One of the Pentagon’s top acquisition officials fired shots against the Senate’s acquisition reform legislation today, saying that a provision in the bill limits the information that can be passed to the Defense Department acquisition officials, thus impeding the defense secretary’s ability to conduct oversight of programs.

DF-ST-87-06962Overall, the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) supports congressional efforts to improve the Pentagon’s weapons buying process, Alan Estevez, the deputy undersecretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, said today. However, it has concerns about section 843 of the Senate bill (S1376), which takes the power to make milestone decisions away from the defense secretary—who usually delegates that authority to the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics—and reassigns it to the service acquisition executives.

If the policy is implemented, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter would have to bring in a service chief to have an in-depth discussion about a program instead of relying one of his own executives, Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Frank Kendall, he said.

“That’s not how the department gets managed,” Estevez said in a speech at the Center of Strategic and International Studies. “It takes away his [Carter’s] direct staff’s ability to provide him information so he can even have an intelligent discussion with the service chief and service secretary.”

He also repeated one of Kendall’s chief criticisms of the provision—that the services are more likely than OSD to add requirements, and thus cost and complexity, during development.

“The reality is, in times of tight money, the services try to cram more into their program. It’s just a natural tendency,” he said.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) said in a speech earlier this week that the Kendall and his staff have not been effective at driving down the cost of weapons systems.

“There’s got to be some accountability,” he said at the Heritage Foundation on Wednesday. “There’s a weird interpretation that this takes away the authority of the secretary of defense. The service chiefs work for the secretary of defense…We’re making them responsible.”

McCain and House Armed Services Committee (HASC) Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) are expected to roll out a conference report of the defense authorization bill next week, complete with negotiated acquisition reform language. McCain said on Wednesday that he and Thornberry had yet to come to an agreement on whether to give greater acquisition authority to the services, but that he hopes to persuade the HASC chairman to adopt the Senate language.

Estevez conceded that the Defense Department could probably find ways to procure equipment faster and more cheaply than the status quo. “But we are pushing the technological edge,” he said. Lawmakers simply can’t create a mandate that the Pentagon develop and buy its weapons over five-year period. “Sometimes you can’t” meet those timelines.

Kendall’s Better Buying Power initiative is making progress by driving realistic requirements, finding savings and cutting bureaucracy, Estevez said. Preliminary data shows that 57 percent of RDT&E programs from 2009 to the current day are showing negative cost growth, as opposed to 17 percent from 2000 to 2008. For procurement cost, 79 percent of programs show negative cost growth as opposed to 44 percent over the same time period.

“Those are significant numbers,” he said. But it will take time—sometimes years— to see all of the results.

Andrew Hunter, CSIS’ director of its defense-industrial initiatives group and a senior fellow of the international security program, also noted his misgivings with the Senate’s changes to milestone decision authority.

While the milestone decision authority, service acquisition executive and program manager all oversee a program, each official takes on a very different role, he said.

 “The role of the milestone decision authority is to make critical decisions on committing to major investments. In the case of defense acquisition programs, we’re talking many billions of dollars over decades of time,” he said. “It’s about laying out the acquisition strategy for the program, which again is not a one year plan, it is a multi-year, in many case a multi-decade plan for how a system is going to proceed. That is a distinct activity from the day-to-day management of a program that a program manager undertakes.”