{"id":27703,"date":"2015-11-09T17:48:52","date_gmt":"2015-11-09T17:48:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/defensenews\/uncategorized\/2015\/11\/09\/us-defense-policy-bill-first-step-in-legislature-s-latest-acquisition-reform-efforts\/"},"modified":"2026-08-07T22:20:27","modified_gmt":"2026-08-07T22:20:27","slug":"us-defense-policy-bill-first-step-in-legislature-s-latest-acquisition-reform-efforts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/defensenews\/pentagon\/2015\/11\/09\/us-defense-policy-bill-first-step-in-legislature-s-latest-acquisition-reform-efforts\/","title":{"rendered":"US Defense Policy Bill First Step in Legislature’s Latest Acquisition Reform Efforts"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

WASHINGTON \u2014 Two powerful US lawmakers on defense say that acquisition-reform provisions advancing as part of the 2016 National Defense Authorization Actdefense policy bill<\/span> are just the beginning of incremental changes they\u2019re planning in order <\/span>to make weapons buying\u00a0less wasteful and more agile.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ambitious efforts \u2014\u00a0spearheaded by\u00a0the chairmen of the House and Senate Aa<\/span>Armed Ss<\/span>Services cC<\/span>ommittees, Rep. William “Mac” Thornberry, R-Texas, and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.,\u00a0respectively \u2014\u00a0mark the latest in a multi-decade string of efforts by\u00a0Congress and the Pentagon\u00a0to improve how weapons systems are acquired. The stakes couldn’t be\u00a0higher\u00a0as military-relevant\u00a0commercial technologies\u00a0threaten\u00a0to outpace a Pentagon where it is widely acknowledged has become a truism <\/span>that\u00a0US weapon-acquisition programs often take significantly longer, cost more than promised, and deliver fewer quantities and capabilities than planned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking to 2017 and beyond, Thornberry and McCain have said that they want to hold hearings to review the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act. The move could amount to a re-examination of sweeping defense legislation that created the military\u2019s current chain of command, from president to defense secretary to combatant commanders, bypassing the service chiefs.\u00a0On Tuesday, McCain’s committee will hear expert testimony on the last 30 years of defense reform.\u00a0On Tuesday, McCain’s committee hosts a acquisitions will hear testimony on the last 30 years of defense reform.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paul Francis, tT<\/span>he Government Accountability Office’s managing director of acquisition and sourcing management,\u00a0Paul Francis, <\/span>and other\u00a0acquisition-policy experts provided a window into the current\u00a0thinking about\u00a0the Pentagon\u2019s systemic problems and potential fixes at the HASC’s most recent hearing on the topic\u00a0, <\/span>on Oct. 27.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Pentagon had <\/span>invested $1.4 trillion to acquire more than 75 <\/span>78 major weapon systems as of March over what period of time?A:unclear from the stat,<\/span>. Over the prior year, 41\u00a0programs in the portfolio lost buying power, resulting in $5.3 billion in additional costs, the GAO\u00a0Government Accountability Office (GAO)<\/span>\u00a0found<\/a>. Overall,\u00a0but it has not been a good steward of taxpayers’ dollars, according to watchdog groups?. And <\/span>it\u00a0is not unusual for delivery time and cost to be underestimated by 20\u00a0 percent <\/span>to 50 percent,\u00a0according to an <\/span>the watchdog agency’s Oct. 27\u00a0Government Accountability Office<\/span>report<\/a>link<\/span>.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“If you’re Ford and you build a Ford Taurus that’s five years late, has a $50,000 sticker price, and it gets bad gas mileage \u2014 your customer walks,” Francis\u00a0said Paul Francis,\u00a0the\u00a0GAO\u2019s managing director of acquisition and sourcing management<\/span>. “In the Department of Defense, when you get a program started, it’s a revenue stream. It’s not an expense. So you get a bigger budget share \u2026 If it costs too much, it takes longer, it under-performs, \u2014\u00a0<\/span>the customer’s still going to buy.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lawmakers would be taking on an acquisitions culture resistant to reforms and fixes.\u00a0Too few new programs are based on sound business cases because the competitive process rewards companies and officials who over–<\/span>promise a prospective weapon’s performance, and understate its likely cost and schedule demands, Francis said. In a market with a single buyer (the Pentagon), low volume\u00a0and a limited number of major sources, there are too few incentives to deliver a program on time and within cost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This waste hurts troops. When increase and delays increase, it weakens the defense dollar’s buying power, which means troops get less capability than promised, weapons perform worse than planned, and opportunity costs are unclear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\u00a02016 National Defense Authorization Act was meant as the\u00a0first step\u00a0in a multi-year\u00a0effort to streamline this\u00a0labyrinthine acquisition system that’s deemed unfriendly to Silicon Valley and a hindrance to Pentagon efforts to embrace cutting-edge technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I believe we can’t have a 2,000-page bill that fixes acquisition,” Thornberry said. “We have to take it a step at a time.\u00a0,” Thornberry said. “<\/span>I think we made some good progress, good first steps\u00a0in the Fiscal Year 2016 National Defense Authorization Act, working on some of the basics when it becomes law.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The latest version of the bill is wending its way through Congress after President Obama vetoed a previous version in a larger dispute over the federal budget. The House approved the\u00a0bill on Thursday, teeing up a Senate vote on Tuesday\u00a0this week<\/span>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

While the 2016 NDAA’s provisions are largely aimed at curbing bureaucracy and improving the acquisitions workforce, its\u00a0signature measure would hand service chiefs and secretaries overall responsibility for acquisition programs within the services \u2014 a shift away from the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics (AT&L), which has held milestone-decision authority over programs for roughly the past <\/span>30 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking to 2017 and beyond, Thornberry and McCain have said they want to hold hearings to review the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act. The move could amount to a re-examination of sweeping defense legislation that created the military’s current chain of command, from president to defense secretary to combatant commanders, bypassing the service chiefs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thornberry said another target for reform is decoupling technology development from product development, which he called “invent-as-you-go” acquisitions. One issue GAO highlighted by the GAO<\/span>\u00a0is that for the Pentagon, <\/span>it is easier for the Pentagon to move immature technologies into weapon-system programs because these tend to attract bigger budgets than science and technology projects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In exploring reforms, the HASC held a hearing on Oct. 27 with input\u00a0from Francis and other acquisition policy experts\u00a0about the Pentagon’s systemic problems and potential fixes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“One of the topics that came up frequently,” Thornberry highlighted from the<\/span>\u00a0his committee’s Oct. 27 hearing, “is that we are not inventing technology as we are producing things \u2014 to have have <\/span>the technology that is mature or at least upgradable.”\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Center for Strategic and International Studies’\u00a0Andrew Hunter., former director of the Pentagon\u2019s Joint Rapid Acquisition Cell and now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies<\/span>, laid out several elements necessary for agile acquisitions: flexible funding,;<\/span> shortened lines of authority,;<\/span> continuous communication between the acquisition community<\/span> and the <\/span>operational communitiesy<\/span>,;<\/span> and focusing on ready, adaptable systems that can evolve over time.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“If we’re always trying to figure everything out for the next 30 years today, and plan that all in, that’s a real challenge,” Hunter said. “That is just an inherently slow process.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Institute for Defense Analyses president David Chu, a former defense official, said that the Pentagon frequently sets technical parameters that stretch physics, and then program managers and the services are incentivized to keep these programs alive, whether or not they are realistic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chu recommended that the Pentagon build attainable systems, especially its major platforms, planning for block upgrades across their lifetime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“That means allowing for extra space, weight, power, et cetera, in the original design,” Chu said. “To be sure that we have picked the parameters thoughtfully, I think greater emphasis of development testing is essential.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Joe Pasqua,<\/span> of Business Executives for National Security,<\/span> suggested the Pentagon could adopt a model gaining traction in the private sector: Favor small, iterative evaluations versus “big bang” acquisitions, and test\u00a0concepts in information technology to purchase as needed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Traditional requirements processes attempt to mitigate risk by conducting long-term, expensive studies to ensure all options \u2014 every conceivable outcome \u2014\u00a0can be reviewed and advance at a decision,” Pasqua said. “In contrast, an agile approach allows companies to start small and scale up as appropriate, thereby reducing the need for protracted requirements processes.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Hill’s efforts share ground with the Pentagon’s Better Buying Power 3.0 strategy, already underway and meant to maintain the Pentagon’s technological superiority over near-peer competitors such as China. The goal is to make better use of commercial and international sources of technology and shorten the cycle time for development.\u00a0Frank Kendall, undersecretary for AT&L, has repeatedly acknowledged the acquisition system’s shortcomings, as have other Pentagon leaders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One area where the Pentagon is struggling to find suppliers\u00a0is microelectronics, the subject of an Oct. 29\u00a0House Armed Services hearing. While\u00a0microelectronics companies have consolidated and specialized, and the supply chain for manufacturing has mostly gravitated toward high-volume producers in\u00a0Asia, the US Defense Department needs leading-edge microelectronics in low volume,<\/span> from trusted suppliers. One national security concern\u00a0is that a foreign supplier could tamper with electronics to fail at a crucial time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“With one transistor, you can make something fail possibly, the denial of service, that’s the simplest kind of tackhack?<\/span>,” said Brett Hamilton, chief engineer for trusted\u00a0microelectronics\u00a0at the Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane Division in Indiana. “So the hidden kill switch gets a lot of attention.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Outside Congress, some have praised the intent but questioned the efforts of authorizers in Congress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In early October, Frank<\/span> Kendall, undersecretary for AT&L,<\/span> said that the Pentagon was still sorting through the potential effects\u00a0impacts <\/span>of the 2016 bill, which would not go into effect until fiscal 2017. Kendall has\u00a0questioned the effectiveness of a provision it contains that levies a fiscal penalty against any service that\u00a0undergoes a Nunn-McCurdy breach, where cost overruns on a program go higher than 15 percent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Under the language in the NDAA, the services would pay a penalty of three3<\/span> percent on the overrun, which would then be funneled into a fund controlled by AT&L for prototyping of new technologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I understand the intent behind it,” Kendall said recently. “I’m just not as sure as a practical matter that it’s going to be all that effective.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hunter was also critical of this provision, suggesting that it is counterproductive when the goal is to promote agile acquisitions. He likened the penalty to a “salary cap” that the services would have to pay should they need to grow the baselines of agile systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“There are many other barriers because it becomes very hard to baseline these programs, where you know you’re going to evolve them but you don’t know exactly how yet,” Hunter said. “So that’s a real issue that we need to work through.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Daniel Gour\u00e9, vice president of the Lexington Institute think tank, published an essay on Nov. 3<\/a> criticizing the policy bill for pursuing agile acquisitions, while robbing the Joint Improvised-threat Defeat Agency of its unique acquisition authorities and its focus on the urgent needs of troops. JIDA was best known as JIEDDO, the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, which\u00a0that<\/span> took on roadside bombs during the Iraq war.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“How can the SASC and HASC, on the one hand, push for decentralization of acquisition authorities and responsibilities, demand more agility from program managers and defense agencies and seek greater access to non-traditional and commercial capabilities and, on the other hand, take a step that will re-centralize the capability to defeat IEDs, add bureaucracy and complicate the acquisition process?,<\/span>” Gour\u00e9 asked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Email:\u00a0jgould@defensenews.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Twitter:\u00a0@reporterjoe<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two US lawmakers on defense say acquisition reform provisions of the 2016 defense policy bill are just the beginning<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":59895,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":19,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[33,19],"tags":[],"coauthors":[3446],"class_list":["post-27703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-home","category-pentagon"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"QGNGTSQVSZFGLJYOWBTE47VKDM","arc_canonical_url":"\/pentagon\/2015\/11\/09\/us-defense-policy-bill-first-step-in-legislature-s-latest-acquisition-reform-efforts\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented 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