By Marina Malenic
Many of the Air Force’s chronically troubled space acquisition programs will get an extra hard look as the service scours its purchasing portfolio for savings, the top uniformed officer dealing with Air Force weapons-buying said last recently.
“One of the consistent themes right now as we look at programs that are requiring additional dollars in the Future Years Defense Program [FYDP]–most of them are space programs,” said Lt. Gen. Mark Shackelford, the military deputy in the office of the assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition.
“There is something still fundamentally out of whack in the way that we are cost estimating and executing those acquisition programs,” Shackelford said during a June 11 conference in Arlington, Va., hosted by Swiss bank Credit Suisse and defense consultant Jim McAleese. “So that’s going to get some additional scrutiny.”
Pentagon officials said earlier this month that the military services will have to identify $2 billion in overhead and “lower-priority” programs over the FYDP in an effort to divert more than $100 billion to current forces and modernization priorities. The armed services, Pentagon agencies and combatant commands are expected to submit cut proposals by July 31.
Shackelford said the Air Force’s civilian leader, Michael Donley, has asked the acquisition office to create an industry liaison unit “to keep track, company by company…as to the performance of industry, looking at things like overhead rates [and] their management systems.”
He said the Air Force is taking seriously Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ “war on waste” that aims to curtail overhead costs so that the department can live within its now slowly growing budget.
“We have become the cash cow for industry, but we’re running out of discretionary dollars to do that,” Shackelford said.
Last month, the Pentagon’s industrial policy chief called attention to the challenges of the U.S. space industrial base.
“We’re at a tipping point with our space industry,” Brett Lambert said at a May 25 event hosted by the George C. Marshall Institute in Washington.
Lambert said European and Asian countries have developed their space industries over the past several decades. He said the United States must reform its archaic export control laws to allow U.S. firms to compete internationally.
“We need to do this. We have second- and third-tiers firms going out of business because they can’t export and they’re not competitive in the global marketplace,” he said.
Lambert said the “permissive budget environment” of the past decade “covered a lot of sins” in both industry and the government.
“When we had problems, we threw money at it,” he said. “Those days, as we all know, are over.”
Lambert singled out the space sector as one “where we all can step up our game, both on the inside [DoD] and also within industry.”
“Space is a unique animal in our industrial base,” he added. “We have to have a more nuanced approach to our acquisition strategies for space systems as opposed to many of the other systems that we have.”
The Air Force, meanwhile, has announced that its long-serving deputy under secretary for space programs, Gary Payton, is set to retire on July 31.