In his President's Perspective column.

• Author: Kojro, Chester A.
• Position: Acquisition Reform - Letter to the editor - Column

In his President's Perspective column, "Budget Pressures Beg for a Serious Look at Overhauling Acquisition System," May 2012, Lawrence Farrell suggests that budget pressures should lead to an overhaul of the acquisition system. This is a quixotic call that will not be heeded since the acquisition morass has nothing to do with the budget. Not only does the acquisition bureaucracy not know what it wants, but in the interest of streamlining, it closes off options.

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For a perfect example, consider the effort to acquire Special Operations Command trucks (May 2012, p. 44). The vast difference in the potential candidates immediately suggests that the actual requirement is very vague. According to the article, the program is using a two-phase approach. First, written proposals and test data will result in an award of up to two contracts for further evaluation. The second phase includes purchasing two prototypes from each vendor for testing. A single winner will then get the Rill contract.

So with no clear requirement, SOCOM is only shopping for proposals and yet...