Newly confirmed Secretary of the Army Eric Fanning said Tuesday the current push for acquisition reform has a reasonable chance of success and could help the service keep pace with technological advancements in the private sector.

Fanning has taken up the mantel of acquisition reform as a priority for his tenure, primarily because he says the opportunity was ripe.

“From my perspective, having been in OSD and all three [services] now…bureaucracies are additive,” he said. “Something bad happens and a process is created to prevent it from happening again and you end up with a large bureaucracy whose job is to say ‘No.’…Inside the institution we are our own worst enemy.”

Mr. Eric K. Fanning, nominated for Secretary of the Army. (U.S. Army photo by Alfredo Barraza/Released)
Mr. Eric K. Fanning, nominated for Secretary of the Army. (U.S. Army photo by Alfredo Barraza/Released)

In the job a little more than a month after a lengthy confirmation process unrelated to his agreed-upon qualifications for the job, Fanning was the guest of honor Tuesday morning at a breakfast hosted at the Association of the U.S. Army’s headquarters outside Washington, D.C.

The chairmen of both the Senate and House defense committees are interested in streamlining how the Pentagon buys weapons and equipment and the current secretary of defense is a former senior acquisition official, all of whom are sympathetic to the need for reform, he said.

“I think we’ve gone too far in the other direction in terms of oversight and prescriptive top-down management,” Fanning said. “We’ll see. It is an enormous process. There are a lot of institutions and processes invested in it staying the way that it is. But I think we have to loosen it up. We are not fielding capabilities as fast as we should and we are spending a lot of money fielding them–money we could be spending on innovation rather than process.”

Fanning, who has held senior civilian positions in both the Navy and Air Force, said there is common concern and frustration that the Defense Department lacks innovation and is falling behind the private sector in the digital era.

“The military used to lead the way on a lot of technological development,” he said. “Now we’re having a hard time just incorporating it fast enough. There are a lot of companies that just think we can’t keep up with them. They iterate and they upgrade and they update at a pace that exceeds that we are able to match on the inside.”

Like his uniformed counterpart Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, Fanning said he will embrace authorities newly bestowed on service leaders to take ownership of certain acquisition programs. Service chiefs are now able to make early development milestone decisions on service-specific programs outside the civilian acquisition system. Exercising that authority could help the Army keep pace with industry, Fanning said.

“It’s not just about being able to buy a specific thing instead of developing it because you see it sitting on a shelf someplace,” he said. “These new authorities, to me, what is exciting about them is allowing us to keep up with what the private sector is doing. We’re slowing the private sector down right now.”

Fanning has also proposed the establishment of a rapid capabilities office, an idea which he picked up from the Air Force. The office would be responsible for identifying areas where the Army is vulnerable or weakly equipped or where potential adversaries have an unforeseen advantage and then rapidly field capabilities to fill those gaps.

Still, the Army and the Defense Department writ large have a fundamental budgeting problem that leaves them hamstrung when preparing for an uncertain future, Fanning said. Living under continuing resolutions from year to year with the threat of sequestration looming means a two-year budget suffices for long-term planning, he said.

“Right now, the biggest threat to the Department of Defense–not just the Department of the Army–is budget instability and the political environment,” Fanning said. “It makes it very hard, especially if you are drawing down and trying to think about the future, to put together any type of a plan.”

“Not only are we not able to provide some stability and answers to soldiers, we are not getting a dollar’s worth out of a dollar’s worth of resource when we have to budget and plan this way,” he added. “I see that as the biggest threat to building the most capable Army we can build.”