Americas Defense Meltdown - IT Acquisition Advisory Council

216 • Long in Coming, the Acquisition Train Wreck is HereComing to grips with these issues will not be easy. While these impediments torational defense program planning have been well known for decades, there have beenfew lasting initiatives that address them coherently. In both his previously referencedwork, “Defense Power Games,” and his June 4, 2002 testimony 10 before the HouseSubcommittee on National Security, Veterans Affairs and International Relations,defense analyst Chuck Spinney spelled out a set of step-by-step procedures to addressthese long standing impediments. While many defense observers and certainly insidersmay consider his recipe for success to be a series of drastic, even bureaucratic,steps, the defense plans/reality mismatch that we have on our hands today cries outfor similar drastic action.At a minimum, the department, in concert with the Congress, should take thefirst of these steps by undertaking Spinney’s recommended crash effort to “clean upthe books.” In the next chapter in this series, Winslow Wheeler takes a major pagefrom Spinney’s work with his discussion of specific initiatives aimed at dealing withdefense’s overall budget and financial management mess. Such efforts would startwith the commitment on the part of the White House and the Congress to fund thecontinuing war on terror on a “pay as you go” basis. In essence there would be nofurther supplemental budget requests to cover the operations in Iraq, Afghanistanand other theaters around the world. At the same time, DOD and Congress wouldagree on a year’s pause or freeze in the department’s core programs while a concertedeffort on the part of the various government audit agencies, to include the GAO, andaided by private accounting firms as needed, is undertaken. This effort would striveto complete a thorough audit of all components of the defense establishment, to includecombat and combat support forces, their equipment levels and readiness, theiroperating and support costs, as well as all the programs underway in various stagesof development and acquisition.While this intense “scrubbing of the books” is underway, an independent panel orcommission of professional experts, agreed upon by both the executive and legislativebranches of the government and adequately staffed with impartial, yet knowledgeable,personnel, would undertake the tasks spelled out in Wheeler’s chapter under the heading,“Sorting Out the Mess.” This panel or commission would combine its evaluation ofthe potential threats facing the nation over time with its assessments of the forces andprograms needed to meet those threats, to evolve a realistic defense funding top lineover the next decade and beyond, as well as the relevant forces and programs that meetthose threats and fit within the financial constraints imposed by that top line.Wheeler’s chapter provides more details concerning this crucial effort to rectifythe Pentagon’s financial books and its future budget projections with practicality andto independently evaluate and scrub its acquisition programs in particular. Whilethose details need not be repeated here, two aspects of these far-reaching initiativesare worth a few points of discussion here.