By Emelie Rutherford
The head of the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) introduced yesterday wide-reaching legislation intended to thwart cost overruns, schedule delays, and performance problems with defense acquisition programs by compelling the Pentagon to take specific steps at the efforts’ outset.
SASC Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) has dubbed the bill he crafted the “Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act of 2009,” of which SASC Ranking Member John McCain (R-Ariz.) is an original co-sponsor.
Levin announced the legislation during an afternoon fiscal-responsibility summit at the White House. A SASC hearing on the bill will be held next week.
“The key to successful acquisition programs is getting things right from the start with sound systems engineering, cost-estimating, and developmental testing early in the program cycle,” Levin said in a written statement added to yesterday’s Congressional Record. ” Programs that are built on a weak initial foundation, including immature technologies, inadequate development and testing, and unrealistic requirements, are likely to have big problems in the long run. “
The bill, he said, “is designed to identify and address major problems much earlier in program development–before a Nunn-McCurdy (cost) threshold is breached, before a program is formally initiated, and before the program’s trajectory has been established.”
Specifically, he said the legislation would require the Pentagon to “reestablish systems engineering organizations and developmental testing capabilities; make trade-offs between cost, schedule and performance early in the program cycle; and conduct preliminary design reviews before giving approval to new acquisition programs.”
It would create a new independent director of cost assessment for Pentagon modernization programs, which Levin also pushed for last year.
The bill calls for the Pentagon to increase the use of competitive prototyping and would require the director of defense research and engineering to review and assess the maturity of critical technologies on a periodic basis.
The measure also would tighten the criteria for continuing programs that suffer critical cost breaches that trigger reviews under the Nunn-McCurdy law,
Currently, to continue programs that exceed Nunn-McCurdy cost growth limits the Pentagon must certify the programs are essential to national security, have no comparable but less costly alternatives, and have reasonable and under-control cost estimates.
Levin said his new bill would: “Address problems with costly changes in the middle of a program by tightening the so-called ‘Nunn-McCurdy’ requirements for underperforming programs to provide for the termination of any such program that cannot be justified after undergoing a complete reexamination and revalidation.”
In his statement Levin lamented a series of statistics, including that since the beginning of 2006 nearly half of the Department of Defense (DoD) largest acquisition programs have suffered significant cost breaches triggering Nunn-McCurdy reviews, and that 95 major defense acquisition programs have exceeded their research and development budgets by an average of 40 percent.
“These cost overruns happen because of fundamental flaws that are endemic to our acquisition system,” Levin said. “DOD acquisition programs fail because the Department continues to rely on unreasonable cost and schedule estimates, establish unrealistic performance expectations, insist on the use of immature technologies, and adopt costly changes to program requirements, production quantities and funding levels in the middle of ongoing programs.”
Levin said that now, “when the federal budget is under immense strain as a result of the economic crisis we simply cannot afford this kind of continued waste and inefficiency.”