The Army’s acquisition czar wants the service to pursue realistic and achievable requirements so that programs aren’t destined for the acquisition “death spiral.”
Army Assistant Secretary for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics (AT&L) Heidi Shyu said Wednesday she’s denied program managers approval to move forward because a requirement did not match an acquisition strategy and she felt the program would be destined for failure from the first day.
Photo: Lockheed Martin
“Go back and reassess your requirements,” Shyu said during a presentation at the Atlantic Council think tank in downtown Washington. “That pushback is very important.”
Shyu said she is fighting back against what she called “gold-plated requirements,” or requirements based more on wants than needs. Shyu said she wants engineers to understand the limits of the trade space because the engineer will tell the Army if a requirement is achievable. The Army has had to cancel a number of programs over the years because it was unable to meet a requirement after spending hundreds of millions of dollars.
Shyu said it’s important for the service to understand the trade space in respect to the current state of technology versus the art of possible so the Army doesn’t “chase (its) tails for perpetuity” until a program is canceled because it pursued a requirement that wasn’t realistic.
“Is the requirement realizable or not,” Shyu said.
Shyu said the Army has annual configuration steering boards in which it reviews all the major programs to ensure they are on track. All the major communities within all the Army are represented on the steering boards, she said.
“We all look at (these programs) collectively because I can tell you acquisition is not a single player,” Shyu said. “It’s a team sport.”
Two major Army program cancellations since 2000 include the RAH-66 Comanche helicopter and the Future Combat System (FCS). According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the Army spent $5.9 billion before canceling the Comanche in 2004. The Comanche was to deliver next-generation armed reconnaissance and be capable of operating in adverse weather conditions across a wide spectrum of threat environments.
The Army spent $20 billion trying to develop FCS, which was supposed to be a transformational force structure consisting of 18 manned and unmanned systems linked by a network. The Army first partially cancelled Future Combat System in 2009 and finally terminated the program in 2011.