Top Military Leaders Unhappy With Pace of Acquisition Reform.

• Author: Book, Elizabeth G.
• Position: Brief Article

Senior military leaders expressed concern about the way the Pentagon manages acquisition programs and sets policy. During a recent conference on defense reform in Washington, D.C., general officers from the Marine Corps, the Army and the Air Force agreed that the current procurement process is not helping advance their modernization plans.

Acquisition policy makers at the Pentagon should work more closely with the service chiefs, said Gen. James Jones, commandant of the Marine Corps. "It's my sense that our acquisition rules are written on the presumption of wrongdoing, and we are essentially outsiders looking in at the service chief level. Once you get into the acquisition process, the message is 'stay out of this.' I think that has to be changed.

"I'm a big believer in the concept that we [the service chiefs] need to do more in terms of internal reform. A lot of the problems are self-inflicted, because we have adopted a system of deferred payment. We rob Peter to pay Paul. We then light fuses to sticks of dynamite, which will explode on our successors' desks," Jones said.

The acquisition process is inefficient, Jones stated, in addition to being very costly to the taxpayers. "We have the architecture to succeed and do things better, but we need to focus on modern business practices."

"The singleness of purpose of the acquisition stove pipes keeps people like the service chiefs from getting too deeply into it, and asking questions like: Where are the milestones? How is the program going? It's a separate community, and I think we focus too much on writing the rules and regulations," Jones said.

Business Practices

Maj. Gen. Robert Armbruster, the Army's deputy for systems management and horizontal technology integration, agreed that modern business practices should be applied to the acquisition process. He said the armed forces must work together with industry throughout the acquisition process to get better results. "In view of the soldier, the expectation is baseline to requirement. We need to start working in a more synergistic manner with industry, to match industry's capability to produce. We need to get concepts from industry early in the cycle and get technology assessments," Armbruster explained.

"We have some innovations in the Army, to try to get prototypes into the hands of our soldiers quicker so that they can use them and provide feedback, so we can get a better product," he said. However, Armbruster noted, budget stability is...