Even before he took over the chairmanship of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Mac Thornberry had a laser-eyed focus on why it takes the Pentagon 20 years to get a new fighter fielded when the private sector can go from design to production in just a few.
In previous decades, the long wait to navigate all of the Pentagon acquisition steps and paperwork — much of which was due to previous congressional requirements — was tolerable. The U.S. had a large technological advantage over potential adversaries, so it had a cushion for those delays.
But that cushion has eroded, if not disappeared completely, as countries such as China and Russia have come up to speed on critical technologies including electronic warfare, surveillance, stealth and propulsion.
In short, in Thornberry’s eyes, the nation’s security can’t afford the bureaucratic drag anymore.
“This [acquisition] system is so gummed up, it seems a wonder sometimes that anything comes out the other end,” Thornberry said in remarks earlier this year at the American Enterprise Institute.
After more than a year of work on the issue, Thornberry will unveil his proposal to begin to untangle Pentagon acquisitions at a speech Monday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. This first bill in a multi-year effort reflects the views of the Pentagon’s acquisitions experts, industry and auditors including the Government Accountability Office, on what changes should be made to streamline the Pentagon’s weapons-buying process.
By the time they were through, Thornberry’s staff had gathered more than 1,000 proposals on how to fix a system that the military’s acquisitions community largely views as broken. The specific bill language, expected to be introduced to members Wednesday, will include these goals:
Targeting paperwork. When Thornberry started this review more than a year ago, he kicked it off with a hearing on the current system. One of the star witnesses was a stack of thousands of pages of federal regulations, to show the committee all of the paperwork hurdles program managers must comply with when fielding a new system. “We have legislated and regulated ourselves into a black hole,” said panel witness Moshe Schwartz, a contracting analyst for the Congressional Research Service.
Thornberry’s bill would consolidate six major reports currently required of program managers — on contract type, industrial base considerations, intellectual property, risk mitigation and evaluations of benefits and equipment into one acquisitions strategy report, and eliminate dozens of other legal certifications that the Pentagon said does not add to its oversight, Thornberry’s staff said in a preview Friday of the legislation.
Targeting the workforce. Thornberry’s proposal makes permanent a workforce development fund to train, recruit and retain military acquisition officers. One of the primary challenges the Defense Department has faced in program management was the continuous loss of expertise on contract management through the loss or rotation of skilled military contract officers.
Greater flexibility on contract type. Eliminates a previous requirement that contract officers had to seek a waiver in order to choose a contract type that was different than what was prescribed in the regulations. Under Thornberry’s proposal, the program manager will be able to choose what type of contract best works for their program without going through a waiver process.
Thornberry’s work also incorporated legislative proposals that Under Secretary of Defense Frank Kendall provided the committee earlier this year.
Defense legislative proposals are normally handed to the committee staff much later in the year, when the committee is already close to marking up its defense bill for the year. However, the timing was right to push on this reform, with invested chairmen in both Thornberry and Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and with the military’s civilian leadership — since both Kendall and new Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter both come from the acquisitions community. So the Pentagon coordinated early to give its proposals a better chance of getting included in the bill.
Staff said Friday six of the seven additional ideas the Defense Department brought to them earlier this year are reflected in the new bill; the seventh, on life cycle system support, the committee is still working on.
