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Army says it’s moving out on acquisition reform

By Philip Ewing Monday, September 12th, 2011 8:51 am
Posted in Land

Big Army may have worried this summer that it wasn’t selling its message about acquisition reform as well as it could, so just as Congress gets ready for another week of defense-related hearings, the Army is back with a reminder of its commitment to discipline. Lt. Gen. Bill Phillips, top deputy to the assistant secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology, told a land warfare conference last week that the acquisitions world is moving out to correct the problems identified by this year’s Army Acquisitions Report, which was released to a handful of confused reporters back in July.

According to an official Army story’s account of Phillips’ remarks, there’s no confusion now: The Army has launched an armored spearhead against inefficiency and waste, using the battle plan drawn up by its former acquisition chief, Gilbert Decker, and the former head of Army Material Command, retired Gen. Lou Wagner, who authored the AAR.

Per the Army’s story:

In particular, Phillips said the Army is implementing as many as 63 of the 76 proposed recommendations emerging from a recently-completed Army Acquisition Review, a holistic study commissioned by the secretary of the Army designed to look at improving the acquisition process.
“Through the Office of the Secretary of the Army we are executing the results of that study. The study did a great job in providing us a blueprint for how to improve our operations,” said Phillips.
In fact, Phillips said the Army has already implemented a series of the recommendations proposed by the study such as working more closely with industry, standing up a deputy assistant secretary of the Army for services and spearheading efforts to reform the Nunn-McCurdy notification process. Acquiring more technical data packages, conducting testing earlier in the acquisition process and increasing cost-saving multi-year contracts are also among the many recommendations in the Army Acquisition Review currently being implemented by the Army.

Well, it is what it is. As we’ve heard, “this is a marathon, not a sprint,” so it may be awhile before it’s possible to tell which things are succeeding, and by how much. But the Army apparently isn’t just rearranging deck chairs and forcing everyone to chant “Competition” and “Communication” — Phillips made it sound as though there could be actual changes in store for the acquisitions world:

In addition, Phillips explained that in some instances requirements established for acquisition programs could be “traded-off” in order to lower costs in today’s more fiscally constrained environment. “We want PMs and PEOs to come forward and let us know what requirements are difficult to produce from a technical perspective. Are we reaching too far or is a certain requirement something that does not make sense?” Phillips said.

The Army invites realism in requirements management! In theory, program managers and program executive officers always should have been able to walk in, pound their fist on the desk and say, “Damn it, general, your flying half-track idea is going to bankrupt this Army! Let’s just buy a normal helicopter.” But sometimes in the Building there are things everyone knows but no one can say, until they’ve been given permission to say them — as Phillips has here. Will this new candor authorization help smooth things along? You can kind of imagine a big sigh of relief as people now feel they have cover under which to come forward and try to save their projects before they get to the congressional hearing-death spiral phase.

What do you think — will the Army step up its game?

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	BOOMER September 12th, 2011 at 9:12 am First off I dont know if its just me but asking the former heads of a failed agency to find a way to fix it now just doesnt sound effective. If they knew what needed to be done then why didnt they fix it when they were in charge??????? I dont forsee anything good coming out of this period.
	major.rod September 12th, 2011 at 11:21 am IF it works I wonder if the Marines will adopt Army approaches? “Then again, there may not be enough budget cuts in Christendom to get the Marines to willingly emulate the Army.”
	Thinking_ExUSAF September 12th, 2011 at 12:42 pm Hopefully, all of the services will adopt whatever is found to “work”! :-) I dont think that anyone exactly has a corner on the market for good ideas, its just that some may have a willingness to at least try to implement. Perhaps a “back to the future” moment will take hold with someone and we can revert to the specifications of an earlier age.… http://wardepartmentpapers.org/docimage.php?id=24… Rumor has it that the gunsmiths were routinely asked to double charge the powder, load two balls and fire the weapon from their own shoulder! LOL!
	David September 12th, 2011 at 12:49 pm Color me pessimistic. The most important of the Decker-Wagner report recommendations was that the Army manage the riskiness of its acquisition portfolio, with 4 out of 5 acquisitions making do with existing products and technology (with perhaps minor enhancements), and only 1 in 5 attempting a leap ahead to capabilities that don’t yet exist. The Army blew that one off in their official response to the study, and even had the audacity to assert that it isn’t _possible_ to assess the riskiness of an acquisition program in advance. So long as the Army continues to pretend that all alternatives in every AoA have equal acquisition risk, they will always choose the one that promises the most capability. And then they will (predictably) fail when it turns out to be either outright impossible, or merely unaffordable. Again.
	captain.hardcore September 12th, 2011 at 1:24 pm the 13 recommended but not implemented changes, are they the least or most important of them?
	Dfens September 12th, 2011 at 2:49 pm Acquisition reform, isn’t that what took us from a system that worked to the system we have now where it takes decades instead of years to develop any large weapons system? Well, bend over because the Army is fixing things again!
	Bronco46 September 12th, 2011 at 3:55 pm Waste, and just plain incompetent use of funds needs to dealt with. But, since our total defense expenditures are only 4% of the GDP; the so-called “entitlements” that do nothing to actually protect this country; need to be scrutinized with at as much zeal as the Democrats (progressives, socialists, what ever they want to call themselves) are putting into doing actual damage to our military and intelligence organizations.
	ClovisMan September 12th, 2011 at 6:46 pm I am skeptical. We have been hearing about acquisition reform for over two years since signing into law. Testing in a realistic environment prior to fielding is good but also building systems for the next upgrade by requiring open systems architecture to be imposed as part of the design. There are many more initiatives beyond having a great budget and believable developmental schedule. But that is all the old Systems Engineering paradigm. I am not holding my breath, after waiting so long to again work as a system engineer in the Army.
	chockblock September 13th, 2011 at 3:57 am We have too many generals chasing too few commands. Too many want to lay hands on programs see “The Pentagon Wars”. Scope creep comes in when Big Army’s powerpoint eyes get bigger than the budget stomach. Will they fix that bug or do too many in the puzzle place consider it a feature?
	Tanker September 13th, 2011 at 5:12 am Weren’t Wagner and Decker the sponsors of the “one page spec” theory of Army Acquisition? We all know how well that worked.
	Thinking_ExUSAF September 13th, 2011 at 8:21 am “Risk Management” is a very interesting topic you know. Some in program management see it as nothing more than trying to run a program to ensure that the next promotion comes on schedule. Some see it as making a list of possible bad events so that they can say that they have assessed the risks. Only a few see it as balancing the cost/schedule of a program against the opportunity of the program. If you just re-role existing equipment and technology, you have much lower development risk (at least in theory) when compared to “bravely going where no man has gone before!” On the other hand, if you stick to tried and true technologies and never run the risk of a black mark on that otherwise shiny OER or SF-50, you end up spending a lot of time and money for a repainted stone axe. But every time we pillory the poor PM who takes an honest. carefully considered risk to advance capabilities but still does not roll a seven, we encourage (and end up promoting!) those stone axe mentalities. Oh well.… .… .
	Thinking_ExUSAF September 13th, 2011 at 8:26 am I think that there is a “lessons learned” assumption in there somewhere. Remember when you were a little kid and your mom told you not to touch the heating element on the range? A lot of kids seem to accept the challenge, reach out and touch that red hot heating coil. BUT… amazingly, once you. personally, have touched it, you probably decided not to make that same mistake again! Hopefully, those who ran the train into the wall have decided that its not a good thing to do again.
	Sheepdog September 13th, 2011 at 9:16 am thank you for bringing up the subject of Risk Management. I recommend Hubbard’s “Failure of Risk Management” which exposes flawed methods and promotes good methods. The red/yellow/green BS is all that intellectually feeble managers may be able to handle, but in the end ordinal ratings are a shortcut to ruin. We need widespread deployment of Monte Carlo SImulation methods to properly assess uncertainty & risk. Most importantly, we need realistic concepts and competetitve prototyping/downselecting vs foolhardy journeys into the jungle of technology development (death marches). Leap ahead technology development needs to be divorced from Major Defense Acquisition Programs — where quality life cycle system integration, KISS, and kaizen (continual improvement) need to become the driving concerns.
	Sheepdog September 13th, 2011 at 9:16 am We need Leader Reform, not Acquisition Reform.
	Thinking_ExUSAF September 13th, 2011 at 10:53 am There are a host of tools for doing “risk managment” but the most important is the simple committment to actually identify, assess, and mitigate the risks vs the benefits with logical trades. KISS is a very good answer for risk management, at least until folks learn to appreciate what risk management really is, the purpose for allowing risk, and the benefits of accepting KNOWN risks, but at least DO IT! Way too often I have seen risk management either touted and ignored; rather more honestly ignored from the get-go; or carried to the extreme where the project staff focused on “eliminating all risk”, at all costs (usually in terms of system performance!), for the sake of personal advancement. Myopically focusing on the more elaborate tools means little and often cost a lot; and after all, Michaelangelo had only the barest of tools to produce the Pieta! Sometimes we focus on tools to the point of ignoring the objective! :-)
	Sheepdog September 13th, 2011 at 11:35 am i agree with much of what you say. Getting people to do quality work is a good risk mitigating strategy, but first you have to have quality people & quality leaders. that’s why I believe so much in Boyd’s mantra of “People first, ideas second, hardware last”. The other point I’d like to make is that all the risk management and quality people & practice in the world does not work if you are on a “Death March” — caused by pursuing immature, exotic, unneccesarily complex, hopelessly constrained programs. Case in point they want “optional pilot” for long range strike and believe they can do this with “technologically mature” technologies. I beg to differ — they have not even begun to ascertain the complexity of this “requirement”. We need to have a technology demonstration of an unmanned bomber loitering & dropping 24 JDAMs on time sensitive targets (like our current manned bombers do). When the technology demonstrator fails, hopefully they will give up on this optional pilot nonsense. If such an ACTD works beautifully, I’ll be the first to buy the beer.
	Sheepdog September 13th, 2011 at 11:38 am i agree with much of what you say. Getting people to do quality work is a good risk mitigating strategy, but first you have to have quality people & quality leaders. that’s why I believe so much in Boyd’s mantra of “People first, ideas second, hardware last”. The other point I’d like to make is that all the risk management and quality people & practice in the world does not work if you are on a “Death March” — caused by pursuing immature, exotic, unneccesarily complex, hopelessly constrained programs.
	Sheepdog September 13th, 2011 at 11:38 am Case in point they want “optional pilot” for long range strike and believe they can do this with “technologically mature” technologies. I beg to differ — they have not even begun to ascertain the complexity of this “requirement”. We need to have a technology demonstration of an unmanned bomber loitering & dropping 24 JDAMs on time sensitive targets (like our current manned bombers do). When the technology demonstrator fails, hopefully they will give up on this optional pilot nonsense. If such an ACTD works beautifully, I’ll be the first to buy the beer. Monte Carlo method is neither myopic nor elaborate. It’s a solution we’ve had since WW2 — the tragedy is we have neglected the method and trusted in red/yellow/green nonsense.
	Thinking_ExUSAF September 13th, 2011 at 12:11 pm ROTFLMAO! You, and the folks that came up with the term, “optionally piloted”, have missed the whole angle I fear. NOLO aircraft are always used as “targets” for live fire targets (for obvious reasons), even though the very same airframe almost always has the capability to plunk a warm fuzzy pilot in the front seat (which is always done for the “workups” since it is much cheaper and easier and less risky to fly the target aircraft manned!). That “bomber” shold probably be called “optionally unmanned”, and for the special missions where manning up presents an unacceptable risk, we just pay the price. From a program/technical standpoint, the “risky” part is the unmanned attack option not the well-proven, well matured, piloted equivalent! Did you perhaps forget to think that proposition through from “both ends of the spectrum”? But then Im not selling UAVs! :-)
	Vitesse et Puissance September 13th, 2011 at 1:20 pm Not sure about that, but limiting the needs statement to a single page — concentrates the mind. The “kitchen sink” model of requirements development is the road to ruin. And in general, the leaner the requirements document, the more likely it is to be fulfilled. Got a problem with that ?
	Sheepdog September 13th, 2011 at 2:31 pm what is NOLO? A live fire drone aircraft is far different than a bomber carrying thousands of tons of a variety of weapons, which will have to be certified, verified, and validated in all kinds of operational situations. Add in stealth to further constrain the situation. You’ve basically got all the costs to support manned bomber capability and all the costs to support unmanned capability and everything intefering with itself. You’ve got unlimited requirements, complexity, and options all kinds of advocates want. Recipe for disaster.
	Thinking_ExUSAF September 13th, 2011 at 3:45 pm A “NOLO” usually refers to a “retired” aircraft that has been turned into a drone, ie a UAS! NOLO translates into “no live operator”. (Old dogs like I started with F-86 targets, moved up to F-4s and now they are chewing into the Block 20 F-16s for NOLO volunteers!) And you are right about the complexity and maturity of the concepts… sorta. Its MUCH more complex to remotely operate a tactical aircraft from 10000 miles away than it is to drive an airplane from a stick and throttle attached to the front end of said air vehicle! We have been doing the former (i.e. UAS) to some serious degree for a bit over 15 years (at least for recce UAVs), and the later (manned aircraft) for a bit over 100 so… lots of maturity differences in the technolgy. :-) Sorry, I dont sell UAVs either!
	wcost September 14th, 2011 at 8:13 pm Well I do declare that this is an unusually mature and informative string of comments. As an “old dog” I have learned a few things. The “optional pilot” idea sounds particularly dumb to me for new development. Now we have to be “man safe” and lose all the cost, weight, and payload savings of drones. But maybe the idea has merit for cheaply using mega-payload B-52’s converted to drones. Waste not want not, recycle!

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