Deja vu all over again.

• Author: Mehrtens, Fritz
• Position: READERS' FORUM - Letter to the editor

As far as defense acquisition goes, the situation hasn't changed much since I entered the business in 1974, in the Abrams tank program. Otherwise, your article ("In the Army, Why Can't Soldiers Be Customers?"--January 2008) would not be pertinent today.

As a member of the Army acquisition community I learned that the civilian managers who run the labs control the acquisition business. The techies only want what they invented, the managers only want the lowest career risk, and the procurement people want to go by the book. Anything the institutional user wants must fit into those constraints. The institutional user may not be the combat user, which adds another layer of complexity.

Later, as a program manger in a large defense company, I learned that the customers are the official who makes the acquisition decision and the myriad of bureaucrats who advise him. To offer something the combat soldier wants but the acquisition people disdain is to court business suicide. Might as well go make something that can be sold on the open market.

How can the situation (assuming my ancient experience still applies) be improved? A few initiatives might be useful:

* Co-locate the development labs with the combat arms centers. In this age of e-communications and when little development is done in-house, having the scientists sit next to the soldiers might help. Or, if moving the labs proves cumbersome, reassign all program management to the training/doctrine centers. This would require the techies to come to the users to implement programs and would put financial control of everything beyond basic research in the user's hands. It would certainly be interesting...