Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has made rectifying the failed acquisition system and the erosion of defense technological edge as top priorities for action in his role as chairman of the Senate Armed Services.
“That’s why our failing acquisition system is not just a budgetary scandal, it is a national security crisis,” McCain said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Thursday.
Chairman, Senate Armed Services Committee
One recent study found the Defense Department spent $46 billion dollars between 2001 and 2011 on at least a dozen programs that never became operational.
“And what’s worse, I’m not sure who, if anyone, was ever held accountable for these failures,” he said.
McCain said he mostly sees eye-to-eye with his House counterpart, House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) and plans using all the committee’s tools, such as hearings and legislation to make changes.
For example, the committee is looking at “how best to give the service chiefs and secretary a greater responsibility for acquisition, especially in shaping requirements, and achieving these on cost, schedule and performance.”
A consequence of failed acquisition is the erosion of the defense technological edge, which could be lost altogether if business as usual persists, he said.
DoD faces an emerging commercial innovation gap. Commercial research and development in the United States overtook government R&D in 1980, and now represents 80 percent of the national total, he said. “The top four U.S. defense contractors combined spend only 27 percent of what Google annually does in R&D.”
Globally, it’s even worse. “Global R&D is now more than twice that of the United States,” he said. “Chinese R&D levels are projected to surpass the United States in in 2022.”
The defense acquisition system itself increasingly poses a threat to future military technological dominance for several reasons, including the need for better innovation incentives by removing unnecessary legislative and regulatory barriers to new commercial competition. Also, he added, alternative acquisition paths must be created to get innovative capabilities to the warfighter in months rather than years.
As well, DoD must review its programs, some decades in the making, to ensure they are appropriate for the current and emerging threat, to include cyber, space controls, directed energy weapons, unmanned combat aerial vehicles and future power projection capabilities, especially the future of the aircraft carrier and the aircraft carrier air wing.
“I intend to be a champion for those kinds of new technologies,” McCain told the CSIS audience that included former SASC chairman, retired Sen. John Warner (R-Va.)
It’s a lot to take on with priorities such as strategy, budget, waste, and acquisition and management reform, McCain said, but “I believe success is essential if we are to ensure the Department of Defense is prepared to meet our present future national security challenges.”
Now is a key inflection point, he said, for the past decade adversaries have been rapidly improving their militaries to counter unique U.S. advantages. “At the same time, DoD has grown larger, but less capable, more complex but less innovative, more proficient at beating low tech adversaries but more vulnerable to high tech ones,” he said. Sequestration has made it all worse.
“As a result, we’re now flirting with disaster,” McCain said.