By Emelie Rutherford
Pentagon officials told lawmakers yesterday their acquisition plans for the new ship-and-land-based missile defense setup for Europe are on track, despite recent criticism from government auditors.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded in a draft report last month that the Pentagon “has not fully implemented a management process that synchronizes the European phased-adaptive approach acquisition activities and ensures transparency and accountability.”
The draft report, delivered to the House Armed Services Strategic Forces subcommittee, highlighted that the Pentagon had not developed an acquisition-decision schedule or an overall “investment cost” for the so-called European Phased-Adaptive Approach (EPAA) to missile defense.
Strategic Forces subcommittee Chairman Jim Langevin (D-R.I.) questioned yesterday if the Office of the Secretary of Defense has appropriate acquisition plans, with milestones and budget figures, for all elements of the missile defense architecture.
James Miller, the principal deputy under secretary of defense for policy, said during a hearing of the Strategic Forces panel yesterday that his “sense is that we have a very good understand(ing) of what the key technical risks are associated with each of the elements of the Phased Adaptive Approach.”
The Missile Defense Agency and its director, Army Lt. Gen. Patrick O’Reilly, have a “clear, lined-up program of activities that stretch from today through the coming decade for when the key milestones will be, when they need to get key systems on contract, and what other key decisions are,” Miller said.
President Barack Obama’s nascent phased-adaptive approach to overseas missile defense, replaces former President George W. Bush’s plan for a “third site” including ground-based interceptors in Poland and radars in the Czech Republic. The Pentagon now plans to initially deploy ships equipped with Lockheed Martin‘s [LMT] Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) system and Raytheon‘s [RTN] ship-based Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) interceptors before adapting to a ground-based setup for the SM-3 interceptors.
Since the Obama administration kicked off the current effort last year, Pentagon officials “looked at the likely cost associated with the phased-adaptive approach and had an overall estimate for those costs associated with missiles, sensors, and so forth,” Miller said.
“As each of those programs matures, we’ve seen the refinement of those cost estimates and currently believe that we have a pretty good grasp on what the overall cost of this program will be,” he said. One uncertainty, is said, is the cost of Aegis BMD-capable ships, which generally are not factored into the cost of the phased-adaptive approach, he said.
In terms of oversight, Miller said all of the phased-adaptive approach programs receive an “intensive” annual scrub.
O’Reilly told the House panel that as the acquisition executive for the phased-adaptive approach he has established six baselines for each of the programs, related to cost, schedule, technical, operational., contracts, and test baselines.
“This is far more descriptive than (what’s) in the typical acquisition program baseline,” he testified. “Ours is more detailed.”
For programs that involve a lead military service, O’Reilly said, he works with their acquisition executives and has them sign on to the baselines after conducting their own reviews.
“It’s unprecedented that a joint program actually has two…acquisition executives, for the service acquisition executive and myself as missile defense,” he said. “We perform twice the amount of reviews you would normally see.”
The Missile Defense Executive Board, he added, performs many of the duties a Defense Acquisition Board would perform for a standard Pentagon weapon-system program. The missile- defense board, though, meets much more often, he said.
O’Reilly told Langevin that the MDA does have cost estimates for each phase of this new missile-defense approach that are being vetted by the Pentagon’s Joint Staff.