Americas Defense Meltdown - IT Acquisition Advisory Council

208 • Long in Coming, the Acquisition Train Wreck is Heretesting and fielding the new advanced sensors continue to suffer delays, raising questionsas to whether these new capabilities will satisfy the warfighter’s requirements.An operational assessment, completed over two years late in March 2007 on the RQ-4A, identified performance problems in communications, imagery processing, andengines. Any independent observer would have to assess Global Hawk as a high-riskprogram, as the most advanced aircraft variant will not be fully tested until mid-FY2010, by which point, the Air Force plans to have purchased over 60 percent of thetotal aircraft quantity.Broken Defense Planning and Acquisition Processes and StructuresThe examples cited above provide ample evidence for concluding that DOD has systemicproblems in how it develops and buys major weapon systems and, furthermore, thatthese problems extend back several decades. Clearly, any astute observer would questionthe effectiveness, if not the competence, of decision processes that result, in caseafter case, of plans and reality mismatches. Astute observers have indeed reached thatconclusion, and the past 40 years have seen several high-level efforts aimed at reformingboth the planning and budgeting and the defense acquisition processes. In some cases,these efforts were established in response to the egregious examples of mismanagementor acquisition horror stories that plague defense today. While DOD’s acquisition policiesand directives have adopted many of the more substantive findings and recommendationsof these reviews, too often, unfortunately, the people managing this process lackedthe will to carry through and implement them in program decisions.Recurring Management Reform EffortsInstead, what has happened is that, every three or four years, yet another high-levelstudy is commissioned to review DOD management in general and the acquisitionprocess in particular. The 1970 Fitzhugh, or Blue Ribbon Commission, was followedby the 1977 Steadman Review, the 1981 Carlucci Acquisition Initiatives, the 1986Packard Commission and Goldwater/Nichols Act, the 1989 Defense ManagementReview, the 1990 Defense Science Board (DSB) Streamlining Study, yet another DSBAcquisition Streamlining Task Force in 1993-1994, the Total System PerformanceResponsibility (TSPR) initiative of the late 1990s, the early 2000s focus on SpiralDevelopment and Capabilities-Based Acquisition, and so on.The common goal for many of these reform efforts was streamlining the acquisitionprocess itself in order to reduce the burgeoning costs of new weapons. In doingso, these commissions and task forces hoped to drastically cut system developmentand production times (and thereby costs) by reducing management layers, eliminatingcertain reporting requirements, using commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) systemsand subsystems, reducing oversight from within as well as from outside DOD andeliminating perceived duplication of testing, among other initiatives.