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AF Plans to Fix Acquisition

By Colin Clark Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 2:29 pm
Posted in Air, Policy

The drift of Air Force acquisition between Scylla and Charybdis (or, in less classical terms, a rock and a hard place) may be ending. The senior Air force leadership has drafted a plan that appears to have the right ingredients to stave off another tanker fiasco or a Darleen Druyun.

The plan, called A Roadmap to Recapture Acquisition Excellence, makes five basic points. In a clear sign this is not just another bit of acquisition mumbo-jumbo, the report is clearly written and signed by both Air Force Secretary Mike Donley and by Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz. The plan says the service must:

1: Revitalize the Air Force acquisition workforce

2: Improve requirements generation process

3: Instill budget and financial discipline

4: Improve Air Force major systems source selections

5: Establish clear lines of authority and accountability within acquisition organizations

But the most intriguing part of the effort is something that isn’t really mentioned in the document. A host of action plans to address each issue is being drawn up by the acting acquisition Service Acquisition Executive, Dave Van Buren, and his military deputy, Lt. Gen. Mark Shackelford.

Over the next few months they plan to institutionalize the process, meeting once a month with Air Force Secretary Mike Donley to lay out milestones and report on the service’s progress in meeting them. That will ease off to once a quarter once things get established, according to an Air Force official familiar with the issue.

A congressional aide who read the initial plan offered cautious praise. “It seems like they are proposing the right things in the right areas. They need good people and good processes,” this aide said.

Those are exactly what the Air Force official said they had aimed at: good people and good processes. The most important, in the eyes of the senior Air Force leadership, is good people who are well trained and experienced.

This is not, our Air force source stressed, acquisition reform. They are effectively rebuilding the acquisition system and it will not happen quickly. Expect the results of this effort to start becoming clear after three to five years, the Air Force said.

Ironically, the big failures of the last several years – CSAR-X and KC-X – mean the service has a fairly clean slate to start with.

“We are kind of lucky that in some of our big programs are starting over, so we should be able to avoid some of the problems we might have run into,” the service official said.

Skeptics who might dismiss the Air Force document out of hand should note the document’s opening paragraph. They know they’ve done wrong: “In 2008, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) upheld protests and overturned United States Air Force contract award decisions related to the CSAR-X helicopter and KC-X tanker programs. In addition, the GAO concluded that the DoD acquisition process does not deliver the promised capabilities to the nation’s warfighters in a timely and efficient manner. Budgets are overrun routinely and requirements continue to creep well beyond their initial scope. We find that the Air Force acquisition process reflects many of the same problems reported by GAO.”

They outline the causes of these failures:

1. Degraded training, experience and quantity of the acquisition workforce;

2. Overstated and unstable requirements that are difficult to evaluate during source
selection;

3. Under-budgeted programs, changing of budgets without acknowledging impacts on program execution, and inadequate contractor cost discipline;

4. Incomplete source selection training that has lacked “lessons learned” from the current acquisition environment, and delegation of decisions on leadership and team assignments for MDAP source selections too low; and

5. Unclear and cumbersome internal Air Force organization for acquisition and Program Executive Officer (PEO) oversight.

Now we get to see if they get it right.

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	Hmmmm May 26th, 2009 at 3:49 pm What the Air Force is promoting is not new. Aqusition Reform (even if you don’t use the word reform) is needed throughout OSD and probably can’t be tackled at the Service level. I disagree the the USAF has “a fairly clean slate”. Aren’t they the Executive Agent for the F-35? Talk about “overstated and unstable requirements that are difficult to evaluate during source selection” and “unclear and cumbersome internal Air Force organization for acquisition and Program Executive Officer (PEO)oversight.” Let’s face it, once the (same) big money — big politics players co-opt the process, PowerPoint briefs of DAU’s Acquistion 101 course will be forgotten. Only when acquisition law is rewritten to include the de-incentivizing of co-opting behavior by punishment of wrong-doers after they have left the aquisition world will real reform begin.
	brandon May 26th, 2009 at 4:40 pm They should quit wasting money on all the silly things they do already. They have a uniform for everything now. The Air Force as whole should be consolidated back into the Army and be the Army Air Corps like it used to be. They can lose about 100 commands and combine all their resources and bases.
	e May 26th, 2009 at 5:07 pm Not new; once again, DOD Buzz is way behind the curve. This news, and the report, broke weeks ago.
	Aduus May 27th, 2009 at 7:22 am I’m not sure how any “roadmap” can stave off another Darlene Druyan. Two better remedies would be: 1) Appointing civilian leaders who can provide effective direction to and oversight of their senior generals and SESs (rather than spending their time attending parades). 2) Enforcing a requirement that program managers must stay with thier program for three years after a contract award (rather than sticking some Col Schmazel to deal with an unexecutable program while her or his predecessor who “bought the lie” is off at General Officer Charm School).
	Aduus May 27th, 2009 at 7:34 am Almost forgot perhaps the best remedy: 3) A girl from Kansas named Dorothy with a little dog and a big pail of water.
	AirBase May 27th, 2009 at 8:03 am Hmmmmm, You are an IDIOT. Air Force needs to be in charge of ALL aircraft. Marines and Army crash too many aircraft. Espically Helicoptors!
	Tony Conner May 27th, 2009 at 8:39 am They will build a top notch GOLF COURSE, spared no expense. Then they will worry about the little things, like tankers and fighter aircraft. GO AIR FORCE!!
	jimbo May 27th, 2009 at 10:59 am hey Air Force golf courses are pretty kick arse… haha have even saved lives!… heard to story of “Bat 21″ ? haha
	zenzky May 27th, 2009 at 1:04 pm It is good to invest on the upgrading of the gadgets of the force for the protection of the people.
	Mack McKinney May 27th, 2009 at 1:39 pm I covered this on my website (www.SolidThinking.org) but the USAF is in a very tight spot: if they spend too much on conventional weapons (advanced bombers and fighters like the F-22 and F-35) they are accused of not supporting the ISR-strapped wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But if they shift major funds from fighters and bombers to Predators and Reapers, the USAF fears it will not be able to defeat a peer competitor like China or Iran with their S-400 SAMs and Su-27s. And there isn’t enough money to fully fund everything. If the USAF guesses wrong, there could be horrendous ramifications in future conflicts.
	tedioustim May 27th, 2009 at 3:44 pm Maybe it is time for the Air Force to show they can win a conventional war on their own. Taking out North Korea now that the Armistice is off. Remind everyone the value of B-52’s with Tankers, wild weasels and fighter support. It would be an example of Async Warfare, being won by Unlimited Async power applied to the 3 municipal areas, the bridges and defense sites of NK. The rebuilding of after the quick decisive air war of a new bomber, new tankers and the already available F-22 would be an easy sell and might even get Japanese support. Fortunately there is so little to rebuild in North Korea from before the bombing agricultural technology will be the main import to avoid starvation in the population. The lesson would be clear to all who think they can pop off a nuke without consequences.
	Hitch Hiker May 27th, 2009 at 4:26 pm Yawn! All these initiatives have been proposed before. The causes as outlined above are more on track but like the former, it’s how you do them that matters. I’d love to see the “how” proposals. I sure wish someone in DoD would pick up and read Hitch and McKean’s bible written in 1960 and follow it beyond implementing PPBE half-heartedly at that.
	Mark May 27th, 2009 at 4:43 pm Yeah Brandon, great idea..let’s give the US Army, an organization that took 8 years to procure a new bayonet, the job of running a high tech air force. Mack McKinney — SHACK
	AirForceDoug May 28th, 2009 at 9:09 am I agree with AirBase. The Air Force should be in charge of all aircraft. Just have a detachment that supports the other armed forces. I don’t know how many times people of the other country I was in showed respect for the Air Force but wouldn’t give the time of day to any other of the armed forces.
	Irishman May 28th, 2009 at 9:25 am Has the Air Force Secretary appointed a new leader for Acquisition yet? Wasn’t the Great Satan Druyun’s downfall that she worked without adult supervision for too long? Are we headed down the same road here?
	Fred Pierce (former F/A-18D pilot) May 28th, 2009 at 10:03 am They did this before. It was called DoDAF. Unfortunately, very few people outside the Joint Chiefs understood it. Airbase, the Air Force can have all the aircraft when they learn to do Close Air Support like the Marines and Navy. Oh, by the way, when the Air Force starts seabasing from an aircraft carrier, LHD/A, and LPH then we will see what happens to their accident rate.
	CWO5 James L. Patterson USMC May 28th, 2009 at 4:36 pm Conspicuous by its absence in the recently signed “Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act of 2009″ is a MANDATED REQUIREMENT for independent and objective assessment of technological maturity and risk for all service programs, including current programs of record. Historically the issue facing DOD has not been the lack of funds or requirements, but more often the limits of current technology. A binding requirement within the DoD applicable to ALL programs would serve to save the taxpayer on the order of billions of dollars. For years now, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has reported that successful commercial firms use a “knowledge-based” product development process to introduce new products. Although DOD acquisition policy embraces this concept, requiring that technologies be demonstrated in a relevant environment prior to program initiation, the Department continues to fall short of this goal. Last Spring, the GAO reviewed 72 of DOD’s 95 major defense acquisition programs (MDAPs) and reported that 64 of the 72 fell short of the required level of product knowledge. According to the GAO, 164 of the 356 critical technologies on these programs failed to meet even the minimum requirements for technological maturity. Section 103 of the recently signed Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act address the problem for MDAPs by making it the responsibility of the Director of Defense Research and Engineering (DDR&E) to periodically review and assess the maturity of critical technologies used within [new] MDAPs. The DDR&E’s assessment would serve as a basis for determining whether a program is ready to enter the acquisition process or not. The Act is ambiguous, however, as to how it will be applied to current programs, and does nothing to address the issue with programs other than those classified as an MDAP. Recently, an update to the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS) process has been published (CJCSI 3170.01G) that better scopes and streamlines the process for capabilities and requirements development for the services, but a critical gap remains within the process with regard to the information provided to political and military leadership necessary to make informed decisions that are based on realistic recommendations. At a time when we are all striving to be good stewards of the limited money provided by Congress, major weapon programs continue to cost more, take longer to complete and deliver fewer quantities and less capability than originally planned. The need for a REQUIRED independent objective assessment of technological maturity and risk provided to political and military leadership would be a major step forward in the Defense Acquisition Process.
	Mike Retired AF May 28th, 2009 at 6:32 pm To the uneducated one that wrote “You are an IDIOT. Air Force needs to be in charge of ALL aircraft. Marines and Army crash too many aircraft. Espically Helicoptors!“ Want to know why they (The Army) crash more Helo’s than the Air Force? Because the Army has more Helo’s than the Air Force! Not to mention that Army guys are allowed to fly NOE (Nap of the Earth) or down as low as they want, while the Air Force limits Helos (Yes, even in war time) to 50′. I have been at 50′ in an Air Force Helo, and that is low enough to kill you when the earth suddenly comes up and smites you.
	mike ohara May 28th, 2009 at 8:54 pm I hate to be critical of what used to be a great institution with superb leadership. However, it is indeed a failure of leadership which has undermimined the Air Force Acquisition System. I was acquainted with Darlene Druyan. Her rise was allowed by both the civilian and military leadership within the Air Force. Even those who had risen to the rank of four star general quaked in her presence. In my nearly forty year experience serving in the Air Force that would not have occurred prior to the year 1991. It was about that point in time that many officers and civilians with courage and leadership abilities bailed out–discouraged and disappointed in the wake of the ‘right sizing’ of the Force subsequent to the first Gulf War. At the same time, the road to a general officers rank became a ‘check list’ of staff assignments, making no decisions of import, and having the right political connections. Most often, those with courage and an independent thought process were labeled trouble makers and shunned. Hence, an era of mediocrity was launched. The legacy is not a pretty one; Darlene Druyan running roughshod over the Air Force acquisition programs, the senior most military attorney in the Air Force being found guilty of sexual harassment, a brigadier general select in the JAG corps being curiously found to lack a critical credential–a license to practice law, another brigadier general within the USAF Personnel Directorate being found guilty of sexual harassment, former devotees of Darlene Druyan being promoted to key positions at the Air Staff and Wright Patterson AFB. Unfortunately, this once proud service cannot hope that any reforms proposed will succeed without a purge of those who genuflected at the altar of greed and personal aggrandizement constructed by Ms Druyan. Unfortunately, many of those same people, both senior military officers and civilians remain behind ensconced in positions of authority. In this case, the adage that you cannot teach an old dog new tricks is altogether true. Until those who swore allegiance to her and her ways are gone, many of the wrong people will be promoted and much of the culture she created will grow.
	Hitch Hiker May 29th, 2009 at 11:57 am mike ohara certain has part of it correct — the failure of leadership that wasn’t as pronounced prior to 1991 and the advent of the McPeak dynasty along with Darlene D but come on. Did her head spin in circles while vomiting decisions making competent acquisition impossible? Did she so pollute the system that unless it’s purged of all who ever knew her it can only continue to fail? Was she really evil incarnate? Well maybe you think so but I saw her as just another product of the system, which was and is broken, and won’t be fixed by platitudes or good intentions or the SecAF looking in on it regularly or talking to senior commanders about how it’s going. Who’s going to say, “not very well Sir and here’s why?” There are “how tos” for each of the goals or to remedy the identified causes of failures and readers here mention good ones from time to time. In fact over time they’ve all been covered by my reading. People have written good books on the subject. Don’t lean heavily on acquisition reform studies written in the past as consider how little impact they’ve had. Bring in a truly independent think tank or group and let them research and assemble the most repeated ideas from all sources on how to fix the system at every level and throw out crap like “hold the contractor’s feet to the fire.” Yes, we know, but how? Then match each goal with the leading causes and identify the actions that are most likely to eliminate the causes. Put these into effect and advertise them widely. Develop metrics for each that will be used to rate the progress or the effectiveness of the action. If the metrics aren’t met, discontinue the action. One role for leadership will be to ensure the best and most often suggested actions will be attempted. If it involves shifting organizational responsibilities or acquisition roles, relocating people or using non-traditional sources for tasks (technical assessments), provided it’s not cost prohibitive, then it must be done. Where leadership can play a bigger hand will be to keep personal opinions of established acquisition managers out of the selection of action fray. Overcome opposition with the Dr. Phil approach and ask them, “how’s that been working for you?” There are greater hurdles of course but this would be a start. The current start simply wont work without these basic ingredients being clearly established. Then, once again, pick up the Hitch and McKean book and read it. No, I’m not either of these distinguished gentlemen
	Musket 104 June 4th, 2009 at 1:55 pm As one who has been involved witheh AF Acquisition process for 25+ years, it is a mess. The news-grabber foul-ups (the Tanker, Thundervision scandal, Druyun’s greed and corruption, the President’s helo) are the tip of the iceberg. The entire structure is too cumbersome and a true muddle. That is why as many efforts as possible are stuffed into the Big Safari program — it’s simple and it works! Everytime there is a major mess-up we get another plan to write and have approved, another report to put together and have reviewed. We have to hire highly paid MITRE people to figure out how to thread our way through the new acquisition maze. A pet rock of mine: the System Engineering Plan and it’s review / approval process (up through the Air Staff) has resulted in the entire program beng concluded and the system fielded BEFORE the plan get approvel (if ever). It is a sad joke, but where I work, there are 4 layers of Chief Engineers (Squadron, Group, Wing, and Product Center) all reviewing plans — but my program doesn’t havv a qualified engineer to writi it in the first place!! Real change is needed — NOT another layer of “acquisition excellence”!