The head of the Pentagon’s Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC) touted reforms officials have made to the powerful body intended to improve the its weapons planning.
“We’re trying to make it more of a meaningful and useful process,” Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. James Winnefeld said about the workings of the JROC, which he chairs. “We have a ways to go. But we’re definitely determined to make this a functioning body that will help…get what the warfighter needs at a great cost for the taxpayer.”
Addressing the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ (CSIS) Global Security Forum in Washington yesterday, Winnefeld said he was surprised to see last year that the JROC meetings were attended by roughly 100 people, including contractors. So Winnefeld, who started steering the council last August, shrunk the size of the council that approves requirements for new weapon systems.
“I just found it strange that we would be able to make meaningful decisions in an environment that big,” he said. He described the current JROC roster as a “fairly effective group and a small audience.”
Winnefeld spoke positively about the Pentagon’s new portfolio approach to setting requirements for future weapons.
“When you start to open up and throw that particular system or idea or requirement in a portfolio, then it really allows you to make more informed decisions that may actually make us more efficient,” he said. Under direction from Congress, the officials crafting requirements are weighing a system’s cost and technical considerations.
“We are now required, encouraged, and expected to factor that in to our decision making,” Winnefeld said. “So looking at a portfolio approach really contributes to that.”
Pentagon leaders are doing multiple things to try to streamline the requirements-setting process, including limiting the size of Initial Capabilities Documents, he said.
“We were getting documents that were hundreds of pages long when they really expected to be 10 pages,” he said. “And so we’re pretty much toeing the line on expecting people to come in with 10-page requirements documents.”
Further, he said requirements officials are “inserting ourselves further on into the acquisition process to make sure that the requirements…have not crept beyond what they should be, thereby increasing costs and adding bells and whistles.” They meanwhile are “also looking for ways where we can fine tune and adjust the requirements to help with efficiency and just to bring reality back into play,” he said.
As an example of “bringing reality” into a program, Winnefeld pointed to the JROC’s recently approved changes to three requirements for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
“People immediately will jump to the conclusion that we scaled that down just to make it affordable, or you know make it easier on the contractors and the like,” he said. “But that’s not what we did at all.”
In fact, he said officials realized a previously approved Key Performance Parameter regarding the F-35’s transonic acceleration was based on an incorrect comparison to such a capability in a clean F-16.
“When the people wrote that requirement they really didn’t know what the (F-35) airplane was going to evolve into,” he said. “So we’ve adjusted that and it’s going to be fine.”
He said he doesn’t want the Pentagon to spending millions of dollars trying to reach a Key Performance Parameter for a system that is not appropriate.
Winnefeld was the keynote speaker at the day-long conference organized by CSIS, a think tank.
Delving into the federal budget debate, he spurred laughter when said Pentagon officials are “thinking about sequestration but…not planning for it.”
The Pentagon’s longterm spending plans could be cut by $500 billion starting next January if lawmakers don’t agree on a plan to stop a so-called sequestration process. Those cuts would be on top of a $487 billion reduction to planned defense spending already approved by the Budget Control Act of 2011. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and President Barack Obama oppose sequestration and did not factor the corresponding spending reductions in the administration’s fiscal year 2013 budget. Panetta insists the Pentagon has not begun contingency planning for the cuts.
“There are potentially different interpretations of how (the sequestration cuts) would be implemented, but the most common one is that every single program would be cut by a certain percentage and that we would have to live with that technique as it were,” Winnefeld said. “And if that’s the case then there’s not an awful lot of planning that needs to be done, because we already understand what would be cut.”
Winnefeld, echoing statements of other Pentagon leaders, said the military would have to start “robust planning” over the summer for the sequestration cuts if no congressional deal has been struck by then.
He expressed concern about how the defense-industrial base would fare under sequestration.
“Companies have to plan for what the future’s going to be like, probably in many cases further out than we have to plan,” he said.
The admiral also said he expects the Pentagon will operate in the beginning of FY ’13, which starts Oct. 1, under a continuing resolution from Congress, because lawmakers will not pass the defense appropriations bill in time.
“This happens nearly every year, and it is very impactful,” he said about the Pentagon operating under such a resolution that temporarily maintains funding at the previous year’s level. “It makes it very difficult to start new programs, you can’t really do that. It introduces chaos into programs that we have, which ultimately costs us money.”