The Pentagon Labyrinth

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116 | Developing, Buying and Fielding Superior Weapon Systems management—to permit circumvention of most, or all, of these reforms? History suggests the latter. The Problem is Not Lack of Study It is difficult to find another process that has been studied more than DOD acquisition. Every three to four years, yet another high-level study is commissioned to review DOD management in general and the acquisition process in particular, or Congress steps in and legislates, in great detail, how the Pentagon should organize and carry out its mission. The commissions, studies and statutes are many. 3 The common goal for many of these efforts has been “streamlining” the acquisition process. Typical techniques recommended were efforts, not always successful, to reduce management layers, eliminating reporting requirements, replacing regulated procurement with commercial off the shelf (COTS) purchasing, reducing oversight from within as well as from outside DOD, and eliminating perceived duplication of testing. Advertised as reform, most of these efforts had the real effect of reducing objective supervision and independent management. While oversight by government agencies and the associated reporting requirements can indeed be burdensome, they are not the causes of the continuing miserable record of program stretch-outs and cost growth. This is true independent of whether those agencies and their reporting requirements are internal to DOD, such as the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA), independent cost analysis groups, and operational test and evaluation organizations; or external entities, such as the congressional committees and the Government Accountability Office (GAO). This finding is borne out by my decades of participation in the acquisition process and some of the more competent official reviews, such as that done in 1990 by the Defense Science Board (DSB). 4 3 The more recent ones include but are not limited to the following: The 1970 Fitzhugh Blue Ribbon Commission, the 1977 Steadman Review, the 1981 Carlucci Acquisition Initiatives, the 1986 Packard Commission and Goldwater-Nichols Act, the 1989 Defense Management Review, the 1990 Defense Science Board (DSB) Streamlining Study and another DSB Acquisition Streamlining Task Force in 1993-1994, the Total System Performance Responsibility (TSPR) initiative of the late 1990s, the early 2000s focus on Spiral Development and Capabilities-Based Acquisition, the Defense Acquisition Performance Assessment (DAPA) of 2006, the DSB Task Force of 2008 on Development Test and Evaluation, the 2009 Weapon System Acquisition Reform Act, and the new “IMPROVE” Acquisition Act passed by the House of Representatives in 2010. 4 This DSB Task Force on Acquisition Streamlining was commissioned by the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, John Betti, in late 1989 and was chaired by John Rittenhouse, a General Electric corporative executive. A sub-group of that task force
Thomas Christie | 117 That 1990 DSB review concluded that failure to identify and admit to technical problems, as well as real costs, before entry into what was known as Full-Scale Engineering Development (FSED)—now referred to as Engineering and Manufacturing Development (EMD)—was the overwhelming cause for subsequent schedule delays, often years, and the resulting cost growth. Oversight enabled the discovery and reporting of test failures during FSED/EMD that often necessitated additional time and dollars for system redesign, testing and retesting of fixes, and costly retrofits of those fixes. It is a viable question, however, whether these delays discovered early caused more, or less, schedule alteration to utility in the field than discovering the problems late, after deployment. Without question, testing and finding problems early, before serial production, is cheaper – by a very large margin. After all the reforms of previous decades, here we are in 2010 and what’s demonstrably different from the past? Major defense programs are taking 20 to 30 years to deliver less capability than planned, very often at two to three times the cost. It all may be worse now than ever before. The basic problem is not the official directives. 5 Instead, Pentagon acquisition officials too often have violated the regulation’s intent by approving “lowballed” 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, 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 examined some 100 major programs under OSD oversight during the 1986-1990 timeframe. Most of the programs were plagued by cost increases and schedule stretchouts; the study group used available program documentation and extensive interviews with DOD officials to determine root causes for these problems. A final DSB report was never published, but the Institute for Defense Analyses produced IDA Paper P-2551, entitled “The Role of the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the Defense Acquisition Process,” documenting the sub-group’s analyses and findings. It is available at http://pogoarchives.org/labyrinth/10/01.pdf. 5 Find these materials, DOD Directive 5000.1 and DOD Instruction 5000.2 governing the Pentagon’s acquisition process, at http://www.dtic.mil/whs/directives/corres/pdf/500001p.pdf, and http://www.dtic.mil/whs/directives/corres/pdf/500002p.pdf.
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The World Security Institute’s Ce
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About the Authors Thomas Christie b
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security issues for members of the
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Table of Contents PREFACE . . . . .
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Preface This handbook aims to help
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xx | The Pentagon Labyrinth and for
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2 | Why is This Handbook Necessary?
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10 | Why is This Handbook Necessary
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Essay 2 “Penetrating the Pentagon
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14 | Penetrating the Pentagon of a
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16 | Penetrating the Pentagon years
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18 | Penetrating the Pentagon Washi
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20 | Penetrating the Pentagon Back
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22 | Penetrating the Pentagon weapo
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24 | Learning About Defense In the
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26 | Learning About Defense with ou
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Essay 4 “Congressional Oversight:
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30 | Congressional Oversight: Willi
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44 | Careerism For example, Gen. Ji
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48 | Careerism brigadier general. Y
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50 | Careerism careerist- and agend
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52 | Careerism Accountability Offic
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54 | Careerism 75 percent) are of E
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56 | Careerism In sum, our armed fo
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58 | Careerism institution.” 40 A
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Essay 6 “Confused Alarms of Strug
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62 | Confused Alarms of Struggle an
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64 | Confused Alarms of Struggle an
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Page 88 and 89: 76 | Follow the Money Why We Spend
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Page 114 and 115: 102 | Evaluating Weapons: Sorting t
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The Pentagon Labyrinth

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