The Pressure for Defense Procurement Reform is Building

[Valin]

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October 9, 2014

 

The Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC), led by Republican John McCain and Democrat Carl Levin, commissioned a lengthy report from various political players about the structural problems with how we procure new weapons platforms. National Defense reports on the findings:

 

 

 

The Senate permanent subcommittee on investigations last week published a 211-page collection of essays written by Washington’s defense procurement gurus. The panel describes the report as a “comprehensive record on shortcomings in the acquisition process,” although no specific solutions are offered to fix these problems.

 

That military weapon acquisitions continue to be plagued by cost overruns and schedule delays is particularly frustrating to many lawmakers who expected major problems would end after Congress passed to great fanfare the 2009 Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act.

 

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The SASC report comes on the heels of similar calls from the House Armed Services Committee (HASC), led by Vice Chairman Mac Thornberry, and also also from the Pentagon’s Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, Frank Kendall, who seems to have a strong mandate from Secretary of Defense Hagel.

 

U.S. defense spending is dysfunctional for several reasons that all drive inefficiency. Price-lowering competition between contractors is artificial if even existent. Deputies in charge of developing particular platforms have no career incentive to call off a project if it looks like it will turn out to be useless or over-budget. We waste gobs of money trying to fit new technology into platforms that were built for the WWII era. And much of our spending is reduplicative; new programs are added to existing ones when they ought to replace those they render redundant or obsolete.

 

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