Message to weapons buyers: make it cheaper and faster.

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

The Pentagon has been put on notice that the days of lavish spending are over and it must make "tough choices" about what weapons to buy.

But even it the military does end up pulling the plug on wasteful spending, that still leaves unsolved another glaring problem with the way the Pentagon buys weapons: widespread customer dissatisfaction with ah unresponsive procurement system that takes far too long to deliver the goods.

Just months after taking over as defense secretary, Robert Gates concluded that the only way to deploy hardware quickly enough to war zones was to circumvent the traditional buyers and create ad-hoc "rapid procurement" teams. Such was the case with the purchase of mine-resistant MRAP armored trucks and the accelerated deployment of surveillance aircraft. Former Pentagon acquisition chief Paul Kaminski estimates that, had the MRAP been put on the normal procurement track, it would have taken at least five years.

The weapon acquisitions system has become so customer-unfriendly that the Army is finding it difficult to obtain spare parts and repair services for the MRAP trucks because the vehicles are not a "program of record," which is Pentagon-speak for weapons that have been blessed by the acquisition authorities and are included in the military's long-term budgets.

When soldiers in Afghanistan complained that their machine guns were too heavy, the Army also went outside the system and, using "supplemental" dollars that are not part of the regular budget, asked its rapid acquisition team to reengineer the weapon. Within a short time, soldiers received a gun that was nine pounds lighter, said Gen. Peter Chiarelli, Army vice chief of staff. "If I tried to pull that through the current system, God only knows how long it would have taken," he said.

The Army needs to be able to buy off-the-shelf hardware and adapt it for combat use quickly, Chiarelli said. The MRAP is a "perfect example" of the model that should be adopted, he added. "The current system doesn't conform to that."

The flaws and limitations of the military's acquisition system have been endlessly analyzed and documented by dozens of blue-ribbon and congressional panels. This month, the Pentagon's advisory panel, the Defense Science Board, will begin yet another investigation into what it will take to fix the acquisitions process.

It's no mystery why weapons can't be produced fast. Traditional modernization programs seek a "99 percent" solution over a period of...