Read William C. Greenwalt’s working paper, “50 Legislative Ideas to reform defense acquisition.”
In late 2013, William C. Greenwalt vividly described the major factors plaguing the US Department of Defense’s broken acquisition system. A year later, his AEI working paper laid out 50 specific legislative ideas that provided the intellectual firepower for the 114th Congress to fix those problems. Today, the lion’s share of AEI’s suggested acquisition fixes are found within Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain’s (R-AZ) version of the defense authorization bill.
All of this builds on the 2010 work of AEI scholars supporting the bipartisan commission established to reexamine the Pentagon’s first defense strategy under the Obama administration. In the landmark report, the Quadrennial Defense Review Independent Panel supported many additional defense acquisition reform proposals now endorsed by Senator McCain in his defense policy legislation.
The panel highlighted that the fundamental reason for continued underperformance in acquisition was “fragmentation of authority and accountability for performance, or lack of clarity regarding such authority and accountability.” The commission said the emphasis must be on individuals in line management, most importantly the military services. The group called for vesting “authority and accountability for program execution in line management to and through the military services and defense agencies, with appropriate oversight from the Office of the Secretary of Defense.”
Broadly speaking, the acquisition reforms recommended by AEI over many years focus on removing unnecessary regulations and barriers to entry, promoting line management and accountability (including of the service chiefs), encouraging commercial innovation and investment, and allowing acquisition professionals to take the initiative rather than merely follow a complex set of rules. As the same Quadrennial Defense Review commission noted, earlier attempts at acquisition reform that imposed more rules and processes have proven counterproductive. Though America leads the world in commercial technology, its Defense Department cannot harness the brilliance in Silicon Valley.
While the Pentagon’s eroding technological superiority owes much to the success of competitors, it is equally true that the Defense Department has drifted away from the successful acquisition reforms of the 1990s. Though rapid acquisition authority flourished during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it stands to wither on the vine as the Pentagon increasingly leans on compliance and cost control in the age of sequestration-level budgets. The federal contracting workforce is increasingly treated as a collection of automatons checking boxes instead of innovative business professionals providing America’s military with crucial capabilities.
Passage of a defense bill that includes many of the proposed legislative fixes from AEI’s October 2014 working paper would represent the first real step toward restoring American dominance in military technology.
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