Americas Defense Meltdown - IT Acquisition Advisory Council

CHAPTER 10long in coming,The Acquisition Train Wreck is HereThomas ChristieSummaryAfter more than four decades of supposedly well-structured defense planning and programming,combined with numerous studies aimed at reforming its multibillion-dollaracquisition system, any informed student of our defense establishment would concludethat the overall decision process is broken and in need of far-reaching, even radical,remedial actions. The evidence supporting the need for drastic action abounds.Perhaps the strongest evidence is that, despite the largest defense budgets in realterms in more than 60 years, we have a smaller military force structure than at anytime during that period, one that is equipped to a great extent with worn-out, agingequipment. Granted, the employment of our forces in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistanhas contributed in a major fashion to the deterioration of our combat andsupport equipment, particularly severe for our ground forces. The bill for restoringand repairing that equipment (reported to be in the hundreds of billions) is yet tobe faced up to and will only exacerbate the already severe modernization problemsfaced by all three services. Those problems have been on the horizon for some timenow and would have plagued our forces even if the Global War on Terror (GWOT)had not evolved as it has.The fundamental cause of the Defense Department’s budget problems lies in along historical pattern of unrealistically high defense budget projections combinedwith equally unrealistic low estimates of the costs of new programs. The net effect isthat DOD’s leaders could claim that they can afford the weapons they want to buy,and so there is no urgency to face up to the hard choices on new weapon systems,not to mention other looming future demands on the budget, such as health care forboth active and retired personnel, and planned increases in ground forces manpower.This confidence is, however, mistaken.DOD’s Planning and Budgeting ProcessThe Department of Defense’s annual budget request submitted to the Congress is thefirst year of a continuously updated six-year spending plan, called the Future YearsDefense Program (FYDP). Informed and effective long-range planning is necessarybecause most of the programs contained in the budget entail an obligation to spendmoney far into the future. For example, a decision to build a new aircraft carrier entailsa spending stream that could last as long as 50 years. In theory, the FYDP is supposed