As with all recent political appointees to Army civilian posts, the service’s presumptive chief weapon buyer did not escape questioning during his confirmation hearing on how he would remedy the service’s less-than-stellar acquisition record.
Bruce Jette, the Trump administration’s pick to become the assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology (ASAALT), was asked by Senate Armed Services (SASC) Chair John McCain (R-Ariz.) whether it was acceptable that the Army racked up $40 billion in failed modernization programs in the past decade.
“I don’t find that acceptable at all,” Jette said during his Nov. 9 confirmation hearing.
Jette comes directly from industry, where he is president and chief executive officer of Synovision Solutions, a management and technical consulting company that provides engineering services, and project management in support of military and governmental agencies including the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Army, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
He also has extensive military acquisition experience, having founded and served as director of the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force, as strategic science adviser to the Chief of Staff of the Army, and senior research officer in the Army Research Laboratory.
McCain ran through a list of conspicuous Army acquisition failures and their costs to taxpayers, as he did the previous week with Secretary of the Army nominee Mark Esper, a former Raytheon [RTN] executive. On the list are Future Combat Systems, the RAH-66 Comanche helicopter, the Warfighter Information Network-Tactical (WIN-T) and the Distributed Common Ground System-Army (DCGS-A).
“The first thing you’ve got to do is hold people accountable,” McCain said. “No one has been fired, to my knowledge, for all this…It undercuts the commitment of this committee to spending more on defense when we’re wasting $50 billion.”
Jette agreed with McCain that military acquisition, particularly the Army’s weapons-development process, must change to keep pace with current and emerging threats.
“Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and terrorist networks, have studied our successes and incorporated them, including rapid development and acquisition, into their own systems eroding our overmatch to near-peer status while major force systems continued to depend on the much slower formal process,” he said. “I believe the Army needs a new acquisition system not just rapid but inherently fast, responsive to current and emerging needs, and visionary in meeting long-term threats leaping ahead of the capabilities of major adversaries.”
McCain gave the Army credit for the recent announcement of six modernization efforts that will be pursued by special “cross-functional teams.” Each team will tackle a capability need like future vertical lift and long-range precision fires by bringing combat troops together with requirements and acquisition personnel to find ways of achieving the desired combat capabilities.
Jette supported the endeavor an included contracting, testing and cost accounting as other aspects of procurement that need to be included in the process.
“Army Senior Leadership has posed forming cross-discipline teams to bring together technology development, requirements generation, and acquisition,” he said. “Weaving these together, interactively, with innovative contracting, robust cost assessment, and testing is key. Commercial technologies must be leveraged to the maximum extent possible and the tech base focused on military unique developments or integration. Prototyping, along with spiral and incremental development, can transform failures into cost effective learning experiences.”
Jette also called for simplifying a Byzantine acquisition process that churns out a 680-page requirements documents for a handgun, which he said has resulted in only 5,000 of the 29 million corporations in the United States even bothering to apply for defense contracts.
“I’m on the other side of this now as a commercial person getting contracts that are inches thick for simple task orders,” he said. “We need to go back into that, find out how to flush all of this stuff out so we get down to a functional contract that gets to the point, that we can hold people accountable for the outcome of what that contract is and to put contracting into a responsible relationship as opposed to making a legal contract and that’s all they have to do.”
SASC recently has been spiriting DoD civilian nominees through the confirmation process in an effort to fill long-vacant Pentagon staff positions. Jette shared his confirmation hearing with three other nominees, all of whom sailed relatively smoothly through questioning Nov. 9.
The other nominees were Robert H. McMahon to become assistant secretary of defense for logistics and materiel readiness, R.D. James to become assistant secretary of the Army for civil works and Shon Manasco to become assistant secretary of the Air Force for Manpower and Reserve Affairs.
Manasco was questioned at length about how he plans to address a dire pilot shortage in the Air Force and an aircraft readiness rate that is depriving pilots of valuable training hours.