Defense university revamps acquisition training program.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.

The Defense Department's corporate university for acquisition professionals plans to revamp its training programs to make them more relevant to Pentagon priorities. Driving these changes is a desire to reshape the weapon-procurement process, so it can be more responsive to military needs and more attuned to modern business practices.

Frank J. Anderson Jr., president of the Defense Acquisition University, said he wants to bring "speed and agility" into acquisition training programs. DAU, with headquarters in Fort Belvoir, Va., trains about 135,000 acquisition professionals. Approximately 85 percent of the students are civilians. The university has a budget of about $100 million.

Anderson came to DAU last October, after a 34-year career in the U.S. Air Force. During his first few weeks on the job, he realized that DAU would need to adapt to the evolving needs of a Defense Department that was gearing up to fight an extended war and take on new missions in homeland security.

"The Defense Department leadership and the services decided that we really need to make some substantive changes in the way we train our people," Anderson said in a recent interview. So far, he said, "the biggest thing we've done is change the philosophy of how we will train our acquisition workforce." The new philosophy is based on "speed and agility in training," he explained.

Undersecretary of Defense Edward C. 'Pete' Aldridge has been outspoken about the need to make defense acquisition programs more efficient. His predecessors during the Clinton administration, Paul Kaminski and Jacques Gansler, implemented a host of regulatory changes and "acquisition streamlining" initiatives that simplified the process. But there are still complaints within the Defense Department and the services that program managers are not doing enough to expedite the fielding of new technologies and that acquisition officials often don't understand the needs of the war-fighting force.

Anderson is quick to point out that there are "great people in the acquisition business," but in many cases, "the challenge they have is the process." Under Aldridge, the Pentagon has placed more emphasis on "outcome and results" in acquisition programs. That means a program team is expected to make a commitment to meet cost, schedule and technology goals, said Anderson. "So when we budget for a program ... we meet those objectives."

The upshot for DAU, he added, is that "we must reengineer training so we provide...