A Pentagon official wants the defense industry to provide greater cost data on weapons program development and production to the Department of Defense (DoD) as part of a “growing partnership” in modernizing the Pentagon’s acquisition programs.
“If we’re going to be rigorous in analysis, we need good cost data,” Jamie Morin, director of the DoD’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) office, said Thursday at the Atlantic Council. “Capturing cost data is always tenuous,” he said, but it helps the DoD “understand what we’re getting into when we start the next program.”
DoD previously cut the number of cost data reports it received from industry contractors but is now working to increase the level of data sharing. This, according to Morin, will help the DoD produce better cost estimates for its programs.
Morin highlighted the collaboration between his team and Lockheed Martin [LMT] on the F-35 fighter aircraft, “one of our most complex acquisition programs.” He commended Lockheed Martin for “handing over a large data feed directly from their enterprise resource planning system, giving us dramatically more insight” that CAPE uses to produce its own cost estimates of the program. The system “has been part of a five- to six-year cost modernization effort,” Morin said, and is a model for “extraordinary collaboration” with “key industry partners.”
Morin also warned of potential upcoming “budgetary stringency,” cautioning that the fiscal 2016 budget impasse could lead Congress to pass a full-year continuing resolution (CR) that would hurt the DoD’s modernization investments and keep department funding at the level of the previous year. “We’ve learned how to deal with those inefficiencies…in the short term,” he said. “Imagining that extended for a whole year is a dramatically different question.”
A full-year CR won’t “let us get after the sort of investments we need, and particularly in the modernization programs, in order to create a dominant joint force,” Morin said. “If we’re going to break out of that trap, we’ve got to get to a fiscal solution.”