Over the past two years, both the House and Senate have undertaken efforts to make far-reaching changes to the Defense Department’s acquisition process, not all of which have been popular with Pentagon officials.
However, a panel of former officials and industry leaders indicated during a June 3 forum that those changes are largely positive, and should be the tip of the iceberg.
Arnold Punaro, the chief executive officer of the Punaro Group who testified to the House and Senate armed services committees—known as HASC and SASC—on potential avenues for reform, said Congress is taking the right steps to improve the agility of the department.
One of the most controversial adjustments in the Senate’s version of the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act would divide the responsibilities of the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer to the new undersecretary of defense for research and engineering and the renamed undersecretary of management and support. The former official would focus on developing innovative weapons, while the latter would manage agencies related to the department’s business functions.
Punaro argued that the Pentagon needs to take bold steps to address the military’s weakening technological superiority. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and current undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics (AT&L) Frank Kendall have made some positive improvements, but the department still has a long way to go to change stifling bureaucracy.
“It is hard to take the department’s initial opposition seriously when the top civilian leaders in the department continuously say we are losing our technological edge, and the secretary of defense has to take his innovation element, DIUX (Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental), out from under AT&L,” he said at an event hosted by the Lexington Institute.
Punaro also commended Congress for its work on Goldwater-Nichols Act-style changes that would restrict the size of the National Security Council, eliminate the Quadrennial Defense Review and codify the role of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Some Pentagon officials opposed some of the changes made in last year’s defense authorization act, including language that gave more authority to the service chiefs, he said. However those changes are mostly viewed positively by the administration now.
“They’re always going to say, ‘oh we don’t like that, we don’t like that, we don’t like that,’ and all the time they come around,” he said.
In the 2016 and 2017 NDAAs, Congress has taken some steps to broaden the Defense Department’s definition of a commercial item, allowing it to do more business with nontraditional firms. This year, it also made strides in the area of foreign military sales (FMS), answering industry’s call for provisions that would put limitations on undefinitized contracting actions and limit FMS to fixed price contracts. However, more could be done in both arenas, said John Luddy, vice president of the Aerospace Industries Association.
Luddy also criticized new language on contracting in the Senate’s NDAA that would encourage the use of fixed-price development contracts by imposing penalties onto cost-plus awards. Currently, department contracting officials consider the level of risk when devising what type of strategy to use.
“We should not pretend that we know the risks inherent in a specific advanced technology development effort to require a fixed price contract,” he said.