By Geoff Fein
The Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer is looking to a number of efforts such as competitive prototyping to improve program execution and help deliver systems and technologies to warfighters quicker.
John Young, Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, is also examining ways to rein in costs, bring stability to acquisition programs, and provide more oversight of those efforts, he told reporters during a recent briefing.
Young told reporters that in light of the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) assessment of selected weapons programs (GAO-08-467SP), he is tackling those issues. The report highlighted $290 billion in cost growth.
Young said he was not quite comfortable with how that number was built, but acknowledged there are a number of programs that have experienced cost growth.
“It’s led me to think about doing some new things,” he said.
For example, the GAO report raises the issues of program manager tenure. Young said that for some time now, his office has been working on an initiative where it has program manager agreements. The initiative asks program managers to sign an agreement saying they understand they are expected to serve three to four years, or to the nearest milestone decision point in that time frame, Young said.
The document represents the cost, schedule, and performance that program managers are expected to execute. Additionally, the resource sponsor and the requirements sponsor also sign the agreement as a partnership among them, Young added. “We started doing that on the ACAT (Acquisition Category) programs a few months ago.”
“We are asking at the OSD level it be done for ACAT I as part of the acquisition documentation, but I would certainly encourage the services to implement that into the lower level ACAT II and below programs,” he said. “It’s just a good business practice.”
Young said he needs program managers to engage the process and have full funded budgets, and he is prepared for that process to create budget pressures that squeeze programs out of the budget.
“It’s particularly unhealthful for me and bad for the acquisition team to have a number of programs that are walking wounded and waiting to be cost growth problems and failures,” he said.
Young also noted that the GAO study led him to look at doing more to help his acquisition team. One step is to direct that no further requirements can be levied on a program without a higher authority’s approval.
Young is also initiating an intermediate review process to determine if an effort’s cost, schedule and requirements are still in line, need adjusting, or if possibly the effort needs to be curtailed.
“I want to improve, to the best of our ability, that we set the stage for success at Milestone B,” he said.
But one of the bigger changes is competitive prototyping, Young noted, because it brings several dimensions to the table.
“For one, it stimulates great creativity. That’s the best environment to get the best ideas when you have a competition,” he said. “Doing prototypes can help develop our people skills on managing programs, doing systems engineering, estimating costs. Building a quality prototype informs us of what the production article might really cost.”
Building quality prototypes can also show how hard it is to achieve requirements, or if they are even achievable,” Young added.
“I’ve talked about the replacement for the Humvee and how high that requirements bar is, and how important those prototypes are, in deciding whether we can build a vehicle in that class,” he said.
Competitive prototyping is also an important dimension to attracting other non-traditional defense industries, Young said. And competitive prototyping inspires young people to pursue careers in math, engineering, and science which, although it’s not a requirement for Department of Defense (DoD), it certainly is important for DoD and the nation, for the long-term, he added.
Young has also implemented a different oversight model for source selection, trying to engage industry multiple times to try to understand their proposal and help them understand what DoD doesn’t like to get the best proposals in.
“It makes it harder to judge, and ironically makes it easier, I think, to explain to industry why we made the choices we made,” Young said. “We are using that strategy pretty well.”
The goal is to make some shift in the culture and setting a higher standards bar, which Young said he is trying very hard to do.
“I see a lot of good signs of acceptance of that. I think it’s a challenge to shift culture and shift mind sets, but I would highlight, for example, in the C-5 re-engining, I think industry understood in the aftermath of a Nunn-McCurdy that we had to have a more reasonable negotiation on price and profit and they accepted that we structured that in way that they can improve their profitability by delivering results,” he said. “But they need to accept the challenge to go manage their business. It’s not universal but in some places I think the companies respect and understand what we are trying to do and they are prepared to go execute their business in that manner.”
The government team likewise is embracing this and making adjustments, Young added.
“We are working hard to change the business model, and deliver results for the warfighter. The most important piece for me is to execute our programs within budget. Failing to do that has many negative implications. Usually [you] have to go break other programs to fix the broken one, everything cost more, [and it] slows delivery to the warfighter,” Young said. “So our fundamental goal here is to try to execute programs to budget and schedule to get better stability into the business.”