By Emelie Rutherford
As the Pentagon grapples with congressional resistance to reprogramming funding in its coffers, a top defense official said yesterday he is working to make more formal processes for rapidly buying equipment and services for troops in Afghanistan.
Defense acquisition chief Ashton Carter told a wartime-contracting commission yesterday that he unavoidably must work around the Pentagon’s Planning Programming Budgeting System–which he said was “designed to prepare for war, not to wage war”–for war acquisitions. He said the current setup, in which the Pentagon comptroller’s office has to seek permission from sometimes-reticent lawmakers to redirect already-approved funding, “is not satisfactory.”
“We need a better system, and the Secretary (of Defense, Robert Gates) has asked me to put on a more permanent footing the constellation of ad hoc systems that we’ve been using, and I’m doing that,” Carter said.
He told the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan: “We have to create a fast lane for contingency acquisition so that requirements are done not in the ponderous usual way, but quickly so that we do the acquisition quickly, including assisting our contracting officers to use all the latitude that they have to get things under contract quickly.”
Those ad hoc systems the Pentagon has used in recent years have helped quickly set the requirements for, buy, and field Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) equipment.
Carter said he is focused now on ensuring troops in Afghanistan are “safer and more successful” as the spring fighting season begins there. That preparation spurred the Pentagon to send the four congressional defense committees reprogramming requests, which he acknowledged are “always difficult things for the Congress to approve.”
Still, lawmakers rejected some of the Pentagon’s attempts in those reprogramming to start new efforts and take funds from well-established systems. The four defense panels, for example, denied roughly half of the Pentagon’s $1.2 billion reprogramming request from Jan. 31 that sought to tap money for programs including Army Humvees and the Navy’s version of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter to pay for ISR equipment.
Still, Carter yesterday highlighted to the commission some of the war-related programs getting under way because of reprogramming items that Congress approved, including doubling the number of tethered aerostats for surveillance from aircraft.
“We are focused on program execution and then on delivery into theater,” he said.
The wartime-contracting commission was created by the fiscal year 2008 Defense Authorization Act and is chaired by former Connecticut GOP congressman Chris Shays and former Defense Contract Audit Agency Deputy Director Michael Thibault.
The commission released an interim report on Feb. 24 detailing 32 proposals to reduce waste tied to contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. Carter said he disagrees with “the method of implementation” for four of them. Those four recommendations are: “Establish Offices of Contingency Contracting at Defense (Department), State (Department), and USAID;” “Align past-performance assessments with contractor proposals (for contingency contracts);” “Increase use of suspensions and debarments;” and “Revise regulations to lower procedural barriers to contingency suspensions and debarments.”
Carter told Shays: “I understand your intent and agree with it but would look at a different way of approaching implementation.”