source GAIA package: Sx_DefenseNews_M5201410310260008_5675.zip Origin key: Sx_DefenseNews_M5201410310260008 imported at Fri Jan 8 18:18:00 2016
The civilian team at the top of the Pentagon’s acquisition structure is charging in several directions at once, pushing initiatives aimed at revamping how the building thinks through technology development, shares those burdens with allies and finds the next leap-ahead capability.
The Defense Department is also working with Congress to rewrite outdated acquisition rules and remove burdens from overworked program managers.
But views vary on how successful these initiatives can be at a time when the national security community faces tight budgets and is focused on conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Ukraine. The timing of the push — just as the Obama administration heads into its final two years in office facing the prospect of a new Congress after next month’s mid-term elections — could also be a problem.
“There’s a blizzard of paper coming out of [the Pentagon] about acquisition that is coming late in the game and might not amount to much,” said the Lexington Institute’s Loren Thompson, who advises several of the largest defense firms.
Some of the new initiatives “reflect the kind of muddled thinking that has resulted in six years of cutting money for new technologies, and now they’re suddenly realizing that the enemy is catching up,” Thompson said.
The defense industry has also been wary of the Better Buying Power 3.0 initiative advanced by the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer, Frank Kendall. The idea is to prioritize technology prototyping by having industry partner more closely with the Pentagon and with allied nations that will share some of the cost burden.
The plan also calls for the Pentagon to reach out to commercial vendors to take advantage of the innovations in communications and robotics that are taking place in the commercial space.
But unlike previous periods of rapid defense innovation — such as the late 1970s when the Army developed the Bradley fighting vehicle, Apache helicopter, Abrams tank and Patriot missile system — the Pentagon now is competing against the commercial tech industry for talent.
And the worry is that adversaries will quickly take advantage of those commercial innovations.
“The relationship between strategy, technology and business is more important than ever,” said Ben FitzGerald, director of the technology and national security program at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). The think tank, former home of Defense Undersecretary Bob Work, has also launched The Beyond Offset project co-chaired by William Lynn, CEO of Finmeccanica North America, and Michèle Flournoy, CEO of CNAS.
“I don’t believe that it’s the secretary’s or the deputy secretary’s strategy to go back to Cold War thinking,” FitzGerald said. “The threats are different, the global economy is very different and the US simply doesn’t have the same privileged access to technology that it did in the 1960s and 1970s.”
One of the big questions for DoD going forward, he said, is “how do you generate unique military advantage from technology that is widely available on the commercial market?”
An example is the recent videos that have shown the Islamic State group flying commercially made drones in Syria, and the occasional Israeli shootdown of drones launched by Hamas over Israeli territory.
While those systems can’t match the United States’ unmanned ISR capabilities, the recent airstrikes in Iraq and Syria have shown that the Pentagon is struggling to task its fleet to have eyes over those two countries while keeping up with the fight in Afghanistan.
“We need ISR,” Andrew Hunter, director of the Joint Rapid Acquisition Cell at the Pentagon, bluntly told reporters on Oct. 23. “You can ask the question: ‘Is enough ever enough?’ ” Hunter said. “We don’t seem to have found that point yet from my perspective.”
The specter of eventual technological parity with an enemy has been one of the driving forces behind the push to makes changes in the acquisition system.
Google’s November 2013 purchase of Boston Dynamics — an innovative engineering and robotics company famous for developing the BigDog, a four-legged robot that can traverse rough terrain — raised eyebrows at the Pentagon, especially when it became clear that Google wasn’t interested in continuing the work the company did with the department.
“There are significant perception issues and there are questions about the market size” when it comes to a company like Google working with the DoD, FitzGerald said. “That’s why we see this as an issue of strategy and not just acquisition reform or process improvement.”
But process matters.
Hunter, who is leaving the government for the Center for Strategic and International Studies to head its Defense Industry Initiatives Group, has been running just such a process program.
His office has been working with the House and Senate Armed Services committees to rewrite some long-existing statutes that keep DoD program managers busy checking off boxes to ensure they’re following regulatory oversight rules, as opposed to spending their days working on developing new technologies.
Hunter cautioned that the legislative proposals are not a “radical rewrite” of existing statutes, but instead are focused on “the things that are most important and critical” in the acquisition process.
That includes developing and purchasing the latest technologies from both the commercial and defense sectors.
But more is needed, Thompson said. “The defense acquisition community is flat on its back and stifled by bureaucracy. No amount of reform can accommodate for the inadequate funding” that has been earmarked for science and technology development over the past several years, he said. ■
