As part of the Pentagon’s and Congress’ acquisition reform efforts, the Defense Department has assembled a list of legislative initiatives to help reduce the burden on program managers and let them focus their time and attention on what really matters: the product they hope to deliver to the warfighter.
The outgoing director of DoD’s Joint Rapid Acquisition Cell, Andrew Hunter, told reporters Thursday at the Pentagon that “we think can really reduce some of the burdens on program managers, allow the department to do more of what the DoD instruction emphasizes, which is tailoring acquisition processes so you’re really geared on what it is you’re trying to buy and not so much geared on how do I check all the boxes on my checklist.”
Hunter said that over the years–including his 17 years working on Capitol Hill as a staffer–statutes have built up to address individual problems that acquisition programs have experienced. The idea was always that the laws would prevent another program from veering off track in the same manner, but the cumulative effect has been less helpful, Hunter said.
“Small issues come up that look like they could be favorably resolved with a small change, and then over a period of 10 years the accumulation of those small changes adds up to kind of a new structure,” he said. “And it wasn’t necessarily built as a well thought-through set of changes because it accumulated a little bit over time.”
Having both the Pentagon and Congress tackle acquisition reform in tandem will be a great opportunity to holistically look at these kinds of issues and question, “does the totality of all these requirements focus us on the things that are most important to be focused on?”
For example, he said, many statutes deal with the idea of program managers identifying and attempting to reduce risk early in the program–“which is the right principle, but you kind of come at it from the side,” Hunter said. “Let’s focus the effort of the PMs, of our oversight, on the things that are most important” by scrapping all the statutes that sidestep the issue and replace them with a new one that lays out how a program manager should deal with risk early in a program’s development.
Hunter said he believes the effort will produce positive changes for the acquisition system, but he said the biggest hurdle would be the trust factor. For every statute the Pentagon wants to eliminate, a lawmaker can point to a failed program that might have been saved had that statute been implemented sooner.
“At the end of the day, when you’re arguing for flexibility, you’re basically saying ‘trust me,’” Hunter said. “And then the issue is, well what about the time you screwed up?…The counterargument just has to be, if we are not focusing ourselves on the things that matter, we’re not helping.”
When Congress launched its acquisition reform act last year, several lawmakers during hearings alluded to the Pentagon’s rapid acquisition system and questioned why more programs couldn’t be pursued in the same rapid manner. Hunter told reporters that there are several good ways to pursue defense acquisition and the key is to give program managers flexibility to pick the correct approach for their programs.
With rapid acquisition, the goal is to give the warfighter something that addresses an urgent need better than anything currently available, and to do it before the next fighting season starts. That often times means finding an 80 percent solution, he said, or sometimes less–which is fine if the system is only meant to be used for a year or two and then replaced.
But, he made clear, “you can’t necessarily do that for all things–if it’s a system you want to operate for 30 to 50 years, you have to be a little more deliberative about your requirements.”
He also said funding rapid acquisition can be tricky and therefore shouldn’t be relied on as a fix for regular acquisition. Programs going through the normal rules move slowly, but each program becomes its own budget line item than can be tracked and debated in the Pentagon and in Congress. The more than 500 Joint Urgent Operational Needs (JUONs) that have come though the Pentagon in the past decade have no stable funding source, which Hunter said he hopes Congress will address soon.
“We have, I think, proven it can be done through reprogramming, through flexible funds like the [Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Fund], the MRAP Trust Fund and others,” he said. “The JUON Fund, which we would like to create, hasn’t gotten funded. So that would be a nice one to have for sure, which would basically just give us a fund with the flexibility” to spend as warfighter needs are validated.