In the coming weeks, the House and Senate armed services committees will take on the Goldwater-Nichols Act in a series of hearings meant to help Congress gauge whether any changes should be made to improve the weapons buying process, two key lawmakers said Oct. 20.
“It’s always helpful for Congress to review what Congress has done in the past and see whether the structures we set up fit with the way the world is changing. So absolutely we need to look at that,” Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee (HASC), said after a Brookings Institution discussion on the National Defense Authorization Act. “Goldwater-Nichols has overall been an unqualified success. Does that mean it’s perfect? No. Does that mean it works perfectly today? No. So it’s appropriate for us to look at that see if improvements might be in order.”
The Goldwater-Nichols Act, which was passed in 1986, streamlined the military’s chain of command largely by stripping away some of the power given to the service chiefs, including in the areas of acquisition and procurement.
However, lawmakers need to reevaluate whether the Defense Department’s acquisition process has becomes too centralized and removed from the military services that depend on those various weapons systems, Thornberry said.
Other Goldwater-Nichols policies might need to be modernized to address how the battlefield has changed since the 1980s, said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC).
“We’re going to have to address how we train and equip people in the cyber area. There are many things have happened in the last 30 years that require adjustments to a fundamentally fine piece of legislation,” he said.
Hearings could start in the coming weeks after Congress wraps up work on this year’s defense authorization bill, he said. The bill contains the chairmen’s first batch of acquisition reform rules, many of which increase the acquisition authorities of the service chiefs and other key service officials.
In next year’s NDAA, McCain said he would like to implement further changes to military entitlements and address the perception that the Defense Department only works with “certain, favored industry that they’ve done business with for years.”
Thornberry said he wants to focus on reforms that would keep the military from “inventing technology as we are purchasing it” as well as thinning out regulations that keep many private sector businesses from working with the Pentagon.