Weapon development cost sharing must end.

• Author: Fenster, Herbert L.
• Position: Government Contracting Insights

Periodically over the last 55 years, the Defense Department has made repeated attempts to characterize and then re-characterize the acquisition and procurement of weapons systems.

The latest series of efforts have lived under the moniker of "Better Buying Power" and now are enjoying a further rebirth under the oft-used title of "acquisition reform."

The Pentagon has approximately 90 major weapons programs in development. A fair number of these programs owe their R&D origins to classified efforts of the early and mid-1980s and were focused on countering fifth- and sixth-generation offerings of the Soviet Union. It is a reasonable assumption--with only a few exceptions--that the objective of these programs is to complete research and development, testing, engineering, low-rate production and ultimately put the systems into inventory.

So what is wrong with the "system" for producing major weapons?

Increasingly, major weapons programs are failing. Failure is defined as never making it into inventory. The reasons include an unrecognized lack of need--defined as absence of a relevant threat--cost growth and changes in roles and missions. The changes in roles and missions today pit the absence of major theater conflict against the increasing presence of asymmetric warfare and the consuming need to conduct stability operations.

When the objective of a major weapons program was matching the progression of a Soviet monolith, there might have been some excuse for program starts that would never make it to inventory. However, continuing such a process today is questionable.

During the Cold War, defense acquisition management could regularly shift development risk to contractors because they had a reasonable expectation of return on their investments. They expected to earn production contracts. It was more the rule than the exception that the process from R&D into production was compressed. The defense establishment was readily able to move the color of money from research to procurement, and the failures of this process were notable but relatively rare.

Meanwhile, the blatant efforts to shift the risk from government to contractor by the threshold use of fixed-price RDT&E contracts were--each and every one of them--distinct failures. These included the C-5A, the F-14 and a series of shipbuilding programs that included the LHA amphibious assault ships, frigates and the DD-963 destroyer, with some SSN submarines thrown in for good measure. Some of these...