By Emelie Rutherford
The Pentagon’s acquisition chief said he is creating a director level-position for space and intelligence capabilities in his office to ensure “corporate-level oversight” of such systems including satellites.
After a string of problems with space programs, Pentagon undersecretary for acquisition, technology, and logistics (USD AT&L) John Young last week indicated he planned to sign a memo creating the new position in OSD AT&L.
The responsibilities for the new role are expected to be pulled from areas including the office of John Grimes, assistant secretary of defense for networks and information integration.
The Air Force lost acquisition authority decision for space to the Pentagon following the 2004 scandal when a former service official and Boeing [BA] executive were sent to prison for breaking conflict of interest laws.
Young told reporters he doesn’t “foresee the Air Force getting acquisition decision authority back [for space] in my tenure unless somebody orders me to do it.”
“Sometimes the service plans aren’t as joint as they should be, they’re not as interoperable as they should be, or they’re not fully funded, or they’re just not logical in terms of their chasing…too much requirement for not enough money,” Young said last Thursday at a Pentagon roundtable. “There’s good reason for corporate oversight and I believe space, like every other area of the business, merits that corporate oversight and I believe it should be exercised here at OSD AT&L.”
Young also pointed to the need “to have people who are less vested in the requirements helping make those decisions.”
“I expect my team to not be advocates of the requirement and the system, but to be kind of somewhat neutral observers ensuring that the program is logical, fully-funded, the requirements are reasonable, the technology is ready, and all those factors,” he said.
“So I need to build … some increased space competency on my team to look at those programs.”
Young noted that he recently “found some deficiencies” in the acquisition structure for the GPS III satellites.
“So there’s an extended acquisition decision memorandum on GPS II that directed several actions that were required there to feel confident about the delivery of that program,” he said.
The Air Force awarded in May the contract for the GPS Block IIIA satellites to Lockheed Martin [LMT].