Acquisition reform ... deja vu ... again.
Author | Skantze, Lawrence A. |
Position | Readers' Forum |
* In 1971, as an Air Force colonel managing the SRAM (Short Range Attack Missile) program, I was directed to initiate a "should cost" estimate.
We immediately went about finding the right kinds of experienced system engineers, software engineers, budget analysts and contract negotiators. It increased the timeline but we ended up with a good product, comparing the program office estimate to should cost estimate, and the prime's (Boeing) estimate. We were fairly close.
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The focus on "should cost" has returned at the Defense Department, so we need to be careful and take the time to build a competent, experienced independent team.
Over the past decades there has been a plethora of acquisition reform studies. One of the impressive ones has been a December 2009 Institute for Defense Analyses report that reviewed cost growth in 11 major programs. Although each of the programs was under the oversight of senior acquisition executives and program managers, all 11 programs experienced schedule slips and cost growth because of development difficulties or production increases. While the study noted current plans to increase the defense work force by several thousand acquisition people, it pointed out that acquiring and training these people, and then assigning them to acquisition programs to develop knowledge and experience, would take several years.
Looking back on my 40 years in Air Force acquisition, I have been impressed by the way in which software system engineering has come to dominate major acquisitions. While I am not privy to the details of the program, the F-35, reportedly with 23 million lines of code, is a significant challenge. The initial requirement is to define and lay out the fundamental software architecture leading to the development of the many modules that constitute the myriad of functions that the F-35 must perform. Then, once each module is completed and debugged, it must perform against a detailed milestone schedule. Then the modules have to be selectively integrated to provide a set of time sequenced events, and integrated in a total performing series of tests to provide a complex fully integrated F-35 combat system.
When I served on several Defense Science Board studies in the early 1990s, the recommendations were not always acted upon. Interestingly enough, when the present DSB Chairman Paul Kaminski was deputy defense secretary; he instituted a process to write and sign a contract with program...
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