The Department of Defense’s (DoD) legacy acquisition systems are too slow to be competitive and are only incrementally innovative, witnesses said at a Senate hearing last week.
During a March 20 Senate Armed Services Readiness and Management Support Subcommittee hearing, academic experts explained to lawmakers that DoD needs to reform its acquisition systems and offered insights into what the agency needs to change to ensure the best technology is available at scale and speed.
Dr. William C Greenwalt, non-resident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, explained that the defense acquisition system “works as well as can be expected given the many, and oftentimes conflicting, mandates it must meet in law, executive orders, regulation, and policy.” But he said because of this DoD has “fallen behind the commercial sector and is in danger of falling behind adversaries” in technological innovation.
The most recent rounds of reform to DoD’s acquisition systems occurred in 2015, which included organizational changes and efforts to promote innovation, speed, and risk-taking by creating or expanding flexible acquisition tools – such as Other Transaction Authority, Middle-Tier Acquisition, the software acquisition pathway, and outreach to the venture capital community.
“Despite these reforms designed to elevate speed and the importance of time in acquisition by creating alternative acquisition pathways around the Pentagon’s peacetime acquisition system, progress so far has been marginal at best,” Greenwalt said.
He said DoD needed several reforms to its acquisition system — including flexible authorities in the Adaptive Acquisition Framework, enhancing the acquisition workforce, utilizing data analytics to improve acquisition, and improving acquisition related to Foreign Military Sales.
Moshe Schwartz, senior fellow at the National Defense Industrial Association, echoed Greenwalt’s testimony, adding that the “defense acquisition system takes too long to deliver capability, costs more than it should” and often fails to adopt the most innovative capabilities industry has to offer.
“Our defense industrial base is shrinking,” he said, adding that development is in part related to DoD’s small business strategy.
Schwartz highlighted that the “Federal government’s small business strategy dates back to 1953,” and told lawmakers that DoD and Congress must take different approaches to expand small business participation.
“For example, small businesses generally do not have the resources to build or maintain [Secure Compartment Information Facilities (SCIFs)], which creates a barrier to entry,” Schwartz said. “Allowing businesses to access underutilized SCIF space could help small and other businesses, increase competition, and provide new capabilities to the Department.”
However, Peter Levine, senior fellow at the Institute for Defense Analysis, said he believes that while reforms could help the department’s acquisition system, much of the current disappointment is due to unrealistic expectations.
“I hear all the time that the department’s continued lack of agility and high barriers to entry have led to chronic underinvestment in critical new technologies, lack of follow-through on innovative commercial solutions to defense problems, and failure to field innovative new systems,” Levine told lawmakers.
But, while he agreed that there was some truth to that sentiment, “much of the disappointment is based on unrealistic expectations … we need to avoid magical thinking about what acquisition reform can accomplish,” he said.
Yet he told lawmakers that a new round of reforms – if effectively implemented – could “help the department access new sources of technology and innovation.”
In his written testimony, Levine made the following suggestions for reforms to DoD’s acquisition system:
- Extend the definition of commercial items to products that are developed exclusively at private expense;
- Reinforce existing authority to waive statutory requirements in the acquisition of commercial and commercial off the-shelf items;
- Strengthen the software acquisition pathway;
- Require an independent study of the impact of the most recent round of acquisition reforms; and
- Establish a robustly funded new Civilian Workforce Recruitment and Development Fund.
