Director of Operational Test and Evaluation J. Michael Gilmore submitted a package of recommendations to the Defense Department’s acquisition reform compendium, which will be forwarded to congressional defense committees for consideration, and he said there is reason to believe this acquisition reform effort may yield results where others in the past have failed.

A congressional acquisition reform effort, led by House Armed Services Committee vice chairman Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), is working in tandem with a Pentagon-led effort and is expected to wrap up this year, with recommendations included in next spring’s defense authorization bill.

J. Michael Gilmore, director of operational test and evaluation for the Defense Department
J. Michael Gilmore, director of operational test and evaluation for the Defense Department

Gilmore noted that Thornberry is focused on understanding the incentives that exist in the acquisition– those that encourage people to do the right thing and those that encourage people to find easy outs  that do more harm than good in the long-run.

“The incentives are strong and enduring, and exactly what we can do to attack those incentives remains to be seen,” Gilmore told Defense Daily after delivering the keynote speech at a National Defense Industrial Association test and evaluation conference. “To the extent that Mr. Thornberry is able to do that, and the Congress working with the Department [of Defense] are able to do that, there is some hope that something useful will emerge.”

Gilmore said he submitted a list of recommendations as part of this legislative-executive team effort. Chief among his recommendations is fixing the program requirements-writing process. In many cases, he said the key performance parameters [KPPs] that come across his desk are either unachievable from an engineering perspective or are “technical specifications that are necessary but hardly sufficient to assuring the department develops and fields a system that provides military utility.”

In the latter category is the Navy’s P-8A maritime surveillance plane. A primary mission is hunting and defeating submarines, but Gilmore said the program’s KPPs deal exclusively with the plane’s performance–range, loiter time, capacity to carry sonobuoys and more. None of the KPPs covered the mission systems.

“There’s a problem, I think, with these requirements. I would pose the question of, how meaningful do you think these requirements are?” he said.

Gilmore mentioned the Army’s Joint Tactical Radio System as examples of unachievable KPPs. JTRS was meant to achieve higher data transfer rates, which means relying on higher frequencies, Gilmore said, but those frequencies are not amenable to bending around rough terrain and penetrating foliage, which makes the system much less useful to the warfighter out in the field. He said the Army spent $8 billion to $10 billion on the program and ultimately the problem comes down to physics and cannot be fixed.

Related, one of his recommendations is that, while the services are doing a better job bringing the warfighter into the requirements development process, engineers and scientists, and even the test and evaluation community, should also be part of the process.

“If we had played a more prominent role in some of these decisions on requirements–and this is a big if, I can’t prove it–perhaps we could have avoided some of these mistakes,” he said.

Also on the list of recommendations is that operational assessments should be mandated before a milestone C decision to move into production, except for with rapid acquisition programs. Gilmore said most programs adhere to this practice, but it is not mandatory.

Gilmore noted that many of the other submissions sent from other Pentagon offices request no new laws and no new certifications, all of which add to the bureaucracy of defense acquisition. But he said codifying the pre-production operational assessment would be common sense.