The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee will introduce a bill on Tuesday to speed up how the Pentagon buys its weapons, including giving services more power in the buying process.
The bill represents the second wave of changes from Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, who has promised to chip away at the Pentagon’s bloated, slow acquisition process each year he leads the committee.
Under the legislation, whenever a program involves more than one service, such as the F-35 joint strike fighter for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps, or the joint light tactical vehicle for the Army and Marines, one of the services would be tapped as the lead agent, according to a House Armed Services Committee staffer who spoke ahead of the bill’s introduction. In the first wave of changes last year, the services were given authority to make decisions when their programs reached milestones, but joint programs were left with the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics.
The change would not go into effect until Oct. 1, 2019, which another committee staffer said will give Congress a chance to make sure the Pentagon and services are being transparent and responsible with the power they’ve already been given before creating more changes.
Under Thornberry’s plan, the defense secretary’s office would set cost targets and fielding timelines, but give the individual services flexibility to meet them.
In joint projects, one of the services will serve as the executive agent to manage the project and design the technology. In the example of the Humvee replacement for soldiers and Marines, the Army would likely serve as the lead and have to ensure its design also fit the Marines’ needs. Oshkosh won the competition for the joint light tactical vehicle program last year.
Responding to questions about how this wouldn’t devolve into parochialism, in which one service looks out for its own needs while ignoring the other service’s needs, a staffer said this process will work as long as Pentagon officials and lawmakers hold the lead service accountable for accommodating all users of the technology.
“If the Army doesn’t design a JLTV that is good for the Marines, should they be held accountable or should we build a team to do what they should have done?” the staffer said, noting that the proposal would cut out bureaucratic redundancy.
After introducing the bill, Thornberry will seek feedback from the Pentagon, other lawmakers and industry before rolling final language into his chairman’s mark for the fiscal 2017 National Defense Authorization Act, which he will release next month.
Thornberry is expected to discuss more details of his plan Tuesday afternoon at the Brookings Institution.
The bill would create an acquisition scorecard on different milestones to allow Congress and the public to easily see cost overruns or delays. The staffer stressed that the scorecard will pull statistics from existing reports into a one-page, easy-to-read format, and not create more work for the Pentagon.
The plan would also require systems to be open, so different components can be upgraded and plugged into existing machinery as technology improves. In addition, it would allow each of the services to use money not tied to a program to do more prototyping and experimentation.
Thornberry has said this is a priority of his as the current budgeting structure doesn’t allow much flexibility to experiment on new technology that could fail, which is a risk if researchers are being truly innovative.
To encourage better collaboration with the private sector, the bill also clarifies how the department handles intellectual property rights and allows the Pentagon to negotiate who gets what piece of the intellectual property on projects funded jointly by federal and private funds. Under current law, the default for those types of projects gives the government all the IP rights.
The acquisition reform proposal does not make any changes to Goldwater-Nichols, the 30-year-old law that governs how the military is organized, which Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has been eager to improve upon while he serves as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Another committee staffer said the House will look at reforming Goldwater-Nichols and could handle that separately from the acquisition reform piece, but was not yet sure what if any changes would be included in the annual defense policy bill.
