Better ways to buy weapons.

• Author: Levine, Stanley H.
• Position: READERS' FORUM - Letter to the editor

* I read your March article "Message to Weapons Buyers: Make it Cheaper and Faster" with great interest but was very disappointed. The opinions of political appointees and four-star generals are interesting but not based on any real experience with the current acquisition process. I have spent over 35 years in Army program management and acquisition. When there is a problem in developing a system, the Government Accountability Office investigates and recommends more controls. The Defense Department responds. Layers upon layers of contractual and legal oversight are added to the process. Reporting processes are put in place along with large amounts of testing. The result is a procurement nightmare. Your article mentions needing 75 percent solutions rather than 99 percent of the requirement. Do you know what the testers, inspectors general, Defense and Congress would do if a program manager decided to deliver only 75 percent of the requirement? Your article does not mention the issues with rapid developments. There have been many.

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They typically suffer from a lack of interoperability/integration and a lack of sustainment. There is no silver bullet. The acquisition system needs to be overhauled so that it has several paths that can respond to different programmatic requirements. We need to be able to field technology faster but it needs to be sustainable and it needs to not be disruptive to fielded capabilities. Also, your article did not address the issue that modern day...