Americas Defense Meltdown - IT Acquisition Advisory Council

Thomas Christie • 213bined to intensify the competition between programs for dollars. This, in turn, hasled to decision-makers sanctioning low-balled program costs and overly optimisticschedules at the outset of major programs, most often at the expense of building andtesting prototypes and critical technology risk reduction efforts.Having obtained approval to enter FSED/SDD with unrealistic costs and schedulesbased on rosy, if not surreal, technical risk assessments, programs inevitably encounterproblems early-on. These problems, in turn, set off the spiral of schedule stretchesand ballooning costs that have come to plague the vast majority of DOD acquisitionprograms. Unfortunately, too often, program managers attempt to limit the damage bytrying to maintain the schedule at the expense of critical test events and design fixesfor obvious deficiencies. The net result is a schedule-based strategy, rather than theevent-based program strategy that the myriad of DOD acquisition directives stress.With our emphasis on the GWOT for the next decade or so, it would seem thatthere is far less need to cut corners and field these technologically advanced systemswithout thorough testing as we have been wont to do over the past few decades. Itisn’t as if the Taliban will be fielding stealth fighters or some semblance of the FCSanytime soon. Furthermore so-called “peer competitors,” Russia and China facedaunting technical and manufacturing challenges in their attempts to mimic us andfield F-22/F-35 generation aircraft. The DOD should take the necessary time to buildand test competitive prototypes for major future systems and make sure it has maturetechnology in hand before proceeding, or at least understand and plan for the technicalhurdles before it. In essence, it is worth repeating, “fly and know if it works andhow much it will cost before we buy.”Schedule-Driven Versus Event-Driven StrategiesThe past several years, particularly after U.S. forces entered combat in Afghanistanand Iraq, the pressure has intensified to keep programs on schedule, even to acceleratethe process, in order to get equipment in the hands of troops sooner than later.As a result, some systems with serious reliability and maintenance problems found indevelopment and operational testing have been waived through the decision processinto production and deployment.It appears that often the programs fail to carry out adequate testing; and in thosecases where they do, they often fail to take the necessary corrective actions basedon that testing before proceeding with full production and deployment. A DefenseScience Board Task Force on Development Test and Evaluation 9 reported that, in the10-year period, 1997 through 2006, roughly 70 percent of Army systems had failedto meet their specific reliability requirements in operational testing. See the Figurebelow extracted from the Task Force Report, dated May 2008. Nevertheless, many ofthese programs proceeded into production and deployment to the operating forces.The Task Force found that similar problems existed with the programs of the other