Senior senators are seeking additional reforms to the Pentagon’s processes for buying weapons, including a reexamination of the acquisition system and attempts to prevent the addition of requirements to platforms as they are being built.
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Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) told reporters Tuesday he believes provisions sprinkled throughout the fiscal year 2014 defense authorization bill his panel approved two weeks ago will help wring savings out of the Pentagon’s requirements, development and acquisition processes.
“There are a lot of provisions that I think will have some effect,” Levin said at the Capitol.
Levin noted sections of the bill that would prohibit the addition of requirements to weapon systems during construction. SASC Ranking Member James Inhofe (R-Okla.), meanwhile, is highlighting reforms in the bill such as a required review of the Pentagon’s process for buying major weapons systems. These and more proposals are being floated as Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), the relatively new Senate Appropriations Defense subcommittee chairman, is reexamining the Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act of 2009 (WSARA). Durbin said he wants to offer legislation that modifies the 4-year-old law, which the SASC crafted.
“I want to evaluate what they achieved, and also the shortcomings of their effort,” Durbin said earlier this month (Defense Daily, June 12). He specifically said he wants to examine concurrency, or when the Pentagon builds systems it is still developing and testing.
Levin said Tuesday he “would look forward to” working with Durbin to modify WSARA. Inhofe also noted the need to build on that 2009 reform law.
“Despite important reforms such as the Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act of 2009, defense acquisition programs continue to be behind schedule and over budget,” Inhofe says in comments he added to the SASC’s report on the FY ’14 defense authorization bill, which was made public on Monday. “During this period of budget austerity, it is critical every taxpayer dollar allocated to defense acquisition be spent prudently,” he adds.
Inhofe notes defense acquisition reforms he initiated in the SASC’s FY ’14 defense bill. Those including a requirement that the U.S. comptroller general conduct a “comprehensive review” of the Pentagon’s process and procedures for acquiring major weapons systems.
“The objective of the review is to identify those acquisition processes that provide no value, little value, or which value is outweighed by the creation of additional costs and schedule delays,” Inhofe says in the SASC’s report. “The recommendations of the report can then be incorporated in next year’s defense authorization bill to create greater efficiencies and savings in the acquisition realm.”
Inhofe also added to the bill a mandate for the comptroller general to evaluate how the Pentagon has reacted to a recommendation, from the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review’s Independent Panel, to give military service leaders a greater role in the acquisition process.
“As a result, it is my hope the review will identify new management models to increase the effectiveness of the acquisition system,” Inhofe writes in the SASC report.
Levin said on Tuesday “one of the most important issues” related to defense acquisition reforms in the SASC’s bill addresses “the avoiding of adding these additional requirement as something is being built.”
The SASC’s report on its bill, for example, directs the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to study how the Pentagon has implemented a requirement for it to create configuration steering boards, which are intended to control costs with weapons programs. Called for in the FY ’09 defense authorization act, such boards are responsible for reviewing proposed changes to program requirements or system configuration that could impact a program’s cost or schedule, and also to recommend changes that could help the program. The SASC also wants the GAO to assess “the extent to which requirements creep has been successfully addressed.”
The SASC says in its report that it “continues to have concerns with the growth and change of requirements during a program’s life-cycle and believes that such requirements creep can occur at lower levels of the requirements chain.” It says the mandate for the configuration steering boards, in the ’09 law, was intended to address the problem.