It's a workforce problem.

• Author: Skantze, Lawrence A.
• Position: READERS' FORUM - Letter to the editor

The military needs a strong, focused acquisition institution and a dedicated and trained acquisition workforce--where young military and civilian program managers can aspire to the highest levels of responsibility and are protected from the vagaries of the office of the secretary of defense and service personnel systems.

Until that is achieved, poor performance will continue.

Following the Cold War, there was a drastic reduction in the civilian acquisition workforce, from 240,000 in 1990 to 124,000 in 1999.

During the latter months of 2001, I did a study on the issue, including the concurrent demise of the uniformed services acquisition skills and suggested what needed to be done to rebuild an effective workforce, which at best would take 10 years.

The Defense Acquisition Workforce Improvement Act (DAWIA) laid down guidelines for creating, educating, and improving the acquisition workforce. If properly implemented, it would blend education and experience in a carefully integrated sequence to establish a logical career progression. It has not happened and will not happen under the present circumstances.

DAWIA has been amended many times since its inception. The latest update, dated July 1, 2007, directs the defense secretary to establish an acquisition corps. To date, there is no Defense Department acquisition corps. Each of the services continues to separately manage its own acquisition people. The defense secretary has apparently accepted this approach

During the past decade there have been numerous studies and proposals to fix defense acquisition, including the Defense Science Board, various special groups, independent panels, and Congress through legislation, most recently in the 2008 authorization bill.

They have produced numerous lists of new processes and procedures to correct the system. Yet program schedule slips and overruns continue to occur. Processes and procedures don't manage programs. People do! The Defense Department needs an acquisition fix which focuses on people, not processes.

There are two fundamental conditions necessary to creating a viable acquisition corps:

* There must be an acquisition institution, with a strong leader and with all the necessary people and resources, independent of other entities and dedicated to the mission.

* Within the acquisition institution there must be clear career paths for people to aspire to and rise to...