Commanders' wish list makes for wishful thinking.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: DEFENSE WATCH

Part of the current gospel at the Defense Department is the notion that field commanders should have a say in procurement decisions.

Consistently, Pentagon officials have spoken about their desire to make the procurement bureaucracy more responsive to the needs of combatant commanders, and several independent studies and commissions have agreed this is a good idea.

Since the early days of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, much of the Pentagon's equipment buys have fulfilled critical battlefield needs. But there are several areas where the Pentagon so far has failed to deliver. Most of these, according to senior officials, involve information technologies.

Combatant commanders cite network-centric operations, command-and-control, intelligence and surveillance as "problem areas" that require substantial improvements in technology, says Army Maj. Gen. Michael A. Vane, vice director for force structure on the Joint Staff. The military services have done a pretty good job in providing "traditional systems," Vane says. "But they need to work on these other areas."

It may seem counterintuitive that the Defense Department spends more than $30 billion a year on information technologies and still is not able to satisfy the needs of frontline commanders.

The reality is far more complex than that, however.

As much as the Defense Department has successfully exploited the advances in the commercial IT sector and has deployed improved communications systems, programs frequently have been slowed by red tape and poor management.

John G. Grimes, the Pentagon's chief information officer, recently offered a mix of good and bad news that explains why the Pentagon continues to stumble in the information technology arena.

He cited as major setbacks two multibillion-dollar programs--a next-generation constellation of communications satellites, called transformation satellites, and a new family of software radios, known as the joint tactical radio system. "Our reputation is going to hell in a hand-basket" because of these setbacks, laments Grimes in remarks to an industry conference that was hosted by Input, a market intelligence firm in Reston, Va.

"I don't blame industry for all the problems," Grimes cautions. "But we have 13 space programs ... over cost, over schedule--and we lost our credibility with both committees on both sides of the aisle." Both the transformation satellites and the joint tactical radio programs have seen their funding chopped substantially...