To cut waste in defense, stop piling on reforms.

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

In the latest chapter of the Air Force's tanker-procurement saga, the officials in charge laid out an elaborate new plan last month to put the program back on track after a series of embarrassing setbacks. They gave assurances that this time around the acquisition reforms will really work.

You could not blame Joe Q. Public for being skeptical, though. "It's hard to tell the taxpayer for the 85th time that now we finally got the dots to connect in the right way," says the Air Force's former chief procurement executive Sue Payton.

Maybe the tanker program will one day become a poster child for how the Air Force turned things around. But if the Pentagon is serious about change, not just in the tanker effort but across all programs, it can't afford another "acquisition reform charade," and must address the root cause of current problems, Payton says in a speech to the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association in Landsdowne, Va.

"We must improve this incredibly inefficient acquisition system we have in the Defense Department," says Payton. Decades of attempts at reform have added complexity to the regulations and layers of oversight, she notes, but have not achieved cost savings or improvements in how the Pentagon delivers weapons and equipment to military forces.

A case in point is the Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act of 2009. The legislation was hailed as the answer to rampant cost overruns, waste and abuse in military programs. But it may unintentionally end up contributing to the inefficiency by adding more layers to an already dense bureaucracy, Payton says. "When you read the fine print [of the bill], you wonder, could you make this even more difficult?"

The last thing any Pentagon procurement program needs is more complexity, says Payton. The true agents of change must bring simplicity to the equation, she says. "We are so comfortable with the complex systems that have grown up over the decades. How do we make acquisition simpler?"

Payton says she once tried to calculate how many hours it took an unmanned aircraft program manager to schedule a meeting with the undersecretary of defense for acquisitions. Setting up a one-hour meeting took 17 hours. "So many people are involved in acquisition that it has become incredibly inefficient. That program manager had other things he needed to be doing."

The Pentagon also should do something about the large number of unaccountable administrators who review and slow the acquisition...