acquisition reform | The Contracting Education Academy

November 27, 2013 By AMK

The man behind the MRAP moves on

Amid the awards and decorations on display in the Pentagon office of Ashton B. Carter, the departing deputy secretary of defense, is a metal bearing, larger than a golf ball, which wears the scars of battle.

If the signature weapon of tenacious insurgents over the past decade-plus of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was the improvised roadway explosive, then the signature weapon of the American response was the Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicle, or MRAP.

The ball bearing so prized by Mr. Carter came from one of the vehicles, easily recognizable by their angular shape, to deflect blast, and outsize outside armor.

First as the Pentagon’s under secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, and then as the department’s deputy, Mr. Carter played a central role in the initiative to rush MRAPs to Afghanistan for the troop surge, circumventing the calcified procurement system that traditionally takes years to move a weapon from idea to the front lines.

Keep reading this article at: http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/26/the-man-behind-the-mrap-moves-on

November 25, 2013 By AMK

House panel targets DoD acquisition reform, but will that be enough?

The House Armed Services Committee is taking another crack at defense acquisition reform.

Committee chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) recently tasked Vice Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) to head up a new panel looking at ways to reform the defense acquisition process.

“While this Committee has led successful efforts to improve the way the Department acquires items and services, there are still significant challenges facing the defense acquisition system,” McKeon said in a release. “We cannot afford a costly and ineffective acquisition system, particularly when faced with devastating impacts of repeated budget cuts and sequestration.”

The announcement came as experts on defense acquisition gave the committee some guidance on how to proceed. One of the witnesses was Dov Zakheim, former undersecretary of Defense (comptroller) and now a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He says a new approach to defense acquisition reform has the potential for new results and the old approach won’t work this time around either.

“The way that we’ve been trying to do it, which is essentially focusing on specific issues with legislation, addressing them or process improvements is just not the way to go,” Zakheim told In Depth with Francis Rose. “It clearly hasn’t worked.”

Keep reading this article at: http://www.federalnewsradio.com/473/3499160/House-panel-targets-DoD-acquisition-reform-but-will-that-be-enough

November 19, 2013 By AMK

Reforming a Defense acquisition system that costs money, lives

(Editor’s note: The following is an Op Ed written by Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-TX, vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and chairman of the HASC Subcommittee on Intelligence, Emerging Threats and Capabilities.)

A scan of any week’s headlines makes clear that the world is not getting any safer, nor are our security challenges getting any simpler. We face a complex array of threats, known and unknown.

Yet, we will have to meet those threats with tight defense budgets for the foreseeable future. Even if Congress and the President can agree to find other savings to replace further defense cuts under sequestration — which we should — the United States will still have to meet essentially unlimited threats with quite limited resources. That means it is more important than ever to get the most value possible out of each dollar spent on our national security.

Too much of the money spent now is not used as efficiently or as effectively as it should be. Upward of 10 percent of the entire federal discretionary budget goes to buying things for our troops, ranging from tanks to toilet paper. Reform of defense acquisition – the goods as well as the services we buy – must be a top priority.

There are a lot of good people in and out of government who work hard to see that our military is provided with the best. But they operate in a system that too often works against them. Heavy federal regulations drive up the cost of military hardware. There are nearly 2000 pages of acquisition regulations on the books, many of which have not been reviewed in years. Too often, Congress and the Pentagon respond to cost overruns by adding another law or an additional oversight office.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2013/10/29/reforming_a_defense_acquisition_system_that_costs_money_lives_106939.html

November 11, 2013 By AMK

All acquisition laws to be scrubbed, says Petagon official

Acquisition reform. It almost makes you feel good to hear those words. They connote improvement, reason and good government. But the more acquisition reform America gets from Congress and the Pentagon, it seems, the less return we get on each dollar we spend.

Estimates of the cost of government oversight of Pentagon acquisition range from $6 billion up. The amount of time and money it takes to deliver most major weapons has increased ever since the famous Packard Commission.

Combined that with sequestration and the coming drawdown of US forces around the world, and there seems to be a growing consensus that the laws governing how the Defense Department buys its weapons need a complete makeover.

Today, the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer, Frank Kendall, told an audience of acquisition experts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies that his office is “looking at the body of law on acquisition management” with an eye to fixing it all. He plans to work very closely with Congress on this — as he must. Between the complexity of the laws themselves, their number and the keen congressional interest this is “not going to be a quick and easy job,” Kendall noted dryly.

Meanwhile, one of the most powerful defense lawmakers has taken it upon himself to pursue broad improvements to the acquisition process. House Armed Services Committee co-chairman Rep. Mac Thornberry, one of the most intelligent legislators dealing with defense issues, held the first of a series of hearings on acquisition last week.

Keep reading this article at: http://breakingdefense.com/2013/11/pressure-snowballs-to-fix-pentagon-buys-kendall-outlines-scrub-of-all-acquistion-laws

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