By Marina Malenic
Air Force leaders have drafted a plan to rebuild the service’s acquisition process in hopes of avoiding the kind of high-profile weapons-buying debacles that have embarrassed the Pentagon in recent years.
“The acquisition improvement plan is the first time the Air Force has taken a big-picture look…at its acquisition approach,” Robert Pollock, the director of the acquisition process office in the Air Force, told Defense Daily.
“In the past we’ve attempted to change how we do acquisition by changing how we do contracting” or some other narrow aspect of the process, he said during a May 27 interview at the Pentagon. “The biggest difference between this plan and the, literally, hundred-plus that have happened in the past is that this one is not just looking at one piece but rather at all the legs of the process.”
Last year, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) upheld industry protests and overturned Air Force contract award decisions in both the Combat Search-and-Rescue (CSAR-X) helicopter and KC-X aerial refueling tanker programs.
“As a result of that, the secretary wanted a hard look at what was going on in Air Force acquisition,” Pollock said. The service plans to reopen the KC-X bidding this summer, officials have said.
But even beyond the problems in the Air Force, GAO criticized the Pentagon’s acquisition process as a whole, saying that it “does not deliver the promised capabilities to the nation’s warfighters in a timely and efficient manner.” Indeed, Pollock said, the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) is grappling with the same difficulties across the military services.
“Many of the things that we’re identifying are the same things that OSD is identifying for the department,” he said.
Specifically, the Air Force plan aims to:
- Revitalize the acquisition workforce;
- Improve the requirements generation process;
- Instill budget and financial discipline;
- Improve Air Force major systems source selections; and
- Establish clear lines of authority and accountability within acquisition organizations.
Three of the five problem areas–workforce issues, requirements generation problems and budget instability–are “endemic across the department,” according to Pollock.
Pollock also noted that a series of action plans to address each of those issues is being drafted by acting Air Force acquisition executive Dave Van Buren and his military deputy, Lt. Gen. Mark Shackelford. From now through September, the two plan to meet once a month with Air Force Secretary Mike Donley to lay out incremental initiatives and report their implementation.
Pollock also highlighted one significant commonality in problematic acquisitions: the difficulty of concisely translating operational needs into “actionable contract papers.”
“It’s to the government’s benefit to be as clear as possible the first time out,” he said. “The less clear we are, the less effective we are in being stewards of the people’s money.”
For example, Pollock said, discussions with industry can be more streamlined and effective when requests for proposals are clear and concise.
“We will always have discussion with industry,” he said. However, “I believe that a firmer set of requirements will eliminate much of the need for the amount of discussion that we witnessed” in the KC-X competition.
He added that those interactions will from now on be much more carefully logged.
“We’ve discovered that we have to be more rigorous in our documentation of discussions with industry,” he said.
Asked how the defense acquisition reform bill signed into law by President Obama last week will intersect with the Air Force’s reform plans, Pollock said the two are complementary.
“We have looked at the law, and…our acquisition improvement plan is a hundred percent supportive of” the new law, he said. “What we’re putting in here is very consistent with what they’re telling us to do.”
Pollock noted that Ashton Carter, the department’s undersecretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, yesterday sent a letter to the Pentagon’s acquisition community hailing the new measure.