THE NEW ‘GANSLER REPORT’


FIGURE 1


to buy commercial, the ability to have civil-military-industrial integration and the ability to take advantage of [an] international, global [marketplace].


Tere are a significant number of areas where the Department of Defense is no longer technologically ahead. Te most obvious fix for this is not necessarily changing the rules, but looking at where the budget’s going. We’re buying ships, planes and tanks from the 20th century instead of doing research for the 21st cen- tury, and we’re not even shifting the types of things that we’re going to see in the 21st century. Cybersecurity, for exam- ple, is a major issue for the 21st century. [GEN Sir] Rupert Smith wrote a book [“Te Utility of Force: Te Art of War in the Modern World,” 2005], saying that what we should think about is that we’re shifting from tank-on-tank [warfare] to war among the people. Tat’s another area. [See Figure 2.]


LOSING OUR EDGE Gansler is just one of many experts decrying the shortage of R&D funding and uses these charts in his presentations to drive the point home. The top chart shows that U.S. government funding for R&D used to be twice that of industry; now it is half that. He uses the lower chart to show that U.S. research funding is far outpaced that of Organization for Economic Co-operation and Develop- ment (OECD) members, which include many European Union countries and other allies and partners of the United States. Less friendly nations outpace United States spending even further. (SOURCES: Top figure, David Mowery, “Military R&D and Innovation” (University of California Press, 2007); bottom figure: National Science Foundation, “Science and Engineering Indicators 2006,” and OECD, “Main Science and Technology Indicators” database, November 2004)


chaired and which produced the October 2007 report “Urgent Reform Required: Army Expeditionary Contracting.”


He talked with Army AL&T Feb. 13 about the commission’s work, what’s hap- pened since then and many other aspects of revamping acquisition.


Army AL&T: Do you think that the Defense Acquisition System is out of date? If so, is it possible to bring it up to date?


114 Army AL&T Magazine April–June 2015 Gansler: Yes. It can be significantly


improved, but it’s a challenge. [Niccolò di Bernardo dei] Machiavelli warned us that trying to make change in gov- ernment is hard. [Former] Defense Secretary [Chuck] Hagel made it very clear that we are, in many areas, los- ing our strategy, which is technological superiority. [See Figure 1.] He said it in terms of air, ground, sea and space. But the major areas that I think we need to address in terms of change are the ability


Another thing that’s happening in the world, and certainly in America in defense, is a shift from a focus on goods to a focus on services. I did a Defense Sci- ence Board study in 2011 or so, in which I looked at the total expenditures in the acquisition area for DOD, and found that 60 percent of the dollars are going to buying services. Yet all of our rules, our policies and our practices are based upon buying goods. Tere’s a big difference between buying an engineer and buying a tank: You don’t need to put the engineer through live-fire testing.


If we are focusing mostly on services, one of the examples is information technol- ogy. Te commercial world is way ahead of the Defense Department in buying IT. If we learned how to do civil-military- industrial integration, we could take full advantage of it.


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