By Emelie Rutherford
Weapon-systems experts outside the Pentagon and Congress have their own wish lists of defense-acquisition reforms that are not included in a high-profile new law.
Signed by President Obama on May 22, the Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act of 2009 is intended to control cost and schedule overruns with major defense programs.
The statute increases oversight of weapon systems in the early stages of development, requires more competing throughout programs’ lifecycles, makes it harder to continue efforts that suffer significant cost breaches, and creates new Pentagon posts including a Senate-confirmable director of cost assessment and program evaluation.
People who study the Pentagon’s acquisition processes point to additional actions they say would improve the planning and development of weapon systems.
Paul Kaminski, a former under secretary of defense for acquisition and technology in the Clinton administration, said the law “falls short” on building the “skill and experience base” of the thousands of acquisition workers the Pentagon plans to hire.
“We will probably find ourselves hiring a number of junior people, and we have to give some attention to our mentoring process to be able to train, educate and build domain experience,” Kaminski said in an interview. “And that takes some time and it takes an organized effort to do it….It isn’t just the quantity of people, it’s building people with the right experience base here over time.”
Mentoring programs are needed, he said.
“That might require doing things like bringing back people who have retired for part-time assignments to do some mentoring, both from government and from industry,” he said. “Doing a good job of developing people might require some exchange in rotational assignments, seeing the people we bring in the government be able to spend six months in an industry assignment to see what impacts the other side.”
Kaminski, the chairman and chief executive officer of Virginia-based consulting shop Technovation, Inc., spoke favorably about some aspects in the law, including its emphasis on systems engineering and development planning.
Yet he questioned how the law calls for structuring a new Pentagon director of cost assessment and program evaluation, saying he hopes the new director’s office does not become detached from the Pentagon and morph into an arm of Congress, to which it must report.
Kaminski said when he was the Pentagon acquisition chief he found value in the Cost Analysis Improvement Group (CAIG) and Program Analysis and Evaluation (PA&E) outfits.
The law places CAIG staff under a new deputy director for cost assessment, and moves PA&E workers under a forthcoming deputy director for program evaluation. The director of cost assessment and program evaluation will assume the PA&E director’s functions.
Winslow Wheeler, a former longtime Senate staffer now directing the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information in Washington, predicted the law will change nothing and could have negative consequences if it spurs people to stop seeking further reforms.
He predicted “somebody from the usual crowd” will be tapped for the director of cost assessment and program evaluation post, instead of someone “who has a nasty track record of brutal honesty and going against the grain on cost estimates.” And he faulted the measure for not requiring additional independent oversight of defense programs from an entity like the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
If Wheeler could rewrite the law, he said in an interview, he’d “start with a totally clean piece of paper, and subject No. 1 would be financial management.”
“You can’t fix a system if you can’t measure it,” he said. “And one of the key measures is cost–past, present, and future. If you can’t understand what the hell your past costs are, you have no hope to understand your present and future costs. “
Wheeler noted financial-management-related language added to the law requiring Pentagon and GAO reports on operating and support costs for major acquisition programs.
Yet, “all that is is a study,” he said. “And when you get studies and reports in a bill, when you have something as broken as the Pentagon, that’s a real sign that nobody’s being serious.”
Wheeler’s wish list also calls for putting a “really tough guy” in as the Pentagons director of operational test and evaluation and a “very independent-minded guy” in charge of program analysis and evaluation who would act like an “in-house, independent think tank,” he said.
Cord Sterling, vice president of the Aerospace Industries Association in Virginia, generally spoke favorably about the new law in an interview. He highlighted its focus on controlling requirements growth and both striving for and budgeting to accurate cost estimates early in weapon systems’ development.
“Whether it will be achieved or not is largely dependent upon the Pentagon and the implementation of the legislation as well as other management actions,” he said. “You know, you cannot legislate good management.”
Sterling said if he could he would alter the law to somehow require budget stability for defense programs–though he acknowledged that would be tricky to mandate in statute, considering Congress ultimately sets the budget.
“Requirements stability and budget stability are both very, very important to providing the program stability, which allows you to deliver the systems on time and on budget,” he said. One potentially cost-saving tool the Pentagon has, he said, is entering into multiyear procurement contracts.
Travis Sharp, a military policy analyst at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, called the new law “solid” overall and said it will help “roll back some of the industry influence in the acquisition process.”
Sharp predicted combining the CAIG and PA&E and making the cost assessment and program evaluation director Senate-confirmable will create more “bureaucratic heft.” Yet he finds fault with some provisions of the law, including those limiting the new cost director’s scope to the largest acquisition programs and allowing waivers from mandates to increase lifecycle competition and cancel some over-budget programs.
Yet ultimately, Sharp said, “the Pentagon doesn’t need new rules; the Pentagon needs to enforce rules that already exist.” Thus, he said, he hopes to see more “top-level people interested in enforcement” overseeing defense acquisition in the Pentagon, Congress, and White House.
The law was crafted by the heads of the House and Senate armed services committees and championed by Obama.