TEAMING WITH INDUSTRY
Tina Hamilton, an explosives production worker in the Ammunition Operations Directorate at McAlester Army Ammunition Plant (MCAAP), OK, works on the BLU-108 “smart” submunition. Intended to defeat soft and heavy armored targets on land or at sea, the BLU-108 is assembled by MCAAP employees as part of a public-private partnership contract that the Army has with Textron Defense Systems. The more flexibility Congress allows in operations of the organic industrial base, including the involvement of and even competition with the private sector, the greater the potential for cost and performance efficiencies, Gansler said. (Photo by Kevin Jackson, U.S. Army Materiel Command)
Gansler: Exactly. We, right now, are fac- ing as much of an existential threat. You figure North Korea and Iran—that’s one set of potential existential threats, with their missiles and their nuclear weapons. And then the other end of the spec- trum is the terrorist threat and even the cybersecurity threat. We have to figure out ways to protect against each of those. Tere are a lot of things we could be doing better in that area, like the terrorism threat in the sense of better integration of the intelligence activity. Te president just announced we’re going to set up a new organization for cybersecurity, and that’s helpful because it’s clear that that’s one of the real current threats.
Army AL&T: Is there anything that you’d like to add?
Gansler: I think it’s very important that we learn how to streamline our regula- tions. It’s very important that we continue to focus on affordability. We have a his- tory of continuous cost growth of our weapon systems. Te largest program in history right now is the F-35, and that,
when it was started as a DARPA program, had a design cost of $35 million. Now its estimated cost is over $100 million, and so we keep not emphasizing cost as much. And the way that emphasis has been interpreted is: Let’s get cheap—and that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about “best value,” getting higher and higher performance, higher and higher reliability, and lower and lower cost.
One lesson learned that we should have followed is to look at the actual data on the so-called “great engine war” for the F-16 and -15. Tey had two engines com- peting continuously, GE and Pratt & Whitney, and both of them got higher and higher performance, higher and higher reliability, and lower and lower cost because of the continuous incentives for innovation. Now with the F-35, the decision was made not to dual-source the engines. How do you throw out all that historic data?
Same thing with the public-private com- petition that I mentioned earlier. When we’ve had thousands of examples with
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average cost savings of over 30 percent, it’s now against the law. I come up with a lot of cases where the facts should be used, and the same thing with flexibil- ity and management judgment—if you have senior, experienced people in the acquisition workforce, both the program managers and the contracting people, allow them some flexibility so they don’t always have to “follow the rules” if the rules aren’t the best answer.
We can make change, and that’s the lead- ership challenge. And I think we need to stress that. I talked to [Rep.] Mac Torn- berry [R-TX, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee] yesterday and offered to help in any way we can. I think that there’s still lots of opportunity, and there’s lots of need for the future. If we’re going to maintain our strategy of technological superiority with fewer dol- lars, we have to take some actions. And one obvious
step is making sure we’re adequately funding research.
CRITICAL THINKING
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