By Emelie Rutherford
Faced with a new report showing $135 billion in increased costs to major weapon systems in recent years, a Senate panel prodded Pentagon officials for additional ways to save money on such programs’ development.
“We need to change the culture throughout the federal government, including the Department of Defense…from what I describe as spendthrift to a culture of thrift,” said Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), chairman of a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee subcommittee that held a hearing to identify “tools” to prevent Pentagon cost overruns.
The Government Accountability Office reported yesterday that the total acquisition cost of the Pentagon’s portfolio of major defense acquisition programs grew from 96 to 98 efforts over the past two years, with an overall increased cost of $135 billion, to $1.68 trillion now. The GAO, in its 9th annual assessment of Pentagon weapon system acquisitions, reported most of the cost growth is driven by “a small number of programs,” including the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, CVN-21 future aircraft carrier, and DDG-51 destroyer.
At yesterday’s hearing, Frank Kendall, principal deputy under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics, said the main thing his office needs from Congress to counter rising costs is help with personnel.
“Helping us get good people in sooner, helping us reward people better,” he said at a hearing of the Federal Financial Management, Government Information, Federal Services, and International Security subcommittee.
Carper said the panel is “interested in solving problems…and obviously, Houston, we’ve got a problem here, when we’ve seen the major weapons system cost overruns rise from $42 billion in fiscal year 2000 to $402 billion in fiscal 2010.”
He highlighted potential solutions, which he cautioned aren’t “silver bullets,” that were discussed at the hearing as it wrapped up. They include thwarting so-called requirements creep when desired capabilities are added for systems in development, working to create a more cost-conscious culture in the Pentagon, focusing more on earned-value management, examining if there is enough competition in weapons programs, and determining if there is an “early indicator” in a weapons system’s development showing that it will breach its cost thresholds later on.
“I want to work with you to help identify those,” Carper told Kendall about such indictors.
Carper added he is working with senators including Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to decrease the number of executive-branch positions requiring Senate confirmation. He asked Kendall and Richard Burke, deputy director of the Pentagon’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation Office, to help identify Pentagon acquisition positions that should no longer be subject to the often-slow congressional approval process.
The GAO, in its report released yesterday, found half of the major programs it assessed do not meet cost performance goals agreed to by the Pentagon, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, and GAO. Also, it said 80 percent of the programs have had an increase in unit costs from initial estimates.
The GAO reported that for the programs it has assessed in depth, it “found that a lack of technology maturity, changes to requirements, increases in the scope of software development, and a lack of focus on reliability were all characteristics of programs that exhibited poorer performance outcomes.”
The Pentagon disagreed with the GAO’s use of total program cost growth as a performance metric, because it includes costs associated with capability upgrades and quantity increases, according to the GAO. The agency argued it “believes it remains a meaningful metric and that the report explicitly accounts for the cost effect of quantity changes.”