Pentagon procurement: the madness must stop.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra
• Position: Defense Insider

A combination of an entrenched culture, management incompetence and bad contractor performance has snowballed over the past decades into an avalanche of embarrassing military procurement failures.

There have been many attempts at acquisition reforms under various guises, but the problems that existed in the 1980s and 1990s continue to this day, said Acting Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Frank. Kendall.

What happens is that too many programs get started and "we find out later on that they were unaffordable," said Kendall. "We have got to stop that."

"There's an awful lot of 'conventional wisdom' in our business on what works and what doesn't," said Kendall. Contracting trends such as "concurrency"--the overlaping of development, testing and production--and fixed-priced buying are embraced and rejected in cycles, he said. In the past two decades, "We...