Americas Defense Meltdown - IT Acquisition Advisory Council

Thomas Christie • 215to deliveries to the troops in the field doesn’t get at the root causes for those scheduleslips. Neither does the cyclical invention of acquisition strategies with catchy buzzwordtitles, such as TSPR and Simulation-Based Acquisition (SBA), for example, cometo grips with those root causes.The bottom line is that the basic policies and directives DOD has on the books,particularly for its acquisition process, are fundamentally sound. They incorporatemore than four decades of experience and findings of numerous reviews. Unfortunately,many of the major acquisition decisions over those years have not reflected adherenceto those policies and directives. Too often, Pentagon acquisition officials have approvedlow-balled estimates of the costs and time required to deliver new capabilities, evenwhen other independent assessments are obviously more realistic. Time and again,early-on funding for building and testing prototypes to better understand technicaland operational issues has gone by the wayside in the competition for dollars, andprogram managers have approved programs proceeding into FSED/SDD before theseissues are addressed.In most cases, by the time the technical and cost issues come to the fore in spades,few, if any, of those involved in the process can bring themselves to admit they werewrong, to cut their losses before inevitable further cost growth and schedule slips, or todemonstrate much-needed discipline by making an example of program officials andtheir contractors who have sold the department and the taxpayers a bill of goods. Bythe time these problems are acknowledged, the political penalties incurred in enforcingany major restructuring of a program, much less its cancellation, are too painful to bear.Unless someone is willing to stand up and point out that the emperor has no clothes,the U.S. military will continue to hemorrhage taxpayer dollars and critical years whileacquiring equipment that falls short of meeting the needs of the troops in the field.Laying the Ground Work for a Disciplined ProcessCertainly, it is clear that more discipline is sorely needed on the part of DOD decisionmakersand it is easy to criticize its apparent absence over the past decades. However,until incentives are in place that encourage hard-nosed decisions, whether it be inthe programming and budgeting or in the acquisition process, the department willcontinue down the same paths that have gotten it into the dire straits it faces today.As long as decision-makers are presented with inflated threat assessments; grosslyoptimistic budget projections, particularly with respect to available funding for acquisitionprograms; as well as the patently unrealistic estimates of costs, schedules,technology maturity levels and performance projections; there are little or no incentivesto face up to reality and take the heat for making hard choices. To proceed withmajor force structure and acquisition decisions unconstrained by realistic fundingconsiderations simply continues the road we are on now-shrinking and ever agingforces at ever increasing costs,