significant changes to programs as originally proposed by the advocates. Approval to proceed with any new development should depend on requirements, both technical and operational, that are attainable, affordable and testable and are based on realistic threat and funding projections.
Most crucial to an effective new start is the conduct of an independent Analysis of Alternatives AOA that explores other approaches to meeting an identified need. The proposed solutions should run the gamut from continuing existing systems, to incremental improvements to those systems, to launching the development and procurement of a new system.
Defense contractors have essentially one customer: the Pentagon. Repeatedly gouging your only customer, one with a small army of auditors, is likely to lead to bankruptcy. New technology is hard to price. If we force a low price on them, they will likely blow through what is allocated and ask for a new contract.
Because military services badly want the weapons they contract for—and starting over would take years—Pentagon officials would then be forced to rewrite the deal. What acquisition reform would work? It might help to increase the number of civilian acquisition overseers and pay them more, given that their workload has expanded, and to allow them more flexibility in their work, not less, as this legislation would.
But these are still minor fixes. Until the services and their Congressional backers start to accept platforms that push the technological envelop less, the problems will persist. Live Now. Cato at Liberty. Blog Home RSS. Email Signup Sign up to have blog posts delivered straight to your inbox! Banking and Finance. This is a national security issue, and the failure to innovate inside the Pentagon will have real life-and-death national security implications.
The United States has the benefit of dozens of amazing models of innovation to look to in industry, from Silicon Valley and Austin to New York and Boston. Companies have been forced to reimagine their internal innovation processes by the forces of competition, and those that survive are far better for it. Reform will take a long time, and will likely be messy. Fortunately, we have the resources, talent, and trained professionals who can build an efficient and long-overdue new system, given the time, trust, and mandate.
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The Body as an Innovation Platform. Join our Newsletter. Login Register. Registration is closed. While the department seeks innovative solutions, the standard acquisition system focuses on structured program execution with minimal risk. Not following these practices invites scrutiny among the government program managers as well as industry. Pervasive change in the processes and culture that supports them takes time, creativity and commitment.
To address these challenges, both the department and Congress have issued various policies and directives attempting to streamline the processes for transitioning science and technology to operational systems. Congress has enacted several changes to acquisition policy aimed at improving the pace of innovation, such as the Section prototyping authorities in the , , and National Defense Authorization Acts — specifically, the introduction of Middle Tier Acquisition pathways into acquisition policy.
The department has also attempted to drive innovation and speed in the acquisition structure and processes through the Better Buying Power initiative, the creation of the Strategic Capabilities Office and the Defense Innovation Unit, and broader use of other transaction authorities designed to incorporate more commercial industry standards and best practices.
These projects, however, are not a panacea for an improved ethos in defense acquisition. Leadership, consistent vision, and alignment of incentives at all levels must be rigorously pursued in order to change culture. Culture cannot change overnight, but it can be changed over time with shared experiences. In a business environment, this can be addressed through consistency in leadership and incentives across the organization and industry. Program managers are trained to maintain steady execution with a mindset that fears failure.
No one intends to fail; however, innovation and change require us to take calculated risks that may at times result in failure.
The risk-accepting culture is a dramatic shift for industry which has been trained through experiences based on the risk averse tenets of defense acquisition policies.
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