The same question keeps being asked at Pentagon meetings: Is there a better way to do weapon acquisitions?
There might be. But Pentagon officials do not believe that rewriting defense procurement rules from scratch will fix what ails the system.
It has become a parlor game at the Pentagon to contemplate the problems of weapon procurements and recommend solutions. “If we could only write the definitive book on how to do acquisition,” William LaPlante Jr., the Air Force’s principal deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, said wistfully.
“Coming into this job, I found it is fun to do that. The room takes over,” LaPlante recounted last week at the Air Armaments Symposium in Fort Walton Beach, near Eglin Air Force Base, Fla.
But trying to reinvent the acquisition wheel ultimately is a waste of time, he acknowledged. “We don’t need new ideas. We need the ideas that are good, and already are in the books, and implement them.”
The Government Accountability Office estimated that 39 percent of the Pentagon’s weapons programs in fiscal year 2012 were running 25 percent or more over budget.
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