POWER OF DETERMINATION


A Soldier assigned to the 498th Transportation Company guides a Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle through a motor pool at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan, Aug. 6, 2014, as part of participation in convoy escort team training. DOD’s rapid development and procurement of MRAPs, initiated in 2007 by then-Defense Secretary Dr. Robert Gates, illustrates the power that a determined senior leader can have in changing acquisition processes. (Photo by SFC Luis Saavedra, 10th Sustainment Brigade Public Affairs Office)


to meet them; and making decisions about acquisition policy based on evidence, not opinion. In our November 2014 NDIA report, “Pathway to Transformation”, we detail specific propos- als in each area, which I encourage the readers of this magazine to review. To view the report, go to: http://www.ndia.org/ Advocacy/AcquisitionReformInitiative/Documents/NDIA %20Pathway%20to%20Transformation%20Acquisition %20Report.pdf


Tose proposals are options to get the process started; they are by no means the only options, nor will they fix everything that is wrong with the system. No single set of proposals will. What we need is durable, sustained effort—we need our senior leaders to keep their attention focused, learn what is causing problems and cost in the acquisition system and then fix those issues over time. Sustained effort is our only hope to resist the power of boundary conditions on the acquisition process. Single-shot law or policy will not do the trick. It has not before, and it will not this time.


Te overwhelming majority of the people working in the acqui- sition system—in DOD, industry and in Congress—respond in good faith to the pressures they face and the prerogatives at their


disposal. If we want to revamp acquisition, we need to introduce new pressures and prerogatives more powerful than those cre- ating the system’s present equilibrium. Te last decade of war demonstrated that an evident need and sustained leadership can do the trick. We have both today, and now is the time to act.


MR. WILL GOODMAN is the assistant vice president for policy at NDIA, the defense industry’s oldest and largest association. Before joining NDIA, Goodman worked as senior defense adviser to Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-VT, the Senate’s most senior defense appropriator, and before that as an assistant for plans in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. Goodman has an M.A. in security studies from Georgetown University and a B.A. in English from the University of Florida.


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COMMENTARY


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