The heads of the Senate Armed Services Committee want an Air Force explanation behind its decision to cancel the Expeditionary Combat Support System (ECSS), for which they say the service spent more than $1 billion on, but apparently failed to produce any significant military capability.
Calling ECSS possibly “one of the most egregious examples of mismanagement in recent history,” committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Ranking Member John McCain (R-Ariz.) asked Defense Secretary Leon Panetta in their Dec. 5 letter for simple answers.
“We believe that the public and the taxpayers deserve a clear explanation of how the Air Force came to spend more than $1 billion without receiving any significant military capability, who will be held accountable and what steps the Defense Department is taking to ensure that this will not happen again,” the senators wrote.
The Air Force said yesterday in a statement it canceled the program because it is “no longer a viable option for meeting the fiscal year 2017 Financial Improvement and Audit Readiness (FIAR) statutory requirement.” The Air Force said it estimated that it would require an additional $1.1 billion for about a quarter of the original ECSS scope to continue and fielding would not be until 2020. The Air Force said yesterday in a statement it received a request for information regarding ECSS and will respond appropriately.
ECSS was an effort by the Air Force to globally view, standardize and manage logistics resources to help close process gaps and use enterprise resource planning (ERP) software to more efficiently manage logistics like end items, materiel and people, according to an Air Force statement.
Levin and McCain specifically ask the Air Force what it gained from the $1 billion it spent on ECSS and what capabilities, if any, will be salvaged from the program. They also ask what the root causes of ECSS’ failure were, why it took so long for senior management to recognize these problems and cancel the program and what changes DoD will make in the way of how it manages procurement of its other ERP programs.
CSC [CSC] was the prime contractor for ECSS.