Americas Defense Meltdown - IT Acquisition Advisory Council

196 • Long in Coming, the Acquisition Train Wreck is Hereto place such decisions in the context of their future obligations.As pointed out so adeptly by Chuck Spinney some 10 years ago in his 1998 treatise,entitled Defense Power Games, 1 Pentagon planners and decision-makers have systematicallydownplayed these future obligations over the years by basing their decisionson three unrealistic assumptions:• The future will be better than the past. Budgets will grow at a faster rate forthe next five years than they grew over the last five years.• The different components of the defense budget will grow at different rates.Investment (research, development, and procurement) will grow muchfaster than the total budget, and the spending required to operate the force(salaries, operations and maintenance) will grow more slowly than the total.New weapons will cost less to operate because they will be more reliable andeasier to maintain than the older weapons they are replacing.• Weapon system procurement costs will decrease. Weapons will cost less tobuy over the next six years because increasing production rates and the effectsof the learning curve will increase the efficiency of production.These assumptions have allowed Pentagon decision-makers to front-load the firstyear of the FYDP (which is also the annual budget request made to Congress) with toomany high-cost investment programs. The assumption of larger budgets in the lateryears, coupled with the biased allocation toward investment, provided a misleadingpicture of the total money available for developing and buying new weapons. The furtherassumption of sharply declining weapon unit procurement costs permitted evenmore weapons to be stuffed into the later years of the investment plan, a phenomenonknown in the Pentagon as the “bow wave.” Planners tolerated low production ratesin the early years because the rising bow wave, coupled with the assumed declinesin unit costs, promised higher, more efficient, rates in the later years. By the last yearof the FYDP, the Defense Department would get well: more complex weapons wouldbe produced at much higher rates; forces would be larger and more modern; trainingtempos would be higher because the new equipment is assumed to be more reliableand easier to maintain; and large quantities of spare parts and ammunition would beflooding into the stockpile.Where We Are TodayThe president’s budget for fiscal year 2009 (FY 2009), submitted to Congress earlierthis year, projected the defense top line increasing from $518 billion in FY 2009 to$549 billion in FY 2013. While this represented a slight decline in real terms over